Virtual Production 101 | How to put yourself in Unreal

hey everybody thanks so much for watching that video that i put out last week i got a ton of really good feedback and it seems like a lot of people were really interested in the process that i went through in order to create it so because of all those comments i actually just put together a tutorial video the video that you're currently watching to kind of show you how i went about doing that it's a very in-depth video it's really slow it's really paced out so feel free to skip through it to see what you actually need one thing that's really important with this method is to make sure that you're filming in double the frame rate of what your final export is planned to be so if you're exporting at 30 frames per second make sure you're shooting at 60. that'll give you a lot of leeway in the end which you'll find i kind of talked about a bit later on in the video and if this is the first video you're seeing you have no idea what's going on here you can check out the video that i put out last week that kind of talks about what virtual production is as well as this method that i've kind of put together in order for people with no budget and no equipment to be able to kind of utilize it to learn unreal and to be able to place their characters in worlds that they would never be able to physically so we're going to start off by opening up after effects you're going to create a new composition from your footage you scrub through it figure out what parts you want to actually have featured in the scene so i'm going to end it here and then i'm going to start it right at that click so once that's all set up i'm gonna type in key and you're gonna look for this key light spill suppressor drag that onto your footage grab the color dropper tool thing pick a random nice flat green spot on your green screen click that click on this intermediate result you're going to look at screen matte and what you want to do here is you want to make all the whites kind of a pure white and all the blacks just like appear black so you do that by clicking on screen matte uh clip black bring that up as much as you can clip white bring that to kind of fill out those blacks this is going to kind of separate you from that background so go back to look at intermediate result you'll see i'm pretty full the background is all gone but i have some of this spill i have some of the spill up here so we're going to want to try to get rid of that so you're going to click on reduce chatter and then this advanced spill suppression you switch it it starts at standard you switch that to ultra and then hit the little box next to advanced spill suppression and that'll get rid of the majority of the color here you can keep playing around with these tools over here to refine it but what i've noticed in unreal at least for me is that it's becomes basically unnoticeable by the time that you add in all your lighting from unreal engine so once that's all set if your green screen is small like mine you then can add a mask so what i like to personally do is pull out the pen tool and just pretty much draw around the body like this to a point where you know that your arms aren't going to be moving out of the space then you have yourself separated from that background scrub through to make sure that when your arms are flailing around a bit there's no issues and this looks pretty all set for me so i'm going to hit file export add to render queue you go down here and you'll see that this says lossless over here you're going to want to click that make sure that that format set to avi and then down here where it says channels click on that change it to rgb plus alpha alpha will allow you to actually remove yourself from the black background when you're in unreal engine click ok click on this over here go back to whatever folder you want to be saving it to for me it's going to be over here hit save and then render and we can see the avi file linked right here double click that to open it up so we can see here that we have it all set up and right now it's just auto filling as a black background so once unreal is open let's just create a new project here we'll just open up the blueprints one that they have create that open up that blueprints project so yeah this looks pretty cool in here let's um find a little spot that we can shoot at i think a good spot would be if we were to take this bench and see this plant and rotate it about 90. move that over here maybe 70. it was over there add this other plant to the other side of it and then delete that bench back there and then take the camera and actually make a new camera that right over here change the field of view down to something like 40 just to make it easier once again you can do whatever settings you want here but these are just the ones that i like to do let's go into content make it a new folder name it media double click that go to that folder where your file is right here it says the avi drop that in here double click that save it right click make a new media player you want you're going to want to add in the texture asset as well hit ok name it something i'm going to name it media for now double click it double click that file that you just added in you can see there's no black background that's good save it exit take that media video double click it make sure everything looks right save that too then you're going to make a new plane that into the scene rotate it to the right angle and then make sure that the angle matches the bench slide that up take that media texture drag that onto the plane and that will create a new medium material so for testing purposes we're just going to change this to translucent and we're going to take the a and we're going to move that onto opacity that's going to get rid of that black background for you apply save exit go to window cinematics sequence recorder we're going to just make the sequence length crazy long for the time being take that camera actor add that on hit record and then stop it go into cinematics sequences recorded sequence open that up then in here we can see that we have our sequence we're going to go in and delete everything in here and then we're going to track media track click this add in that media source that you had in previously drag it over to the start you can see it's much longer than the actual sequence so we're just gonna slide this out slide this out right click on it hit properties and add in that media texture that you had previously so we can see that you're now in the scene up here hit play this clearly is not long enough so let's extend this out a bit more and extend this to the point that you can see a little stripe in it showing that it's duplicating so right there is duplicating so i like to add a little bit of overhang to it just in case then take your end of clip drag it all the way out take your camera actor add that to your camera cut line it up make sure it ends at the same point hit play and you'll be able to see yourself moving so now we need to go in and mess with the rotation scale of your character rotate it 90 degrees so it's lined up right so we can see here that it's clearly not lined up right with the chair so unsave that bring it back to that original 90 degrees that it had so that that red bar is lined up right then you can rotate near 90 degrees and then bring it back to lining up with the chair so you can see i'm lined up right now so when i shot this it was vertical 16 by nine so we need to do some a little bit of math here to figure out what the right scale is so correct me if i'm wrong but i'm just gonna do something around 0.75 and then 1.25 to get roughly the right scale then scale yourself up a bit that seems pretty much okay i'm a bit big that looks good drag yourself down so it looks like you're actually sitting in that chair i like to bring myself forward a little bit and then look at your camera i look really small so let's bring that back up let's pin that to the screen maybe lift yourself up a little bit this is all just going to be playing around a bit i didn't i didn't plan to put myself into the scene so nothing's going to be perfect here but if you do a little bit pre-planning everything will look pretty good so let's do this maybe bring it back a tad that looks pretty okay so we can see that the coloring is pretty accurate here it's not awful we're getting the sunlight coming from the right direction but i am a bit dark not so much in camera but in engine i look a little bit dark so let's go back into content browser go to content back to media and let's hit that media material so in here what we're pretty much going to do is we're going to replicate some of the sliders that you might find in something like photoshop or adobe lightroom in order to kind of fix a bit of the the lighting of the scene so we can see here i'm a bit too pale for the scene like i should be getting a little bit more of the light hitting me so that that's going to be fixed in engine so we're going to look at here is more fixing the contrast and the darkest darks the lightest lights more like the the whites and black slider that you can find inside of lightroom so to do that first i'm going to add in multiply node and then i'm going to add in just a variable number drag that to b drag rgb a to a and then drag that to a miss of color so what this is going to do it's going to play with kind of how bright you are overall so if we slide this all the way up to say 27 you can see that i'm literally glowing we don't we don't necessarily want that we just want to bring it up something small so let's just go 0.8 for now that looks fine it's not a big change but it's enough of a change if we bring that back to zero you can see kind of what it does a bit better yeah a little bit brighter so let's move that over to the side and what we're going to do next is add in three point the three point levels bring that rgba from your texture down into the texture and add in three more values by holding down one and left clicking drag the top one to new black new middle and new white the way you can think about this is kind of like um it's like black contrast and white sliders inside of lightroom so this will help us with both i guess like the dynamic range of the image as well as the contrast of it just so we can look at it a bit let's bring this result to base color and just so you can see how what each of the sliders do let's bring this blacks up all the way and we can see that all the blacks in the image are blown out very very bright white so we don't we don't want that so let's bring that to somewhere around i like to do something like a 0.2 to start out and then let's look at the whites we'll bring that up to say uh we'll bring that up all the way so you can see what that's doing this will blow out all the brighter parts of the image see on this side so once again if you look here at the right side where the light is hitting me is blown out and then back here if i bring this up all the way the darker left side of the image is blown up all the way so once again bring it back to point two let's bring this up somewhere around one just because i'm i'm bright enough for the image as it is so i don't need to do too much here and this is gonna be your contrast your middle point right so if we bring this up all the way we'll see that it's purely flat and pretty bright we'll fix that later and if we bring it down all the way it's honestly pretty solid not bad but we can see that there are some points in it over here where it's a little messed up so what i like to do is kind of split the difference of the two and we can see that the colors themselves look fine but i'm overall i have like a little bit of a white cast to me so what we're going to do now is we're going to kind of bring back in some of that contrast with blend overlay i can't type there we go let's bring that rgba back into base and let's bring this result into blend and then bring that result into base color we can see looks pretty good i'm a bit bright right now so let's bring this down to say 0.8 that's 0.9 almost there we go that looks pretty solid so let's apply that and then save exit out and we can see that looks pretty good i'm a bit too bright still so we'll bring that back down in a second maybe the 0.6 0.51 sure that looks good once again this is all just trial and error it's just kind of playing around a bit out of that that looks pretty good i'm happy with that and then to add in some more blending you can either take your post-processing volume and mess around with the white balance here or what i like to do is go into camera just because um we'll go into the white balance of the camera click temperature i usually like to make my scenes a little bit warmer so we'll bring that up a bit that looks okay bring it down a bit that also looks fine so we'll bring it up to about seven five and let's add a bit of like a purplish tint to it a little magenta that'll blend you into the scene a little bit better and that looks pretty cool so what you can do after that is you can kind of add some more like motivated lighting so if we say we take this random light over here see if we have that all yeah move it around you can see what the actual other lights you can add in will do to the scene so i bring this up i can get some more of those like rays going overhead it's kind of green so i don't really like that too much but we can use this to help motivate the scene so we can see that the sun's coming from this direction over here so if we move this over here we can kind of cast some rays right in front of it which looks pretty nice i'm happy with that actually let's let's get rid of this light let's just move that out of the way let's actually take this big ray over here i like this a lot let's move it and have that cast over behind me we'll see what that looks like in camera this will help motivate that light that's being cast on me because it's very strong so we can kind of add this in as like more of an effect so you can kind of see oh yeah that is the direction the light's coming from cool once that's done click out of that and then we can kind of get ready to start our final render so we just click play through this so go into here hit play on this you can see everything looks pretty good right it's not the most high quality environment so it doesn't look really too real this doesn't look like the most real chair in the world but you click play everything seems you're working pretty well but what i've noticed with unreal is that it's not really optimized for this type of workflow so what's going to happen when we hit render is that i'm either going to be a lot slower in the final output or a lot faster so the the best way to kind of go about this is i personally like to change the fps here to something around 60 whatever you shot natively in your camera which i highly recommend shooting at 60 so you kind of have some wiggle room in the long run but play through that looks good go to do your your final output and then change the folder of course to where you want to go and then use custom frame right here make it 24 frames per second switch to 1920x80 just because you can and then turn off any type of compression and then just hit capture and see what happens because there's going to be different little bugs to it everywhere you go right here it looks pretty okay it doesn't look like it needs too much of any changes so let's open that up yeah it looks a little bit slow right so let's see what will happen now if we change that output we change that output now to 60 frames per second instead capture it open up the capture folder and yeah see now i'm now on double speed but it's a lot better to be at 60 frames per second at double speed then on this to be 24 frames per second at half speed and i'll show you why right now so exit out of this open up your premiere project take that file drag it in create a new sequence at say we'll do 30 frames per second okay we have our little sequence here let's drag this down into here keep resisting settings and let's see what happens when we render and hit play so we can see here i'm at double speed but that's okay because i'm running at 60 frames per second so i have a little bit of wiggle room here once again nothing's going to be perfect with this method but it's just tricks to kind of work around what you're working with so let's take this hit the speed and change it to something like 75 for the time being right that looks a little bit better this looks more of the original speed so we're going to now to actually figure out whether or not this is right is we're going to take the original file the original shot add that in and place that in here i personally like to see it as well so we'll change the opacity down to something like 65 so let's actually get rid of that and we can look here a new method of filmmaking that allows cut this here back it up a new method of filmmaking now a new method of a new method of new method of filmmaking that allows storytellers to place their characters in virtual worlds with greater ease than ever before so we can see that it's a bit too slow right so let's change that to about eight percent a new method of filmmaking that allows storytellers to place their characters in virtual worlds with greater ease than ever before and that's passable so once again you're gonna have little bugs here and there but you can always go and tweak it to have it be exactly perfect but for my purposes at the moment this is pretty okay so let's render that a new method of filmmaking that allows storytellers to place their characters and virtual worlds with greater ease than ever before we can see after the fact how it keeps doing random stuff at the end and that's because we added that overhang but that overlay overhang is what allows us to do that if we weren't to have that overhang then that little bug at the end could happen anywhere in the actual part of the footage that we want to have in our final cut so what we can just do is bigger ease than ever before go to the end and just cut it there expand this out back and then at the end we have this a new method of filmmaking that allows storytellers to place their characters in virtual worlds with greater ease than ever before that's basically how you do it at the end you can just file export media save it as test and then export and then we go back into it a new method of filmmaking that allows storytellers to place their characters in virtual worlds with greater ease than ever before if you made it to this point in the video thanks so much for watching i really appreciate everyone kind of taking the time to learn this alongside with me if you have any recommendations or you've figured anything else out during your testing please let me know put it in the comments send me a message literally anything i'm really looking forward to kind of building a community of people using the same type of methodology and then i also have a video coming out hopefully next week that will kind of show you what you can do with this process if you're going to try to make a short film it's not necessarily a short it's more like a tech demo highlighting what you can do with this and i have a few more things in the works that i'll be planning on making videos about in the weeks to come so thanks again for watching once again if you have no idea what i'm talking about here check out that video that i made last week and i'll see you next time

Channel: Bryce Cohen

Views: 2,715

Keywords: virtual production, Unreal Engine, UE4, tutorial, how to, vr, virtual camera, unreal engine, Virtual Production, How to, epic games, Getting started, introduction, education, virtual production tutorial, unreal engine virtual production, virtual production for students, learning virtual production, low budget, low-budget, creative filming ideas, what is virtual production, game engine, learn, learning, new, tech, technology, mixed reality

Id: VgEnkGPFjDU

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021