Virtual Production Scene Setup Tips - Unreal Engine Tutorial

we'll be setting up a scene for virtual production going over several details tips and tricks filming in locations like this are more and more possible and it's not hard to assemble if you know your way around unreal epic is constantly growing its tool set and knowledge base for everything virtual production you can see on their website they have a whole dedicated write up lots of things to click and articles to read videos to watch links um virtual production Pipeline and if you go over to YouTube unreal's page has a growing number of virtual production videos including this in camera VFX tutorials playlist where you can find a plethora of details for how to set up a virtual production if you're new to Virtual production here are some considerations to setting up your scene first I'm going to start in Photoshop where I have an illustration here of the stage and you can see um we have the Sound Stage here which would be practical elements the LED wall or volume and then the virtual stage where unreal would take over and it's good to talk with your team and have a plan for what's going to be practical and what's going to be virtual and where that line is going to be in order to do this you need the dimensions of your stage and your LED wall this will help us later in unreal when we actually put in the stage and the LED wall into our Engine with some practical elements and some standin actors so we can see exactly what things will look like on location in the epic games Marketplace today we're going to be using some free content free for the month I saw this Gladiator Arena uh which is pretty Rock Solid awesome uh we'll jump into that and we're also using these posed humans uh by epic games it's free content on the marketplace place as standin actors as we're composing our shots so once you get your once you get Dimensions from your stage you're going to be actually filming on you can build out the stage here in unreal and typically that's like an end display setup but for right now I'm just going to build a simple little blueprint that contains all that information so you can see I've already done that here um basically just right click blueprint class create click on actor and it creates a new blueprint so delete that for now click on view Port inside this blueprint and you can see I dragged and dropped um the meshes in here into this blueprint and now I have the stage Dimensions you can see the LED wall I've got a material on that already uh it's just a glass material so we can see through it when we put it into our scene so normally compile and then save and so here's the blueprint that I've already set up of the stage and the dimensions and I'll say this about Dimensions actually matter um when you're building on a virtual stage because the stage is only so big and the wall you have to consider when you're filming there's a secret measuring tool inside of unreal if you go up here in the top uh change the perspective to top uh you can middle zoom in Middle click so this is the stage it's selected and I middle clicked and dragged and this is 920 cm and that converts to 30 ft and um about 790 CM wide which is about 25 ft which is exactly right and the dimensions are correct if you want to see the the units that unreal is using you can go to editor preferences and type in units and it will show right here measuring tool units are in centimeters you can change to meters or kilometers all right I'm going to go to our our Arena scene and you can see that I've already dropped in our stage and I moved it around for the record if you wanted to do that again just see it's just a drag and drop and then you slide it around now just since we were talking about measurements I was kind of curious to see how big this scene actually is so if I go to top view and I zoom out this arena is [Music] about we'll say about 6,000 cm in the center and if I compare that to 6,000 then that's about almost 200 ft and then just because I thought well I mean you got to go compare that to the Coliseum in Rome so zooming down here on the Coliseum there's this cool feature if you didn't know in Google Maps if I click on layers and I switch it to this it's a little easier to see and then I go to more and click on the measure tool you can start clicking and draag dragging and you can see let's hide that you can see the distance um so well it's kind of hard to see now what on the inside so from here to here that says about 200 ft oh goodness I have too many now I don't know how to make it stop there we go uh 200 feet 250 ft I'm sorry inside of the Coliseum just goes to show you how how huge the actual Coliseum is so and obviously let's just zoom around just to see this pretty big coliseum's even bigger okay The Next Step was I once I had my stage in here I put in these uh characters POS humans meshes and I just scrolled to find someone that I wanted um I don't know like yeah obviously you're going to have a guy in here he's going to be taking pictures yeah nice why not let's throw a dog in here there's a dog there's a guy put him back over here they're all right there okay great I want to go back to um the not top view the uh we'll say Right View and I just want to zoom in and see if I can see these people okay so right here and I'm going to do another quick check so 200 no 177 in 177 cm and again I'm horrible at math so 177 is about 5.8 ft so these people are pretty accurate as far as um to scale so that's helpful because it's important now we drop in a camera first camera we'll say we'll just ignore these other two I'm going to hide them just for Simplicity so you're going to want to think about a few things so the camera is locked in um first is sensor size of your camera that you're actually going to be filming with on this virtual production stage so if you go to film back and you can set you can set a a preset which I did here or you can set a custom uh and and actually uh type in your sensor with WID and height to get your aspect ratio which combined with the lens that you're going to use which here we currently have um a 20 mm on this lens that you see but if I let me pilot this camera and I tilt up you can see the edge of the LED wall right here that line if I select it it's a little bit easier to see that that outline around it um and these are types of things that you when you lock in the the size of people your your camera sensor size and your focal length on of your lens on your camera then you can start to see oh what what framing can I get oh I'm going to see the floor here so we're going to have to fill the floor with some practical I don't know dirt and debris to match this Scenic set extension that unreal is having on this led wall otherwise I need to tilt up and uh you know a little cowboy shot but oh no I can't be this far away with this millimeter because I'll start to see off the wall and that'll be like I don't know black wall or whatever is in the in The Sound Stage volume or you're shooting off the volume at that point so you either need to zoom in uh maybe or or change your uh focal length so like this one maybe just go to 24 oh perfect now now I don't see off the- wall I don't see the floor that's great I'm going to unpiloted right there and then zoom out a little so now I know okay look this is great information I'm right here on the Sound Stage of my um my LED you know whatever virtual Production Studio with my camera put the actors right here they're not too close to the wall now I know this is what it's actually going to look like when I go into an actual practical stage with practical subjects and the LED wall is using this unreal scene it's pretty powerful here's a few considerations for how you can set up some relationships between your camera and your subject for recomposing different shots around your scene first you could just move your move your camera uh and then you have to move your subject and that just takes a little while so one option is you could actually bring your uh your camera as a child of the subject so now wherever I move my my character the camera follows if I want to move and like I don't like these pillars over here let's let's move it over here or let's rotate so now we're composed over here in this shot this is this is helpful so the camera is a child of the subject that's one way another way is actually the subject or the the the mesh is a child of the camera and the way to do that is it has to be set to movable so if it's set to static and I try to move it it won't actually go underneath there but if I set it to movable I can move the woman underneath the camera so now she's a child of the camera and so once if I move the camera then she moves as well that's another option um and in this case obviously if I rotate the camera she would rotate as well that's great um another option is if you want I think more control you can um create an actor so put the the the put the camera as a child of the actor and the woman so now oh boy we've got a lot going on here so now the actor is over here and if I move it then both the camera and the woman move that gives you some options as well I find it's best to uh move the actor um like right exactly by the woman so I would make it make the actor a child of the woman zero it out the actor is actually right at her feet so and then if you want to rotate it around it's exactly where you need it to be one last thing you can do is utilize look at feature on a camera so if I type in look and then I use this little pick actor and then I'm going to pick the woman uh so it's chosen her I have to enable look at tracking and you see it's going to jump to the bottom because if I click on her you see where her her axis is is at her feet so you can go back to the camera and you can uh adjust the offset so move it up so that's kind of cool it's a little wonky to me I would actually prefer I have a little cube in here it's set to Invisible so I turn it on and then I'm put a going to put the cube uh I have to make it movable put it as a child of the woman zero it out um and then I'm going to pull it back out and bring it up to about her head height and then I'm going to make it uh we'll we say visible can't spell so turn it off so it's not visible and then now I'm going to use this look at and set it to the cube which we've called uh look at object and hit enable so now if I move this Cube around [Music] the camera is going to look at the cube so I can just keep it right here I can even keep it as a as a child of the woman so that when I move her it's actually moving uh but then I still have the ability to tilt the cube down and look wherever I want and so those are some options as you're composing cameras inside of this virtual set in unreal from there build more camera setups and even levels but there are quite a few more steps to get prepped for an actual production but that's the goal get on an actual stage and do some filming I hope you found this helpful if you did leave a comment below or a like subscribe for more content like this we'll see you next time

Channel: Cart & Horse

Views: 2,030

Keywords: Virtual scout, epic games, game engine, how to do virtual production, how virtual production works, ue5 tutorial, unreal engine, unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 beginner, unreal engine 5.1, unreal engine virtual production, virtual art dept, virtual production, virtual production setup, virtual production studio, virtual production unreal engine, what is virtual production

Id: FXwnTYBr5EU

Length: 13min 10sec (790 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023