Unreal Engine for Filmmakers - Create Cinematic 3D Worlds for Free

hey guys sam here and in today's video i want to talk to you guys about something that i've been working on on the post-production side of things and i want to share it with you guys today because i feel that it's a really incredible tool that's just bursting onto the scene of the film world for some of you this might just change your entire outlook on what is possible in the indie filmmaking world what i'm talking about here is unreal engine and i just want to say that for the filmmaking community if you don't know what unreal engine is or if you aren't really familiar with it you're starting to fall behind because unreal engine is absolutely the future of filmmaking in my opinion the developers over at epic games are doing incredible things with this software and it's already great as a game engine on its own and we're just starting to scratch the surface of what it's capable of in the film world because they're just starting to implement the system into film production now i personally am somewhat nude on real engine i started learning it about five to six months ago because i wanted to use it for the visual effects in my new film gemini i've been trying to make videos documenting my progress as i discover tips and tricks and solve problems while i work out the best pipeline for visual effects and post-production on the film side of unreal so this video is another installment in my journey into the world of unreal engine and its potential in filmmaking now if you guys like this video i'm gonna link two other videos that i did on unreal engine one of them being how to get extremely realistic cinematic renders from unreal and the other being on the post production pipeline that i've discovered and how to get a 3d tracked camera from after effects into unreal engine to use as a vfx tool so check those videos out i'll link them in the corner here and at the end of the video and also in the description so you guys can check that out if you're interested but anyway unreal engine is all about delivering the most realistic looking results possible in real time so that means you can use it for virtual production creating digital backdrops for real-time shooting and much more so take the mandalorian for example unreal engine has been used on huge productions like this for the application of real-time vfx which consists of projecting a 3d environment created in unreal engine onto a wall or walls of led panels that surround a set now the projected environment is then synced up with the movement of the camera in 3d space using a camera positioning sensor and the projected environment then reacts with the physical camera's movement creating a 3d parallax that you would see in real life and thus selling the virtual set extension this all updates in real time and there's no lag so that it looks entirely seamless when you capture it in the camera and this allows you to capture realistic reactive lighting and reflections in your scene and on your actors since you're surrounding your talent with the real projected environment this means that you can capture realistic lighting and reflections in a much more straightforward way as compared to a green screen which becomes very messy or any other alternatives and in the meantime you're also saving on costs for post-production and expensive visual effects because you're getting it done on set so not only is unreal engine useful for real-time visual effects but now more than ever it's extremely useful for post-production and that's primarily what i want to talk to you guys about today so i'm currently using it on my film gemini to create the detailed and massive scenes for the backdrop of the film and the ability to work in real time in conjunction with its now even more powerful renderer and the ability to use qixel mega scans which i'll get into in a minute has made unreal engine a free to use monster of a tool for any person out there with a computer and some drive to get a great result now for those of you who aren't familiar with unreal let me first explain what it is so unreal engine is a game engine created by epic games and if you played a video game you've probably played something created in unreal because it's pretty common and it's been at the forefront of innovation in the real-time rendering world for some time fortnite batman arkham city some of the borderlands games are just some of the examples of some games that have been created in unreal engine but what's great about this software is that it's 100 free to use that's right it's free to use for anyone all you need to do is make an epic games account which is free of charge and you're ready to get started now unreal is not like blender 3ds max or cinema 4d you can't really model complex objects or do super advanced texturing in unreal you can only create simple objects like cubes and spheres light them add volumetric and lighting effects reflections and other modifications in the engine so you can only import complex objects typically in the fbx format which is very common in the 3d world so you can certainly model your own objects in free software like blender and then import them into unreal engine so you may be wondering at this point how does this help me i don't have time to learn 3d modeling and if i'm going to 3d model objects in blender i might as well just render them from blender so what's the point one of the main points for using unreal engine in my opinion lies in something called quixo mega scans quixote mega scans is a huge library of 3d objects textures decals and other useful 3d assets for use in unreal engine the library contains over 10 000 photorealistic photo scanned assets most of which have 4k or 8k textures for maximum detail and they're already pre-set up to import directly into unreal engine but what's so great about this library is that qixel has partnered with unreal engine in the past year to provide all of their 3d assets to unreal engine users for free so just take a look at these assets guys i mean they're incredible they're extremely detailed highly realistic and when you apply lighting to them they're pretty much indistinguishable from real life so we're inside a quixle bridge here and you can see these objects and these images are all rendered from unreal engine if we go into our 3d assets we have like you know building assets here these are all real 3d scanned objects prepped for unreal engine you can see you know we can move around this object it's been scanned in it's a statue you know we have all these different objects and there's over 15 000 of them we've got lots of you know building we have food we have historical objects you know if you're building a temple or something you know these are great assets for games but also for film you know rusted middle barrel we've got all kinds of interesting stuff here and it's all very nicely organized into these different categories and we also have collections which is just groups of objects you see all these are rendered you know incredibly realistic but it's great because you know they're nicely labeled into these different groups we have lots of rock and and coastal rock assets like these are great highly detailed and they're huge as well so that's really nice if you're building up a large area so you can see there's just like an incredible amount of stuff in here lots of detail and you have these textures as well so if you want to export something into unreal engine we're gonna have to uh set up our our path and you're just gonna set that to wherever your project file is located for your unreal engine project that's pretty self-explanatory so now all we have to do is click download here i've already downloaded this object and then once you have it set you're also going to want to set your resolution before you click download so 4k 2k or 8k and once you have it downloaded then all you have to do is click export and it's going to export into your into your engine so i just want to show you guys a quick glimpse into the unreal engine user interface and the software so you guys can see just how easy it is to use and how quickly you can get some really realistic results as i said i've only been using unreal engine for a few months and i've already learned quite a bit it's actually a very intuitive software and you really don't need that much if any experience in 3d software to pick it up and start using it and this is what sets it apart from other 3d renderers and programs it's going to allow you to get great results and it's quick and easy to use and you don't have to have that much experience so it opens up a whole new world for filmmakers that are trying to get visual effects in their film but can't afford a vfx artist need to do it themselves or even if you just want to visualize what you're going to shoot before you shoot it unreal engine is a great way to do that so now that we have all of our assets imported here um i have a basic scene set up and now some of these objects were modeled and textured uh in blender and you know these are some qixel megascans assets now i just have a basic scene and this is this is going to be viewed from this view you know obviously i'm not designing a game level because this would be a terrible level because it doesn't look good unless you're looking through this camera but that's okay for you know filmmaking purposes i can turn on path tracing here and that's going to give us some more realistic lighting but you can see the scene is looking very realistic and a lot of what's contributing to that is right here if we look um all this detail in these objects these are these are all from quixote mega scans and you know these these really look very realistic so that's adding a ton of detail to our scene if we just had these buildings it wouldn't be very convincing they're not the greatest i'm obviously not a 3d artist by any means so these are really helping the scene along in in selling it so you can see there's a ton of detail in these in these objects especially if we if we have our realistic lighting turned on you know we're just getting so much detail here and we can get very close and still they look excellent so once you've imported uh your your objects we can go into our mega scans folder find our 3d assets it's as simple as just dragging it out into the scene and we can rotate it around move it however we like we can scale it up or down very simple very quick and easy and we navigate just by using uh your typical gaming wasd so it's very simple to to pull these megascans assets in and move them around so the next thing i want to show you guys is you know how easy it can be to set up your lighting so now we have no lights in this scene and what we can do is just grab a directional light there's lots of different lighting that you can do you can grab a point light and you can put it in here and you can move it around and as you can see that's just like a point source of light you can scale it up or down and if you go over here you can change the intensity of it and you can see you know very quickly if you're creating like a street light or something it's extremely realistic looking you get some very interesting lighting just right off the bat it's it's very intuitive very easy you don't have to modify much the intensity you can change the color of it it's just everything kind of is very self-explanatory but now what i'll do is i'm going to add a sun essentially and that's a directional light source and uh you know if we take our rotation we can just rotate it around and light the scene however we we feel fit so you know something like that is interesting it's it kind of looks like sunset you know we can get some very dramatic lighting on this building if you have an hdri backdrop all you have to do is take an hdri backdrop and just drop it in here this is another way of lighting your scene you know as you can see if we turn it off and on this sky is actually lighting our scene so if we move it around you know you can see the lighting actually changes on this building because we're changing the lighting of the sphere so you can take any hdri texture and apply it into your scene and it's going to light it accordingly with the texture that you use so that's really useful very very easy very quick and if you have these these mega scans assets all you have to do is move them around you don't have to you know know how to how to model how to do any of that stuff but you have these incredibly realistic assets and you know you just take a look at them they're they're excellent if i go back to our path tracing uh now we have a scene that's uh that's lit in a different way so very easy it's very intuitive so here's a rendered image from unreal engine and you can see uh once you render it it looks even more realistic so it's extremely powerful so my whole point in making this video is to tell you guys if you're a filmmaker you need to start looking into unreal engine it's going to become a bigger and bigger thing at some point you're going to need to know this software or at least be familiar with it so you might as well get ahead of the curve so anyway that's about it for this video i hope you guys found this video helpful and i hope it inspires you to go and learn something new and i really hope that this video helps at least some of you guys realize some of your visions because i know unreal engine has helped me to achieve things that i didn't think were really possible in the visual effects world and i hope that it can do the same for you guys so if you guys enjoyed this video please feel free to comment on any future videos that you want me to do also leave a like and maybe consider subscribing to the channel because it really helps me to grow and it helps me to make better videos for you guys in the future so as always thank you for watching and have a good one guys

Channel: Boundless Entertainment

Views: 35,840

Rating: 4.915709 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, path tracing, lighting, cinematic lighting, unreal engine lighting, unreal engine lighting tutorial, unreal engine render, post apocalyptic, cinematic scene, filmmaking, filmmaking in unreal engine, the mandalorian, film look, film, virtual production, virtual, production, vfx, free vfx, free 3d software, game engine

Id: IUkD87VSmyg

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021