Introduction To Character Animation In Unreal Engine 4

1. Animate Your Character In Unreal Engine 4: Hello, I'm Michael Rix, and I'll be your guide is we cover the steps on how to animate your character in Unreal Engine four. This is a project based course, and I've designed it to be really, really fun. All the scene files you will need are included in the course. You will get the exile alien character along with 28 motion capture animations that work with him. You're gonna love how easy it is. You just drag and drop your character into the scene, and it's ready to go. We're also gonna cover lighting, physically based materials, camera movement and much, much more. And best of all, it's gonna be great fun. The first thing will cover is how to prepare your dad's Genesis character for export and animation. There are certain steps that need to be taken in order for the character to be able to accept motion capture animations in mix Imo. Next, we'll upload your character into adobe, mix Imo and add motion capture animations mix Emo is a ton of fun and super easy to use. As you'll see, there are literally thousands of animations in mix Imo and all you have to do is click on the animated preview, and it will be applied to your character so you're basically auditioning your character. Using different animations. You can adjust the speed of the animation and adjust things like the arm spacing as well. Your character won't have his materials or textures applied. We will do that over an unreal engine for inside of unrelenting gin. We will have some fun with the mix Imo animations you applied to your character. All you have to do is select your character and drag him into your seen hit play, and the animation begins being rendered in real time. Inside the course, I've set up 28 animated aliens ready for you to drag and drop into your scene for instant animations. In no time at all, you'll have your aliens fighting, jumping, running or falling. You'll have enough animations to make some really awesome movie scenes. Take a look at all these animations that are included with the course. Next up is the unreal engine sequencer, which is very similar to a nonlinear editor. We will set up your scene, complete with spaceship, interior exile, alien characters, lights, smoke effects and cameras, and get it ready for animation sequence or makes it really fun to get your scene set up and feels very similar to being on a real movie set. In fact, I've found that's the best way to think about it like you're in the real world. Unreal Engines Lighting System behaves like real world lights, so it's very responsive and intuitive, as you will see Now we're going to export your movie in high definition in near real time. Check this out. What you're seeing on the screen is being output in high definition at this speed. No longer does it take hours or days to render a single frame. This is a real game changer. Imagine being able to set up, animate and then render one minute of finished animation per day. It would be entirely possible to complete a two hour feature film in 120 days. Unreal Engine has provided the tools to make this possible. Someday we now take are rendered video file and bring it into hit film three Express or your favorite video editing program. Here we will add color grading, music, sound effects and fine tune our edits to prepare our scene for final output. Now that the final touches air completed on our scene, let's watch the final cut way. Go ahead and click on the enroll now button to get immediate access to your seen files and get started right away. To recap, you'll get 28 motion capture animations. The Complete Unreal Engine four Project with all assets. The exile alien character, the genesis to male and female characters, the Complete Spaceship interior and best of all, it's fun. See you on the inside. 2. Download Links For Programs REV: one of the first things you're gonna want to do is go to the download links. And if you don't already have these programs, you're gonna want to download the following ones. You want to get Dad's studio Unreal Engine four. You want to get the SciFi Warrior bundle from Dad's duty for dance studio and then also pick up hit film three Express video editing program if you don't already have an editing program, so let's just take a look at where you go to get those to get unreal engine. Just goto unreal engine dot com and up here in the top right hand corner. There's a blue download button or the get started now and that just click on that and it will download the entire unreal engine program for you ready to install next year. We're gonna wanna hop over to Daz three d dot com and, ah, you're gonna want to pick up Daz Studio and just click on the get started today. And that's gonna take you here to where you can register and then download the program to your computer again. If you don't already have it, then you're gonna want to go over here and get the assets that we're gonna be using in the course. This is the SciFi warrior bundle. Really cool model. Ah, Genesis two female model comes with the outfit Thesis Ore did the hair all the texture ing and also comes with the the SciFi interior called level 19. So it's everything that you're going to need for the scene that we're going to set up in unreal engine you're also going to get this is the exile alien HD you, um, character created by Josh Crockett. Now you're not gonna download it here. This is where you could purchase the character. If you wanted to do future animations. I've got it as an asset in the scene file with the mix Imo animation already attached to it . So you'll be getting the exile alien already ready to just drag and drop into the scene and then hop over to hit film dot com where you'll be able to get a free version of hit film three Express. So if you don't have an editing program like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere, this is a really, really easy to use a fun program. I like it a lot. In fact, I I have final cut pro. I've used it for years, but I find myself just going to hit film Three Express for a lot of things because you could do color grading and all kinds of fun things within this program. They also have a paid version. Of course, it has even more features. Um, and you can take a look at that as well. So that's over here on the Install page hit film Three Express. So go ahead and take a few minutes if you need to download these programs and we'll get ready for the next module. 3. Quick Start: Welcome to the quick start getting around. Unreal engine four module in this one. We're gonna We're gonna get a quick start. We're just going to jump in and start learning about how to move around on riel engine for . So let's we're gonna open up the project and start getting familiar with some of the basics . I'm also going to be covering the material as if you are brand new to, um, unreal engine. So if you know this already, feel free to just skip ahead. The first thing we want to do is open up a new project and I'm using version 4.183 right now. But you can use whatever the most recent version is. So you now should have your alien spaceships seeing, downloaded and on your computer. So, in order for unreal engine to find the file, we have to actually launch a fresh version. So let's do that right now. And this is what it looked look like for you, The icon for this project. Once you have it loaded up, and then real engine knows where to find it. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna browse for it I've got it right here. And you're going to select the alien spaceship Unreal Engine Project File and just click open and it's gonna open up for you. I'm not going to do it here because I already have this open on my computer. Okay, so when you open up the project, it should take you to this screen right here. Should look something like this with all the exile alien animations in scene in which want to do is go over here. This is an expanded Go ahead and click over here. Go to content. Hey, alien spaceships seeing click on the downward arrow, the exile alien folder and then click on animations. And here, you're gonna see down here all of the 28 motion capture alien animations. So let's go ahead and jump in here and just have some fun. Go down here and grab the fireball. Click with your left mouse button, drag it into the scene and then release, and you've got your character right there. And what's really cool about unreal engine, is it? It puts the feet right pretty close to the floor. So you don't really have to do much adjusting, okay? one thing I wanted to cover. That's really important, and it was very frustrating for me in the beginning. It actually took me a couple of weeks before I finally figured out how to pit it, pivot around the object or character. So what I was doing as I was just using the left mouse button I couldn't figure out. You know how to get around this guy. So I was just kind of moving around doing all this stuff. It sounds simple, but there is a trick to doing this, and that's gonna help you out a lot. And what you do is you select your character or your object, and then you press the F key on your keyboard F to frame it and then press down the altar key along with your left mouse button. And now you can smoothly pivot around your character or your object, and this is a real life saver. So let's do that again. Hit the escape key to de select your character. Let's select him again. Process actually amusing back press F to move forward to frame the object or the character , press down the all key left mouse button and then scroll around. That's how you do that. Now, while we're here, the other hot keys or controls is you want to. While you have the all key press down, use your right mouse button to zoom in and out. You can also use the scroll key. But as you can see, it's ah, a little jerky. I use both, right. He is really, really smooth. Right? Mouse button along with the out key being held down. And then the middle mouse button released the all K. Use your middle mouse button and you can move up and down. You can move left to right. So this is kind of how you get around the interface. But by far the most important one. The F key is your friend. It's gonna be your best friend in unreal engine. So remember that one right off the bat, Press f hold down the Elke rotate around. Okay, let's hit escape. Now, How do we get these guys moving? How do we start the animations? Well, what you're going to do is go up to play. You see this little arrow key here? Drop down arrow, go down and make sure the simulate has the check mark next to it. So we're not gonna be in game mode. We're gonna be able to move around just like we were with our mouse once we hit play. So hit play and everybody's animation starts in. There you go. Now we can move using our mouse controls. We could move around while the animations are taking place. Zoom in left mouse button moving in and out. You don't need the l key to be able to do this and then press stop or pause and your animations will stop. So let's let's go over this one more time. But use a different one. Let's, um, let's use the fight idol. So go down here and click. Drag him in. He's already selected, so let's hit the F key to frame him all. Key left mouse button. If we wanna reposition, let's move closer the camera down. Tilt up with the right mouse key or button him. I mean, he had escaped to de select him and now come up here and hit play. And there you go. You've got your motion capture, capture animation going and give yourself a pat on the back because you just did your first animation. Okay, there's a couple of more things I wanted to show you while we're in this level. One is the size of the thumbnails in your menu. Down here, these air adjustable. If you look down in the bottom here where it says view options, click on that and right here you'll see a controller that says Scale you can make these thumbnails is big or small as you want right in here. This is fully fully adjustable, so if you want him big so you can see him better, that's where you do it there. There's also a setting here called thumbnail Edit Mode. If you click on this and then you click on one of the, um, thumb nail icons, you can actually rotated around. So if you want to change the view, um, this is where you would do that right there, and it will remember the view so maybe you can see the pose better and then click done editing there little helpful things just to get your ah, you're lay out the way you like it. Another thing is, as we're moving along in here, you'll notice, um, sometimes it feels like we're moving too fast. Especially as you get close up to a character so we can adjust the speed of the camera right up here. See where this little icon is, and it says the camera speed number four, we click on that and we can slow down the camera. So if we put it on to now, when I move my mouth. So I used the controls. It goes much slower and smoother if we're going to get really tight in to our object for editing or animating or something like that. So keep that in mind. Too few. Or you could move it up faster, too. If you wanna, you know, move way out really quickly from your scene to suggest the camera speed. I usually keep it right around four is a good default setting for most of this stuff that you're doing 4. Practice Animation Scene: Okay, now we're going to jump in, and we're going to do our first test animation, and we're gonna begin by creating level sequence. Not a new level, but a level sequence. That's kind of like a set where we're gonna place our camera, are actors and move the camera around, and then we're gonna at the end export a finished video. So this is just gonna be practiced. And, um, don't worry about getting it perfect is just gonna be to have a little bit of fun. So you get familiar with the various the various tools, so you should still be at the exile alien animation level. And what we want to do first is we want to find go to the alien spaceship folder over here and then find the practice animation level or the practice animation map. So click on that or double click on that and load it up and you'll see that I created a practice animation seen or a level or a set Kresta practice on. One of the things I want to mention before we get going to is all these icons that have the light, the reflection dome, sound camera, everything like that. Um, we can get rid of those icons because they can get a little bit distracting by going up here to the little arrow button and clicking on the game view, and then they disappear. Now there's a hot key that you don't want to learn. It's called the G key. You want to press the G key, and that will bring them back or make them disappear is well, Now we want to create our first level sequence, and we're just gonna call it a practice sequence will go up here to the cinematics icon, the one that has the little clapboard and then click on add level sequence and this is gonna bring up our our window. We want this to be Go ahead and save it in the alien spaceships. Seen area and let's give it a different name. Let's call it practice sequence, click, save. And now you can see that we have our sequencer with the name of practice sequence right here. Think of this like a like an empty set, and we've got to bring in all the elements that we need, such as cameras and actor actors and that type of thing. So the first thing that we want to do is bring in. Oh, are camera so over her to the left and you'll see where it says Cinematic Click on cinematic, and you'll see that we have some really cool things in here. We have a camera rig, rail, a camera, rig crane. We'll be using these later on, but not right now. What we want is we want the Sini camera actor so we're gonna bring in our camera, just click on it and drag it into the scene. And you have your representation of a camera right there, which looks pretty cool again. The transform tools work the same way on the camera as it does for any object in the scene . The move rotate scale, buttons. All of that are with the hockey of the space bar. So if you hit your space bar, you can rotate the camera and you notice the little window. The view that you have over there that showing you a little window this is really handing will be using this as we set up the scene as well. You want to rotate this way? Hit the space bar again. We don't need scale on the camera, but to move the camera up and down who turned around like this with the camera up, Move the camera down. We can with the camera out here. Really, really powerful camera controls here. Okay, so we have our camera in the actual scene on the set, but it's not in our sequencer. And so this is the step that I missed a lot in the beginning. We need to actually select our camera here, which, if you go appear into the world Out liner, it's called Sini Camera Actor, one which we can rename if we want to click on it. We could rename that something else right up here. We could rename it if we wanted to name it Hero camera or camera A or camera B. Ik ever see etcetera like a real camera? We could do that as well, but we'll just leave it like that for now. So it's selected, and now we need to go down here in our sequencer, the sequence or tab right here and the green button where it says track. Click on that and we need to go up here where it says actor to sequencer. This will highlight and then right at the top it's gonna have are selected object, which is our sini camera after one. And we need to add that now the camera is active and in our scene. But until we do that, we're not gonna be able to have it in the scene for recording purposes or anything like that. In a little bit, I'm gonna go over the camera controls because this camera works pretty much exactly like a real world camera. Like a like a cinema camera. It's got the F stops. It's got the different folk focus lenses, all kinds of the things you can do and you can set just like a real camera. But for now, we want to put in a character. We need an actor, so we need to go back to our content browser. Over here. Let's go back to our animation seen exile alien down to our animations. And we need, um, an actor to focus on here so you can use any of these. I prefer to use one that some ah looped. So let's let's use this one here. The fight idol. Let's drag the character in here. Now let's say he's gloating up here. If I press the shift key and the end key on the keyboard, it will place him really close to the floor. Now. This depends on the kind of translations he was saved in, but pretty close. If he's like that suppress shift key and then end Studi F Key to get closer. So he's floating up here, press the shift key and then end, and he's gonna be pretty close to the floor now if we really look closely, we could see that he's still floating. And in order for our contact shadows toe look, riel, we need to bring him down to where he's really touching the floor. It looks a lot better there. One of the things I really, really like about unreal engine is right away. Just just right right away out of the box. You drag a character in there in the shadows, and the lighting is working without much, uh, adjustment on your part at all. Okay. And you can see here we've got these icons again in here that I mentioned before. So to get rid of these, if they're in the way, um, we just clicking are seeing press the G button and they go away. Okay, But we're going to need it for now because we're setting up our camera and want to be able to see our camera. We'll go back to our sequencer, select our camera. There he is. So the camera's way out here. Let's set this scene up to where it's gonna be a little more helpful for us to do this. This animation go up here to the top hair. Okey goto layouts. And you see the layout we're on right now is one pain, and you can also see there's Ah, many different layouts that you can use, you know, to assist you in your animation or the work that you're doing. Let's just choose this one for now and let's have one over here that's going to show us the top view, and this one over here will be perspective, and then this one over here, click up here on the button and go down to where says place cameras. And this is our camera actor. We want to be able to see what the camera sees now to move around in here. Use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out on your mouse. Scroll wheel moves in and out right mouse button to move around like this. You can see our cameras way out here, so we need to move, You know, a bit closer in there. Now we can see our camera here. And as you see as we're moving the camera, we can see what's actually happening over here in our final screen because we're piloting the actual sini camera actor that's in our sequencer. Now we could see here that he's a little blurry, so let's go into the camera's settings over here. And ah, this is what Actually one of the most powerful features of the camera is You can do depth of field. You can have the foreground, your alien, for example, in sharp focus and the background blurred all kinds of neat things like that. But for this tutorial, this this module, let's go ahead and set it to where the focus map. That method is not on manual, but it's on none. So on none that's going to just give us a deep focus for the entire shot. All right, now we've got our character in the on the set, but we don't have our character in the sequence here yet. This is another step that's really important that you make. Otherwise, you're gonna wonder why it's not working. So let's select our alien character in the name of it. Here's he's called Fight Idol. So he selected here, and we need to go into our sequencer and we need to click Track up the top actor to sequence, sir, and add Fight Idol. Select that. And now you're going to see we school down here. Here's our character fight. Idol is now in the sequencer, so you can see we have our camera actor here and our character right here. Now, when we press play, nothing is happening because we haven't assigned actually an animation or anything to it. So with sequence, sir, you have to tell it what to do every step of the way, which is extremely powerful, actually. And once you get the hang of it, it's it's It's very simple as well. So the fight idol character, what we need to do is it's already given us an animation track. We need to go down here, click the animation button and then Let's go and find Fight Idol, which is his particular animation. But it could be any one of these. This is, Ah, powerful. You drag it in, you could change the animation. So let's use fight Idol. And now we see down here the animation has been put into our timeline. Now this is actually too short. So what we want to do is go down and clicking here and let's make this animation a little bit longer. Let's say let's go up to 1000 and then let's move our end marking all the way over here. So this will give us more time to play around with. If you notice, though, my fight idol ends right here. So he's gonna be too short. See, he's moving around and everything. And then, boom, he just freezes. So all we have to do is click on our animation and then stretch it out all the way to the end. And because this is a looping animation, he's going too smoothly. Just continue going through his animation without, you know, a jerk at the end. So now we've got our alien character. We've added the animation to him. We've increased the length of the animation to the end of our 1000. We've got a set to 30 frames per second, which we could change. We could change these 2 24 frames per second for film 29 97 for NTSC, all of these air available in here. So check these out for now. We'll just leave it at 30 frames per second. And then when we pressed the play button, which is right up here, it's also down here. And you can also use your space button on the keyboard to begin to play and pause as well. So let's just watches this goes. We've got him outlined in yellow because he's still selected so I could click on something else. And here we go. We've got our alien doing his move as our cursor goes through our timeline. Okay, so we've got all that set up. Um, click this button here to go to the front of the beginning of your timeline. The next thing we want to do is we want to get the camera moving, so let's select the camera and let's pick a good place for the camera to start. Let's say we want to start right here. I'm gonna click my space button and then rotate it around. Okay, so now we are with the camera is selected and I want to have a key frame here, so let's scroll down a little bit. Here, clicking the transform, See where the camera Cindy camera actor is up here. The camera component, these air, all the animate A ble features click down on the transform section over here, it says, Add new key at the current time. When you hover over this, this is where you're going to add your key frames. Now you can set this up where every time you move and you stop, make any change. It automatically does it with ease settings over here, I usually will go ahead and click on it anyway, just to make sure I got that key frame where I wanted it. So go ahead and click here. Sometimes you have to move down like this to show it, and you'll see that there's ah, little orange dot where your key frame is, and that's your first camera key frame. Now let's grab the in the timeline, grabbed the cursor and let's move it forward and Sometimes what I'll do is I'll just hit play because I wanted to get a feel, for the timing of it is this is happening in real time and let's say right about now I want that camera to be closer and on the aliens and will pause and we'll grab the camera, move them in. We could even give the camera a little bit of a cool tilt like that, and you'll see the key frame was already created for me because I have this set on auto key frame. Okay, so that's this. The second key frame for the camera. Let's go back to the beginning and let's hit play and we've got a nice, smooth camera move from the start position up to the alien. That's a simple is it is. It's extremely powerful, and those of you have used other programs will see that this, this is this is really simple and very intuitive, and it's it's just really Ah, um, cool to use. Okay, let's stop. Let's go to the beginning again. Um now, another thing that I'm gonna show you is how to go to the cinematic. Vieux Port has a few more controls in here. So in the drop down menu here from Perspective do cinematic Vieux port and what it does is it changes here. It gives us the ability to jump from key frame. Two key frame. Very, very helpful. Now. I also lost my camera, So I want to go back to get my camera view, cause this just threw me back into the perspective. You when I did that. So let me show you how to do that. There's two ways to activate your camera. You can either go up here and activated from here, or you can do it in your sequence or go up to your camera. Sini camera actor And then right next to here is a camera icon. You click on that so those air a couple of ways you could do it, Whatever. Whatever you like. I use them both. Okay, now we're back when we have our camera scroll down a little bit here so we can see our key frames again with play and we go. We're moving in now. There's are key frame. Now let's say I think that's a little too slow. It's just moving too slow. I want I want us the shot to be quicker. I want my camera to arrive at the alien faster. So here's how we do that Unreal Engine gives us extremely powerful key frame tools. So all I have to do is I click on my key frame here and I drag it closer if I want to slow it down and move it out this way. So let's put it right here. Let's go to the front of our animation. See how much faster it is. Very intuitive. Just makes total sense. It's not difficult. You don't have to go into 1000 menus to set that up. Just move it and boom! There's even a speed ramp. Ah, setting in there, Which will cover later. Okay, so I've been bring my key frame back over to about here because I want a smooth move and we've got the camera going to this alien. Now, let's say, uh okay, we want it. We want to move the camera. We want a dolly passed this alien and we want to have another alien in there. So let's go back to our content browser. Go back to the animations, choose another one. I'm gonna drag this guy in here cause he's doing a really cool fireball, like a magic kind of thing. We'll rotate him around. Member. The space bar Space bar gives you all these scale. You know, if you wanted this guy to be a little bigger, you could scale him up. See, now he's a bigger alien f key to frame in, make sure his feet are on the ground. Yeah, they look pretty good. Okay. And now he's ready to go. Let's put him back down to his his regular size, though. So over here in the scale section, click this where they're all locked together, all access of the scale. And let's just type in there one again. And now he's back down to his his normal scale. Okay, so we've added another character. But we forgot to do one thing. Remember, we he's not in this sequence or yet, so we have to go to the track. And since he's selected, he's highlighted in yellow. Add to sequence, sir, and we're gonna add Fireball. So now we've got the fireball character in here, but he doesn't have an animation attached yet, so we go down here to Fireball down here to the animation. Click on animation in Ad Fireball. Now because my cursor was here and it wasn't at the beginning, it put the animation right where my cursor was. So let's drag this back to the beginning. And again, it's too short. So we want toe click and drag all the way to the end, and now it play and you can see both of our characters or moving. They're each doing their own thing. Our camera has stopped here because that's the last key friend we gave it. Okay, so now here we are, this key. Frame this button over here. Jump to the next key frame when you're on the selectable track. So let's go back up to the camera actor to the transform track and this down a little bit where we can see our key frame. Let's jump to the next jump to the next key frame. Here's where we ended up. Okay, so now on the next key frame, I want to end up right by the second alien back in the distance there, so a medical ahead and just click per play for the timing of it, just kind of feel it out and then hit. Pause. And now we're gonna take the camera, and we're gonna move. It passed this alien right mouse button. I'm moving this. Get a better look at the camera. So you have cut his head off. So what I need to do now is going to this window here, press my space key space bar, and then tilt this up space bar again and maybe position him a little bit better there. Okay, Now, we've got a good look at the alien. And as you can see here, we have a key frame automatically placed here. If I didn't have it set up that way to auto Key, we would just simply go over here to add a new key and press this little button here. Okay, so now we've got that key frame. See what it looks like from the beginning. Good. In the beginning, click play. All right. Nice. Smooth camera move. Really cool. Okay, I'm going to get rid of the icons in this particular screen so we can see it better. Okay, so now let's say we've come to this place here and now we want to dolly the camera up So let's, um it play for just a second. We're gonna create a key frame right here because we want a dolly the camera from this position, so I'll make another key frame. Now move the cursor forward during the camera up in this screen. Use your middle mouse button to move up and down. So we moved the camera up. It's space key. I want to kind of rotate it right here and then a place. That key frame right there. So coming up. Oops. Select camera. I would bring it up a little bit higher. We could forward a little bit more. We're going to spend the camera around, find her character here where you go. There he is. Okay, so now we're way up high with our camera. We've just done like a like a crane shot. Let's see what that looks like. Camera spends around. We see our guy from way up high. Now what we want to do is we want to end our shot. Let's go to the end here. Let's go here. I want to go really low to the ground and just kind of angle up at him. If the space bar move the camera up space for again. Oops. Position the camera. Okay, so let's say we're really low to the ground here, and we're gonna end up with that key frame had frame 1981. Let's see what that looks like. So let's go back to the beginning of the animation Tick play. Okay, so you see what happened there? We had, like, a little bit of a glitch in the end right here where we're going through our character. So what we need to do is adjust the camera here, and, um, just take move the camera over like this. Just it will create another key frame right there. And it should have taken care of that was Check it out. Yeah. Now we're on the other side. Yeah, that's it. Pretty cool. See, we got our camera motion dahling past our first daily in up to the second alien. Could bring her camera up, spins around and comes back down. Okay, so I've got this set. You probably noticed I got this set right here to loop. You can have it just stop at the end as well. I just like to keep it looping. Okay, so there's are simple camera move, and hopefully you've been doing this along with me cause that's the best way is just to have your own Unreal Engine project open and just do this right along along with me. Let's go back to our layout. So let's go back to the main one here and I'm gonna hit G. Get rid of the icons. And now we're just in the perspective. You here. I want to get my camera view back. So remember how we do this is we either go up to perspective and select the camera actor from here or in our sequencer, click on the little camera icon here. Okay, so there's are seen now that's cover right now a little bit, just real fast about the camera's settings because you select the camera here. I like to have more of a widescreen look to my videos, looks more filmic, more cinematic. So the way we do that if you go into the camera's settings over here in this side of the, uh, world out liner in the details tab and make sure you're not over here in the world settings that can be confusing. Make sure you're on the details tab of the camera. Okay. And then we're gonna go, and we're gonna find our film back settings. Now, there's a lot of, um, default ones here. Custom ones 16 by nine D S l R. Digital film 60 minute film. All this kind of stuff is in here for you to select. I do a custom one. See, the sensor width and height is what gives you that wide screen effect. Um, I like to use 34 by 14 and that gives a really nice widescreen effect. You can use whatever you want. This is where you do these settings. If you need to get back to the default, just click to the side of the windows here. We'll get you back there. So 34 by 14 just a personal preference is just I like the way this looks Universal Zoom. You can also put custom lenses on here to give you different looks and they are mathematically correct to where if you use ah, 12 millimeter prime lens is going to give you that same kind of ah, you know, distortion that that lens has in the real world. So these air these air a lot of, ah, powerful features that you can use in your camera your camera. Although it's a digital camera, it does act like a real world camera, so it's extremely powerful. You've also got F stops in your minimum and maximum F stops. Now, when we get into the actual alien spaceships scene that's dark and moody and has lights in there, you'll see how this actually affects your focus settings in your depth of field and things like that. But for now, we'll just leave things as they are. I just wanted to show you how to make it widescreen. Okay, so now what we need to do, we've got this scene. But you can't really show anybody this scene right, because it's on your computer. It's no good until we out put it into a video that you can upload the YouTube Facebook. Share it, you know wherever you want. So let's do that. Let's just see how simple that is to do that. What we need in sequence, sir, in order to export your video at this time, you just can't export it from the city camera actor. We have to add what's called a camera cut track. So you go to the track again, go up here to camera cut track, select that and then right at the top, it put that into our sequencer. Now we have to tell the cut track what camera we want to use. This is designed so we can actually have multiple cameras in our scene in our sequencer, and we can cut from camera to camera. That's more of an advanced thing that we'll talk about later. For now, we want to just click on camera and we want to select our sini camera actor one which is the only camera we have now. Once we do that, it throws are animation are animated camera here In order for us to see this and also export it, we need to select this camera icon. Now, If you don't do this and you go through the following steps to export it, you'll be frustrated cause it's not going to come out right. So make sure you cook this this camera icon in your camera cuts and we can play it. We can see that it is our animation that we set up and we're ready to go so How do we export this into a video file? Well, our little render this movie to a video or image frame sequences right here. Click on this movie Clapper Icahn, and you'll see up Here are movie settings. Now for this, we're just gonna leave it at video sequence. We're going out. Put it as a video sequence. We could do it in a image sequence of peeing J peg or bump files. The real handy if you're gonna do Cem compositing later on some advanced things, we'll leave it in 1920 by 10 80 16 by 9 30 frames a second Compression. Just leave. This is the default 75%. It will give us a good quality. You don't have to put anything in the video. Kodak here output to read their director you to the desktop. We're just going to do that, and it's going to use the name of practice animation. It's gonna just take the name of our sequence. That's what it will be named and weaken Rename that afterwards. Okay, so now let's go down here to our in frame. Ah, it only says for 90. I think we had more frames than that. So let's go back here and find out. 9 81 Okay, so we we want 981. Let's go back up here. Start frame is zero and frame is 9 81 and it should be ready now for us just to capture the movie. When we hit Capture movie, it's gonna ask us to save our scene. So go ahead and save your scene. And now, up here in the little screen, you're seeing that the high definition 1920 by 10 80 video is being rendered out in near real time just a little bit slower than how we were watching it in the scene. Pretty amazing, actually, that you can render out this high quality oven animation this fast. I'm sure there's, ah, a lot of you out there they can remember or know right now that it takes literally hours, if not sometimes a day or two, depending on your quality settings and the complexity of your scene to render out a single frame 5. Practice Animation HD Output: And here is your finished practice animation recorded in 1920 by 10 80 high definition videos of Let's give it a play and give it a run through. See how it looks. Let's go ahead and put it on a full screen. Okay. Looks really good. Congratulate yourself. You got your first animation done in unreal engine four. 6. Depth of Field: in this module. We're gonna cover depth of field. And I got to tell you, this was one of the most exciting things for me when I first got into unrelenting gin because the virtual camera actually behaves like a real world camera, especially with the focus settings and the things you can do with depth of field. So right off, I just want to play this short 500 frame animation of the fallen one, another cool character by Josh Crockett, and take a look at it and check out the the focus settings. Okay, now let's analyze this Ah, particular scene, and I want to show you the settings that we have on the camera and the location of the characters on the set to achieve this, um, depth of field. First of all, on the camera one. Over here, let's look at the settings here. We've got a really wide screen set up 38 millimeters by 12 millimeters to give a super wide , um, aspect ratio. That setting is right here, the lens setting. We've just got the universal zoom lens on. We don't have a custom prime lens or anything like that, and down here the focus method, we have it set on manual. This is a key setting because if you put it to none cr, everything goes into focus. We don't want that. We want to be able to adjust the focus ourselves. So make sure this is on manual setting, and then this is our setting here. Of course, it's are also over here in our sequencer, and that's where we're gonna be adjusting it. So these are the main settings to get this, um, depth of field. Look, the other thing is the aperture of the camera, the F stop rating. If you look down here, we've got the camera said at 1.4, which is giving it that depth of field. Look where the background is that a focus? Now, if I change this to let's move it up to on F stop of 12 do you just like a real world camera? It's gonna bring the background into focus so we can do that as well. Just remember that your aperture setting down here can change your your focus greatly. But let's put it down back down to 1.4 so we can throw the background out of focus Now on our manual focus. Weaken, do Iraq focus. You just grab it right here and now I can bring the background into focus and blur out the foreground character, the backgrounds and focus in the foreground. So this is really, really handy, too. Get a cinematic moody look to your shots and you're seeing. The other thing I want to show you is how to get a full screen click on this arrow here and go to immersive mode. Or you can hit the F 11 key. Click that, and now we go into full screen mode so you can view it much larger. So let's watch what this looks like in full screen. Okay? And to get out of full screen, just go up to the top right hand corner. You can hit the escape key as well, but restore from immersive right here. Go to the beginning of our scene. Now let's take a look at the side view so we can see where the camera is in relation to the other characters in the background. So up here you can see the camera, and here's our main character right here. The other characters Airway back here in the distance. So this is also key in giving. The depth of field is you have to have your characters far enough back in the background to be able to compress that space and get that that, um, blurred background and that's it for this module. 7. DAZ Studio Export Genesis 2: in this module. We're going to export our genesis to character from Dad's studio. We're gonna prepare the models so that it is ready for import into mix Imo animation. So go ahead and open up your dad's studio. And here I am in the blank screen, and we need to find the SciFi scene that you downloaded the free scene that's that we're going to be using. So the best way to find it overhears go to the left and it's usually under ready to render right over here. And then there will be your scene should be here. It's called the SciFi Warrior scene. Click on it, drag it over into the scene and release, and it's going to load up our entire scene. Now you can play around with this if you want in Dad's and render it out and whatever you want to do to have some fun. But for our purposes, the only thing we're gonna want to export is the character, just the character by herself. So I want to delete out the spaceship because the spaceship is already over in the unreal engine seen as part of the scene, so you won't need that. So let's go ahead and find Level 19 and delete that, um, the rim light. We don't need the lights, so let's delete all of the lights. Spotlight. We don't need the camera. And so now we have our character and she's holding a sword. We don't want the sword either for this particular a module. So let's go ahead and click. Click on Genesis two. Female right click and go to expand and expand all. And now we've got to go down here and on for that sword. There it is, right there. Electro blade. So delete that Go back up and collapsed the character and we don't want to export her in this pose. So what we want to do is get her back into the default t pose. Click on the Genesis two female. Let's go up to our file. Excuse me. Head it figure. Restore and then restore figure pose. Okay, so she's back in a t pose. Get her straightened up here. Okay, Now we've got our character ready for export. Now, the thing about the genesis two characters, as opposed to the Genesis three is this will carry forward. We don't have to export it like the other way with the O. B. J. We just simply export the character with all of the clothes and the textures and the materials and everything into an fbx file. So let's go over to file export, and we want to choose auto desk F B X and give her a name. SciFi warrior, female. And then we're gonna get our F B X export options. We don't we want to leave this here at FB X 2012 winery and bed textures. Merge clothing into the figure skeleton. Make sure that's checked. Allow degraded skinning, allow degraded scaling animations. If we had an animations, it would carry across any props like that sword. If we had wanted to bring that across and the figures and nothing hidden, So go ahead and just select except and now Dad's studio is converting everything into our FBI F B X file so that it will import smoothly into mix Imo animation. And there we have it that's ready to import, and we'll continue on with that in the mix. Imo Import module 8. DAZ Studio Export Genesis 3: in this module. We're going to export a Genesis three character out of Dad's studio to get it prepared so that we can import it into mix Imo animation. So let's who hadn't opened up dad's studio. Okay, now, over here, we want to click on figures, and this is gonna show us where all of our characters are. And I'm gonna find the exile alien character. I'm gonna click on him and drag him into the scene, and there is loaded into a T pose. Now, the first thing we're gonna want to do before we export him, we're gonna have to go through a series of steps who are going to need to, um, lower the resolution down from the high resolution to the base resolution. So we need to come down here with the exile alien selected, come down here under the general setting tab here, down to the mesh resolution and see here where it says high resolution. We want to click in select base resolution. If we don't do this step and we exported and go through the remaining steps, it will fail when we try to import it into mix Imo. It just won't take it unless it's the base resolution. So another We have the base resolution. We want to export our model out without the rigging. Because on a Genesis three, the rigging has changed in mix. Imo doesn't like that. So what we're gonna do is export as an O B. J file. And let's just delete this cause I had that already in there. Choose wavefront object. It will its name it Exile alien and Click Save. Now we're going to get the export option box used these settings The Dad's Studio one unit equals one centimeter and the following Just leave these these air pretty much the default settings. We're going to write the material library. We're gonna collect the original maps and so on. So just go ahead and click except and that has exported. Our model is an O. B. J. Now this original one we don't need anymore. So just click delete, clear the scene and go up to file import. And let's go into the same folder where we just exported the O. B. J. We want to bring the O. B. J back into Daz with these settings. Just the default settings, except that And now we have our alien back in is an o. B. J in the base resolution We're gonna now export the character out is an FB x file. We're going to do it without the materials. We could add the materials and the texture ring here in Daz, but it's not gonna carry forward into unreal engine four. So we're gonna wait till we get over and then rail engine four before we texture him and apply all the materials correctly. So at this point, we have our O B. J. Go back up to file export, go to the drop down menu and choose auto desk F B X just named him Exile Alien again. And now we're gonna get our fbx export options screen. We want to keep this setting on FB X 2012 binary. We want to embed the textures. He doesn't have any clothing, but if he did, we would keep that setting right there. These air important allow degraded skinning, allow degraded scaling animations. We don't have any, but we can just leave that checked. If we did, it would carry forward props, figures and no hidden. So go ahead and just collect Excuse me. Just check Export. And now we have our exile alien exported as an F B X file. Now this will load up into mix Imo animation, which will see in that particular module, and that's it for this module. 9. Genesis 8 Character Export to Mixamo then UE4: okay. In this module we're going to cover how to get Genesis eight dad's characters out of Dad's studio and into mix Imo to add an animation or add animations and then exported from Mix Imo into Unreal Engine four. So I've got the Genesis eight female character loaded up here. She's got hair and clothes on. So the first thing we want to do is select the Genesis character over here and then go down to under the parameters tab under the mesh resolution. Switch it from the high resolution to the base resolution. That's very, very important Step. If we don't do this, it's not going to We're properly in mix Imo. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go up to file export, and we're going to need to export Genesis aid is a as a uh oh BJ file because for some reason, mix Imo does not like the fbx format just straight out of Daz. So go ahead and select wavefront object from the drop down and give it a name. I'm just gonna call it G eight female, and then we're gonna get the dialog box up, so just I usually have it custom and have these settings. You want to write the groups the nodes. You want to write the surfaces in the material library and collect the maps into a separate folder because we're going to need to bring the texture maps into Unreal Engine four in order to create the materials for the character. Because when we import Genesis aid in, it will be without materials. So just go ahead and collect. Excuse me. Go ahead and click. Accept Now we've exported the Genesis eight character. Next, we're going to go over to mix Imo log into our account, and we're going to select our character file. So here we have here the O. B. J file. And here's where the folder is, where all the materials were collected, the textures for the clothing, the hair, the face and the body in the arms and so on. That's where that's at. But for now, we just want o select the O. B. J file and upload this into mix emo. I'm going to fast forward through this so we don't have to wait through the whole process of processing and all that. Okay, so now here is our Genesis, a female character ready for the auto rigor. So that looks good. So far, we're going to just go down here and collect us. Gives me click the next button, and we're going to take our little circles and just put him where they're supposed to go. Pretty self explanatory here. Elbows go where the elbows are, the knees washing worst growing. And we'll just leave this standard skeleton and click next. And the mix Imo auto Rigor is gonna goto work and magically create a rig a skeleton all rigged up and ready for animation in just a couple of minutes. Which still amazes me every time I see this. And there we go. She's all rigged up, looking around with a default animation they threw on her and everything looks good. So we just click the next button when we want to proceed with this character. So she's gonna get loaded up right here, and I want to choose an idol animation. So I'm gonna click on this one right here. Looks pretty good. Make sure her hands aren't going into her leg. It looks like her thumb is Yeah, So we need to move the character arm space here. Out just a little bit. There we go. Now her thumb isn't jamming into her high. Okay, so that looks pretty good. We're gonna export this. Remember, From the other modules, we're gonna export the 1st 1 with skin. And any subsequent animations could be without skin to save space. Um, but we'll do this. We're just gonna click on download. Character has an fbx file with skin. Just leave this in the default settings here, 30 frames a second. Or if you had 24 frames, whatever you like, and then we're gonna just click the download button, and this is going to download it into my download file in my in my browser. Okay, so that is complete. If I wanted to go through and get more animations, I would just go ahead and pick some or select on him like this one here, lets I wanted that one, and then I would download it, and I would select it without skin, and that would give me a much smaller file. It loads a lot quicker and then religion for us. Well, okay, now, let's go over to unreal engine and I've got a file over here G eight f for Genesis eight female and we're gonna right click in here and go to import. Okay, I named it G eight f Idol 3.16 point 18 So let's make sure that these two or check the skeletal mash import mesh None for the skeleton because this is a new character. If there were more targets which will get into when we get into facial animation, we would check this box. But there's no more targets, but we do want to make sure the import animation box is checked. There's no materials at this time, so we can uncheck these boxes and then just click on import. And we get these little warnings that you can just ignore. And here is our character. Let's just drag the animation one in right here quick, the space bar rotator around. And as I mentioned before earlier, there's no textures. There's no materials. We're going to have to create that and assign it to the Genesis a character. But the animation is intact here, and let's just take a look at here. Scope to our play button. Make sure you have these simulate checked off here and click Play, and we can see she's doing her idol animation. She got her clothing. She's got her hair. Animation's working perfectly. So everything. Everything is looking good. And that is how we get Genesis eight characters out of Dad's studio into mix Imo and then imported into the Unreal Engine four. In the next module. I'm going to cover how to get the materials, how to get the textures in, create the materials and then assigned the materials to this Genesis eight character. And that's it for now, thank you. 10. DAZ Studio Export SciFi Interior: in this module. We're going to export our spaceship interior without the character. So to find it again, the scene that you downloaded free from Dad's three D Usually it's over here, and they're ready to render sections. So just click on that and you'll find the scene right here. If for some reason it's not there, there's another place you can find it. Click on the content library tab who knew collapses here and then go over to products. And over here, if you click on this little arrow, you'll find that everything is listed here in alphabetical order. So if we go down to the S, click the S because it's called SciFi Warrior bundle. You'll see it right over here and all of the assets Air here is, well, back over to the smart content window. Let's just grab the seen click on it with our left mouse button, hold it down and drag it and release. And as will load up this scene for us, you could also double click on the icon and it will do the same thing. Okay, so here is our scene, complete with cameras, character lights and the only thing we want to keep is the Level 19 object, which is the full interior SciFi interior. I'm calling it a spaceship interior. So click on the Genesis two female character, select her and then quick the delete button So she's gone. And then we want to select the rim light control. Click the back light, the feel light backlight spotlight feel like spotlight, lead all those. And we don't need this camera either. We don't want to bring any of this over into our fbx file. We just want a clean level so we can see here that it's got an elevator shaft. That's it's hidden. Um, basically, this is what we want to have for our export. So now we go up here to file drop down to export and prison. We'll just use this, this area here, and let's just name this spaceship interior, and this is going to give us our fbx options. So we want to go ahead and just pretty much leave everything on its default. The 2012 binary seems to work. Well, um, and then down here, it's going to tell us that yes, it's gonna export the Level 19 gives us the polygon count the burgesses count and so on. If you want to collect all the textures to a folder, just select this box here, and then Daz will collect all the textures into its own folder. Otherwise, the textures will come across in the fbx file quick. Okay, And now we've got the level 19 exported to FB X and ready to be imported into unreal engine four. Now, this is important to know how to do, because unreal engine marketplace Although it has quite a few structures and environments, it really doesn't have, um, a huge selection. So when you learn to export environments or buildings from Dad's studio, it's gonna open up a whole new world literally of buildings and interiors and exteriors and things like that for you to be able to use. So over here, I just wanted to kind of quickly show you, Ah, some of the structures that are available and it just goes on and on the type of buildings SciFi country. Um, you know, old time buildings pretty much anything you can think of. Somebody's created in Daz, and the items air are available for sale. Um, a lot of them are on sale, discounted prices. So you could just kind of go through here and do a search and find out what you're looking for. And, um, purchased the item. And, ah, you'd be able to have it available for your your seen to do your your renders. Now, one thing I want to mention about the dad's store and this. This holds true for the characters as well as the environments. Anything you purchase is it's OK to use the item in a in a video or ah, cinematic or a cut scene. But if you were going to use any of the Daz characters or any of the Daz items such as this dirty kitchen, for example, if you notice here they have an optional license, add on I need You would need to purchase the interactive license if you were going to use this as part of your game in your game engine, because this is, ah, different license to use, and these used to be a lot more expensive, and they've dropped the price very recently to where it's extremely affordable. So if you wanted to use this this prop, for example, this this dirty kitchen property would just pay an additional $35 plus the 13 97 it's on sale. Normally, it's 1995 and you would have that that entire room and everything in it available to use in your in your game engine if you were creating a game. Ah, the same thing goes for the characters again. Important to know that you can use all these characters once you purchase them. Um, if you're creating ah movie scene or a cinematic or a cut scene. But if you wanted to use the actual character such as that the alien in your game is a character in the game, you would have to pay the interactive license, which is usually about 35 to 50 bucks, and that's it for this module. 11. Mixamo Introduction: in this module. We're gonna go over the mix Imo website, which is a really cool website that you'll be able to use to import your characters to add animations and then export them and then bring them into unrelenting four. Um, let's just quickly go through this. I just want to show you a few things. You're going to need an adobe account if you don't already have one, so you can sign up here and then you'll be able to log into in the account. So let's get in here, and I just want to show you a few things here. A default character will show up Little robot character, um, up here in the left hand corner. This is where all the mix Imo characters are, and Adobe says you can use these. You can download these and you can use them in your projects and your games and everything , uh, at no charge right now. And there's over 70 of these characters. So if you scroll through here, you can see all kinds of different kind of cartoony characters fantasy characters, nights, zombies, kind of funny looking characters and things like that. So just kind of check that out a little bit and now appearing to click on animations and just want to kind of show you where you find the motion capture animations of which there are literally thousands in this website available for your use. So let's go up here. I'm just going to do a search for Idol and gonna go over here to this one right here and just click on it and you can see that that animation has been applied to the character right here. You can scroll forward and backward. You can rotate around the character. And then over here on the right hand side, you've got some adjustments where you can make the characters arms spread out a little further. You can change the speed of the animation, the and the little things Ah, that you'll need to use. So let's put another animation here. This is like a fight idol getting ready to fight. All of these motion capture animations are done in very high quality. Very well done. There's one that's a dance, and a lot of them are looped. So where they'll just continue going on and on, which is really nice. So this just gives you an example of the type of animations that air here in mix Imo. In the next module, we're going to, um, cover uploading or importing your Genesis two Dad's studio modeling to mix Imo and then applying the animations, getting it ready for, um, importing into unreal Engine four. 12. Mixamo Upload Genesis 2 Character: in this module. We're going to upload our genesis to character that we had prepared from Dad's studio. And keeping in mind that the genesis to process is different from the Genesis three character, which will be covering later in another module. So what we want to do, we're inside of Mix Imo now, and we want to go to the upload character button and you can either drag and drop the file . Or you can come here and select the file in the normal way. You find our character here in the SciFi warrior, okay, and we'll get this screen is the file is uploaded, just takes a moment to upload or filed, and now our file our characters processing. So this takes another moment, and what mix Imo is doing is it's actually creating a a rig, a skeleton for our character all automatically just like magic. It's really, really cool. And for those of you have set up rigs before, um, you'll appreciate just how awesome this is. Okay, now mix. Imo was loaded. Our character and you can see she's got a default animation. She's just kind of looking around. So everything imported correctly and now What we want to do is go down to the next button and it says your character, your three D character has been uploaded. Proceed with his new character and we want to click next. We want to do that, and then we've got our character in the scene. Now the first thing that we want to do is we need to export this character. First of all, let's put a Heidel animation on. I just went over here and clicked on one of the idle animations. So let's use This is our default character and pose, and what we need to do is download the character, press the download button, and we need to download the character with skin. It gives us the option to do it with skin and without skin. Now in the future, animations were going to do it without skin because the file sizes so much smaller. It's just gonna export the animation data, not the full mesh every time but the first time we need to have the model with the mesh skinned with e skeleton, the rig and everything all combined. So we want to choose. FB X is our format to download frames per 2nd 30 There is some other options. There are some other options in here. We'll leave it at 30 key frame reduction. Just leave it to none. And so these are our settings, and we want to go ahead and click the download button. It's gonna prepare our download. It will just take a moment. And then we want to save our file. So hit okay, and then it's going to save that file to my download. Ah, folder. Then it will be ready to import into unreal engine. Now from here, you just want to repeat that process except without the skin was will show you in a second is just go through here and pick out some animations that you want for your character. There's a whole bunch of them in here. There are, like I said before thousands of them. But let's say we want to go to dance just for fun. And let's see if we confined, um, hip hop dance. You say you're just gonna audition these animations, figure out the ones you like, figure out the ones you you want to export, and then you will click on download and then you'll change this to without skin, and you click on the download button and save it just like that. And that's the process you'll do with with all the animations that you choose. Preparing the download is going to do the same thing. Come up with a save screen, and I'll just say that like that. Over here, you can see there's different genres here. If you click action, you get rid of my dance. And then we've got, um, all kinds of different things. Groups kind of hard to follow. Really cool animations. Here's jumping and rolling. There's a follow camera here that you can talk along to. That will kind of follow the animation for you that you get the idea. Find the character again. Remember to look for the character arms space because in some of these animations that hands are going into the legs and so you know they're the fingers air disappearing into the legs. So you need to use this character armed space and move it to the side, and it will avoid that. We can also adjust that an unreal engine for, but it's easier to do it right here. Okay, so that's the procedure for the genesis to character, you just upload the character, select your animations one at a time, and then click the download button. Once you've saved it with skin the first time, you can save it without skin. And then all those animations will just be applied to the main character, and that's it for this module. 13. Mixamo Upload Genesis 3 character: in this module, we're going to upload a Genesis three character, which is a little bit different than the Genesis two characters, which comes straight across. No problem. Genesis three has a different rigging, different skeletal structure. So we have Teoh import it slightly different. So let's go ahead and upload. Our character is grabbed the exile alien, okay? And he comes in like this in a T pose, and what we need to do is just click the next button. And in this screen, we're going to tell mix Imo. We're gonna get mixing a little bit of help on how to create the rig. So we're gonna take the chin circle and put it right there on the chin. Risk on the wrists, but on the elbows, the knees and the growing. And then we're going to just use a standard skeleton with the 65 bones and then tell mix Imo next and it's going to create our rig, which it's doing right now, which is very, very cool Auto rigging. Love it again. Those of you who have created rigs understand just how amazing and magical this is to have the computer to all this hard work, okay? And there's our alien dude looking around with the default animation applied to him. So we just click next and it gives us our three D character has been uploaded. Proceed with this new character. Yes, that's what we want to do. And here is our Haley in character with a dance applied to him. So let's say we like this samba dancing and hey, where'd you go? We want to apply this animation to him. Then we go and click. Pause, click the download button and remember the first time we need to download the character with skin so that the mesh comes along with the rig and download it that way. Fbx format and then the subsequent animations. All the other animations that you want to download you can just download with without skin , and that'll save file size. And it also loads up into Henry, alleging a lot a lot quicker. So there you have it. Genesis three Character into mix Imo 14. Import Genesis 2 to UE4: in this module. We are going to import our genesis to character, along with the mix Imo animation that we applied to it into Unreal Engine four. So I've created a special level for you or map. So let me Let's find that go to alien spaceships scene and then find the character import map. It's right here. No, and you want a double click on that and get that loaded up because this will allow us to practice on importing our characters and getting the materials set up and so on. So once you load that, it should look like what I have here in the screen and then go to character import down here and click on Genesis to character. And that's going to give us the area in which we want to import our character. So put your cursor in the empty area here, right click and go up to import game character, and that will open up our screen here when I've got the character named a SciFi warrior Idol, Idol animation and you'll notice up here. It's also going to import all of the textures and unreal engine is gonna bring this into the scene and create materials. We're gonna have to do some work on the materials to get them working. I'll show you how to do that. But that's also going to come in with our fbx file and you'll see over here it's quite large. It's 41 megabytes, so it's going to take a few minutes to load this into the scene. Let's go ahead and click open and now our pop up screen, Our import options air here. We want to have the settings as follows. You want to bring in the skeletal mesh. I want to import the mess. Make sure that these two are checked. We don't want to have any other skeleton assigned to it because this is a fresh character we're bringing in. Let's move this over here. Um, preserve smoothing groups who want to have that checked import meshes in bone hierarchy import morph targets. This becomes important later on. When we were doing facial animation, Levi's on the default Compute normals and M I K K T space create physical app asset, all of these air just setting the default settings very important that the import animations is ticked off this box right here Otherwise we won't have any animations coming in. You wouldn't leave this the same and all the way down to the bottom in the materials. Make sure that your import materials and import textures is checked so that that comes in with the character. If we didn't do that, we could bring it in another way. But it's just better if we bring it all altogether. Now click on Import, and this is going to begin to prepare the character the animation it's going to be creating the materials, assigning textures. It's doing a lot of things behind the scenes. So sometimes this intake about 3 to 5 minutes, depending on your computer configuration, to get the character, um, to to load. So I'm gonna go ahead and pause right now, and we'll wait for this to load. Okay, as soon as Thedc Akhter is loaded, you're going to get a message. Log up here and usually for some reason, says no smoothing group information was found in the fbx scene, even though there is a smoothing group. So just ignore that and click the top right hand corner of the X to get rid of that. Now, as you'll see, we've got quite a lot of assets down here, and it's kind of a little bit confusing in here. So we're gonna organize this in just a moment with some file folders, but I want to show you where you find your character. If you look down in here, there's the SciFi Warrior Idol and look for the animation one here, the one that's actually posed down here. Click on that and go out and drag her out in the scene. Let's press R F key to get close up, and we can see that looks like her feet are planted on the ground Pretty good. Okay, it escaped. And there is our character, all textured with the textures on. We can tell that arise, air funky. We're gonna have to fix the eyes, um, and then go up to play. Let's make sure that we have simulate checked here, back up a little bit and we hit play and there's the animation. We see her just kind of looking around here. Okay, so we see the animation is is functioning. So congratulations. You have imported your character along with the animation, and she's functioning inside of un riel engine four. That's Ah, that's a a big thing. So let's go over here now and let's let's start organizing this the scene a little bit. This is the genesis to character, So let's click on that file folder right click and go up here to where it says New folder. We're gonna make a sub folder in here and we're gonna make one that says Materials, and then click on it again. Let's make another one go up to new folder, and this one's going to say textures. And now what we want to do is we want to go in here and select all of these materials left . Click bring it, drag it over here to materials and release your left mouse button, and we have a choice to copy or move here. We want to move them into this folder so it's gonna rename all the assets for us and move them into the materials. Now the textures we're gonna put in the in the texture folder. So let's go ahead and just kind of shift. Select these moves that over and now in control. Selecting is a and it's see we've got, um, you know, he's here. Okay, so all the materials air over here where they should be, and now we want to move our textures. So let's go ahead and select all of these textures. It's got a rename. Everything, which is good and hate to manually have to do all that and looks like we're missing. One need to bring this over into materials and move it there. Okay, so now this is a little more organized, so we can access, um, our character a lot easier. So from here, if we want to drag in multiple characters, you can You can dragon as many as you want. Um, and, ah, they're just instances. So it's not gonna bogged down your seen it all. So they're all gonna play, and they're all doing the same animation. And this is probably a good place to show you something that's really handy. Especially if you're gonna be using the same character, same animation. But you want to make it a little bit different. Go click on your character and go over here into the details panel. And there's a setting here called play rate. So let's make this 1/2 the speed. 0.5 and we'll keep the one on the right over here the same speed. And this one over here. Let's speed that one up a little bit. It will look funny, but I just want to show you how that's gonna look. Okay, so now we've got all three of them. Different rates hit play. And you can see that now they're not going in tandem, and, uh, they're each doing their own thing. So that's really a handy little tool or handy little setting, too to remember for when you're setting up scenes. Okay, delete this character out and delete this character out. Now, we've got this character here. We need to fix some things because first of all, we can see that her Her eyes are freaky. She just got white eyeballs. Remember, appear the camera setting. If you want to slow it down, just move it down to two so we can get closer. Middle mouse button to move up and down left mouse button to go in. Or we can use our all key in our right mouse button to go in and out as well. Okay, so now what we want to do is we want to get into the material editor. So let's right click go up to edit SciFi warrior idle because that's the name of this particular character, and it's gonna open the editor. I've got ah couple monitors, so I need to bring this over here. It helps to have multiple monitors. If you have multiple monitors, you're gonna you're gonna love it because you can spread all these windows out. Okay, so let's go ahead and get closer. I just want to a little bit bigger. We need to fix these eyeballs. These eyes. If you look over here in the material slots, you're going to see everything is named nostrils legs, I reflection so on. There's quite a few in here. The main one we want to deal with right now is the I reflection. Anything that showing up in the eye area, like tear it, showing up white for some reason, it comes across now. What we want to do is we want to use the glass material which is found in your starter content. Okay, so if you go down here into your starter content and down to materials and you will find it right here called M underscore glass. So just click on that with your left mouse button and bring it up and drop it into the eye reflection and you can see there's, ah, slight change right there. Let's do the same thing with the other white ball here that says Tear, drag it on and drop it hours the cornea, Same thing. And now we've got to my balls. I believe that's it. Yes. Okay. So, yes, we get really close. You can see that the eyes have a really nice reflection to it. We haven't built the lighting, and this is just giving us kind of a preview. But now we can see that the eyes look like eyes and they're no longer the freaky zombie white I. Now, since we made these changes, we need to save this. If you don't save it, then the changes air going to be lost. So come up here, click, save, and then we can exit out of the material. And now our character has some nice eyes. Look, escape to de select and let's play the animation. Now we've got her looking around. Okay, so that is how we bring in the genesis to character now in ah, a bit. We're going to look at the materials of the skin and make some adjustments there, too, because what we really want to do is is make sure that we have the normal map attached and , um, the roughness to give it the right sheen and so on. But for the most part, you know, we've got our character set up here, and it's looking, you know, fairly decent. And that's it for this module. 15. Setup Your SciFi Interior In Unreal Engine: in this module. We're gonna go over setting up the SciFi interior or the interior of the spaceship seen. So the first thing you want to do is go over here to the alien spaceships seen folder and click on that and looked down in there for the spaceship practice map Have created this for you, So just double click on that. And it should open up to something like this where it says the word spaceship practice. Seen just some text there. And now do the drop down menu on the alien spaceships scene, and we want to go down here to where it says Spaceship set. Click on that folder right there, Spaceship set and come over here and look for the SM merged spaceship Interior left. Click on that click down and hold it and then drag it into the seem like. So now let's set this up to where we have it centered the way it should, so let's go up to the perspective. Drop down menu and go down and select top using your scroll wheel back up and then you're right mouse button. Click on your right mouse button so you can move it around this way we can see where we're at. Okay, So we want to just kind of get this, um, centered. Kind of like so And then go back to perspective and remember to move up and down. You hit your you pressure middle mouse button to go up and down scroll wheel to go in and out or your ault key, and you're right mouse button to zoom in and out as well. I'm going to be a little bit repetitious going over the same thing over and over as far as the keyboard keys because it will help you to remember how to do these. It's a big, big timesaver, Teoh. Remember how to use these keys. Okay, so this is where we're at here. Remember the all key groups. So remember to click on your object, press down on the out key left mouse button, and this is how you pivot around or rotate around your object. That's click on our words here and move these over a little bit. Okay. Looks like from the outside that our spaceship interior doesn't have any walls, but it actually does when we get inside of it. So let's go ahead and zoom inside middle mouse button to lower down and we will see are inside his dark except for the texture that's on the bottom, which gives us that neon glow of the lights. Okay, so the next thing we're gonna do start making some adjustments here, and then we're gonna start bringing in our lights, as you can see appear a the top. If we pivot up, we've got those neon lights in the ceiling as well. You could leave that or weaken at a texture to that to make it darker. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's go here to the space ship set and go to the Materials folder and then scroll down here to where we see we could really use anything. Let's use metal one. So click and drag on that, drag it up and release it onto the light, and it'll just take care of that has put a metal material on that. Okay, now there's a few things we need to do to prepare for our lights so that we get the best effect. Um, one of it. One of the things. Let's go over to volume and we want to find the light mass importance volume right here. So I'm gonna go in back out here and you want to just click on that with your left mouse button and drag it into the scene. And what this is going to do is it's gonna tell unrelenting in the area of our scene that we want to be the most important as far as getting the most realistic lighting. So in this case, we want the entire spaceship interior to be showing up correctly. So go to perspective and let's pick the front view, right mouse button to move around. And we've got this little box, and what we want to do is scale it up toe where it encompasses the entire area. So press your space bar twice and then click on it and let's go ahead and scale this. I'm not like that and move it over here space bar again. And let's scale it up where we've got the entire height of the structure and now go up to the left view and we can see that it's way off to the side here. So let's drag this in here. Press the space bar twice again and stretch it out. And just to be sure, let's go to the top view and we can see that our light mass importance volume is covering our entire structure. No. And in our perspective, you we can see and we can hold key left mouse button kind of pivot around and make sure that the entire structure is encompassed by our light mass importance volume. Very important. If you forget to do this, it's it's still looks OK, but this really, really add some ah, cool things to the lighting. Okay, the next thing we need is we need to go to the volumes again and we need to find our post process volume and let's go ahead and just drag this into the scene. We could do the same thing and scale it, um, in the same way, there's an easier and quicker ways. Just go over here with the post process volume set and go all the way down here where it says infinite extent unbound. And by clicking this box here, we're just telling unreal engine that we want our post process volume to cover the entire scene. So that's gonna cover everything. Now what? This is going to do and we'll get into this later is it's going to give us the ability to do all kinds of really cool effects like Bloom. Ah, just the auto exposure lens flares, depth of field and being occlusion, global illumination motion blur. All those things are gonna be adjusted in here when we get to that that part. So now let's go and zoom back into our interior and we've seen we see it's pretty dark here and let's go ahead and build are seen. Go up here where says build and just click on that button. It's It's also gonna build the lighting even though we don't have our lights in there yet, and it's gonna come up with this message log. Just click over here on the X. Get rid of that. Okay, so now we see that we've got a pretty dark seen. The only thing lit up is the neon floor and some of these neon lights here, as we just kind of rotate around so we can begin to light are seen. No, since it's dark, we have a couple of choices. We can go toe lights in here and we can drag in a bunch of work. Lights like point lights and weaken set these up all around the interior so we can start to you so we can see what we're doing. Or we can go up here where says lit, click on this and then click on unlit. And this will just give us Ah, brightly lit Look at the scene here. Okay, This is a good way to work because you can You can see everything brightly lit is you're bringing in your your lights and then simply toggle it back and forth from lit to unlived. Okay, so in this spaceship interior, we're primarily going to be using spotlights. They give a really nice, moody effect. So we want to go over here to lights, click on that, go over here to the spotlight and click and drag into the scene, hitting my space bar so I can get the move, but hitting f So my spotlights out, actually outside of the scene. So I'm just gonna move it back down. Let's rotate this up against the wall here. I just wanna demonstrate how this works. Now. Over here on the right hand side in the detail panel. Not in the world settings Don't confuse these two, but in the detail panel, with our light selected Ah, we can change the color of the light we can change. The intensity is you can see. Right now it's pretty low. So we want to go to the intensity, click with the left mouse button and drag to the right. Or we can just click on here and weaken type in there what intensity we want. So just adjust this up where we can see that wall. Another important thing, especially for cinematics, is we want the highest quality light. So over here, where it's in the in the transform section, we've got static, light, stationary light and moveable light. The movable light is the highest quality setting, and it's all. It also makes it animate, herbal and all kinds of cool things like that. So we want to set that light as movable, hit the space bar, and we can move our light back and forth. Okay, let's go ahead and build the lighting, so go up here. We don't have to build the scene every time. Every once in a while. When you do something new, bring in new characters and things like that. You want to hit a total build. It just takes a few seconds longer. But for the most part, we just click this arrow here and select build lighting only so unreal Engine is gonna build the lighting as you can see down here in the bottom right corner and then we'll get our message log showing that the light Now if we hit escape it will de select the light. Now, if we don't want to see the light, we go up here and we pressed game viewing. The light will disappear or are hot key G on the keyboard shows the light for Makes it disappear. Okay, so that's your first light that you've added to the scene pretty cool. Now let's Ah, let's start making some changes in this scene. It's the floor is really, really bright, and we want to break that up a little bit. So go over here to the spaceship set and down here to the mess folder, and you're going to see an item called Iron Walkways. So just click on that and drag that into your scene and release it. Now let's go up so we can adjust where it is. Go to perspective, go to top and we can see that it's way over here. So just click on this object and drag it over, and basically we just want to center it to where it's spaced out. We can go to the front view and zoom way in. I'm using my right mouse button to move around here. I'm using my scroll wheel to zoom in, and you can see the thickness of this, these iron walkways. So if you want it to be really high, just move it up like this. If you wanted to just barely be above the lights, you can adjust it fully here. So now let's go back to our perspective and we've got those in, and you can see how this is broken up the lights nicely, so it gives it a darker, more moody, uh, look. So let's find this one spotlight. Hit the space bar and let's move it down here, rotate it, it move And let's, um, let's bring it up here a little higher, going to go to my front view so I can see where it is. There it is, right there. And if we bring it way up to the top, so we get a different effect now. This is This is a good place to show where you can see the bottom of the spotlight, how it's above the floor, not quite covering it. So to adjust that angle, we go over here to the right, and it's called the Attenuation Radius. This is gonna make it go further, throw the light further, so just click on this and extended down towards totally on the floor. If we don't want the light to be as spread out, we go to the outer cone angle here and we can adjust our cone angle here. Let's go back into our scene and let's watch this happen. We can also see since I moved the light up, because this is this light acts like a real world light. We have to boost the intensity. So I met 100,000 right here. Let's go up to 250 1000 type that in. Now we can see that's a lot better. Let's go up to 500,000. Boom. Now I've got this nice shadow because the light is coming through that walkway up there, so we cast like a real world Shadow Interactive Lee, which looks really nice. Here we go. Okay, so that's your first spotlight that you put in there. See, we've got a nice glow up there as well. It's kind of blown out, which looks kind of cool. Now, once you get a spotlight that you like, it's very easy to duplicate it. And for that let's go to the top view. Let's select it so we know where it's at. Go back to the top of you. Okay, here it is right here. Now you use this a lot. It really helps out to duplicate a light or a character or an object. Just press the out key on your keyboard, left mouse button and then drag it over and then release it. See, here's our original light right here, and I've just made a copy of the exact same light with same intensity. The same ah angle cone angle on everything. So let's try that again. All key left mouse button and drag it over here like that. So now I've just made three spotlights. Let's go back into the scene and you can see where they all are, and maybe a little bit too bright. So what we do is click on the light. Let's use this one for for an example. And let's just type in here 250 1000 that adjust that light right there. Remember to adjust the outer cone angle. What? Down here in the outer cone angle. Okay. And we're gonna end this module right here and next week next. Coming up, we're gonna be getting into the fog. 16. Light shafts and fog effects: in this module. We are going to continue to set up some lights, but we're going to get into it's called volumetric lighting, and this is really cool. This is where we're gonna have the fog effects to really get some depth and moodiness to our scene. So follow along here, the first thing that we want to do here we are in our scene, got our lights are spotlights showing up here is we want to click on our post process volume over here in the world out liner and let's turn on some settings First things we want to put on is the tone mapper these air film quality settings. And they're really gonna show up when we set up our camera in a little while and we're actually looking through our our camera. And what we want to do now is we want to scroll down here and click on Bloom and just turn these default settings on here. And what that's going to do is when the camera looks into a light, it's gonna kind of bloom out the the light lens flares. We want to turn the lens flare on here and again, some of these are gonna show up is we start moving around, setting up the camera, scroll down to ambient occlusion, click on intensity and radius. And for now, we're just gonna leave that on the default setting and then global illumination. Click on these two. Let's get this back down to the default. Now. It doesn't show up very much here because our scene is so dark. Um, let's raise this way up to 10 just so you can get an idea of what? The indirect lighting intensity up to 10. And you can see that we can bounce the light around and really start showing up those walls . Bring it down to five. Um, bring it down. I'd say, Let's let's put it on to around three for this particular dark scene so we could just see a little bit of the walls back here before we start adding, adding more lights. Okay, Now what we want to do is we want to make our our spotlights a little more pronounced, and we want to kind of show Ah, fog effect. So for that, we're gonna go over here to visual effects Over here on the left, click on the visual effects and then look for exponential height, fog. Now this one. Go ahead and click on it and drag it into the scene. See how we drag it into the scene and automatically adds kind of like a hazy effect here and then just let go of it. And we're gonna go over here to the world out liner. Click on the exponential height fogs so we can go down into the detail settings, and we want to turn some things on here. Let's go up to the top here. The fog density. This is where we can really crank this up or down. Really add a lot of fog here. We can change the color of the fog here by just clicking in this area. We'll just leave it at the default color fog, height, fall off capacity, all kinds of different settings that you can test around later. But for now, what we want to do is go down here into the volumetric fog section. This is a fairly new feature that UN re alleged in Just put out recently, click on the volumetric fog, and now let's scroll back up to the top to our fog density. And let's type in 0.15 and see what we did there. All of a sudden are spotlights. Now have ah cone showing the fog or haze coming out of it. Let me hit G on the keyboard so we don't see the icons or the of the lights, and we can see this better. So, see, as we move around, you can see some of the lens flares that we turned on those red dots. And you just kind of can see what we did when we turned on those fog lights again. We can just turn this up or down. It can have It is bright or his gym as you like, But for now, I'm gonna leave it a 0.15 because that just gives a nice, moody look to it. Okay, so that looks nice. Licks. Let's click. Save are seeing right here. Down here. Save all. So this is going to save our level. This is going to save all the changes that we've made. Now, if we look up here, you notice that thes tube lights up here. They don't look very bright. They just looked kind of red and colorful. So let's change that. Let's go into the spaceship Materials folder over here and you'll see down here I have one called flooring trim glow. Let's grab that click on it with your left mouse button and we're going to drag it in and put it on one of these right here. There we go. So now we've got these all showing up, and you could see what what's happening to the lens flares is they've gotten really, really pronounced. So we're gonna need to go in and adjust that and turn those down. So to do that, we go back to the post process ball, you scroll down to the lens flare intensity and this is said it one point. Oh, let's try it at 00.5 0.25 0.1 to 5. We'll bring it down to like that. That way it's not that is obnoxious, is it? Waas Okay, now we've got some nice glowing lights up there. We've got some nice light shafts coming in, and that looks pretty good. Okay. Now, to finish off this scene, I mean, you can you can spend quite a bit of time lighting your seen in fact, you do want to spend a lot of time and get the look that you want. Um, we're just gonna place a few more lights in the scene just to get familiar with what you could do. So click over here on lights and then want to use, um, point lights and just add some illumination to some of these dark corners that we have in the scene. So let's grab a point light and let's bring it into the scene right here. I'm gonna click G on my keyboard so I can see the light Icahn and it's scroll up. And by default, the point light is pretty bright. It's a 5000. I want to bring that down to about 1000 so I don't want it to be too, too bright. And then there's a couple of ways we could change the color. We can click on it right here, or if we want to use color temperature like the rial worldly um, the color of actual lights, like daylight or or a tungsten bull or something like that. We click on used temperature and then right here gives us the Kelvin temperature of the light the default to 6500 which is close to a day light color. So if we click on this and do 3200 see how that doesn't nice hit my f key so I can zoom in . How does a nice orange glow here See how we did that? Change this back to 6500 and it's Ah, cool blue. But if we go 3200 it's ah, it's a nice warm glow So I think that looks pretty good and it kind of offsets with the lights coming out of the floor. These settings also are animate herbal. So if you want to change the color color of the lights in your animation, you can do that as well. Everything is key frame animate herbal. Okay, so let's back up again. And you can see that this light is also being affected by the fog. So that's kind of cool in a way that works. I want to go up to the top view, and since we have this light already here, I just want to duplicate it, and I don't wanna have to redo all those steps. So remember how we duplicate an object or a light is we press down on the keyboard, the all key, and then we shift left key on the mouse and drag. So now I've got another light and I'm gonna do that one more time and go over here into the corner and let's go back to the perspective and see what we have. Okay, so we've got one over here in the corner. We've got one here. It's kind of getting lost a little bit with that bright light so you can move these anywhere you want. Put it where you think it looks best. You're the cinematographer's. You're the one setting up the lights. So this is your this is your scene Click G on the keyboard or up here game view in order to get rid of the icons so we can get a better look, I think that's looking pretty good. I also, since we're gonna be putting an alien appear on the scaffolding or the walkway appear, I put a spotlight appear to, and when we set up our scene next, what we're gonna be doing is bringing in our alien characters, so they're gonna be placed right around here, here and up here, so we'll make sure they each have a spotlight, too. So once we get them placed, will had the spotlights and adjust the light for them as well. We'll also then get into bringing in our smoke effects are steam effects and those air motion effects. They're moving around. So that really adds realism to the scene. Really gives it. Ah, moody look. So that's it for this module. 17. Adding Your Characters To The Scene: in this module. We're going to bring our characters and our actors onto the set and place them into position. So here's where it gets fun. Let's go up to the Exile Alien folder and right underneath that click on the Animations folder, and it will show all of our 28 animations here. Now for our purposes. We're just gonna keep it simple. We're just going to use the the Idol animation in the scene. But keep in mind you're the director. So if you want to use one of these other animations and you feel that would be better than use whatever animation you want to use, so click on Idol three Left, click and drag into the scene and then release, and we'll see that we have our our first alien character in the scene have, by hitting the space bar, I can get the rotate gizmo to come up left, click and drag, and I can move him into position. Now, I think I'm gonna want this guy kind of kind of just a 3/4 turn facing in this direction because he's gonna be kind of looking at the other. The other two aliens hit the escape button, and we've got him placed in position. But he's dark and we can't really see him. So I want a copy one of my spotlights and put position it right above him. So let's hit the G on the keyboard. I'm going to select this spotlight here, press my space bar a couple times, and I want to duplicate that. So I'm going to do the click and drag the Salt Cay and the left, click and drag to duplicate this spotlight. And let's see, I think I'm just gonna go to the top view easier to position it. So we're gonna go right over our character like this. And yes, it looks like we are exactly above. So this gives a nice, um, kind of ah, creepy little shadowy illumination. Since I have my spotlight selected here, I'm gonna go over and I want to adjust the outer cone angle So it's come down over here where says outer cone angle and I'm in a clicking here and I'm gonna just bring this in cause I want to just highlight him. I don't want all that light spreading out over over here. Okay, so I've adjusted that. And now I'm going to adjust the color of that light. So we'll go down here into the used temperature, and I'm gonna bring this to 3200 K Kelvin, which makes it that that nice amber color 6500. We give it that that bluish tint. Actually, I like that better. So I'm just gonna leave it at that color right there. His escape. And that d selects my light. I like that because what's gonna happen once we set our camera is we're gonna be panting like this past this, Moving forward like that? Yes. So he looks nice there. I'm going to go up here. Let's just see what he looks like. What? He's moving slightly. Let's make sure that he simulate Button is checked and press play. Oh, yeah, he's looking good. She's kind of standing there, moving around, slightly shifting from one foot to the other. Press stop. Okay, so we got our first character here. Now I want to place my second alien character, so I'm gonna use the same one idol three, and I'm going to placing their press the F key, so we'll bring me closer to him. Press the space bar so I can get the rotator gizmo. And this guy, I want to be facing the camera. So I'm gonna turn him around like this. Let's get his feet onto the thing. Remember the art little trick here to shift button and then the end will bring him down. But we're still gonna want to make sure his feet are planted firmly on the platform. Press escape to de select. And again, there's our character here, but we can see that he's too dark, and so we need a light above him as well. So going to do the same thing. Let's pick this light. Press the old key left mouse button, click and drag. And now I've got this light hit F rotate around this light so I can see a little better. Move this light right above the alien. Rotate around and that looks pretty good. Select the light and we want to do the same thing with the light. We want to adjust the outer cone angle, bring it in towards just showing our alien here. Okay, press escape to de select the light click on the alien press f. And now I can rotate around and see how I like that lighting. Now from here, I can move them back a little bit or forward. I can, either. Just the lighter. I could move my character around a little bit either way. And now let's press play. See what he looks like? Pretty creepy. There he is, moving around. Great little actor. Okay, press stop. Let's back up. So now if we just cut a frame, this shot is a test. We can see how it's starting to come together, press play, and now they're both moving now, as we did before, we don't want these things were using the same animation. We want to adjust the speed of one, cause we can tell in our eyes, picking up that they're moving in tandem. So let's click the guy over here and let's go down to his play. Rate the speed of the animation. And let's just do 0.5. Let's slow him down. Okay, That way they're gonna look different, moving at a different speed. Okay, Now are third character. He's gonna be up here underneath this light, so let's once again grab this animation Idol three. Press the space bar to get the rotate gizmo and let's move him around to face the camera as well. When we get in really close and make sure his feet are planted, Okay, this light here needs to come. And I think I want him side lit a little bit more, so we'll have his face a little bit more in shadow again. All this is up to you. How do you want to like the scene? You're the director. You're the cinematographer. This is all your baby. So however you think it looks good if you think these red neon lights are too bright, then it's a matter of just simply going in to the textures, the materials, actually, and putting a different light on like that. I think it looks more rial like this, but Or if you didn't want them to show up, it all grab something really dark and said it like that. Put that materials just a drag and drop onto the materials. But for now, I'm just gonna leave it like this because it gives a nice glow. Okay, so now we've got our three characters in. I'm gonna press the G button to get rid of the light icons and its press play, and we can see our foreground character moving around Nice. Once we start adding the camera in the movement, this is going to come together really nicely. Okay. In the next module, we're gonna cover adding some more volumetric effects. Such a steam and smoke and fire. And that's it for this module. 18. Add Steam, Smoke and Fire Effects: in this module we're going to cover particle effects had add smoke, steam and fire into your seen to give it more atmosphere and a little more of, ah, moody effect. So now that we have our three main characters in the scene, but our character in the foreground are mid character and then are one back in the back, we're gonna add Cem steam effects to kind of enhance the way this scene looks. So I'm gonna hit Stop here. I've added to your seen the starter content. You should find it right here if you click on the starter content. And then there's a folder called Particles. That's where we want to go to. If for some reason your starter content got deleted or lost, somehow you can add it to any one of your unrelenting scenes by just going up here to the add new button. Click on that and then go way up to the top where it says, add feature or content pack. Click on that and a window will open. Click on the content Pax Tab, click on Starter content and then down here on the green button. Add to project and by just clicking that it will add all of the starter contact. Excuse me. Content that has the particles, the materials and all kinds of, you know, basic architecture, things that air handy to use handy to have access to. So that's how you get that. So let's go down here to particles and the one we want to use first is our particle steam lit? So just click on that and just drag that into the scene right behind our alien character here. And let's select the alien character. Press the F key I'll and let's rotate around just so we can see where this where the steam is, we select esteem and now we can just drag the steam where we would like. I think I'm gonna want it to be a little bit further away from the alien here, Over on the right, the details panel. We have all of our scale settings, location, settings and all that available to us as well. So if we thought that this wasn't big enough, we could just make this look at 1.5 and make it a little bit bigger. So let's go back and just see what this looks like I'm gonna hit the escape key. So from this angle, it doesn't look too bad. I think, though, that I want to bring it closer to the character. So it shows up Writer in, in the in the light, it's backlit better and gives him more of a silhouette. Okay, so we've got her first steam there, and I want to add a little bit of fire in the background just for effect to back here. So I'm gonna grab the fire right here and drag it in the scene and drop it. We'll just have it appear right here. Now, it's not going to make a whole lot of logical sense. I mainly wanted just for the the look. And maybe these guys like to roast marshmallows or something. You will fashion way or makes Amores. But anyway, we're just gonna have this in the background. Just so it gives us something there in the background to look at this also could be scaled up over here with the size, the scale buttons. And you could move it wherever you you want to move it. Okay, Let's do the steam again. We'll scrap another steam. And this one we're gonna put behind our middle alien character. And I want to make this one probably about twice a zbig. So I'm gonna press 2.0, over here in the details panel and make that a little bit bigger. Move it to where you feel it's gonna look the best. You can have it right under the light where it looks really bright or you can push it back towards the wall and give it a, you know, less pronounced look. Okay, Now let's push forward. Middle mouse button go up, Push forward to our last alien standing here on the on the rafters and I want to add some steam behind this character is, well, maybe push it off to the side. Let's make this one about a two point OAS. Well, see how that looks and you can see how it's reacting to these. The spotlight as well gives it a nice you know, moody look with all this atmosphere. So as the camera pushes through, it's actually like a three d ah effect. It's a riel Ah, three dimensional steam effect that we have going on here trying. I want to just this because we seem to have lost some of his rim lighting. Okay, that looks better now. Okay, so now we've added some fire effects here. We've added some steam behind you. Each of our characters. You could continue to had this throughout your scene. If you'd like to have more of, ah, smoky, hazy effect. In fact, we didn't add some smokeless. Just put a little bit of that click on the smoke and let's just throw it in here. Put it over here by the fire. You can see that looks a little different than the steam. It's more of Ah, a brown look. Press g on my keyboard to get rid of all those icons. Okay, I'm liking that. That looks pretty good. So just go through your scene and add steam effects, smoke effects, fire effects. Over here, you can adjust the size how big you wanted or how small you want it. It's all up to you. And then we've got our atmospherics ready, and we're ready to set up our camera and our sequence er next. So we can start getting our camera ready for movement and actually start filming are seen. And that's it for this module. 19. Lights Camera Action 01: in this module. We're going to set up our sequencer, which is our nonlinear editor. We're going to set up a camera. We're gonna bring our characters into the sequence or along with their animations. And then we're going to start moving our camera and start getting our our shots lined up and ready for export. I'm going to go through this a little bit slowly, so if this is familiar to you, just speed up the video or you can skip ahead 15 seconds if it's too slow for you. But there's a series of steps that have to be done. Ah, that if you miss one, it's gonna mess. Mess up your animation. So here we are in our scene or spaceships. Scene where we left off and the first thing we want to do is let's click on our alien spaceships scenes. So we get into the right holder. Let's go appear to cinematics. This is where we're going to create our first sequence. Sequences can also be thought of as a shot like a clip. So let's select this arrow here, and we want to add a level sequence. Go ahead and click on that. It's going to open up this window. Now click on alien spaceships. Scene and down here in the name. Let's name this alien sequence. Underscore 01 We're actually gonna have three sequences or three shots that will be editing together. So let's just name this alien sequence. 01 And we're going to save it right here in the alien spaceships E file folder, Click Save! And now we've got the alien sequence 01 open and ready for us to start adding are objects. Now, if you remember the first time we're playing around with the animations We went up here two cinematic and we dragged a camera into the scene and then we just started adding things in that manner. There's also ah, quicker way to add a camera and a cut scene into the sequencer. And that's this icon right here, the camera icon. So just click on that that's going to put a camera into our sequencer. And it's also going to give us a cut, a camera cut track that will need for exporting the video as well. So we have our camera in the scene right now. It's set to 16 by nine DSLR and let's go ahead and change that. Click on the camera in our world out liner and let's scroll down over here to the film back settings. And let's change this to 34 by 12. Let's say he's given a super super wide. Actually, that's a little bit too much. Let's do 14. There we go. So now we've got a widescreen format that will be letter boxed when we exported as a 16 by nine high definition video. Now the Universal zoom is fine. For now, we see the focus method is on manual. We're gonna We're gonna play around with that later on. But for now, let's keep everything in focus. So let's change this to none. So everything remains in focus just while we're moving the camera around and so on and up here. We've got 35% Excuse me for focal length of 35. We can change that if we want to have more of a wide angle. We could change that to 25 that gives us more of ah ah more of the spaceship included in the in the frame. And since it is kind of a confined area, it's helpful to do that. Okay, so now we have our cameras set up, and what we need to do next is we need to bring in our characters, our actors, because they're they're not in the sequencer. So if we start animating this, we move our camera, our camera will move, but our characters will not. They'll just stand there just like that, because there's there's, they're not in the sequencer and the animations aren't attached. This is one of the things that tripped me up in the beginning, as I thought, just cause they were already in the scene and they're already animated before. How were just clicking play that it would naturally, just following the sequence, er and it does not. So the way to get our characters into the scene is we're just going to select them and you see, over here this one's called Idle Underscore three. And since he's selected, we're gonna go over here to the green track button, click on that, go to actor to sequencer, and we're gonna add Idol three. Now he's he's in there. You can see he's been put in there, and Unreal Engine has given us an animation track, but there's no animation attached, So click on the animation button and let's go ahead and give him the Idol. Three animation. We'll scroll down here and we can see that the animation is taking up all the way to the 165 frame. Now, this is obviously way too short. So click down here where it says 0165 or whatever is in there and type in 1000. We're gonna go ahead and stretch this end marker out here, and we can now see that our idol three animation I see him moving right there and then he stops right there because the animation ends. So what we want to do is click on this animation and left, click and drag all the way to the end of our 1000 frame animation. That way he's just gonna repeat what he's doing. Okay, back to the front. So we have our first character in, and now we need to get our next character, and it's making me select the steam so I gotta move forward so I can click on the next character. He's Idol underscore three underscored to. Since he selected, we go over to track, click on the green button. Go up to actor to sequence, sir. It's right there at the top, so it's really easy to find. Add Idol Bone. And now we go down to his animation track. Click on the animation, and if we wanted to, we could add the fireball animation any of any of these animations in here you could use because they're all attached to the same skeleton. But for this seeing, we're just gonna keep it really, really simple. So let's go up to Idol three. Okay, let's eliminate thes, and we've got this animation here. We're gonna do the same thing, click on it and drag it all the way to the end. Okay, now let's go to our third character. So let's push left mouse button middle mouse button to go up. Zoom in with your scroll wheel, or you can use the Ault key in the right mouse button to smoothly go in and out and let's select our last character and we go over here again, just like we did to the track button. Go to the actor to sequencer and add Idol 33 go down to the animation and find Idol three animation or, if you want to do a different one, do a different one and then click and drag all the way to the end of our 1000 frame animation. Okay, what's backup now? Let me hit. Escape to de select that character and its move closer to her starting point. Okay, now play here. Play down here. Excuse me. We'll see that all three of them removing, but they're all three moving in tandem, and they look like they're in some kind of ah, dance course. So we wanna alter the speed of the animation. So remember how we did that? Let's go back to the front. Is we select this animation and let's do this guy at 0.5. So he slowed down. We'll keep the middle guy at one, and then we'll do the top guy up here. Way in the background. Let's change him to about 0.75 He kind of goes into T pose until we hit play again. Okay, so now there moving a different at different rates. And since our cameras gonna be moving, you won't. It won't be too noticeable that they're all on the same animation. We're kind of cheating that a little bit here. Okay, let's go ahead and save our scene. Click on Content browser. Let's save all because we want to save our sequence is well, click on her sequence or tab again and go back to the beginning. Now, I had this set to the cinematic viewpoint. If yours is not set this way, go up to the perspective and do the drop down menu and select cinematic Vieux port. This is the one that gives us the ability to skip forward to go to the next key frame, which is gonna be very helpful in our animation. Okay, so we've got that. Okay, now we're ready to begin animating our camera. So to do that, we want to get into the camera view. And remember, there are two ways to do that. One is from here. Select sini camera actor, too, Or down here in our sequencer, I kind of like to use the sequence circus. It reminds me, dio, you know, to stay in there. Okay, so I've clicked on this and it's highlighted is a bright white now, which means the camera is selected If I want to de select it just go up here and this little pause button here, this arrow click on that, and then I I could move around. We can move around the scene and it doesn't bother the camera key frames. So let's go back here to Cindy camera after two. We're at the beginning of our animation on frame zero, and this is where we want to set up the the shot composition of where we're going to begin our scene. So pick something that looks really cool. Okay, We're not going to spend a whole lot of time doing this because you're gonna want to do it your way. Um, let's say that we want to start like this so we can just see all three of the aliens here standing here. Okay, so let's go down to the transform track and select that, and I'm gonna add a new key frame right here. And as you can see it, just put a dot right there. I also have the sequence or set up to where it's going to keep frame all channels when I change anything automatically. So this will This will kind of help out. So the next thing we're gonna do is we're gonna move ahead now. We can either do this by hitting play and just kind of time it See what it feels like when it goes or you can just scroll forward. Okay, it pause. Now we move the camera, and what I'm doing is right now I'm doing the left. I mean, excuse me, the middle mouse button, and I'm just moving to the side. Now we're gonna run into this thing, so I want to move forward. So I'm in front of that, and I want to Just kind of right mouse button will tilt. So we created a key frame right here automatically. What's going? Just scrub through that. See what that looks like? Looks pretty smooth. You want to get a sense of the timing, Just click play, or you can click it down here. Okay, so we're here on this key frame. This is the button that jumps to the key frame when this track is selected. Okay. Now, where we gonna go from here? The next camera move is I want a dolly into the second alien here. So we're gonna move this forward, and then I'm gonna do use my left mouse button on the mouse. I'm gonna move forward and you'll notice. Um, unlike the other animation practice we did where we had the screens set up where you were actually clicking and dragging the camera from a top fewer left. You you can also just animate in this way. It's just a preference thing. Whatever you like. Whatever you're comfortable with. Okay, So let's get closer to this guy. Maybe we wanna have ah, you know, like a medium shot of this guy. And we've got a key frame here. So now our camera has moved. It's come from the looks like we got a little issue here. We gotta fix nice, smooth camera move, and now we're dahling in to our second alien. Now, let's say, um, that was a little bit too fast. I want that dolly to be slower. I want to draw out the suspense. So I click on this last key frame and I click and drag. And I could just move this wherever I want, which is so powerful because unlike other animation programs, you know, you know the steps you have to go through to do that. This is so intuitive and unreal engine has made it so. Ah, simple and fun. Really to animate in this way. Okay, now, that's fine. We're gonna skip to the key frame, and I'm gonna push the camera a little bit forward a little bit more, and we'll see if that fixed that little where we're running into the object. All right, That looks pretty good. He doesn't look too happy. Okay, so our next movement, you know, depending on what you want to do, and it's it's really easy to test things out. Let's say we wanted to go all the way over here and move the camera. I'm gonna move it like this to the side here. So we're kind of having the camera rotate around the character. Let's see how that here we go. So we kind of just dolly around the character, and now we're gonna go past him. So a school like this assuming right past him, and then we want to bring our camera up. I'm using my middle mouse button to come up. Let's go all the way to the end. And for the in shot. I want to be tight in on this alien here maybe something like that, and that's where the shot is gonna end. So let's scrub through this conceivably fast how this camera movement is progressing. Okay, let's let's hit play. Let's see what this looks like. Nice, smooth camera movement. Just like a Steadicam. Or like you've got Dolly tracks coming up to Amy and number two. Okay, that looks pretty good. I think we'll just stick with that for now. Now, another thing that will help you when you're animating your sequences. At least it does for me, I really like to do it is to add Cem music, especially the kind of music that you're gonna be using in the finished piece. So to do that, even though we're not gonna output the audio because unrelenting doesn't output the audio as of now, um, well had the music and sound effects in hit film express or or your favorite video editing program. It's still good, especially when you're doing pacing and timing, and you're getting into some more elaborate animations. Toe have that musical track and certain sound effects cues there. So in order to do that, we go to our green track button and we click. Add audio track, and then this is going to give us the audio. And we have the audio. I've included that in your scene. It's down here under music by a very talented composer and put his name and his email address here, too, because you're gonna want toe. Probably use some of his music. Let's go back to sequence or here. So what we're gonna put in is called an be ambience five cave, and then this discussed Throw that into our our scene. Okay, so now we're going to go to the beginning of our sequence again, and we're gonna press lay, and now we can hear the music. Uh, okay, so you can see how it it's It sounds a lot better when you're animating. If you have something to to listen to, we're gonna call this shot done. Now, obviously you can you can spend and you're gonna want to spend a lot of time on your shots , really tweaking the camera movements, the characters, animations, the lighting and all of that stuff. But this is just to show Show you basically you know how to set up the shot, how to do the camera movement and now how to export our our shot, um, into a video file that we can then bring into our editing program for finishing. And so now we're ready to output your video as a video file. And to do that, we need to go to the camera cuts, and we need to add our sini camera actor to to the camera cuts. Now. There was already something in there, but it was just a partial thing. So come over here, click on camera and then select camera actor to, and it's going to put the entire, um, sequence video sequence in there. So now that we have this selected, if we click play, I just want to check that everything is working correctly. It looks to be fine. We don't have to go through the whole file. That's some really cool music by John Leonard French. He's He's a really, really good composer. Okay, so let's go to the beginning. We have our camera cuts selected here and now we're gonna go over here to the slate or the clapboard icon, and we're going to click on that. We're going to choose our video sequence now in here as I mentioned there's image sequence that you could choose but for our purposes were just going to use a video sequence at 30 frames per 2nd 1920 by 10 80. We'll go ahead and keep all these settings pretty much at the defaults who start frame zero and frame 9 80 That's close enough to our 1000. This is going to where we're going to save our file. I'm just gonna save it to the desktop. It's going to Neymar Videophile spaceship underscore practice Underscore M A p We can change the name later after we exported. So now we're gonna go ahead and hit capture movie and we're going to export the movie in near real time in high definition. So I click that and unrelenting Jin wants me to save the sequence in the scene. So go ahead and click that and we're saving the scene. And now our scene is rendering out as we see up here in the upper left hand corner. We'll just go ahead and watches. It exports the the entire shop. And again, this is not going to export the music or any sound that we have in the sequencer on real engine doesn't export the sound at this time. The audio will be importing that into our video editing program. This is actually very amazing. That unreal engine is rendering this quickly. I'm sure there's Ah, there's a lot of you that that know how long it takes to render a single frame. Sometimes hours, sometimes even a day or more, depending on the complexity of the scene and how many characters you have in it. So this is just a real game changer that that we're able to render this quickly and in high definition. Okay, we're right at the end and are seen is captured. Click out of this and let me find our Videophile. And here it is, right here. We'll open it up in full screen and looks like everything. Everything rendered correctly. Now we're gonna do the same thing. We're gonna make two more sequences, one more for each shot and will render in out in the same way 20. The Unreal Engine Sequencer Shot #2: for our next module we're going to duplicate are sequencer, and we're going to set it up for our second shot, which is going to be an over the shoulder shot of this alien way. Appear on the scaffolding or the bridge up here. So the easiest way to do that is come over here to this button it says saves the current sequence under a different name, and we want to go in and select that. Make sure we're in the alien spaceships. Seen folder and let's just name this one alien sequence 02 over here and Click Save. And now that's opened up alien sequence to for us the sequencer and we've retained all of our information. It's just duplicated everything straight across, so we don't have to go through all the trouble of bringing our actors in, assigning animations and all that kind of stuff. It saves quite a bit of time, and we can think of a sequencer or a sequence like a shot, like each one is a shot that we've we've accomplished with with the camera. So the next thing we want to do is go down here to can't Cindy, camera actor too. And we want to find our are transformed track down here with all of our key frames, and we want to move our camera to a different location. Like I said, we're gonna be way up here over the shoulder of this alien. So we want to delete most of these key frames here. We won't need them. Let's retain the original one, but the the other key frames. We want to just click and drag and select them and then just press delete on your keyboard . So now we just have the one key frame here. So now the cameras not moving okay from here, we want to move our camera and let's just go ahead. And since we're looking through the camera, we want to select the camera so we can do it right here. Or remember, the second way is up here in perspective, and we could select our camera there. Let's go down here in select our camera in the sequencer. So now we're looking through our camera and we want to change this key frame. So let's just push forward Middle mouse button gets us up left mouse button and just pushing forward the right mouse button tilts up and down. Middle mouse button exist. Go forward. So let's just go past this alien and let's pivot around. Go up a little bit higher here and we want to get a nice composition shot here. So keep moving it around until you get the shot composition that you want. One that looks nice for you. Okay, that looks pretty good. He's just looking down on the other two dudes, and let's make sure that we have a key frame there, So this now will be our original key frame. Now from here, let's move our cursor forward. Let's go to about frame 500 and let's move our camera down. We're gonna have to just because I'm going through some options objects, What were very low on the ground here. So we have our second key frame. So we're gonna be having a camera motion going down to here because we were moving through the object we can see right about here. It's going to move our camera back a little bit at this point. That's gonna create another key frame here for us, but we won't be going right through the object, so that will look better. Little wisps of fog and steam that we're going through. Okay, that doesn't look bad. Now, let's say from here we wanted to dolly the camera over so we can see this second alien. So let's move our camera. I say over to there on that didn't look very good, did it? So let's go ahead and delete that. Let's try that one. Okay. Selector transformed track so I can use the jump to a key frame tool right here. Okay. From from here, we're gonna dolly into our nice, slow shot into the face of the far alien. And we'll just call that the end of our shot. So go ahead and click to the end of the scene and move your camera forward. You can use your scroll wheel as well. And as we get closer, just use your left mouse button and then pick the competition that you want. Excuse me. The composition that you want. If you want him in the middle, do you want him off to the side? Here? How close do you want him to be? Select that. And that will be your your last key frame. Okay, Escape So let's go ahead and test this movement out this camera movement. Ah, Uh, okay, not too bad. So you get the idea here, and you can just remember, you can click on these key frames in your sequence or timeline, and you can just drag them to adjust the speed of how quickly your camera's gonna move to that key frame. Move the camera up or down. Make your adjustments to where it's exactly how you like, how you think it looks the best, and this will be our second shot. So now we're ready to render this one out. And I wanted to mention at this point we've been doing practice shots. But when it comes time for you to actually, um, render out your final shots, you want to go up here right next to build. And then there's a drop down menu item here called lighting quality. And we've been on preview this time. There's several other settings here. Medium high and production. When you get your final shot that you want to export, you're gonna want to set this on production quality. So you get the highest quality, um, possible. Okay, so now let's go over here, We're ready for our to export our shot. And remember, in order to export the video, we need to go appear to the camera cuts it will not export from the city camera, and we need to click on the camera icon. So now we're selecting the camera cuts track, click on play, make sure it's working back to the beginning, and now over here to our slate or a clapper board. Click on that and we're going to say this to the desktop again, and we're going from 0 to 9 80 for our whole whole sequence. Now we're ready to capture our movie. It's going to ask us to save our scene again. Go ahead and click that. And now, hon, Riel engine is rendering are high definition shot in near real time. Let's just watches that that finishes up to make sure we have everything that we needed again. The audio will not export out of unrelenting for at this time. We will be importing that into our video editing program and we're nearing the end of our shot, and it is now complete up here. We can open up our shot and there it is fully complete, we'll make it full screen. And this is our shot number two, and that's it for this module. 21. The Unreal Engine Sequencer Shot #3: in this module. We're going to be completing our final shot, and we're also going to be covering a few items here. We're gonna go over reflection, capture spears and how those work to help, um achieve greater realism, we're gonna go over the depth of field focus. We're going to cover how to tilt the camera during the camera movement and then build our lighting to make sure our lighting is built at the production quality before we export this final shot exporting it to video. So let's continue on here. The first thing that we want to do remembers. We want to save this sequence as a new sequence. So let's go over here to this icon right here. Saves the current sequence under a different name. Click on that. Make sure that we're in the alien spaceships. Seen folder and let's go ahead and name this one. Change it from alien sequence. Underscore 02 to 03 Since this will be our third shot, that will be working on click Save. And now we're in the alien sequence. Underscore. 03 sequence. Let's go ahead. And I moved the camera down here because I want to get it ready for our depth of field. Ah, situation. But let's go ahead and delete our other camera movements. So go to your city camera actor in the sequencer down under the Transform tab and keep the original one. But click and drag on the remaining key frames and then just hit your delete button to get rid of those. If you want, you can drag your camera to this position and follow along mainly. We're gonna cover a few different settings here, the focal length, the aperture and then the focus. We're going to take it off of automatic focus, and we're gonna turn it on to manual focus so we can play around with the depth of field throwing the background out of focus or the foreground out of focus. So let's come up here to our city camera actor, too. Object. So we're on our camera now, and the first thing we want to do is change it. It was on none like this. Over here, go into the focus settings with the camera selected and then drop down menu. You want to select manual okay, that's gonna give us the ability to manually adjust just like a real camera. We're gonna be adjusting the focus. Now, over here in our sequencer, go ahead and click on the camera icon. If you forget to do that, you'll be making adjustments and nothing is responding. You'll be wondering why nothing is working. I always found out when that happened. I forgot to select the camera right here. And remember, we can also select the camera up here or down here. So we select the camera and now we're actually looking through our virtual camera and we can start to adjust the settings. Now, a couple of the things that are important when you're doing a depth of field type of shot is the focal length of the lens. You can see right here I have quite a wide angle lens, a 25 millimeter lens. So I'm gonna change that first. And let's change that to 40. And what that's going to do is that's gonna zoom the lens in, and we can already see that the foreground alien is already starting to blur and go out of focus. The other important setting is the aperture, and we can see here that the camera is on 2.8. If we change this to 1.4, go down to the lowest, you can see he just got blurred even more. And to see how this setting works, let's say we knew this up to 12. Now we've got a deep focus. We can see everything and focus again. So these two settings that the focal length and the aperture give you a huge amount of control over your focus settings when you're setting up your shot. Okay, So I'm gonna make sure where the start of our seen here or a shot. And we have our alien and he is now out of focus. So what we want to do, I want to bring him into focus. So I go down here into the sequencer under the city camera actor to the manual Focus Distance. Here, click with your left mouse button. And this is totally interactive. Because you see, is I bring this slider to the left. The foreground alien comes into sharp focus and the background alien goes into and add a focus ST which gives us a really cool depth of field shot. So another two shots remember we we just kept it in, um, in an automatic focus. So everything was was in sharp focus. You can now go back if you want to redo those shots because we've saved each shot is a sequence and you can go and you can adjust the focus settings and give a more cinematic moody looked here to your shot if you like. So this is very, very powerful. When I first started using unrelenting in and I came across the ability to do this in real time, I was blown away because it actually gave me the feeling of being on a real movie set. And, um, you know, being behind the camera and making the adjustments in the same way that you would with a real world camera, it's extremely powerful. And the fact that you don't have to render this, um and it's giving you such a high quality image, um, is really an amazing tool. So the next thing that we want to cover is and we haven't gone over, this is the reflection. Capture spears. Now, these Let's find these over here. Spear reflection, capture these air like little balls that you're gonna bring into your scene and basically what their job is is to with a 360 degree view, it's going to take a picture of all your objects, and then it's going to render it the way it should be in real life. So if you're materials are metallic, it's going to make them appear more metallic. If there cloth or skin, you know, it just it just takes that. And somehow, through the magic of of unrelenting in its doing something behind the scenes in the Ninja code Warriors over an epic Games have done a fantastic job with with this particular thing as well as the whole the whole program. I don't even begin to understand what it's doing. Just that it works really good. So let's take. And I'm gonna un connect my camera by clicking here. Rid of that and let's go to a top view. So I want a few these in the areas of importance. So I'm gonna click and drag, and I also forgot to press my G key so that we can see everything and there's one right now . See, that's what they look like. They're just a around sphere. Okay, so we can see where this is I wanna have these spread out. So what I'm doing is I'm pressing the all key left mouse button clicking and dragging to duplicate my sphere. Or I could just drag another one in here. I like to use the all key and shift drag. So I'm putting one in front of this other alien character here. I'm gonna go ahead and drag one over here. We just kind of spread these out so they can do there their magic. Okay, now, let's take a look at the height of them. Yeah, that'll work. Okay, There's also a setting here. If you want to visualize the reflections, we can go down here and we can see what the's spears air picking up. And it'll just kind of show you the reflection effect that that's going on. So you can move these around if you decide you want, you know, a different look back appear to lit. Remember also that we have this setting over here unlit in case you wanted to see a little bit better and lip. And let's see, literary. Let's duplicate this one here. Let's bring it up and let's bring it over next to our right around the area of our other alien up here on the the bridge so we can get some metallic reflections off of railing and so on. Okay, so the reflection capture spheres are in place, and that's going to help with the scene as well when we render it out. Now, it's a good time when you make changes like this and add things like the sphere reflection capture to build the lighting again in your scene. I'm gonna hit the g key to get rid of the icons. So let's go ahead and do that Now is to go up here and build and build the lighting down here. We can watch the progress. This particular scene is building pretty quickly. Okay, now that we have our lighting built were ready to reposition our camera for another shot. Actually, this one looks pretty cool right here. So if you wanted to do a shot and just place some camera movement, a couple of key frames, you could do that very easily and then export that shot. You don't have to create a new sequence or sequences. Er, for every single shot, you could treat it like, you know, you're just moving the camera in the real world, exporting your shot and then do it. Do another camera set up export. That video shot, etcetera. You could do that All within the same sequence, sir. The only drawback is, if you decided to go back and redo that shot, you would have to set it up all over again. So that's the reason why it's advantageous to keep different versions of the sequencer. Okay, so let's move back here. I'm gonna press my geeky to get rid of the icons. Um, we are already We have the cameras selected. So now we're going to go over here. What I want to do is do it like a dolly shot into this camera. I mean, excuse me into this alien spy where he is. There he is right there. I'm going to go back down here to my focal length and put that back down to 25 because I want a whiter angle Look, and we're gonna place our camera very low. I want a really low tracking shot and the focus. I want the alien and focus. So we'll set the focus about there for now. With the camera transformed. Track selected, making sure that we're in the front of our shot. I'm going to set a key frame right here. Go over here. Okay. There's my key frame right there. Let's press play. Make sure camera is there. Indeed. You can see our alien dude moving around back there. Okay. All right. There's one more setting I want to make for the camera. I want to do it camera tilt to make it look a little different. So over here in the transform with your camera selected in the transformed section of the details tab, we're gonna go over to rotation when we go. This one here. Actually, I was in the wrong one. Respect zero. Okay. Going to begin this shot with a camera tilt of tin click to set key frame again, even though I have mall on automatic. Just to be sure. And then when we get up to, let's say frame 500 this would be a really slow shot. Let's move the camera forward. Uh huh. We're kind of through the fog here. I'm going to just the focus, So he's in sharp focus clique aqui frame on the focus track, right here. And then I think it would be cool if the camera was tilted the other way by now at the end of the shot. So let's go appear to the camera rotation. Make sure we're on the transform track here and let's do a minus 10. So we're tilted the other way. Maybe even a little more minus 12. Readjust. My camera. Looks like we're gonna justice. Focus a little bit more. All right, so there's our camera tracking shot. You can adjust anything along the way. Let's say that right about the middle here. We want it to be more centered like that. Then we just move our camera over an unreal engine for sets, a key frame there for us. So let's see how that looks to get him into focus. Better here. So you get the idea. You have total control over this very easy to make changes. Say I decided that that was just taking too long, and I want thes oops, wrong key frames down here in the transform track of the camera. So let's say wanted that to go faster. I select these two, maybe this one here, and move it closer to the beginning. Now we're gonna have a really fast dolly camera movement into our character or the other way around. If you wanted it to be slower, you just click on he select your key frames and then move them where you want to be. And since this is happening in real time and you don't have to wait for forever for your seem to render, you can get like instantaneous feedback, which, during the whole animation processes you can see, is really, really super helpful. Makes it a lot more enjoyable to animate a lot more fun for sure. Okay, so let's say that we want to end the shot right here on this last key frame. Let me get to it correctly. Let's go right to the key frame. And then I'm going to use the set. Play back end to the current position, and we're on frame 5 97 So now we're ready to export. This shot is our third shot alien shot that will be bring into our editing program. So remember how we do this. We scroll up to our camera cuts we cannot export from our camera itself. So we've got to choose camera cuts go up to the icon here, Make sure you select this icon back up to the beginning. Test it out to make sure it's got the whole thing, which it does. And now we're ready to export this shot. So we go to the slate icon or the clapboard movie clapboard. Press this and keep everything the same. We're going to save it to the desktop again. This is the end frame is 9 80 We wanted, um, what we say 5 60 or something like that. So tight that in there hit return to make sure it accepts it. Otherwise, you know, it'll retain the former setting. Got everything ready to go. So we're gonna press capture movie on real engines, gonna ask us to save the sequence, which we will do. And now our scene is rendering in high definition in near real time. So this will be our final shot in this module. What we're going to do next in the upcoming module is we're going to bring our three shots into hit film three express or your favorite editing program. We're gonna bring them all together, do some color grading, had the music and effects and then output the final, the final scene, and that is it for this tutorial. 22. HitFilm3 Express Importing Our Footage: in this module, We're going to import our three shots into hit film three Express or your favorite video editing program. If you don't have an editing program, go to the resource is section of this course, and I provided a link for you to download this really amazing free program. They also have a paid version that has some very, you know, advanced controls and things like that. But for a most or for a lot of your things, the basic free version will work out fine. So we're going to go to our project settings first and just accept the default settings of 1920 by 10 80 30 frames a second. And we want to click on start editing, which will bring us up to this screen. A fresh project with nothing here. The first thing we want to do is go over to import right here. We want to import media now. If we had an image sequence, we would do it here and it would import the entire folder full of our separate images. But for now, we're gonna go media and we want to go to desktop, and we're gonna go to space ship I've got it down here somewhere. Practice map. A one. This is our first shot. A shot. Let's see if we can open all of them and we can. And the other media we need to import is our music soundtrack. So let's look here. It's called ambience where it is right there. Okay, so now we've got our shots and we have our music as well. So you need to find our her first shot right here. Just click on it. And we want to drag it into the A movie to the beginning. Just drag it into the video. One track and then over here we can play it and watches are animation moves through the shot. The 2nd 1 over here, we're just gonna click and drag, bump it up next to the first shot and then do the same thing with our third shot. So we can just kind of scrub through here and see everything's there. One thing we have to watch for that was at the very beginning. It seems like, um, unreal engine records out the last frame, so let's see if that was here. It doesn't match up. That one doesn't have it. That's fine. Let's go over here to the end. That was good, too. Sometimes it tags on the very end, a frame or two of something out. So you want to watch out for that? There it is right there. That's what I was talking about. So we don't want that last frame in there. So we need to back here with Zoom way in and we're on that very last frame. So let's go over here. Click the razor, but me. Go over here and click that back up to our selection arrow. It was just select that little in peace and hit the lead on our keyboard. Just this so we can see the whole thing. Okay, looks like we're ready now to add a little bit of effects here. Let's do a little bit of vignette ing in color grading. Okay, click on color grading. It's under here under vignette and just click and drag that to the first clip under here. We can see that it's set for 1920 by 10 80 and you can adjust this if you wanted to make it softer. If you wanted to make it more see through the opacity over here. You could bring it in more or less that then getting effect. Let's go back over here. That's added to our second shot and then added to our third shot, so we'll have a vignette ing effect there. 23. HitFilm3 Express Color Grading: in this module. We're gonna cover how to do the color grading on our three shots. So the first thing we want to do is go over to the effects tab. Click on that. Then we want to go down to the preset tab and scroll down all the way to the bottom where it says film looks. I'm gonna have to minimize my screen a little bit because my pause button is in the way. The recording pause button. So we click on film looks down here, and we get all of these selections here quite a few in here. That looked really, really cool. They're presets. So all we have to do is drag it and drop it on to our clip. So over here, if we look at what our shot looks like just out of unrelenting four, it doesn't look bad. It looks kind of neat, but watch what happens when we grab just a basic warm and drag it and drop it in the timeline. Look at that. Look, look how much nicer that looks. I'm gonna undo that. And they've got all kinds of different ones that you want to play around with. Here's a black and white old stock. If we wanted this to look like a 19 fifties alien movie or something like that, just select that one. Um, deepest blue. That'll add a real blue overtone to it. But for our purposes, we're just going to use the basic warm. So we're going to drag that onto our clip number one here. It shows you can also make further adjustments to the Gamma, the diffuse and also the brightness and contrast. So you can actually customize this even further besides just the default. But for now, we're just gonna leave it on the defaults. That looks pretty cool. Back over to the effects tab. Grab our basic warm and put it on clip number two. Move our cursor to our last clip over here to the effects tab and Dragon onto our last clip . Now we can see that we've got that nice warm going through our entire seen. So let's go ahead and play this now and see how it looks. Okay, that looks good. So now we're ready to export our finished sequence here. And to do that, all we need to do is go up to the export tab up here and what's cool about hit film three expresses. You can put in your YouTube account information, and it will automatically upload your clip to YouTube. Now you have to do is give it a name here, select the category. Of course, you could change that later to any tags you want to put on it right now. Keep the aspect ratio, hit the export button and then hit film. Three expresses going to process the video and uploaded to YouTube, and then it'll YouTube will take it from there and process it into your high definition video. Um, if you want to downloaded locally your clip, you could do it in a church dot to 64 you have all your settings here that you can change you can export. It is an image sequence if you're going to further edit. If this would have been an image sequence, um, into a compositing program or you can use the A V I setting. So you have, ah, hole a bunch of different ways to export your video out. Teoh whatever you're you're needing it for, and that's it for this module 24. Conclusion Video: in conclusion, I just wanted to cover some things that will be doing in an upcoming course. The next thing would be doing is something like this where we take our characters and we do some facial animation. We will go into Dad's studio, set up the character. This particular one is called Dead Blade. Really cool character, Um, Genesis three character, and we'll set up some key frame animations, and we'll go through how to animate the head, the eyes, the, you know, facial controls and that type of thing. And then we will take our character exported from Dad's studio and then bring the character into un really Engine four for further animation. The other thing I'll be covering in the next course of intermediate and animation will be how to take the motion capture, mix Imo animations and edit them, and also combine them into multiple animations. Blend them together in that type of thing. We'll also be covering how to key frame from scratch so that you can just, you know, start from ah, basic character and do your own animations. So there's various various things that will be covering in the next course of intermediate animation that will be coming up. I also wanted to share with you some of the exciting things that are going on with unreal engine. Zafar e is a well, they're saying they're the first television show to use unreal engine completely. So check this out. That's being rendered completely in the Unreal Game engine. I had a pretty healthy skepticism when Digital Dimension came to me and said, Let's use the game engine on riel to render the safari it needed to meet certain production qualities in order for me to say yes, that's the render for our show subsurface scattering and the inclusion vector based motion learner. And it's got to do really good looking water and digital dimension using on riel has stepped up to all of them. When you get to a project the size of the firing, we're looking at one hours of material. 10,000 shots, one episode a week. You have to reach a velocity about foot and minimize errors. So for me, rendering has always been a big stressor. Previous iterations of the pipeline we were lucky. Get to touch renders in a day we can now do 20 within 1/2 hour. I've never worried so little about rendering on a project ever way might get 20 notes for episode, whereas probably in a traditional pipeline that would look like 120. It was like just finished animation, and 10 minutes later I get to see the shot rendered way went from being very concerned about the postproduction part of the process where we didn't know how the hell we were going to render this stuff to very quickly thinking that that was gonna be no problem. But effects animation, things like water effects, fire effects. That's the potential bottomless pit of generations and time and therefore money. I don't worry about it anymore, because now way just do all the working on Rio Oland. The effects are pretty much real time the fact that go into lighting effects and rendering and compositing in one package, and that you be able to see results of your time. That basically opened up a number of advantages to the studio that reaping the benefits right now, I can't imagine wanting to work on a production that is done in a traditional pipeline on a show like this. At our pace, usually relating department, you know, is probably eight people or three. Overall, our estimate is that you reduce the size of our lighting, rendering Com team by about 75% from a traditional pipeline, which translates into a 3% increase in efficiency and productivity. Forgiven Artist It's so difference. I think it's really motivating for them to work in real time like that. I don't think we've scratched the surface yet about what using unreal is going to allow us to do. I think my only regret is that it took us so long to say yes and do it. I think the interesting take away from using unreal is that it has allowed us to have our cake and eat it, too. On the one hand, our costs are coming down at the same time. The qualities going up thistles, one of the only times in my career. Okay, Is it that some pretty amazing stuff? It just gives you an idea of, um of what's possible in unreal engine four right now. And this is just the beginning. I also want to show you if you haven't heard of hell Blade send you a sacrifice. The game that just came out by, um, Ninja theory. Let's take a quick look at the at the trailer here because this is pretty amazing. Using using a motion capture facial animation. And they did it on Ah, a fraction of the normal Triple A game budget World will come to an end grow black earth sinking to soothe Stars will disappear Fire with water for meat Flames that will scare away the world will be burned All the gods will be dead on the warriors way. Prepare yourself for Ragnarok, for it is nigh. Okay, so isn't it amazing? The quality of the facial animation, the quality of the cinematics in this is just stunning and hopefully gives you an idea of some that the, um, cool things that you're gonna be able to do. And let's check out one more thing. This is just coming on the horizon. Um, the iPhone 10. Because of its facial capture ability, people are beginning to use this with Maya and unreal engine. It's not out on the marketplace yet, but this will just give you an idea of, um, what's being done with just a knife phone and being able to get it into the animation programs. Eso Very soon we won't have to worry about just manually doing facial lip sync or anything like that will be able to just record it into an iPhone. And it will translate in real time into our our game engine. And, as you can see here is showing where is his little text file with all the code and how he's gotten that to translate into Maya in real time and then from there and Unreal Engine. Now I know there's I think there's a couple of people right now, at least two or three. They're working on this particular method or this technology, and it's going to be very affordable right now. The motion capture rigs are fairly expensive, you know. They get run a few 1000 bucks for the suit in the head gear and cameras and all that kind of stuff. But with this technology and its fastest is progressing, it won't be long before we'll be able to have this type of motion capture ability and quality for just a few 100 bucks. And then it's really gonna be leveling the playing field in, um, it's it's really bringing it down to where it's about your your storytelling ability, your talent, your creativity rather than having you know, tons of money to be able to afford all these thes high tech, high end tools. So gonna end that there. And I just want to say in closing that I really, really look forward to seeing what you produce in unrelenting for. So please let me know. Send me links and me your videos Send me any project you're working on. I would I would really love to see that. And I look forward to to talking with you soon.