Unreal Engine: Understanding Subscenes in Sequencer

hello in this potentially brief video we're going to freestyle and see how far we get and hopefully it's quick and to the point we're going to pick up after the unreal engine jump start video and go over a few more sequencer options that you have so if you haven't seen this video the unreal engine jumpstart from my vfx and animation friends watch that first then come back here because we're going a little deeper on some of the concepts that were introduced in that video where that video landed we were in a shot for example you hit play and here's your character moving and in this case it's nothing crazy oops i actually forgot to look through the camera i just have a simple track on a look at setting on that don't know if we covered in the last video so if i go to the camera just to show that there's this look at track settings you can add what you want to have looked at turn on tracking in this case i had to bump and offset because the track is at her feet so just bump it up in z a little bit so you can offset your uh look at a little bit but anyway so i have a camera and my female here with a little bit of a transform and some uh some cycles added right so we covered that in the other video in that other video we made two shots so back to the content browser here's here's one shot we made two shots and then we strung them together in yet another level sequence where we added two shots together that works and that's fine the good thing about sequencer and level sequences so a level sequence is just a container of information you can put all of your shot data with one camera and your animation in one shot then put it in another shot and then put them together though i often get asked well what if what if i want this animation and i want multiple cameras to cover it so we're going to go over two additional things you can do that the the slight catch here is there's no right answer there's no one way to do it which kind of frustrates some people because they want to say don't tell me all the options just tell me the best way to do it there's kind of not a best way there's a way that works for you it's like you know going to the beach you can take one freeway you could take a different freeway you could ride your bike there you would depend where you live you could walk there you know there's no as long as you get to the beach that's what matters as long as you output some cinematics that's what matters there's some ways or better than others but it still is kind of situation dependent like walking's fine if you don't have a car but you know you might want to drive but then you have parking to deal with so again totally up to you my goal here is to show you some of the options that you have with sequencer in this one particular shot i just happen to call it shot one an animation usually in one shot you have one camera but unreal doesn't you know that's not a thing for it so let's talk about what you can do in here i'm going to delete this half of this here we haven't talked about this in the other class so much as this camera cuts this allows you to have more than one camera in a shot if you choose the default of this is you'll usually find when you make a new spawnable camera that you know your your camera cuts track comes automatic and it just fills up the whole thing with whatever camera got created however i'm going to eject out of the camera here just to get a little bit of a bigger view here i'm going to add another camera just for a super extreme of a super high top view so i'm going to add another camera just using the spawnable button here which means if i hit this button versus drag one in from the cinematics this camera will only exist in this shot if i have other level sequences it won't be in those it's not getting added permanently to the outliner it's only going to be there when you have this shot open hit this button and i'll get you know cine camera actor 2 i'm going to hit f2 so i can rename this i'll just call this top cam to make bluntly obvious that it's a different camera otherwise the names are kind of similar and here's my view from it i'm going to go even higher right i'm just going to get the whole world here if i am clicking on this icon here that is my top cam specifically and that is my view from my top cam right so i get the whole action from way up there but when you click here on camera cuts that shows you the cameras that you have chosen for this particular shot as a whole i guess you could call it so if i hit play it's going to play my camera cut from only this camera because this is what drives when you're running your shot and this is selected and this is also what carries through when you bring it up into higher sequences this is what defines what camera gets used i want this camera in the first half okay so i'm going to click here i want this camera the cine camera actor this one right same same view i want this camera cine camera actor to be used for the first part of the shot and then once i hit here i want to switch over and use the top cam so in the camera cuts what i do is i just hit add a camera where the playhead is new binding and i want to add the top cam as my camera to take over when i hit that spot right so right now you're looking at you're like hey how come it's only that first camera still this is really important keep an eye on where this button is if i click this i'm only going to see that for the whole length if i click this i'm only going to see that for the whole length but the overall final output when you would potentially at the render button is going to be what's defined here in the camera cuts so i'm going to click that button go back begin the sequence it's going to play through here then it's going to pop over to the top cam to play the rest of the sequence that is a viable way of working you can do that i'm gonna show a slightly alternate but similar kind of version and that is using a subscene in your sequence so let's let's try not to make too mess of this i'm going to say that the animation in this shot is all that i want i actually don't want cameras in this shot i'll get back to that in a minute let me just delete this delete this i'm going to delete the whole camera cuts i'm going to delete these two cameras all that's going on in this level sequence now is my character from far far away he's here way down there all right so she's way down there doing her thing that is the only thing animated in this particular level sequence i just deleted everything else you're going to think well how are you supposed to render anything as is you can't in the sense of that there's i don't even have a camera to render through but that's because i'm looking at this from a different way of organizing uh my project so this is a self-contained let's see it's called shot one i'm going to save this i'm going to go back to my content browser and i'm actually going to rename it just to try and make life a little easier here i'm going to call this char anim so this is my level sequence where the only thing going on is animation of the character in this especially when you're working with more people this probably is a valuable way of working if you're in the unreal fellowship and you're doing your own short all by yourself and you don't need to collaborate with anybody this still may be useful for you and it's good to know that this is how it works because you know eventually you work with people but you may not have to do this level of detail when you're working on your own project but definitely when you're working with others this comes in handy so this is a self-contained level sequence called char anim with just a character walking so now i'm going to go and i'm going to make another level sequence remember level sequence is just a container and make another one i'll call this scout game level you know whatever because i'm going to just scout the camera a little bit for all the action that's going on so i'm going to double click and it opens a brand new sequencer scout game level nothing in it like we've seen before however this time i'm going to pull in that sub scene i'm going to pull in the animation of the character at this point in this scout game level i hit play nothing's happening right because just like we've seen before it's just a basic no there's nothing in here so we're not going to see anything i'm going to add a track and i'm going to add a subscene so a sub scene itself is the terminology and should almost say like add a sub sequence because really what you're pointing at when you do this you're pointing at another sequence and bringing it in to this level sequence i add the track itself this just is still empty and now i add the sequence that i want to bring in here and i want to bring in the char anam oh it comes in where your playhead was my playheads at the end so i'm just going to slide it back here right so now when i hit play i get my animation but the animation is not occurring in this level sequence the only thing this level sequence holding at the moment is a sub scene track that's pointing to that other level sequence the char anim why might you do this you might have one person working on the character animation or say yourself working on the character animation a little bit separate than maybe an effects uh animation that you have that you're working on and then maybe there's like a disco scene so somebody else is kind of working on like the lighting effects and having all this crazy animation going on each person can be working separately in their own level sequence and then you have you know in this case it's called scout game level but you could call it your master sequence that you're pulling in a bunch of different sub scenes and pulling those in and the advantage there is you know i can i can change the timing of what's going on here as well right so i can hit play and she's already halfway done with what she's doing so i can adjust you know my clips a little bit but that aside why else might you do this this action is gonna happen and then in this level sequence i can add multiple cameras so i just added three cameras in this and from here it's not that much different than what we've seen before i have three cameras so let's uh what am i looking through first let's look at this camera first and go to the beginning of the shot right so where is she i'm gonna go really close so my first shot come here you my first shot with using camera one i mean i'm saying the word shot but let's just say the first camera this cine camera actor is going to be here really close so i can hit play she kind of instantly walks out of scene so it's not that exciting right so maybe you know i might have to back up a little bit you know i could deal with focus we'd deal with focus and all that stuff in the other one so i'm not going to bore you with that here let's just say i get a little bit of it from this first camera here and then as she walks i want to go ahead and cut to camera two whoops gotta grab the end of that come here there we go right so camera two i gotta look through camera two here this i'm gonna make a side view come here you at that point i'm gonna have her walk for a little bit from this camera's point of view i need to add that i want this camera to take over so i'm gonna go to add camera i can also i can just grab it here as well like say camera two so from here she's going to be walking and then let's say from here because i don't want to move the camera i'm just going to slip over here jump over to camera three look through it and that's way here let's do something like artsy shower like really low low camera and see if she like runs at it i need to add it to my well actually i'm viewing it here so i don't i haven't clicked this to designate i want to look through the matched camera here i'm going to just look through there so she comes running at the camera oh i missed her feet whatever all right so let's go really close here so it's just going to land on her feet at the end and she's hovering but who cares so then let's go back and drop in camera 3 to take over there so just add a camera camera three alright so now if this is selected all i'm going to see is that camera's point of view for the whole time but the camera cuts track is defining again what this overall level sequence is going to use as the camera so i click here to have that take over so it's going to go through camera one and camera two then camera three camera one camera two camera three all right you can also add again you can add other kinds of subscenes now the difference between this and a master sequence is when we were doing the master sequence in that case you're building a sequence of shots that are end to end right so if you go back to that other video we had shot one play and then shot two play and then shot three play so it's a very linear workflow in this case we're playing multiple uh sub scenes or those other level sequences in parallel so i can have the animation track running at the same time i can have the effects track running and i can have the lighting track running and they're all playing simultaneously but they're also available i can double click here to char anim that opens into the sequencer it opens the level sequence for just the character animation that i can make changes to if i want you know if i actually want her to get back on the ground here i could just nudge her down just a little bit right so now i've fixed that my character animation is fixed i save my changes i go back out up to this top level and it's fixed at the top level as well so again the hopefully you get the idea that you can separate the animations into multiple level sequences and then pull them into a you know a parent of sorts level sequence again they're all just level sequences and you can pull them into each other kind of like what you can do static wise with the different levels but here you're doing it on a time-based workflow you can add your cameras here you could also add audio track right i can come here and add an audio track but i could also add the audio track here in the char anim and that's going to get pulled in as well because it's you know kind of built into that down there so you can mix and match and put stuff kind of wherever works that works for you hopefully that gives you an idea of what you can do and how you can work with level sequences specifically how to use subscene and where you can put different cameras to cover different shots alright enjoy

Channel: 3D Education with JC

Views: 10,007

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Id: 5pK6JmarYhM

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021