Transcripts
1. Filmmakingwith Unreal and Quixel Intro: Hi, my name's Nathan Limbach ski. And in this course I'm gonna walk you through rendering a short film and Unreal engine. On top of that, I'm going to show you how you can use quicksort bridge to bring amazing high-quality free assets into your short film and save you a lot of time in building sets and such. There's just no reason to use anything but a real-time engine for rendering a short film, especially if you're a filmmaker making these things by yourself. The process of going through and rendering and something like Maya or even blender and not using real time, it's just, it's so much slower. And if it's slower, you're gonna make fewer short films. Use this process, use the assets that are available today, all these amazing free programs and let yourself be creative and not get bogged down. And all the technical details and the little extras that you could do if you do it all the slow way. Just make films, make them faster and have more fun in the process. I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys make. Lack of physical disabilities changes. You have to decide that. Hey, you can add in there. We've got at their height. And mobilize is done. Nerves.
2. Lesson 01 Exporting Animation: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to export both your RIG vendor animations from, in this case Maya. But the same principles should carry over into most any 3D software package that you would want to use. So to get started here, we've got our crop Walker and the export process is really pretty simple. First off, I'm just going to delete these controls. We don't need those. And I'm going to select the top here because all we really want is the joints and the geometry. I'm going to export this here. And let's just take a look at my settings. I turn on smoothing groups, tangents, and buy Normals. Obviously, animation isn't what we're exporting. But for whatever reason, I've found that it seems to have issues with exploiting the joints and stuff. Sometimes if I don't turn that on, I do turn off bake animation because I'd like to do that myself. Skins definitely need blend shapes don't necessarily mean, but it doesn't necessarily have to leave it on. I'm not using any blend shapes. And scroll down, turn skeletal, skeleton definitions. And I leave cameras on even though in this case I'm not exporting cameras just so that when I do export cameras, I don't have to remember to check it. It's not going to hurt to leave it on if you're not actually selecting and eat cameras and your export light stuff and don't want audio, you definitely don't want Definitely turn off embed media. If you leave that on, it's going to spit out the textures and stuff and that will make your file huge. Include children input connections. You want that on the units, you can just leave that to automatic. Why is up in my case in my and then this is on are often better. And I'm just using the 19 FBX, But the settings are really the same. Alright, and that's it. So then we'll just call this prop Walker. Hit Export and there's our FBX. Sometimes you'll get errors, but in this case it really just doesn't matter. I seem to always get random errors, but I'm, I'm just not worried about them. Next up, we're going to export an animation. The animation is much the same, but you wanna make sure that you bake your joints before you. First of all, you want to import the reference. Just make sure you don't save f to go pass this point. Then this may not carry through into other software. But in Maya you want to delete the namespace editor. So you go up to window general editors, namespace editor, lead that and tell it to merge with root. See that removes the reference names that were put on there. Now, if you shift, click the plus sign and it's going to open up everything underneath there. And I'm just gonna select all the joints does matter if I've got the IK handles and stuff selected the constraints, it's fine. And then we're gonna go up to Edit bake simulations. Now make sure that you have your timeline set to whatever you want to bake. Because if it's not in here, it won't make let that go through. Now we can see we've got keys down here. So we can go ahead and minimize that. And again, delete controls. And this time we're also going to delete the geo. You don't need the geo all is looking for for animation is the bones because we're not animating the geometry itself. And so there's no reason to make the files bigger by having the GOs in there. So you can delete that. And then we're just gonna export with the exact same settings that I had before. Again, like I said, I don't turn on bake animation because it doesn't necessarily make the joints the way I want it to. And so you can ignore that. Name it what you want. So you know, it's an animation. And you're good to go. The key thing is to make sure that you bake your joints and that you delete anything in there that you don't want. And make sure that all the names lineup. For instance, with a Maya rig, it'll let you have two things named the same as long as they're not in the same place in the hierarchy. But if you go into Unreal and two things are named the same, it's not going to like that. It doesn't care if it's in the hierarchy where it is, like if there's anything name the same, it's going to get confused and it's going to be errors and it's not going to work. That's probably the most important thing to remember when exporting to unreal, something that works fine in something like Maya, but will not work in a game engine. And remember, groups also count. It's not just in the joints, it's anything, anything in that hierarchy. Everything has to have a unique name. Alright, we'll see you in the next lesson.
3. Lesson 02 Importing Animation: Welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to import our rig and our animations into Unreal and then show you how to hook those two things together. What settings you need to worry about, because there's a lot of them. So let's get started. First up, you've got our crop Walker rig. We're going to drag that into a new folder. And you're going to get all this stuff to worry about. It's really not as bad as it looks because this is our rig and not one of our animations. We do want to make sure that we're bringing the meshing with the animations. We don't have to worry about that, but this is going to be our base rig. So make sure Skeletal Mesh, import mesh. Although those are checked, we do want the geometry and the skinning weights predicts color. It doesn't really matter. These two here update skeletal, skeleton reference pose, use T 0 is referenced both. If you're having some issue with the reference posts from your rig, you can mess with that, but I only had to deal that a couple times that it shouldn't be a problem if you've done things right in your 3D package, preserve smokes, meeting groups would leave that on. I am going to leave on import meshes in Boehm Hierarchy because I have a bunch of pieces of geometry that make up this rig. If I had done a cleaner, it would just be one single piece of geometry and that would be ideal. But since this isn't for a game, I'm not quite as worried. We do not have any blend shapes, so you can leave off morph targets. We don't have any yellow Ds. Do make sure that you import and normals and tangents otherwise unreal, we'll just take it's own stab at it and it might not be quite what you want. Going down. We're not going to worry about animations, were not importing animations. We don't need any of that just yet. I don't like to let it create materials when I'm importing, will make that separately. So I can name them what I want and I don't want to deal with that setup. And that's about it for the rig imports. Let's just go ahead and hit Import. There we go, long as everything works, alright? Alright. So as you can see, we've got our geometry in here. And everything. Looks like it should. It just doesn't have any materials. Before we add materials though, let's go ahead and bring an animation. And so I can show you how that hooks up and grab one of these animations were hidden, pull it and it's already sees our crop Walker rig. What to make sure if it's not selected here, that you select this skeleton. We don't need meshes in the bone hierarchy, you should just be joints. We just want the animation. If you turn on default sample rate is going to choose 30 frames per second. Ours is at 24. So I'm saying the custom sampling rate to 0, which will just do whatever it sees as his best. Import custom attribute. Not worried about that. Can leave it on all of these you can leave on, they're just not going to affect anything. Remove redundant keys, this one's fine. If you have some function results, your animation doesn't look quite like what you remember, then you might want to turn that off. But it does little bit optimization. If you have duplicate keys that are redundant in that can save you some memory. Less important for just pure animation, definitely more so for games. And then the rest of this is just fine. So much less to deal with when you're importing animation because you've already set up your Rick. So we're gonna import that. And there we go. So we can open this up. And we can see right away that it looks like everything's hooked up in working just like we would hope. Perfect. And that is how you import a rig and animation and hook them up in Unreal. Next lesson we're gonna look at applying materials to this because as you can see, these look a little plain. Alright, see you next lesson.
4. Lesson 03 Materials: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up your materials in Unreal Engine and going to give you a few tips and tricks that you can use within the materials and some very important information on what to do with certain texture maps as you bring them in. Because if you get the settings wrong, your materials not going to look like it's supposed to and you won't know why. So pay attention. Alright, so I've brought in all my textures. I've gotten the materials here set up. There's really nothing special or bringing in the textures themselves, you just drag and drop. But what is important is what you do with them when they're in. So as you can see, we're just let's focus on this big leg material and I'm gonna go ahead and bring in the rig. You can see the materials are set up here. We're gonna look at this back leg. Now one of the important things when setting up your materials is realizing that if you've exported from something like substance painter, you've probably packed your different passes into different color channels. And that's exactly what I've done here. So in this case I have my blue channel is my metallic, my green channel is my roughness, and my red channel is my ambient occlusion. And this just saves memory, saves in just having lots of maps and makes things simpler. And then here I have my separate Normal channel, plug that in normal and my color channel. And all you have to do if you want to connect these RGB, that's gonna use all channels in the base color or metallic, whatever we need to. That part's pretty simple. In our case, we've got this set to default lip. If you wanted to do something different, you can make this unlit. Select that, let it compute. If I save it. Come back to our main window here you'll see who think I must have disconnected. Very hard. So if you change the Unless you have to put your color for the massive there. So what will do is it'll give you your colors, but you're not going to get metallic and I'm going to get any shininess. It's just like a cartoon flat. So there's lots of different things you can do the materials, but for most cases you're just going to want to leave it to default. Let we don't have any transparency in this material. And so we're going to leave this tuple opaque, but you have options for that as well if you need it. Now one of the most important thing is that this is all you remember when bringing in your materials is this. Let's go ahead and open up this texture file that has our metallic roughness ALL. Make sure when you bring in this file that you turn off SRGB fits. It might be on by default and make sure that it is off. And we're going to leave this at linear colored. Normal also has a similar thing. It shouldn't be done by default, turn-off SRGB, such normal map. Your main texture. And that can have SRGB on, that's fine. But if you have this set as RGB, it just won't look right. Things will be Shiny in a weird way to metallic, it'll just, it looks weird. It's not, not meant to be that way. Alright, so let's take a look at modifying these things. This one doesn't need a lot, but let's say, I'm just not quite happy with say my, my roughness. And want to play with how reflective This is. What you can do is drag this out. And it's going to give you this search bar. I'm a lookup multiplied. And if you plug this in, it's just going to let you multiply that value by whatever number you put in. Now you could just multiply here. And that would work fine. Or if I hold down the one key number one and I click, it'll give me a float. And if I plug that into the Multiply node, it'll let me set that number here. And I can set that to whatever I want. Let it refresh C, It looks less shiny. Now let's say I set it to 0, will make this completely. It's just a great way to make an adjustment after the fact. Maybe once you get it into the scene, the texture doesn't look quite right and you don't wanna go all the way back in substance. It's a good way to make little tweaks. When the other major ones that used for this kind of tweaking is power. So let's drag off again. And this you can just think of as contrast. That's really what it's doing. And this is by default set to power of two. And it's just like I said, it's just going to up your contrast so it'll just make things more extreme. Both more shiny and less shiny. So between these two, you can really do a lot of tweaking without ever going back into your materials. Alright, Last but not least, we're gonna take a look at a little animation within our material. You can see this scrolling text just to give a little life to his computer monitor. Let's, let's open this up. And what this is is a spreadsheet. If I openness, you can see it's just a series of screens that I've made into this four by four block. The little hard to see, but these are actually square, square, square their frames of an animation of the text scrolling. And you can use that to create an animated material. So how do we do that? First, you create a flip book node. If you right click anywhere here. Flip book, you can be able to bring that up and create it. So we're going to bring in our time Node and multiply it. And that's going to allow us to basically change the speed of our animation. Now the number of rows and the number of columns is going to be dependent on how many sprites you've got stacks on the R case, it's four by four, so that makes it easy answers for both ways. Froze being horizontal, columns being vertical. And then our texture coordinate. We're just going to leave one-to-one that gets fed into our base color. And then I'm also multiplying it and using that power node and adding in some other stuff. So I can play with the color into the message or I can have it glow a little bit. Now in this case, this anger node here that I've got, if I crank it up, you'll see that it turns a screen read. And so that's just a couple of tools that I find that I use really frequently. And unreal materials are, are really powerful and unreal. There's, I mean, as you can see, there are so many things. But that's the most basic. One last hotkey that I'll leave you with is if you press the three key and click, it will give you this three channel color. We'll allow you to just make whatever color you want and plug it in if you just want it, something gets all the color are like when we made the globe. Alright? Hopefully that made sense. Hopefully that helped materials or it's a massive subject. This is just barely scratching the surface, but hopefully that helps you understand the basics of how you interact with it and the things that you need to pay attention to for the most part, if you're creating a material and substance, you can bring it in and use it straight away. You don't have to dig super deep in. But there's so much there if you want to start exploring. That will make this just gives you a base level understanding. And we will see you in the next lesson.
5. Lesson 04 Setting up Quixel Bridge: In this lesson, we're going to look at setting up pixel bridge to allow us to export their free assets directly into Unreal. This is super powerful because it gives you access to a massive library of objects and textures and decals and all sorts of things that let you very quickly build incredibly realistic and high production value set that you can use in short films, games, whatever you want. And as long as you're using it an unreal, it's completely free, which is mind-blowing. So let me show you how this setup goes. There's a few things you want to make sure you get specifically right, but it's really pretty straightforward and we should be good to go. Okay, first thing first you're gonna wanna download and install quicksort bridge. You can get that at pixel.com slash bridge. Once you've done that, like I have here, I went ahead and signed in with my unreal Epic account. And let's go ahead and we're going to use this asset which I've already downloaded. If you haven't downloaded something, you'll see this little icon, you just click that and it will download to the default folder. Now you can go to download settings here and you can change all sorts of things, what you end up grabbing. They'd give you a ridiculous amount of options and maps, et cetera. I'm just gonna leave it at the default. Next up, I'm gonna go to my export settings. This is very important. So I am targeting Unreal engine. In this case, I'm using 4.25. And then my plugin location is under program files, Epic Games. And you're gonna wanna go to whatever version of the engine you selected up here. Go to the engine plugins folder. Make sure you're under program files and not programs files. X86. That's that would be the wrong one if for whatever reason you have a folder in there, alright, then you're gonna set your default project. Basically just go to wherever your project is and double-click the content folder, and that should be enough. Now the last thing is make sure that before you hit export back here, make sure that your project is actually open. And once you do, it's going to go through its thing. It might take a moment in Unreal. And then it will show up here under this mega scans folder. And there you have your asset, your textures and materials. All setup. Good to go. We'll just go ahead and open this up. And there we have it. Easy is that you have this ridiculously realistic looking asset that you can throw in and use. And like I said, they have more than just 3D assets. There's a whole library they're constantly adding to 3D assets and textures. The decals are a fantastic way to just add some, some detail to any kind of set that you're setting up. It's almost easier to make something look photo real and, and it's stylized at this point, all these assets to work with. And so that's the basics of setting up quicksort bridge to allow you to export into your unreal project. We'll see you in the next lesson.
6. Lesson 05 Megascans Blend Materials: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to set up a blend material using materials from quicksort bridge. Now, usually this would be a pretty complicated process sitting up in material to blend several together in a convincing way. But if you use the mega scans provided blend material, it's actually really simple, gives you a whole lot of features in power more than I could possibly go into N1 less than, but this will get you started and then you can play with it from here. So first step, you're going to want to find three materials that you want to blend together and the order that you select them as very important. The first material you select is going to be your base layer. So I'm going to select this flagstone floor. The middle one is going to be your middle layer and the third one will be your top layer. So think of it just selecting from bottom to top. All right, then we're gonna click on mega scans up here. Hit create material blend. It's gonna grab those three. And it's created this blend material here under a blend materials folder. Go ahead and open that up. And here you've got a host of options. Almost too many it feels like, but it's really fairly straightforward. Let's just start at the top here with some of the most important stuff. First, I want to turn on this puddle layer. And this is a great way to add some detail. Any AC and really where it makes sense to be able to add a puddle to break things up. And we'll get to that in a minute. If I select this, it will allow me to make specific adjustments to the base layer, middle layer, top layer, whichever I want. So I'm just gonna leave this on base layer for now. Let's go ahead and close this out, pull it off to the side. This material could be applied to anything really, a wall floor, a landscape. But right now I'm just going to apply it to this plane that I've brought in from Maya and my case now makes sure that your plane has a decent number of polygons are really what we're looking for is the vertices. Because the more vertices you have, the more detail you can paint with, it doesn't mean that it has to be super dense. But if I only had the corners of this, this was just a single polygon, then I really wouldn't be able to paint much on it at all. So keep that in mind. Don't have to go crazy, but you do need a few vertices to work with because that's basically going to be your, your paint density. So let's go ahead and pull our blend material onto our mesh here. And you can see this just looks at the wrong scale of things way too big or maybe our crop walkers miniature. But I want to adjust that. So first I've checked this US based layer adjustments and I'm going to come down and we'll pull this over so you can see a little better. And I'm going to adjust the tiling for this base layer. Click that toilet down. And let's set this to a three by three. It's a little better ethic that feels, feels about right. So now that we've gotten that, let's make some adjustments to our other layers here. Now, right now we can't see them because by default, it's the base layer that's basically taking up all your paint. If you want to paint down or reveal these really, but there are other layers. Go up two modes here and select mesh pane. Click on paint and the top tab here. And here we have brush options where we can adjust the size of our brush strength. We can adjust the strength. I'm gonna bring this down quite a bit and then fall off. Now for this to be visible and want to flip my pink color and race color options here. And I want to specifically choose what channel I'm going to paint, starting from the left here with the red. If I paint red, that will reveal the middle layer. If I paint in green, that will reveal the top layer. If I paint blue, that will apply the reveal the puddle layer. So I like to work my way from left to right here. It's just an easier way to think about it. So let's just paint a little bit. Here we can see are kind of gravel, dirt, whatever layer here being revealed and just give it a decent size patch here. And that looks a little bit oversized as well. So we can do the same thing we did with our base layer. Come in here and let's just bring this up to three by three as well. See how that looks. Looks a little better for more detail. But this isn't very realistic, has it? It's just this little bit of a fade, but it's just kind of a splat of this texture. It doesn't feel like our textures are interacting at all. Well, thankfully, they've built-in tools to fix that. Come to your top here with this base middle layer blend controls. And here you have four controls that will let you tweak how these two layers interact based on the height map. So if I pull this up, you can see how the texture kind of pulls through there. If I adjust the blend contrasts, we can get even more. And you'll see that it's kind of pulling away from the rocks because it's doing this based on the height map. Now we could completely invert it and have it just be on the rocks instead of between them. We can adjust the fall off how how soft it is between the two, but we'll just leave that for now. But by messing with these controls, you can really get some great effects. So let me pull up my strength painting here. We'll paint this in a few more areas. And what I can do is if I shift collect, I can actually erase just like I paint down. We can help make it feel a little more natural as well. So look how much better that is. It really, really breaks it up when you can just throw stuff in and just give it a much more natural look. Alright, let's do the same thing with our top layer. We're going to paint on the green. Paint a splotch over here. And again, we'll looks terrible to start with. It's too big. Same thing. Rinse, repeat. Come down to our top layer and do three-by-three. Since that seems to be working. And then we'll come back to our Blend settings here. Top layer blend controls. All right, let's take this. He's just crank that up a bit. Up the contrast. And again starts looking much, much better. Erase a little bit in there. And it's a little bit. And yeah, not too bad, really great way to take something that initially looks good but overly tiled and give it a little bit more of a natural feel. You could do this with brick, adding in, damage sections in between the bricks, any anything you want. The possibilities are really endless. Alright, the last thing we're going to cover is to add it puddle. To do that, we're going to paint the blue channel. Let's just add a puddle over here by our crop Walker. There we go. Now this doesn't look all that convincing. Sure, it's reflective, but we can add a lot more detail. So we're going to scroll down here to puddle layer. And let's change the color. I want to make this a muddier puddle. Let's say spring that they're a little darker. That's starting to feel a little, little more natural with our setting. I can play with the capacity. Maybe this is a little denser liberty or you can play with the financial power, all these settings, the amount of roughness which will change how much it reflects. The real fun one is if we come down to her Wave controls. So let's go ahead and up the speed. Not too much. Just a bit. Well up the scale or anybody into shrink it hard to tell until we can see it show up. And we'll up the normal strength just so we can start to see this a little better hug if too much, too much. So we're gonna pull our poor speed down, even lower. Its close up our scale and reduce it rather. Well down that strength. Touch speeds still a little too fast. And there you go. Just tweaking things to fit your scene. You can get something that really adds a lot. Looks great. And don't think of this as limited to just a water polo. Say I want to have some chemical spill here. There you go. Add that. And suddenly it's the green foods that has spilled out onto the ground. As I said, the settings they haven't here feel endless. There's so many things to play with, but that's enough to get you started and feel free to mess with things, mess with the displacement maps. There's just so much that you can add that will bring this new level of realism for really no work at all to your seeds. Alright, we'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Lesson 06 Set Building with Quixel Assets: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use quicksort assets to make your set, to really dress your scene. And we're going to look at using objects that you can pull out a pixel. We're gonna look at foliage and how to use different things like grass and rocks to quickly populate a natural area. And we're also going to look at how to use decals to add cool little details to your scene and to really break things up. So first off, let's look at how we can use objects that we brought in. Now in my mega scans folder here I've brought in quite a few objects that I'm using in this little short film. And in a minute, I'll show you how I've implemented them, but let's just look through some of these pieces. So let's take a look at this log. All I gotta do is drag it into your scene. And as you can see, I can treat it like I do any other asset that's too small. I can make it bigger. Rotate it. And it actually fits pretty well with this texture I have here. And it looks pretty darn good. Now if I want to add to that, I can just bring in something else. Let's say we've got a bucket here. So let's drag that in next to raise it up a little. And bit by bit, we could start to populate this with details. I mean, I have no idea what you're seeing is that would include a login, a bucket as your whole set. But that's not necessarily the point. What I do when I'm building a set is I will animate to a very basic low polygon object. And let me show you what I mean. So as you can see, this is very basic raw materials. I knew that I needed a bond. I had some of the traits that I had made outside of unreal that weren't Quicksilver assets. And I just barely roughly put together this fence. And really this is just for framing something that animate to so they know where the characters are going to make contact with the ground and such. It's just the most basic thing you can come up with. The whole point is to not waste any time in making assets. You see, I didn't then UV anything. It's just there as a bare-bones reference. After I brought that in, that's when you start to layer up for this and that. Before I show you how I layered up on top of that basic set, let me show you foliage and decals and how we can make use of those. So fully edges, pretty straightforward. If you go up to your modes and you switch to foliage, you can bring in different pieces of foliage to this area. And then once they are selected, you can use them to paint on top here. So let's go ahead and we're gonna change this from landscape to static meshes. Well, because that's what we're painting on. Now this is important to take note of because if I'm painting a landscape and I have other objects like this, and I have Static Mesh turned on. It will paint on top of that log, and we don't want that. So let's undo that. Unfortunately, everything in this scene as a static mesh, so I'm just going to have to be careful and paint around it. So you see if I paint, it looks fine. But it's not it's not very dense. It's not quite what I'm looking for it and also pane over here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on this asset. And I'm going to up the density. Let's crank it way up there. Now we're, now we're getting a little bit more to work with. I can also do things like randomizing the scale, giving you a range to work within. I can adjust the rotation, all sorts of things, whether it's static, movable, whether it cast shadows. All these things can be really useful for improving performance if you're having issues and just making things look a little bit more natural and less uniform. So you can use it also for things like these beams here. So I'm gonna select those, bring my density down to a 100. And if I paint on, you'll see that then it's just kind of placing these at random along here. And if I were to give it a little bit more variety in the scale, and it'll even vary how big they are. This is a really easy way to add natural variation to clutter and garbage details that you want to just fill your senior, that you want to fill your scene with, without having to hand place every single object. Now there are some things obviously that you only want a couple of an unseen light this bucket. I wouldn't necessarily want to just fill a scene with buckets unless it's a bucket factory. But with the case of grass, rocks, sticks, stones, whatever. Really easy to get a scene filled with detail with very little effort from you. All right, so here I'm going to show you decals and how you can easily add detail to any surface really. So let's go to our manga scans will go to Atlases where I've gotten several decals here and we'll go to road debris. So let me just zoom in here so we can see a little better. I'm just going to drag this Di Cao instance right onto the surface. And here you can see right away we've already added all these little rocks that wasn't there before. We easily added on no real work, didn't have to place them. But you can also see on the bucket here that it's receiving the D ticket, that it's receiving the d count, and that's a problem, we don't want that. So let's select our bucket. Can search for beef cow, and we can choose whether or not any objects receives decals. In this case, I don't want the bucket to receive details. I don't want this to. And so when we go to make that adjustment again and we move these rock decals over around that tree. You'll see that it's not being painted anymore. So that's really easy, again, really easy way to add great details. You can do this obviously with graffiti, with mud splat, with tire tracks, any number of things there's a ton of options to work with in the quicksort library. And I highly recommend playing around with that. I usually go in after I've got my scenes set up and just use it to just have fun and really break up any areas that I think need more detail or looked to tiled or whatever. Alright, now I'm going to show you my scene and how I took that barebones gray set and built on top of it. All right. Here is the map that I made out of that barebones gray mesh that you saw. I've taken all of this out of Quicksilver assets aside from some of the strawberries, unlike some of the custom things that had made. But 99% of this is all adequate soil. And you'll notice that none of these things exist as is in flexible. This does, that was great to pull out, copy few those in. But this right here isn't a single objects. I've taken this piece of wall, this piece of roof, fill that hole and you can mix and match things together without an all having to come out of 1P. So use your imagination, combined pieces and you can make a much bigger set than you could if you're just depending on what they give you as single objects. So I started with a landscape, in this case that I painted to basically follow the terrain that I had developed before. And I did that by going into the landscape tool, telling it to generate a landscape. And then just the way we painted with our materials, painted on landscape. And obviously that's not what we want. So we'll undo that. But it's very easy to just quickly paint in hills like this. And then I took assets in the foliage tool. And I painted on the grass, I painted on some rocks. I grabbed this fence asset and I layered it in just one bit at a time. And then you'll notice you can break up terrain with some of the Iraq assets as well. So they go back to my select mode. You'll see that these are part of the landscape. This is a rock that I brought in. And I can take these assets, I can go into their individual materials and you can make adjustments. You can make adjustments to the tent. You can make adjustments to any aspect of this material to try and make it fit. Maybe other pieces of landscape or dirty rock that you're using and make it blend together and feel cohesive. So this is really just as far as you want to take it, as much details you want to add. I've got decals on the ground here. And all of this was done with free assets. And it's just mind-blowing that you could get something like this super quickly for free and have all that to work with and be able to focus on animation and making my short film what I want it to be without having to spend what little then I can't imagine how much time would benefit. I had to make each of these assets from scratch by myself. So dig into the crystal library, take advantage and excited to see what you guys can put together from all the pieces of the puzzle that they gave you. We'll see you next lesson.
8. Lesson 07 Post Process Volumes: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use post-process volumes to adjust visual settings like ambient occlusion, bloom color correction, and all these little things that can be changed overall in your scene with just a simple box. So speaking of simple boxes, the post-process volume, if you look over on the left-hand side, search for that and find this process volume. You can simply drag it into your scene. Now I already have it in my scene. And the first thing you're going to want to do is scroll down and look for infinite extend unbound, where this will let you do is not have to be within the box itself. Which I can show you. Because if you do not turn on infinite extend, you will have to be inherent to see the effects of it. That's great for games if you only want to pass into an effect, but for the most part you're just gonna wanna put on internet. Alright, now that we have that on, let's take a look at some of the settings. And I'm not going to cover every setting because there's just too many. Some of the ones that I always start off by checking. First off, checkout Bloom. You can use several different methods of Blum. I get the best results, especially if you have a scene with a lot of glowing objects from Convolution, however, if performance is a problem for you, that one definitely takes a bit of a hit. Scrolling down, you can adjust all sorts of camera type settings like exposure and color correction. There's just a host of those kind of things I'm, I'm gonna avoid most of that just because it's it's fairly self-explanatory. But I do want to show you some of the options for color grading just because this is such an easy way to make adjustments. So let's just play with the saturation. So say I want to make my shot here fill in more old timey. Well, without having to do anything in post, I can just bring the whole shot and to this more sepia tone, I can make it go full black and white. I could blow out the color and have something that's just completely eyeball bleeding. So very easily you can adjust the whole look of your shot. The same goes for contrast. Again, anything that you could do in a typical camera. Video editor, what have you, you can do in here? And that's one of the great things is that you can basically do all your post work before you've even rendered, which was wonderful. Alright, we're going to skip past the rest of these and we're gonna go down to ambient occlusion. Another big one that you can adjust in here. So if we start playing with these settings and assuming you don't have ray tracing turned on. Because in all of these settings, the ray tracing ones will be different than the ones that we're going to use here. They're all under the same place, but as you can see, there's ray trace ambient occlusion and there's ambient occlusion right now we have ray tracing turned off, so we're just going to use this. So I can adjust the intensity, I can adjust the power come just the radius. If you can really play around with things, see as I adjust the power, that gets more or less severe. If you have a ray tracing turned on, you can play with the global illumination, which is, if you haven't, I recommend using it. It's really amazing. Motion blur. Here's where you can adjust how much it's going to adjust the target FPS. So you can really play with how much blur there is. Pull this down to 0, you won't get any. You can adjust your reflections again. For a tracings, an option that's gonna be the better one in most cases. But if not, we'll use screen space. And you can adjust how then you can adjust how that looks. Now one that I find useful in final renders, and it really just depends on what resolution you're going to render out. But if you take your screen percentage and you'd bump it up to something like a 120%. But that's gonna do is it's going to render at a higher resolution than your actual resolution. But say I'm outputting a 1080, it will render at 20% more and then bring it down. And if you're having issues with aliasing or just the quality doesn't seem quite sharp enough. That's a good way to bump it up while still maintaining a lower resolution. And that's about it for post-process line. Like I said, there's a lot of features in here that I skipped over, but those are the ones that I usually find that I hit. And it should be noted that when you're using sequencer, if you have a different camera for every shot, you can actually make all these same changes within the camera. So what I'd like to do is I will have a post-process volume that sets the settings as I want them overall for the scene. But on our shot by shot basis, I might tweak things a little just to make them look better if the bloom is too hot and one shot, I'll bring it down without having to adjust the post-process volume with every single different angle or whenever you have. So keep that in mind. Cameras were basically exactly like the post-process wine with most of these settings, just with a few additional ones. All right, we'll see you in the next lesson.
9. Lesson 08 Lighting: In this lesson, I'm going to show you the basics of how to set up lights. Some of the features that you can use under each kind of light. And as a bonus at the end, I'll show you how to use light functions, which is a fun way to add some movement and texture to your lights. Alright, so to get started, we've got our scene here and there's actually some lights in RC on the side here. I'm gonna pull up the lights tabs. You can kind of see what the options are. First we have a direction light, which is mostly what you would use for something like a sunlight hits a world encompassing directional light. And that's what we have in our scene right now. If I hide some of these other things, turn them off. You can see our sunlight. And if I rotate that, you'll see are lighting changes for the entire scene. The shadow is coming from Sun-like source. Above that we have this skylight. The skylight is great for adding just general ambient light. Again, pull lighting from the environment of your scene, or you can change it here to a specific cube map. So let's take one of the ones that is built in and you can see that it's just giving you this nice skylight HDR fields. Now you can pull in your own HDR maps if you want a particular environment light. Or you can just use what's in the scene by leaving it on captured seem. Now to use the SLS captured seniors have to build your lighting so that it knows what it's pulling from. That can be done up here. And you can choose to build the lighting or you could just grab reflection captures if you're using static reflections instead of sea-based. But we've already built our lighting. So as you can see, it's, it's working just fine. Now your skylight can have its intensity adjusted, its pulling lighting information from the surroundings, but you can still make it brighter and dimmer depending on what your needs may be. You can also tell it to cast shadows or not. If you come down here, you can see that the actual intensity of the light is this intensity scale as opposed to on our sunlight, where it's this just intensity setting. So they look a little bit different. If I pull this intensity and see we get like atomic bomb going off. If I pull it all the way down, you can see this is basically the lighting that you're getting from that skylight. It's just basically the bounce light from the sky. And that's, that's the point and the goal of task shouldn't be an intense light is just a phil. Alright, let's look at some of these other lights on the side. These aren't in our scene. Let's check out a point light. This is the most basic light bulb light. As you can see. And now that we've pulled a fresh light and you can see that we have three settings. Static, stationary, unmovable. Static light is light that will only show up if it's baked. And what baked lighting is, is it's essentially lighting turned into a texture. The computer will calculate what objects are touched by the light. And then instead of computing it in real time, you will build your lighting up here and any static objects and any static lights in it. We'll bake that into a non adjustable light texture. The good thing with that is it's very good for games that need performance. You can get some beautiful lighting with the baking bounce lighting, all of that. But you can't adjust the light, you can't move it, your shadows aren't going to shift. It is baked into the texture IC 0. Reason to use that if you're making a short film because performance isn't really a problem. So I recommend always changing it to movable. Stationary is very similar in that it will, it will bake font static objects, but it will also caste dynamic shadows on dynamic objects. So it's kind of a halfway in-between. So we have a point light here. Let's set to movable. We can adjust the intensity as you can see. So let's imagine this is for something like a camp fire. So we can click on here. We can change our color a bit more of a warm glow. Now I find want to warm up a lighter, cool it down. I could change the color or I could come down here. And I could say use temperature. And this will give you the kind of temperature you'd expect on real-world, like movie set lights. And if you're familiar with that world, this will be a good place for you to start. So let's bring this down and change that temperature. And I can tell it to cast shadows or not. I can also adjust how far that lights effect will go by. Really bring it in here then this camp fire, we're just affect the things really close by. And you can see it has this soft fall off. If I up the intensity now, no matter how bright it goes, it's not going to go past the bubble that I've given it. Now, all these things you could animate. So imagine that you want to make a fire will get into it later but in sequence, or you could make this Flickr. And there you suddenly have firelight. Now most these lights will all have very similar settings. I'm not really going to get into the source radius and stuff that basically just would affect how big your light itself is. Less noticeable when you're doing non retracing lighting. But let's come down here. We'll check out a few more of the settings. If you're using ray tracing, this is where you could adjust the samples. If you're using distance field shadows, which we're not gonna get into right now. All these things are in here. A lot of these might be more gain related. And like I said, between most of the lights to Settings, you're going to be much the same. So let's grab a spotlight. Spotlight works about like you'd imagine. Unlike our point-like though, which is shooting in every direction, this is shooting in one. But because it's shooting in one direction, you have a few extra settings where you can adjust an inner and outer cone. If we bring the brightness up, you can kinda see how that works. This outer cone is gonna really soften it up. But the closer it gets the intercooling, you get this really harsh spotlight line. Same thing. We can adjust colors, give it a nice green hue. And so just shadows. And turn off shadows. And I turn it towards this, what you see happen is it will cast on everything behind it, even on a character. So while if I had shadows on it wouldn't be effecting this shadows off. It's going to go right through. And now there are situations where you might want that if you're just trying to lighten up the side of something, but you don't want an extra source of shadows. You might bring in a light like this. Turn its brightness down just because you want to add a little bit of counter light to an object. Alright, last thing I'm going to show you is this rectangular light. Now this is great because it's basically an area light. If you can use ray tracing, then this will get you really nice soft light. But it works well, even knew that if I scale this up, it's not going to do anything. But if you come into the settings, you can actually adjust the source width. And that will adjust how much light is being cancelled spring up the brightness. You can see the difference, Lamar. Let's play with that. See if I bring it narrow versus y. And you can see the light and reflections shifting across that there. This is really good if you are inside a building and you've got overhead fluorescent lights, stuff like that. Very diffused lighting. Same thing works for the height. You can see as it makes contact with the ground, the shadow gets really harsh. You can adjust barn doors again, this would be more like real-world LED panel lighting, where those barn doors can control just how much spread it's going to have to come down same settings temperature. So let's come down here and I'll show you one more feature that can be very helpful when making short films. You might have a situation where you want to light, say a single character, but you don't want to light your scene. So let's take this Spotlight. Let's say I want to add this green hue that gets cast really harshly on my robot. But I don't want it to fall on the floor here. What you can do is you can take one of your lights. If you come down here, you can see that it has the channel 0, like channel checked. Everything has that checked by default, all lights do. Oh, objects do. However, if I uncheck that, now the light suddenly doesn't work. But if I checked channel one on the light, and I check channel one and just search for it on the object. Now, it's receiving the green light, but the ground isn't. And again, if I turn off gentle 0 on the object now it's only receiving that spotlight. So this is a really, really powerful tool that's something that you would expect to have in something like Maya when you're rendering to be able to light just what you want, you probably won't be something as crazy, as harsh as this. But being able to have a character that you can add some highlights to some rim lights without worrying about affecting your scene is extremely powerful. Alright, the last slide I'm going to show you is this sun sky. Now I'm actually gonna go into my other scene to give you a better look at that. So in this scene, I'm not actually using any specific lights. I'm just using the sun sky system. And what this allows you to do is have a very realistic time of day skylights setup with just dragging this one thing and do your scene. And when I say realistic, I mean, they let you get very, very specific. So you can choose the specific spot on the globe and what time of day and year the sun would be here in just such a way like it's, it's a little ridiculous. If you're trying to match like, I don't know. I can't imagine why I would use that personally, but I'm sure for somebody that's like the best thing ever. But in short, what this lets you do is just by adjusting the time of day. You can bring the sun up, bring it down, and really make this as realistic as you want. Now when I said I'm only using the one-line, I wasn't quite telling the truth. Remember how I talked about that you can use the channels to add just a certain amount of light to one thing or group of things as you want. Well, that's exactly what I'm doing here because you can see as I bring the sun down, there's still some light on this guy. Friend do that. See it's not very noticeable. But I wanted to have just a little bit more white here that I have on the scene. And so I have this direction light. And it only affects the crop Walker. Subtle, but it just adds a little bit of warmth them. Everything else, whoever is just lit by that one skylight. Now if you want to make adjustments to the skylight, it doesn't work quite the same. You'll look in here and you'll see that you don't have those normal light settings and that's fine. If you really want to dig into it and say you want to switch this over to being ray traced. If you look under the components here, then you can make all the typical changes. But for the most part you can just leave it alone. Alright, time for one last trick, I'm going to take you back to my other scene. So in this scene, what I wanna do is I'm gonna take this spotlight and I'm gonna show you how you can use something called a light function. And basically what that lets you do is it lets you take a material and apply it to a light. And it's a, it's probably better to think of it more as like a gel in real life, where you're putting some kind of transparent thing in front of the light. Except we can do way more powerful stuff because while it real life, sure, I could take a green jello and put it in front of the light and make it look like this. In unreal, I can take an animated gel and put it in front of the light. And let me show you where that might be useful. So we'll just do it quickly with this. And if you scroll down you see light function. What you have to do is make a material that is set up as a light function. So I'll just quickly grabbed one of the displacement maps from one omega scans because you want something black and white generally. And it really doesn't matter. And I've created this light function. And all it is is I've taken this random black and white texture. I put a painter in it to make a, you can see it scrolling the time function, Click on the panel. You can see I've set the speed and I'm not even using these power nodes. I was playing with that. And then just setting it in the MRC. And the important detail is here, you want to click on your main node here and set material domain to light function. By default, it's going to be on surface. Once you've got that saved, them, come back to your light. And we're just going to drag this material into our life function material. And now as soon as we do that, that has been applied. But you see it's, it's really subtle. It's not much. And ultimately we're, you'll probably use this kind of thing is if you want to fake the shadow cast by rain on a window or a clouds passing over an environment. Or the effect that water has in politics that it casts on the ocean floor, stuff like that. That's where this becomes very useful. So if I take this same light function and I apply it to our sky or rather our sunlight. You can see how this can be used for clouds. It's not gonna look very good because it's just random. But see if we're looking at this as like shadow passing through smoke or clouds or something like that. It's going way too fast. It's not the right scale and shape. You can adjust the scale here. So if I brought this up to say 20 thousand, but I'll make it bigger, but it also makes it faster in this case. Then you can start to see it. But again, I would want to slow it down. This isn't isn't really intended for, but very quickly you can affect your whole scene and get details because like the cost x under water or the rain drop shadow, that's going to be really hard to actually do with the real and lights. But with this, you can fake it and get just as good as an effect. Alright, that's gonna do it for lights. Hopefully that gives you the basic understanding. There's so much more with all these things I feel like I'm just blasting through it and just picking a few of the important things. These are the things that I find myself using the most, the settings that I am constantly tweaking and feel free to play around with them and figure out what they do. But this will give you at least a decent foundation work with. We'll see you next lesson.
10. Lesson 09 Sequencer Basics: In this lesson, we're going to teach you a little bit about sequencer, a really powerful tool that we're going to spend the next several lessons in. And it's basically where you can bring your animations together. You can bring in cameras where everything comes together and gets rendered out from. So we're going to spend several listens to really dig into this and hopefully get a better understanding of how you can use this very powerful tool. All right, so we're just going to use our little setup seen here. Before I jumped into showing you how I've set up a more full sequencer sequence in my actual short film scene. So to start with, I actually just want to use sequencer to animate this light. We're just going to move it around the scene. So first things first, we're going to talk to cinematics here. You're going to add level sequence. It's going to ask you for a place to save it. In this, in this case, it doesn't really matter where, but I'll just put it under sequences. We'll just call this Test sequence. And it's going to bring up this section here that looks very much like an editor time-wise. Now the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set this to 24 friend to second because that's what I've animated and for my short film. And this green line will tell you where your playback is going to start. So why don't I go ahead and move this to frame one. And this red line is going to show you where your playback ends. We'll leave that alone for now. So the first thing I wanna do is I want to create a camera. And if you don't already have a camera in your scene, you can click this button that will make one along with that camera, and it's gonna make this camera cuts. And what this will allow you to do is if you want to, during the course of the same animation or playback, cut between several different cameras. You can do that here. So if I create another camera and I shorten the length of this camera cut, this is using this camera actors. You can see what's come to the end of this. Let's go to the plus cameras sign. We're going to add in camera actor for which is this camera. As you can see. It's got this cut between the two that I really see it. I'm going to take this camera actor for, and I'm gonna reposition it over here. If you click the camera icon by camera tells you will be looking through that perspective. And if I scrub through, you can see that the camera changes when we get to that different camera cut. Alright, let's go ahead and undo that. Now if I click on my camera here, I'm going to want to uncheck the camera viewport and click on this one. And that will let me pilot this camera around. So let's just get a nice little wide here. And that's just feels a little too zoomed-in. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select my camera. So I've got that camera positioned. There's a lot of settings that we're gonna get into in the next lesson in Canvas specifically. But for now, I just want to animate this light. So let's go ahead and drag this light and c. Now this will work like your typical animation timeline. And if you don't see an option that you want here, for instance, I want to adjust the transform on this. You can click the Plus track. And this will open up all the different settings within that light that you could adjust. So transformers here at the top, van, if you scroll down under transform, you have all the axes on location Rotation scale. I'm not going to worry about the specifics. I'm just going to keep all of them on frame one. And then I'm gonna move forward to frame 48. And I'm gonna move this over. And right now it's set at the top here to create a cheeky when channels properties change. So since I've made a movement, it said an automatic key. You turn that off, that won't make one a little farther. And then if I scrub, you'll see my light moves when I play. If I hit space, it'll play through and we'll just see that like move. So if I want to have it come back to where it started and select that key, hit Control C. Let's move to the end here, control V. And I've pasted that frame. Now and I play, it moves over there, then it moves back. Now let's say I don't want that easing that is happening by default. If you select your transforms and select show the animation keys in curve editor, it will bring up a curb Editor. And this, again is typical to animation programs. Everything works about like you would expect being able to adjust things, being able to change things in the step mode. What have you? Let's just switch this to linear to make everything very straight. And now if I play it, it's not going to ease. It's just going to go that same speed there and bounce straight back. Right? Very simple. And this can apply to anything. You can animate anything in this way. You can animate any setting in this way. So let's draw one more settings. I'm going to key the intensity here for my key at the same at the end. And then in the middle here, we're gonna bring the intensity way up. Then as it moves, it gets brighter and then it moves back and it didn't spec. So like I said, anything can be animated for the most part. And it's great because those are things that you have to animate in your 3D package. You could, but you don't have to add. One more thing I'm going to show you with lights is you might have lights that you only want to show up in certain shots. So basically you want to only have it show up in the sequence. If I wanted that to be the case, I can right-click on this point light and change it to convert to small animal. Now you'll notice in our side panel here that there's this little electric lightning bolt icon that appears over it. What that means is this will only spawn when that sequence is playing. It is attached to a sequence. It won't be there for anything else. So for instance, if I were to create another sequence, to sequence sequence two, you'll see that that light is gone and it is nowhere to be found. But if I open up the sequence one, ha, led his back. This is great for having certain objects that you don't want sharp and other scenes, but they're there for casting a shadow, casting a light, whatever the case may be, they can be specific to that sequence and you don't have to deal with them the rest of the time and remember to hide them every time you're doing something, they can just show up in that sequence. Very, very useful tool. And at any point I could change this back to something that's just there. Invert two plausible. And now the lightening symbols gone and that light will show up even if I switch to a different sequence. That's the basics of sequencer. In the next lesson, we'll get into cameras little bit more. But hopefully that gives you enough to start with working in this very, very powerful tool. We'll see in the next lesson.
11. Lesson 10 Cameras in Sequencer: In this lesson, I want to talk about cameras and specifically cameras in sequencer. So to get started, I must show you how to import one of those cameras that we export it way back to the beginning of this whole thing. So all you have to do is right-click on one of your created cameras that we made last lesson. And I'm going to import, and I'm going to select one of the cameras from shop for the short film here. It's going to be in a weird place in this scene, but that's okay. It'll do for our purposes. Now, when this dialogue pops up, go ahead and uncheck everything. We don't need it. It's not gonna do any good unless you want to mess with it, but you don't need it. So we're going to import. And you can see it made all these keys in here. Now the first thing we want to do, let's go ahead and shorten our shot to the length of this shot. And if I scrub, you can see we've got our camera movement, but did in fact come in. It's in a weird place sliding along behind him, but that's okay. It'll do. And the first thing I'd like to do is since it's keyed everything and I really only want the movement and zoom if there is any. I'm gonna go ahead and delete all the keys on the focal length in this case because I don't need that. So I didn't animate it. And also on the distance. Now if you had animated doom, you'd want to leave the focal length on. But since they did not enemy that, I can go and delete that. And since I deleted those keys, you can see everything's in focus but one family to specifically focus on, on something. Let's go ahead and select our camera actor. And you can see a whole bunch of settings on the right hand side. A lot of these should be familiar. If I scroll down, you can see this looks exactly like what are post-process wire. And it is you can make all those same tweaks and setting and changes in here. But we're going to focus on the cameras specific stuff at the top. Specifically, the focus right now is set to manual and that's just fine. And I can adjust this. And as you see I slide, you can see little focus changes. But how do I know where it's focusing? While an easy way to tell that is to go ahead and click on this Draw Debug focus client. And we see this purple square made. And what it is is it's going to be set at the exact focal distance. So as I scrubbed this through here, I can see it lines up with the back of my character, which is where I want to focus. But if I scrub and now it's moving, how do I handle that? So let's start a frame one. Let's set our focal distance where we want it. Let me go ahead and click this to add a key. And we're going to scrub to the end. And we're gonna add another key after we adjust it. Let's check in the middle and make sure it's about lining up. Yeah. And there you have it. And just like with anything else, you could go into here. And we could adjust the curves if we needed to, but we're leaving, it's more or less the same. Alright, now one thing to make sure you do, and I've done this far too many times, is turned off the debug plane because it will render and it is not pretty. Click back on our camera, will turn that off. And we are good to go. Now there's a few other ways you could track focus. You could select an object and have it track that. But I'd like to animate it by hand by finite, just get better, more consistent results. Alright, another thing you don't want to make sure you do when you bring in a camera is go up to film knack and set it to six by nine DSLR. If you don't do this, it will not frame up quite right the way you've exported it from Maya. Unless you had some weird non 16 by nine ratio, in which case nevermind. Alright, we can also adjust our aperture, which will of course, adjust how severe the depth of field gets. You'd see it happening with that background light as I tweak that. Any normal cameras sitting that you would imagine on a real camera is basically here. I'm not gonna go through all of them. But yeah, you can you can adjust how wide your camera is even after you've brought it in and animated it. Because I'd leave the keys on the focal length. If I wanted to tweak this and do something crazy, I can, I can do that, but there's really no need. Alright? And that is how we bring in animated cameras and play with the focal length. All right, we'll see you next lesson.
12. Lesson 11 Importing Animations in Sequencer: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to use those animations that you brought in width sequencer to set up an entire shot. So what we've got here is shot for this short film. And it just has our crop Walker, Mozi and along then the strawberry falls off. So this would be a good shot because it's got animation on three different objects in this scene that I pulled in from Maya. And that would be the luxury for the camera, the crop Walker, the crate, and the strawberry. Now in the last lesson, we learned how to pull in animation on this camera. And this camera is basically if we free switch out of this perspective, It's tracking along as this guy moves. Can't tell so much because we're facing the sky, but it's correcting along. We get here on the strawberry, false. So let's look back at camera. So we didn't know how to set that up. So let's focus on these other assets. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and delete the animation on each of these things, and we're going to recreate it. Then our stuff is gone. So the first thing to do is you've got your assets in the scene. And so we need to bring them in. And so a crop Walker, a strawberry, strawberry rig, those all get dragged in here. Some funky stuff. There's all get dragged into this scene. And then once you've got them in the sequence, we're going to go to the animation tab. And in this case I notice the shop for, so I'm going to find shot for for the crop locker. And voila comes right em. And that's work. And we're gonna do the same thing for the crate. Grab shop for. And the great thing is when you bring it in animation, you associate it with a rig. It knows what it's looking for. It knows that the animation for this goes with that. And so you're going to pull this up and you're just gonna see what you need in their first step. And that's very helpful. See, I was on the wrong frame when I pulled it in. It's going to set it at the start of wherever your play head is, and that's fine. I can just grab this and drag it back down there. And we're going to do the same thing with strawberry, Mubarak playhead back, one shot four. And there we go. Now, I don't know if this will be fixed in later versions, if it's the bug or, or what. But I noticed that I would lose a frame on the end of my shots. If I just rendered them as is if I just set had set this to here and rendered out, I would I would lose a frame that I needed. And over the course of several shots, you start to lose chunks of your animation. You're short film and single frames make a difference. So that's not acceptable. The only way I've found to fix this and get it to render that final frame out properly, is to select your animations. Right-click, go to Properties. And set your post roll frames to one. Now in theory, what that would do is it just going to hold the last frame. But what happens in practice with LEC skeletal animations is instead of getting a duplicate of that last frame, like it seems like is happening when you just play it in the sequencer. It'll just render out the proper frames. So that's a little annoyance that I've had forever. That is the only way I've found how to fix it at the moment. Hopefully, that's something that'll get sorted out. And another version of Unreal. Alright, so we've got our camera in, we've got our animations in. It's kind of the camera and see how this looks. And there we go. Everything seems to line up just right. Timings, right? And we are good to go. It's as simple as that. Now as bonus here, I'm going to show you just as a side trick. Even though it's not important to this shot, measure you how you can animate a material in the shots. Let's say there was something on the, on the strawberry or whatever here that I wanted to animate over the course of this shot, but I want to animate its material. So let's get to the library. And let's add some glow to it so that completely unnecessary. So when they hit the three key to bring up three channels, and we're just going to make this thing below. So I'm going to feed this. Actually, I'm not even going to use them. I'm just going to use its texture as is. I'm going to feed this through a multiplied. Feed that into the permissive color. I'm going to hit the one key, which bring up, you're going to add a number and you generally want to single float. And we're going to give this a value of one. Now if I right-click on this, I can convert it to a parameter. And we're going to call this strawberry glow. Actually bringing this back down to 0. So we don't want Negro to start with. Okay, and we're gonna save that. And we're gonna come back to our strawberry in sequencer itself. Now if we hit this plus track, we're gonna see some options. Anything you want to animate are affected sequencer, this is where you would add it in because not everything is going to show it by default. So let's, let's look at this where we've got our Skeletal Mesh Component. We wanna click that. And that's basically bringing in the model. If you will. Run out of two element 0 material parameters element 0. And I'm going to click on that and we're gonna see strawberry glow pop-up. And that's the reason I wanted to show this to you because it's very important to be able to animate your materials in sequence or if you wanna do an effect like this, but it's really kind of varied and not very intuitive defined. So our strawberry glow pops up because we made a parameter. And now I've got a key of 0. Sit on one. We're going to set it to something ridiculous like 50 here. And then we'll bring it back down to 0 here. Now if we play this, see it gets bright and then it cools off. Super-simple, not what we want in the shot, but really powerful and really important for doing like flashing lights or any number of things you could want to do with the material. And that's how you get at your parameters within sequencer. Alright, I'll see you in the next lesson.
13. Lesson 12 Particles in Sequencer: In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to toggle particles and sequencer. Now this can be really useful for things like dust puffs or explosions or fire or whatever. You need to be able to trigger in timeout very well. Sequencer makes it pretty easy to control that. So let's jump in. I thought this blank sequence created, and I've got two particle effects in my scene. Scroll down here, you'll see I have P explosion and fire none, both of these are from the starter pack, so are the starter contents so you can feel free to play with them yourself. I'm going to drag both of these into our sequence. And just see I don't have a camera anything in here or the camera tracked contract because I just don't need it. Alright, so what I want to do is I want the explosion to go off in the bucket once and light it on fire, should be pretty basic to do that. So let's say we want the explosion to trigger about here. I'm going to hit the plus track. We're gonna go down to particle toggled track. And I'm gonna set trigger. Now you have three options here. Activate, deactivate trigger. And what triggered does is it's going to fire the particle once. Activate would turn it on and leave it on. I don't want it to keep exploding over and over, so I just want to trigger it once. So we're going to set trigger and we're going to set a key. You see are explosion goes off. Let's hide those. I hit space, boom. So we have an explosion happening once in the bucket. Looks pretty good. Now, what about fire? So at same time that this goes off, we're gonna add another particle toggled track, and I want to activate the flame. So let's activate it. So that goes off. Let's put our fire system and it may be set to auto activate which we did not want. Yes, it is. So on your particles, if it's auto activates on, it's just going to turn on automatically. We don't want that actually for either of these. We only want to trigger. Now. Boom, fire. Perfect. But let's say we want the fire to go out quickly. If we want to do that, we're going to go here. We're gonna go to deactivate and set a key. And you can slide this around as much as you want, adjust it. But now, if I fire that, exploiting those off the fire starts and then it goes out. Easy, adds great effects, gives you a lot of control. And yeah, there you go. Alright, we'll see you next lesson.
14. Lesson 13 Rendering from Sequencer: In this lesson, I'm going to finally show you how to actually render a shot out of sequence. So we've already set up shop for. So let's go ahead and use that one as our example. So I'm gonna go up cinematics here, select shop for. And by the way, this cinematics tab, it will just show you any sequence that you have in this map scene. We won't show you every sequence in existence, but if you've dragged it into the scene, it's when you're using here, it'll show up. Okay. So we've got sequence for scaling to our camera view. And that's all looking good. Now all we need to do is come up to the render, this movie, the video button. Hit that and we're presented with a bunch of options. First and foremost, make sure that this is set to Apple resin coder. You can do the API, but it's gonna be a lot bigger and lot more pointy. Just set it to that. We're not rendering out audio with this. We're not worried about that. You can use custom frame rates. This one sets 24. It's going to use whatever defaults you have here, you can choose your resolution. Let's just bring this down to 1920 by 1080. And I don't want texture streaming really anything that's going to reduce the quality and bring it down to a more video game type. Look, I don't want I'm using 42 LT. You can play around with these if you want. They're going to be different quality, different sizes. Can leave it at HD Rex and no nine can set your coding threads. A lot of the stuff you can just kind of leave it default. Here. You're gonna choose your directory and your shot name. So we'll call this shot. And again, mostly certainly by default, I like turning on a read existing because I find that I'll tweak stuff, rerender tweak stuff. And so I'd rather it just whenever the same file, instead of making a ton of giant new ones, must use a separate process. I find if I'm having issues with quality or just frame drops, whatever the rendering of uses separate process. It's going to open up the render as a new program. And I just get a little bit better results, fewer bugs. Coming on down. Cinematic engine scalability. Usually you leave that on and you'll get better quality for some of the settings that I had cranked up during this, I actually found that leaving it on was reducing my quality. If you find that things aren't looking like, they feel like they should try turning them off and see if it helps you. It did for me. Cinematic mode. Leave that on. We don't want any video game stuff taking it. Okay, that down to the bottom, custom frame, you can choose a custom frame start if you want. I've just gotta left on default for now. Same at the end, it's going to use this warm-up frame. This is very helpful. They didn't use to have this and it was a big pain. If you use the warm-up frame, things like particles or the final gather in ray tracing, stuff like that has time to kinda kick in before the render starts going. Even. So sometimes the first frame can be a dud I've found. And so if that's the case, just render extended play your playtime and render one frame beforehand so it has time to kind of catch up. But usually warm up helps. You can set a delay before the warm up and on and on the delay every frame that will weight whatever time you set In-between every single frame. And this can really add up depending on how many frames you have. But again, it's very helpful if you have something like Ray tracing, whatever that needs time to just catch up and render just a little bit beforehand. However, there's a few side effects to this. If you have something like grass and you use this, the grass doesn't care about the delay. It's going to keep moving because it's on a different system, it's not keyed. And so you're gonna get weird Jenkins with dynamic things like that. So be aware of it. And with that, we will capture it's going to open up that separate process. And there goes our lovely glowing strawberry in there. And there you have it. You can open up the capture folder down here if you want to go straight to that. But that's all there is. Once you've got everything set up, that's how you render. I hope this has been helpful. Thank you guys for come along for the journey. Feel free to dig through the files and see how I set up this short film. And I can't wait to see what you guys make with all these amazing assets and tools that we have freely available. We'll see you next time.
Nathan Glemboski, Animator
