Unreal Engine for Filmmakers - Cinematic Camera Settings & Setting up Virtual Camera

what's going on guys sam here and in today's tutorial i want to go over how you can make your renders as cinematic as possible coming out of unreal engine specifically for filmmaking so i already did kind of a specific episode on this on path tracing but today i want to go over just like general techniques that you can use to make your renders look as cinematic as possible so let's get right into it so the first thing we're going to talk about here is setting up your camera so you guys can see uh we have this shot here and we just kind of slowly push in and we rack focus into the background so we can see our background and that's pretty much what we got here so very basic shot but lots of detail and lots of things going on in the foreground the background i have a huge city in the background okay so uh this is one technique that you can use to kind of make your scenes look a little more uh cinematic per se using a bit of a longer lens can actually help you kind of get that cinematic look a lot of films are shot on a little bit longer lenses uh that's kind of changing now but traditionally films are often shot on slightly longer lenses and what's great about unreal engine is that you have a lot of control over how you're going to be framing your shot and also capturing your scene so you can kind of hide shortcomings of unreal engine by doing things like using slightly longer lenses and what that's going to do is using a longer lens collapses the depth in your scene a bit so um if i set this out to like to a wider field of view for example if we go back to 24 millimeters we can actually see a lot more depth and we can see like you know how far away this is how far away these buildings are from us and if i turn off the exponential height fog here because that's also helping to show the depth um we can see much better how far these objects are away from us okay so that's certainly a look that you can go for if we go back to our 47 millimeters here now we've collapsed a lot of this depth in our scene can see a lot of detail and it's giving us a more imposing shot of this city using a longer lens is going to make things look a little more up close and personal it's going to showcase a lot of the detail that you're you're putting into your shot which is helpful and it can certainly make your images look a little more cinematic so what i'm going to do now is i'm actually going to go and just make a new camera and we're going to basically set it up in the way that we normally would to get a cinematic of a look as possible okay so we're gonna type in cine camera actor and we're just gonna drag one out here into the scene okay drag this back approximately where we want our camera to be all right now what we can do is go into our camera and we're going to pilot it and we can position it basically how we want to this isn't bad we're at 35 millimeters we're losing a lot of what made that other camera look pretty good so what we can do is go down here and we go into our camera settings and now the first thing i'm going to talk about here is our film back so we have 16x9 digital film right now and that's decent but if we want to get a little bit more sensor size we can change it to 16x9 dslr and now as you can see that's made our field of view much wider okay so let me just quickly explain the field of view and sensor width versus focal length relationship is in the real world uh when we're shooting on a digital cinema camera you have full frame sensors you have super 35 sensors you have micro four thirds sensors and there are several others but those are pretty much the three main ones the difference is the size of the sensor so if you're shooting on a micro four thirds sensor and you're using a 35 millimeter lens you're going to have a much more cropped image than if you're using a full frame sensor just to demonstrate that i'm going to make the size of this sensor really small okay so for demonstration purposes this isn't uh mathematically accurate but we'll say we'll say that that is the size of a micro four thirds sensor we're on the same focal length of lens we're on a 35 millimeter lens right here and our aperture is 2.8 we're gonna actually take this down to one okay so our aperture is one so you can see we have a very much more shallow depth of field here okay and if we go up here and now we say we want to go up to the super 35 millimeter sensor we'll just take it up around 35 we increase this appropriately so we're about 16 by nine what we can see is that our depth of field did not change right but we got a much wider field of view okay and we're still on the same lens here we're still on a 35 millimeter lens and our aperture didn't change so if we wanted to get that same field of view as we did on the micro four third sensor what we'd have to do is zoom in okay so now we're getting approximately the same field of view as the micro four thirds sensor the difference is we're using a longer lens longer lenses give you shallower depth of field at any given f-stop if you increase your sensor size in order to get the same field of view you're going to have to use a longer lens which means that you're going to have a shallower depth of field for the same exact field of view the larger your sensor size the longer lens you will have to use and therefore the shallower the depth of field will be at any given f-stop so now you guys basically know uh what that's about and we're going to go back down here and we're going to change our aperture back to 2.8 or so so go into our post process and you can also do this with a post-processing volume so that you don't have to apply it to all the different cameras in your scene and you'll just have the same look for each camera but i'm just gonna do it in this particular camera so you guys can see and then you can change it for each different shot if you have different shots in a scene so uh what i like to do sometimes is use this bloom feature and that's just gonna give us these really nice looking uh this nice looking highlight roll off here and you know obviously you can go way too far with it but if we just go back and then kind of bring it up just a little bit somewhere around like three or so that's gonna look really nice and it's gonna give us a bit more of a filmic look it's gonna have that bit of glow to it which is nice that looks good and we can go down here to our chromatic aberration sometimes i like to add a little bit of this um nothing too crazy obviously that's way too far something like 0.5.4 is is going to give us just a little bit of that distortion which can look kind of nice looks a little more organic you know we can go down into our rendering features go down here to our motion blur and what i like to do is just increase this a little bit to 0.75 i find that that gives us a little bit more of a cinematic result you know if you're moving your camera especially that's just going gonna give you that little bit of extra motion blur and i find that to look really nice uh in this program i've told you guys about path tracing before uh so you guys can look at uh up that tutorial here i'll put it on the screen but basically we can just set our our settings here we'll go down to like five we'll set this to like 500 and we'll turn off our denoiser so now if we go into path tracing mode you can see that gives us some really really nice looking results here so basically now we have our camera set up and uh that's looking really nice so if you go into our other camera actor you can see that we're getting about the same result here okay so that's basically how i set up my camera it's very simple um but it's going to give you some nice looking results and what i'm going to do now is i'll show you guys another technique that is going to help your shots look more cinematic so the next thing is fog so what we can do when we're not in path tracing mode is we can go into our exponential height fog so we'll take exponential height fog and we're just going to drag it into our scene and immediately you can see what that's doing is as as a dp what you always want to do is add as much depth to your scene as possible okay one way to do that is by using a certain type of lens which we already talked about another way to do that is by adding atmosphere particles and other elements in the air to your scene that are going to give the audience details as to where things are located in your scene in terms of the depth so now you can see this building looks dark this building looks brighter and as we go back the buildings look more and more in the distance because you can see there's more fog in front of them so um that's just a really simple way and we can go into our exponential height fog we can increase our fog density a little bit which i like to do maybe we'll go up to 0.1 and see what that does so that looks really nice you know we can change the the height fall off so if you don't want it to be all the way up into the sky so if you want to see some of this guy you can bring this up you can always bring the max opacity down if you want to see more of your background that's just going to basically control how much of these buildings that we see i'm going to leave it at one and the start distance you can change this so that it starts farther away so you can uh but i like to keep that at zero usually because that just gives us a little bit of detail as to the distances of the objects in our scene and now we can go and we're gonna check volumetric fog so we can change this extinction scale so if we come over to somewhere like here where our sun is being obscured by an object we can see that we get these nice light rays and if we turn up the extinction scale those rays will become more and more obvious as you can see this only really works when you're looking directly at the sun the the light rays so the god rays that's basically what that does now uh the problem with this is that if we go into our path tracing we no longer have any fog and uh i went over this in a tutorial recently how you can add fog that works with path tracing i'm not really going to show you guys how to actually do that so in this case the god rays aren't going to work what we can do is go in here and we can adjust these parameters and now we have some really nice thick fog and you can see we're pretty much back to where we started and we're in path tracing so obviously uh path tracing is another great technique that i like to use for getting more cinematic renders because you can see we're getting these beautiful specular highlights our lighting is so much more realistic we're getting bounced lighting another big thing here is we talked about motion blur already but in terms of getting a cinematic look what we want to do is set this to 23.976 frames per second a lot of game developers make the mistake of rendering at 60 fps 100 fps 120 fps that's not really helpful unless you're doing slow motion you want your your shutter angle at 180 degrees when you're shooting at 23.976 frames per second if you shoot something or render something at a higher frame rate from unreal engine when you play it back it's not going to have any motion blur for gaming that's generally a good thing you know people don't really like motion blur when they're trying to game uh in terms of cinematics that is not a good idea because your shot is going to essentially look like a video game cut scene or even just straight out of a video game and that's not what you want you want it to look like a movie and films are shot at 24 frames per second you're getting a certain amount of motion blur when you're shooting at 24 frames per second at a 180 degree shutter angle and if you increase the frame rate your footage is going to look really really smooth and it's not going to have that nice motion blur just keep that in mind you're always going to want to render at 24 frames per second now i want to go over one more thing real quick and that's composition we have these foreground elements this thing we got rubble here we got plants and stuff and then we also have this object here which is like it's going back into our scene and the reason for that is things like this add a lot of depth to your shot shooting along a wall or something that gives us these leading lines which is what these are back into our scene it gives us information about where things are in our scene and it also shows the depth of our scene so we go back to our camera here we see this is right along the side and it's going back into our scene that's just showing us how far each thing is in relation to where we are so things like that shooting along walls shooting along objects that lead back into your scene is a great way to show a little more depth and it's a good compositional tool so the next thing is uh we have our foreground element we have something leading into our background we have our mid-ground element right here okay now let me show you guys what that does if i just get rid of this look how flat this scene looks in comparison you know because we just have we have our foreground elements and then we just have our background you know this is our far background in the distance now if i turn this on suddenly our scene is much more interesting this gives us a lot more depth information about our scene and it also gives us something to kind of focus on like another focal point of our image now it gives us a lot more visual interest we're also kind of mixing things up because we have these lines going up and now we have this line going across here you see how this building is contrasting the direction of these buildings if you're able to add a mid-ground element that's really going to help you and now obviously we have a very detailed background you want to have enough detail where people can look at it and be like okay this is real so uh that mostly wraps up what i have to talk to you guys about today so those are just some quick tips and tricks to get more cinematic images coming out of unreal engine go check out the path tracing tutorial that i did as well as the tutorial i did on how to use fog with path tracing it's a really powerful tool and it's something that's really nice coming out of unreal engine 4.27 you can just see right there i changed it and it gives you so much more realistic results so uh don't forget to check that out i'm working on a lot of new content for you guys trying to come out with filmmaking and unreal engine course so if that is interesting to you guys make sure you subscribe once again don't forget to like this video comment any future videos that you'd like me to do and also subscribe to the channel it really helps me out thank you guys for watching and have a good one

Channel: Boundless Entertainment

Views: 2,099

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: how to, how to get cinematic look in unreal engine, cinematic look, cinematic, unreal, engine, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 4.27, ue5, ue4.27, ue 4.27, lumen, path tracing, pathtracing, lighting, cinematic lighting, unreal engine lighting, unreal engine lighting tutorial, render tutorial, post apocalyptic, cinematic scene, filmmaking, filmmaking in unreal engine, film look, exponential height fog, reactive lighting, cinematic camera settings, bloom, filmic, raytracing

Id: gFO0qhdLKec

Length: 14min 44sec (884 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021