Why I'm ADDICTED To Filmmaking In Unreal Engine

I'm completely addicted to making films in Unreal Engine and there's a very important reason why so I'm going to show you by building a cinematic scene in unreal from scratch and in the end you'll know why I'm hooked this better not suck now Unreal Engine probably isn't the first piece of software that comes to mind when thinking about film making but it's actually used on tons of film and TV Productions because of its ability to render photorealistic 3D Graphics in real time it's the reason it's the key ingredient in Virtual production where an environment created in unreal can be displayed live on set behind the actors on massive LED walls or green screen sound stages wait you do have a Sound Stage right don't worry about it it can still be used for indie film making as well let me show you so here we have a blank Unreal Engine project ready for us to make something and without giving away too much it's a fantasy scene set in the mountains and I'll say no more cuz you'll see it at the end of the video so for a scene like this I'm going to need a landscape and unreal has an amazing landscape system built in where you can sculpt Caverns Mountain mountains add erosion but in my opinion the most amazing thing is the ability to use real world environments in your scene for instance if you wanted to use a mountain range from New Zealand wonder why you'd want that you could just go to a site like tangram height mapper highlight the area you want to use download a map and import that into unreal and unreal will just generate a mountain region for you just insane I love this the landscape that I'm going to use in this scene I've made myself and I've just added it to the patreon and you can get the landscape mesh or height map plus the materials and they're all available to download and for you to use in your projects now I think it's cool that you don't have to be a 3D modeling expert to make amazing things and unreal I'm certainly no 3D modeler and that's why I always use quickel Mega scans this is basically a library of nearly 15,000 assets things like surface imperfections 3D models textures and these things are just readily available in the engine for to import drag and drop into your scene and position as you want the 3D assets were created using a process called photo photogrametry where sometimes thousands of photographs are taken of a single object and then it's reconstructed in 3D space which means that it retains all those beautiful imperfections that real objects have not all Mega scans are created equal some of them are incredible quality and some of them are more suited to be used in the background but a well-lit mega scan used appropriately is more than enough to fool someone that they're looking at the real deal so let's say you've built parts of your world now is a really good opportunity to add some cameras to your scene start Scouting For locations and setting up some shots and we have the added benefit here that these are virtual cameras and can be basically any kind of camera that you want you can set your aperture can set your focus but you can also adjust what sensor size you have do you want to shoot with an IMAX sensor or do you want to shoot with anamorphic class maybe you can do that I'm not going to be quite that adventurous and I am going to be shooting some green screen footage as well on this camera so I need my settings to match so I'm going to be setting this to a 16x9 DSLR and probably using focal lengths of about about 24 or 35 mm now we have a whole valley in place but no sense of how big or small a person would be in this environment so I'm going to go on mixim and get one of their mannequins and drag that into my scene that gives me that scale reference and also lighting reference as well so I've selected loads of Mega scans that I think are going to work with this scene so I've got lots of rocks I found some really nice Japanese Lantern type things as well so I'm going to start building the scene placing our sets here this is really where we start to find the scene and where they are direction is unreal has an amazing set of lights that can mimic lights from The Real World like Point light could be a light bulb you've got a rectangular light which is like a soft box directional light like the sun and also a spotlight which is very dramatic but these can all be controlled in detail down to the color temperature and intensity and radius how soft they're going to be on your scene it's incredible to be able to go from daytime to Sunset immediately the blink of an eye and watch all of the Shadows shift it's beautiful really and I'm not just eyeballing this because I can load in a false color L and really nail exposure as well I can start to see this scene coming together now it's giving off a bit of a mood but these mountains should have trees I've already gushed about Meg scans Lots but they do trees so you go to the Epic Marketplace and you can just add them to your project then in unreal go to your foliage painting mode drag in a few trees and you can just paint them all over your landscape wherever you want them it's called the foliage painting tool sure but you can do it with rocks TW pigs bins whatever so I'm just in the process of setting my lighting up for my green screen shoot I've got about three shots to do it shouldn't take me too long all the footage that I capture on the green screen here is going to go into After Effects the green is going to get keyed out then the footage is going to get sent into Unreal Engine and placed directly in the scene on a transparent plane I want to be able to film within the environment that I've built it just makes a lot more sense to me in my head and I've been working this way for quite a while I've made plenty of videos on the channel about how I do this I'll link few of them Below in case you want to try it out in the past during pre-production if I wanted to communicate the look or the mood of a film I had to rely on story boards or concept images but now I get to start building this world straight away and see it right away and a lot of that is due to unreal's real-time technology when you view your scene in Unreal Engine by default you're looking at it with Lumen epic developed Lumen so that you can view your scene in real time with good quality lighting so it calculates both direct and bounce lighting or Global illumination and the results are really generally beautiful but when the time comes to render your scene from Unreal Engine out to a movie clip or an image sequence so you can use it in either Premier Pro or D Vinci resolve you have the choice to either render with the alumin system or the built-in path Tracer which is built upon R tracing technology but just with a lot more raise it pumps these out into your scene and you get some of the most realistic results so that's what I'm going to use for this scene so with a bit of extra tinkering I've made something and here it is [Music] [Music] [Music] PE [Music] [Music] [Music] the path [Music] [Music] but what is it right is it a storyboard no not an animatic either probably a previs which is amazing because you've only just been writing your script and now you can see it and test those ideas what works what doesn't and then go back to your script and amend the things you don't like about it so we can see our films before we've made them that's why I'm addicted to Unreal Engine and you can just continue from there because there's no reason in my mind why an indie filmmaker can't reach final pixel in unreal everything I've done in this video can be learned with simple online tutorials and I haven't even scratched the surface so if you want to dive deep into virtual production with me subscribe to the channel and watch this video next to see what's possible an Unreal Engine in 3 days

Channel: Joshua M Kerr

Views: 303,439

Keywords: virtual production, unreal engine 5, unreal engine, unreal 5, unreal engine 5 cinematic, unreal engine 5 film, unreal engine 5 filmmaking, unreal engine 5 for filmmaking, unreal engine 5 movie, unreal engine 5 movie making, unreal engine 5 short film, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5 virtual production, unreal engine film, unreal engine filmmaking, unreal engine short film, unreal engine tutorial, epic games, unreal, ue4

Id: AWkbyPDFUPo

Length: 8min 2sec (482 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 03 2023