Unreal Engine 5 For Beginners: Learn The Basics Of Virtual Production

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi, you must be the new students. Welcome to my class. I'm Jordy, the supervisor engineer of the Unreal Engine 5. Pretty cool. That's right behind me. Now, what should you guys probably know me from YouTube, where we have a channel called Cinecom and where we host tutorial videos about Via VIX, film-making, all that kind of juicy stuff to an audience of more than two million subscribers. For the past year, I've been using Unreal Engine as a tool for my creative work, not to make games which actually the engine is traded for in the first place. In the recent years we've seen more and more functionality coming to the Unreal Engine that is great for us content creators for Via VIX artists, for filmmakers. That is why I decided to make this Unreal Engine 5 class for beginners and explore some of the virtual production tools. Now by the end of this class you'll be able to create beautiful outdoor landscapes and get complete control over the atmosphere, the sunlight, and treat stunning beautiful shots. We're going to create an entire interior scene as well. Set up interior lighting, create a certain mood instead of different virtual cameras, which we're going to animate into a movie. Towards the last lesson of this class, we're going to do live kinking. We're going to control the virtual camera using a motion tracker and more specific, our iPhone. We're even going to explore some of the DMX functions where we can control literally the lights in the real world, but also inside the Unreal Engine. Now, I am super excited to teach you the world of Unreal Engine in this begin of the class. It's going to be fun and interactive , but most importantly, you are going to learn so many new things about this beautiful program. Put on your safety helmet and follow me into the most wonderful begin of the class for Unreal Engine 5. Come on. [MUSIC] 2. The User Interface: [NOISE] Hey guys, you've made it to the class. Welcome. The biggest misconception that people have about Unreal Engine is that they think it's a program, a piece of software. Look around, you guys. Welcome in Unreal Engine 5. As you can see, this is not a software, this is a machine. I'm the quality assurance supervisor. I have to make sure that the agent keeps running and there's no meltdown. I know every button, every wire, every dial, and that is why I'm here to teach you how you can get started with Unreal Engine 5 as well. Without further ado guys, let's put on [NOISE] your helmet so that we're safe [NOISE] and let's dive into Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine can be found within the Epic Games Launcher right here, then go over to a Library. From there we can install different versions of Unreal Engine. We are going to work in 5, which is the latest. From there, we can hit "Launch" to open up Unreal Engine 5. Now you'll be prompted to start a new project, which is obvious. We've got a few options here on the left side, we can start a new project. You create a game to do something with film and video, which is for us because this class is focused at those who want to use Unreal Engine for virtual production film-making, or to make 3D animations and such. You might be wondering what's the difference between a blank project for film and for games? Well, there are so many options within Unreal Engine. Just look at behind me, way too many stuff. That is why a blank project for games will have certain options and features enabled that are disabled for film and the other way around. For that reason you want to make sure to start a new blank project for film and video. On the right side here, you'll see Starter Content. You want to make sure to enable that. Basically, what's that going to do is just import a bunch of stuff that we can just play around with, like 3D models and such, that we have something to work with, to experiment with. Right here, we can choose where to save the project and I'll just save it on my desktop and to give that a name. Let's call this one Unreal Engine class and hit "Create." Now it's a waiting game guys. The first time you're going to open up a new project, it's going to take a time to compile all the shaders, but that's only going to be the first time that you're opening up a new project. I'm going to grab a coffee, I'll be right back. [MUSIC] One eternity later. It's open. [LAUGHTER] We can get started now with Unreal Engine. Don't worry guys, this is only the first time that you'll open up a project. Let me just take off that stupid helmet. The way that you navigate inside Unreal Engine is like you play a game. You hold down your right mouse button and then you use the WASD keys to move around like this, like you're playing a game. Now if you don't like that, you can always go up to the menu, click "Edit" and then choose Editor Preferences. From there, you'll find here on the left-hand somewhere keyboard shortcuts, and from there you can change all the shortcuts to your likings. Now if you've never really played games before then this might be very weird to control your 3D environment. Well, you can also just use your mouse. With the scroll wheel, you can zoom in and out, with the right mouse button you can look around, and with the left mouse button you can move forward and backwards although I don't find that really convenient. Now here on the right side, we can find two very important panels, the Outliner and the Details panel. The outliner can be seen as your layers in Photoshop or an After Effects. You already have a bunch of options in here like the Floor and if we select that, we currently have here the Floor selected in our worlds. On the bottom then, you can see that the Details panel has become active and the Details panel shows all of the options that the Floor layer has such as locations. We can change that. We can change the rotation and all. We can change the scale and everything. These are basic properties that you should be familiar with if you've already worked in programs like Premiere or something like that. To undo any action just like any program, Control Z will undo everything or we can also find here on the right-hand side the reset button for that program to bring it back to its default settings. Now not every layer is an actual physical or digital objects. It could also be something like a light source, as you can see right here. We also have a skylight. All of these things, well, they're exactly doable. We'll get into that later in this class. Now here on the bottom you can find the Content Drawer. We can click on it or we can also hit "Control Space" to hide that or to bring it back open. If you don't like it that this pedal hides itself automatically each time. You can also say here on the right side doc and layout, and then it will stay there permanently. Now, what is the Content Browser? Well, here you collect all of the assets that you're going to work with. Every 3D model that you're going to import will be important here. It doesn't mean per se that you have to use it in your world. You can see it as your project's panel in Premiere or in After Effects. You just collect everything in here. We can find back here the Starter Content folder. This was imported as we check that box when we created the project. If we double-click on it, we can find a bunch of stuff. Like if we scroll down here, we should find somewhere Props. If we open that up, you can find a bunch of 3D models. We have things like chairs, we've got a bench right here. We should also have a table somewhere right there and to insert them into our world, we simply have to drag them. We take the chair and we just drag that into the scene. It's going to take a little time to also render the textures, the materials and all. Once that is done, you can see your chair here in the world. Now if for some reason you've been dragging around these panels like this and then you maybe you've closed a few things, I don't know what, and you don't know what's going on anymore and you're like, "What happened to my Unreal Engine?" Well, no worries. You can always go here on top to Window. From the bottom here, say Load Layout and then click "Default Editor Layout" and that will just reset everything back, so don't worry too much about that. You can also of course, create your own custom layout and you can then go back to Window on top. You can save that layout as a new presets. Let's focus on that chair right now because it looks so beautiful. We can select that chair. As we do that automatically, the layer itself will be selected in the outliner. We've seen that we can change location and all through these options down here, but that is not so convenient. You want to use the tools, the widgets. You can see here, this little access widget as we select it, which allows us to move it around on the x, y, and z-axis, which is going to be more precise. We can also rotate it, and for that we take the Rotate tool here on top. Select that and you can now see it that the widget changes. We can rotate that chair around. Finally, we've got a scale option as well. From here, we can scale it in the z-axis and everything or we can also take the middle block which will select all of these axes to make a uniform scaling. Now I would highly suggest to set short keys freeze options as you'll be using these a lot. I had these sets so I can very quickly move around between these different options. You notice that your model is snapping to a grid. Well, that are the options here to the right. We've got a position grid, we've got a rotation grid and a scaling grid. We can choose how big that grid needs to be. For example, we can set that to 50. Now if I'm going to move this object, you will see that it will snap in way bigger steps. We can make those steps smaller again by clicking on a 50 now and sending it to one which is very small. Now we will snap to a very small grid or we can also make it float so that it doesn't snap by disabling this grid option right here. Now you can see that we can freely move that chair around without it being snapped to any grids. That is the same thing for the rotation and the scaling. You can play around with these options. [NOISE] We've got a chair, what's next? Well, we can duplicate this chair. I'm going to zoom out a little bit. We can copy and paste that but there's an easier way to do that and that is simply by holding down the Alt key on your keyboard as you reposition that chair. Look at that, we have just made a duplication of it. It's that easy. What I want you guys to do now is go and practice this. Move around some chairs, make some duplications, re-scale them, re-rotate them. Just make a nice and cozy scene with a table or some chairs around. Practice that well, and then I'll see you guys back in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. [NOISE] 3. Materials and Lights: [NOISE] Oh, you're back. Good. I hope you practiced well because we're going to go to the next level right now. So what I have done right here is added two chairs. I added a round table with this little art piece onto it. So what I want to do next, is create a wall right here, but there is no wall in the starter content, so we're going to make that from scratch. Well, here on the top right here, we can click on this new item button or to add something to the project and from there, we can choose shapes. There are a few options like a cube, a sphere, a cylinder, a cone, or a plane. I'm going to pick a cube and just drag that into the scene like that, and like we've seen before we can reposition that. I'm going to take my scaling option to make that wall a little bit thinner and to stretch it out, to actually make a wall of that. This is all done using a scale tool, the position tool, and all to bring that into place. There we go. We've got a wall. Now I'm bothered a little bit with this thing right here that is sticking out on my wall. Well, that is a widgets. This is great things right here which you talked about before a little bit they are called widgets. We can hide them for a quick mode by pressing the "G" key on our keyboards, then they're gone. But if we press G again and then are like back. If you think that they are in the way, you can always move them around. So just select them and just move them out of the way. It doesn't matter where they are. It really doesn't matter. They just need to be in your scene somewhere. Just move them out, be gone. We've got our wall. I want to add like a different texture to it because right now it's just white, pretty boring. So I'm going to go over [NOISE] to my content drawer and from here my starter content, we can also go through our folders here on the left side through this panel, and I want to look for materials because in Unreal Engine we don't really talk about textures we talk about materials. Materials are built from textures. We can mix different textures together to create a new material. We can give different properties to materials and such. That is why we always talk about materials and use materials and Unreal Engine to give a texture to an object. We have a few things right in here. For example, this brick texture, let me just use that. A brick wall why not, drag that to the wall [NOISE] and "better bing better boom" after it's loaded, we have a brick wall. Look at that. Now let's add a light onto that wall. So I'm going to go back [NOISE] to my cotton drawer, and I'm going to look for props again because there should be this wall light right here. We can just drag that onto the wall as well. There we go. I think it's behind door in my wall, so let's reposition that is right there [NOISE] and we're going to have to rotate that. So let's rotate it at arounds 180 degrees, and let's bring that nicely against the wall. Now you can see here that my light isn't really aligning well to my wall. For that we're going to have to disable the position grids so we can find [inaudible] that a bit more so that sticks nicely to that wall like this. Now, currently there's no illumination coming off from that light, it's just a light fixture for now. So like you've seen before, we're going to go back to the arts button here on top, and this time go over to lights, and from here we can add a light into the scene. I'm going to pick a point lights and just drag that into the scene like that, and you can see that a light is also a widgets. This time you don't want to drag that away because as you can see, this widget is actually giving illumination. So I'm going to position that widget into the lights like this and automatically, you will see that it will also cast the correct shadows and all, which is really nice. Now like we've seen before with that light selected here, we can go over to the Details panel and change some options from it. For example, we can change the light color. Maybe that is not a white light but a yellow light. I don't know, or like a blue light which I have right here in my backgrounds. We can change the intensity, maybe it's a much brighter lights and we have so much more other options here to change the look of that white. Like all those options can be changed right here in the Details panel. It's as simple as that. I'm not going to go through all of these details, just experiment with that yourself. It's a light. What can you change about a light color intensity? Radio cone, all that stuff. We'll dive deeper into this when we are going to build an indoor scene later on. Alright, the volume has gone to the first lesson. [NOISE] This is a long one guys, but you've also learned alternately with things like you've learned the entire basics, the foundation of this program already. Now it's important to organize. Right here is our outliner which you've seen before, and it just a mess right now. So what I'm going to do here is select my chair, my wall, my statue which is on the table, and then the table itself. With all of them selected, I can hit right here on create a new folder. It will automatically put everything in that folder. I'm going to call this [NOISE] the models and we can collapse or expand that folder. We'll set these widgets here like the atmospheric fog, the light source, the sky sphere, the skylight, the sphere reflection, capture things that we don't know what it is yet. But let's just put that into a folder and call that [NOISE] stuff because we don't know what it is ye. Then we've got a floor and a cube. Perhaps rename that cube to wall and floor can stay floor. That is good. Now these two things right here, I'll also put in a folder, and I'll call that structure [NOISE] because they are part of the structure. So we've got one last thing here which is a point light. Now this is actually part of my light fixture, like is there a way to make that together? Well yes there is guys. If we go back to our models and look for that lamp right here on the wall, we can drag that point light into that wall. Now you can see that it's part of that lights or at fixture. So if we take that fixture now and move that around, you will see that my light widgets or the point light will move as well. The one last thing I want to talk about is while you're building out these scenes, is that maybe you would have a different perspective, because right now we are in a 3D environment weekend. We move around, and by the way guys if you hold down your right mouse button and then scroll backwards or forwards, you can change the speed of what you're moving around width while that's fast. Anyways, we're right here on the top-left you can choose perspective, and from there we can choose a top view. That gives you a wireframe of the top view and sometimes you know, that's easier to move around like this chair if you want it to be exactly somewhere right here or there, you can do that. By the way if you don't like that wireframe, you can always change that here on top. Select wireframe and then choose "lit" and that will bring back to normal scene or how it actually looks from that same top view. You can also go back from here to top and then change that to bottom. Do have like a bottom view, we can also have a left view, a right view, front view, back view, I think that is pretty obvious guys. Let's change it back to perspective. We've seen here the lit option on top, which will show like how the scene looks with a light. We've got a sunlight somewhere right there, and it's also casting shadows. But sometimes while you're building these things, you don't really like that. You can change that from lit to unlit. Now everything looks very flat again, which might be easier to work with eventually, you can always set it back to lit. One final thing guys, I'm working on a pretty fast beast of a computer right here. Everything goes super smooth. If your computer already has trouble, well then it's best you check the scalability option right here. If you click on it, it's currently set to cinematic, which is the highest option of all, what we can also bring that down to epic high or even all the way down to low. You can see that the quality isn't really good, but that doesn't matter. It's much easier to work in right now. But that is in a nutshell how to navigate around in Unreal Engine and how the panels and everything works and the different options. This is the basis. You can now start using Unreal Engine, and the next lesson we're going to continue with creating a landscape. 4. Create an Atmospher: The engine is running smooth. That is good because we are moving forward to something more advanced. We're going to create a landscape. Let me take my hat off to get serious. I'm going to open up my content browser because I want to create a new level. By default, you'll have a main level, which is the one that we've just been working in. You can see this as a composition from After Effects or a sequence from Premier. That means that we can create multiple levels as well. Just right-click to do that, and from there you'll see level. We can also click here on the Add button on the top left, and then choose Level. Let's call this lesson four as it's lesson 4 that we're working on. You can actually also download this entire project to follow along, so that is why a call like that. Let's open up lesson 4, the new level. Straightaway it's going to ask you to save that. Let's do that. We've got a completely empty level right now you can see here in the outliner that there's nothing in there and the viewport is also completely black. We're going to have to create a new atmosphere first, and that means a sun, the actual atmosphere and all, so we have an outdoor, a natural outdoor lighting. Let's create that. There are three things that we need. The first one is if you go here to Add new item to the project to that button, we're going to start by going over to Lights, and from there choose Directional Light. Now, the directional light can be used as a normal directional light like this one right here or you can also use it as a sunlight. Now, to use it as a sunlight, we actually need to enable an option from it. With that layer selected here in the Details panel, you want to make sure that atmosphere, if I can find it somewhere right here, Atmosphere Sun Light is enabled. By default, it will actually be enabled so we don't need to do anything. Next step, let's go back to that Add New button right here and under Visual Effects, choose Sky Atmosphere. Click on that and we've got a sky atmosphere and already we have that low golden hour, really cool. One last thing that we want to add, go back up here and choose under Lights, Sky Light. Basically, this is the reflection light coming off from the atmosphere or from the sky. Now we can't really see it yet or what it's actually doing that is because we don't really have an object where we can see the lighting appear on. Go to Create here on top. From Shapes add a new plane to have a floor, seems to be right here. Let's scale it up a little bit to make that floor bigger, and then go back up here to create a new cube and place that in there as well. Move that up perhaps, there we go. It's right there, the cube. Move that into place. We now have a cube on a plane, and that way we can see what the shadows and everything do. Now, if you hold down Control and then press L, we can see here what the sunlight is doing and how it's casting its shadow on that cube. At the same time there we can see in the atmosphere as well, if we move that sun down, you can see it there, there is the sun. If you move it down, we can see how the atmosphere is reacting onto that, and we get that golden hour, very awesome and very cool. There's one thing that isn't really working yet and that is the skylight here in our outliner. It's not really casting light from the atmosphere just yet. That is because we need to enable here at the bottom that it should work real-time. The option is right here, real-time capture, enabling that you can instantly see what that does to your shadow. It's getting lifted because of the reflection or the skylight. That is the basis that is looking good. There are two more extra elements to make your atmosphere look really realistic. You don't need those, but it's highly recommended that you do. Go back up to that menu to add a new item, we're going to go over to Visual Effects and from there choose Volumetric Clouds. Adding that will add clouds to your atmosphere. Maybe you don't want that, but if you do, there is the option. One last thing, go back up here and choose under Visual effects, Exponential Height Fog. Adding that to the scene will drastically change it and will make it look really good. This will add a natural fog to your scene, giving off reflections. Now let's put all of those layers or actually I should say actors because they are referred to as actors inside Unreal Engine into a folder. I'm going to select them. You can hold down your Control key to select multiple actors and then hit that folder to put that into the atmosphere folder. There we go. Now there are a few things that we can change within our atmosphere. Right now it looks natural as it is on Earth, but as you know, I'm not normal, so let's make this not normal as well. The first thing happens in your sky atmosphere. This is actually trying to reproduce an actual atmosphere. You also have some options in here. If you go over to the Details panel, such as the Mie scattering, which are the particles in the atmosphere we change that, you can see what that does. It will scatter more light around. We also can move up the atmosphere, the height of that, is the atmosphere high up in the sky or is it more down below close to the ground? We can all change that. You see here what that does to your scene. Your whole light reflection is starting to become way different. We can also even choose the roundness of Earth or maybe it's a different planet. It's right here, the ground radius. If we decrease that, you can see here in the distance what that does. We're standing on a smaller globe, which is really cool. We have some more options for the Mie or the particles here, such as the absorption scale, like how much of the light is being absorbed by these particles. Finally, we've got the general absorption scale of the atmosphere itself. You can also increase that, and you can see here what that does, again, to our scene. You can really create this alien planet if you like so by changing all of these settings. Before I asked you to play around with a chair and a table in-between two lessons. I want you to do the exact same thing right here as well after you start the next lesson, play around with the sky atmosphere, with the fog and everything, and see what you can create. Is there some cool planets, cool look that you can create by changing these settings? But before you do that, let's first have a look at some other settings. We also have the exponential height fog. Something very important in here that you want to enable, and that is to enable volumetric fog. Right now, it's 2D, I would say, but we can make that more 3D or more volumetric by enabling this option right here. This way, your sun will actually interact much better with the fog. Of course, we have some default options like the fog density. Do you want to make it more foggy? What's the height of the fog and everything? What's the opacity of the fog? We can also bring that up or down. We can, of course, change the color of the fog and everything. Definitely try to play around with these options, really cool. Lastly, the same thing goes with the clouds. We can change a few options to make our clouds appear a little bit different. How high are those clouds? We can bring them down, put them really low, bring them higher up. Again, play around with these settings. Now, this was a lot of work, guys. If we have to do this for every single new level that we create, we're going to lose a lot of time. I want to create a preset off from this. Now you might be wondering, Jordi, why should I do that? If I create a new blank project, I also have an atmosphere. Why should I create my own one? Well, let me open up the previous map. Yes, I'll save the current one. Back here with the chair, and a table, and everything, we also have these clouds up here. Let me just locate my sun, there it is. When I'm going to press Control L to move my sun around, it's actually not going to do that. That is because the default scene is driven by a blueprint. We'll talk about that in a moment. You can see here in our outliner that the sky sphere, I'm going to disable that, which are the clouds, is actually driven not by the clouds which we added in there, but by a blueprint. Something that Unreal Engine has created itself. That's definitely an AI or something. I'm not sure yet. If we open up that blueprint, we can actually do that. Let me just say, make that panel a little bit bigger here, Edit BP Sky Sphere, we can click on that here on the right side. We're just going to open up the blueprint, and we can see here how the blueprint is made up. We can see these different nodes and this here is the programming language within Unreal Engine, which are the blueprints. Now this is pretty advanced, guys, so I'm not going to bother you too much with all of this, but basically this is going to give functionality to your scene, is going to automate certain things, things that you can control through these blueprints. That is very cool, but maybe for a different class, for now, we're not going to bother blueprint because we don't need that yet. Let me just close that back, open up my content drawer and open up my lesson 4 level again. Yes, let me just save that, doesn't really matter. We've put a lot of work into this. Can we save this as a preset to use in other levels? Well, yes, we can. But in order to do that, we are going to have to create a blueprint. No worries, guys. We're not actually go to program stuff. We're just going to use the blueprint as a file or a folder, a preset thing where we can put all of our layers or actors that make up the atmosphere in. That way we got to preset. To do that, we're going to open up the content drawer again. We're going to right-click and choose Blueprint Class. That way we're going to create a new blueprint, and we're going to choose Actor because it has to be something that we can place in our scene, an actor. Click on that, it will create a new blueprint. Let's give that a name custom atmosphere. There we go, and open that up by double-clicking onto it. There we go. It's an empty blueprint. You can see here on the tabs that we don't have any notes. There are some starting notes but they're not being used. Actually let me just make that window a little bit tinier like that. What we can do now is simply select all the layers or actors that make up my atmosphere. Hit Control C to copy them, go to my blueprint, and here on the left side where it says components, this here is actually the outliner for the blueprint. We can just go ahead and paste them in here. There we go. You can see here in the blueprint itself, we can also see our clouds in the atmosphere and everything. That is good. We can go ahead and save that blueprint right here. Hit the Save button, close that window. We could go ahead now and just remove all of these layers. Hit Delete. We don't need that atmosphere folder either. Open up the content drawer, and simply dragging that entire blueprint into the scene, and everything is back. Hitting Control L we could still move our sun around. Everything is working nicely and everything sits now inside of that blueprint. That is great. Everything is working as it should. If we go now over to our custom atmosphere, just select that layer. You can see that we have everything in there as well. Here's the sky atmosphere, the skylight, the clouds, the fog, and the directional light. We can select them individually and then change any settings from it. If we select the sky atmosphere, you can change the settings of that here in the Details panel. It's nice now to just have that one file which we can reuse. Here's the cool thing, guys, I'm going to minimize Unreal Engine for a moment and locate my project here on my desktop. You will find back the same [inaudible] key that we had inside Unreal Engine as well. Here is the content folder, and in there we have our lesson 4 map and everything, but also our custom atmosphere. Even if you create new projects, you don't have to create new levels, you can create new projects, you could go ahead and just copy this file right here into your new project file, and automatically your custom blueprint will appear in there, and you can just reuse that as a preset. After making such an atmosphere, you're putting pressure on the engine. I'm going to clean up a little bit here, and I'll see you guys back in the next lesson when you're going to create an actual landscape. [NOISE] 5. Create a Landscape: It is time to create that landscape that we've been talking about. Let's hop back into Unreal Engine, I mean, the software, not the actual engine, of course. I'm going to start here within my content browser. Let's first clean this up a little bit because we've got some things going on in here. I'm going to right-click and simply say here on top new folder. Let's give that a name, call it levels. [NOISE] I'm going to drag in here all my levels here that I created prior. As you drag it into a new folder it will ask to move it there, to copy it there. We're just going to move it all in there, yes I want to do that. As we're making these changes here inside Unreal Engine, when I go back here to my desktop, you'll actually see in my project folder contents that you can find here a folder called levels, and in there you can see the levels that I've just dragged in there. Those two are always in sync. Let's create a new level right now and call that one Lesson 5. I'm going to open it up. Yes, save everything. As we know, this is now an empty level but we can drag in our blueprint in here to bring back the atmosphere and the sunlight and all. There we go. We can change the sun, which control L to reposition that, look at it. Now to create a landscape, we actually have to change our interface a little bit, change the mode. We can find that option back here on top, select mode. From that drop-down menu, we are currently in the select mode, which is the normal interface to move around objects to build a world. But we also have a landscape mode right here. We're going to click on that. You can see that our interface is going to change a little bit. We get a new panel on the left, but also we get this grit in our worlds, which is going to represent the landscape size that we're going to create. From that panel here on the left side, we can choose how big that landscape needs to be. We've got a few presets here, like we can make that a whole time bigger as you can see, or we can make a small landscape like that. We can also just choose to fill up the entire world, but always keep in mind guys, when you're doing that that your level becomes much heavier. I think that is pretty obvious. The bigger the world, the more objects you have in it, the heavier it becomes to work in. As you've seen before, we can always change the scalability here on top to something to hire medium if your computer has trouble to render that all in real time. From there we can then choose to create our world, but we have a second option and that is to import a world or a heightmap from something that we've downloaded off from the Internet and I'll also show you guys how that works in a moment. But first, let's create our own world. Once you've chosen the size, we can hit Create and we get a flat landscape. Now, there isn't even a texture onto it, just these cubes which show us that there is no texture onto it or actually material. We can now go ahead and use the sculpts tools here on top to create mountains, to create craters, rivers, it doesn't matter. The normal sculpt tool right here is the one that we see, and if we click and hold, we can actually create mountains as you can see. If you hold down the shift key, we can bring down that mountain, so we're going to create a crater. This way you can sculpt something, create your own mountains, craters, and whatnots, you can also change the size of your brush. Obviously, here on the bottom, we've got brush size, so we can bring that down to you have like a smaller brush to create smaller mountains and such. We also have a strength option right here, so if we increase that, you'll see that we're going to create much bigger mountains much faster. This way we can just start sculpting, creating something that we like. Usually what works really good is to have some mountains here in the backgrounds, high mountains back here and some more smaller mountains. I'm just going to decrease that here in the front. That way we get more of a feeling that there is a larger distance. You can always go down and just have a look at your landscape how it looks from down below. Maybe those mountains here in the back could even be bigger. Let me just increase my brush size a little bit to do that. There we go. This is starting to look really good. We're creating depth here guys. We got a mountain here in the front, one right here, one there, one in the back, so we have multiple layers of height, which is really good. Now we've got a few more options to make our mountains look a little bit better. We can smoothen them with a smooth tool right here. We get the same options like the brush size and the strength of that brush. This way we can get rid of these hard edges, these hard peaks, just make things more smooth. We also have stuff like erosion to give more of a natural feeling to these mountains. We can just use that as well. As well as hydro like if it rains, it's also going to shape the mountains a little bit different. We can use that tool as well and just go over your landscape like this. You can see here that we get more of an uneven surface as we go over it. That isn't [inaudible] how to create mountains or a landscapes. Try to experiment with it because it nothing more than this, just go through all of these buttons, see what they do. We also have a ramp option right here. If we select that one, we can actually draw more where we want to have a ramp. Let's, for example, create one right here. We click, and then we can drag out where that ramp needs to be. We get two points, so we can make one higher or lower. Let's say that we want to have a ramp right here. As we created that, we click here on add ramp and it will actually sculpt a nice looking ramp for us. Maybe if you are creating skate park or something, you can use the ramp tool. That is actually a whole lot of work, to make your own landscape like this. You also need to be talented, not only to technically know how to sculpt and such, but also you need to have an artistic mind on how landscape work. That is definitely not easy to do. Then there is the second option which is used the most often, and that is to work with heightmaps. Heightmaps are basically preset files that you can download off from the Internet. If you look for heightmap, you can find numerous of heightmaps on Google or on any other search engine. There're some need to be purchased, but there are also many heightmaps that are completely for free. What I'll do is go back to my select mode right here so that I can actually remove my landscape. As you can see here, it hasn't been applied as a layer or as an actor inside Unreal. I can just delete that to remove the landscape and start from scratch. I'll go back here to select mode, and from there choose landscape. What I have right here on my desktop is actually such a heightmap. You can see that it's actually just a PNG file, a photo, an image file that consists out of dark and bright areas. This is a way to tell Unreal Engine what should be higher or what should be lower. The black areas are low areas and the whites are mountains, these are higher. Of course, we get all of these different gradients here in-between. You can see the stripes right here and that is going to make sure that we get nice mountains. Yes, you could also just go into Photoshop and create your own heightmap and see what that turns out to be in Unreal Engine, you can definitely experiment with that. For now, I will actually place here this heightmap. Let me just open up my Unreal Engine folder to make sure to go back into that content folder so that everything is organized. Use the right-click in here, say new folder and call that assets or something. Let me just drag in my heightmap in there. There we go. Let's go back to Unreal Engine, right there. In my content drawer, I should find here the assets folder back. I don't see my heightmap in here and that is because Unreal Engine needs to reload if we're going to move new items into the project folder. But it actually does the deck that, you can see here a pop-up that says a change to source content file has been detected. Would you like to import it? We're going to say yes, import it. You'll now see here in my assets folder that we have a heightmap. We can go here now over to import from file from the landscape modes, and here we have to specify which file that needs to be used. We click here on the three dots, locate that file into my content folder assets. Here it is, heightmap and hit Open. You can see here that automatically now we get these mountains created from the heightmap. We can then just hit Imports. There we go. Look at that guys, we got a realistic mountain. As you can see, this one here looks a whole lot better than if we would sculpt one ourselves. Definitely, with the fog and everything, it looking really good. We can now go back the select mode to move around, look around into our landscape, which looks really good guys. Maybe the fog is a little bit too much, if that's the case, we can always go into our blueprint here, select the exponential height fog property and it bring down the density till we can see some more mountains. Look at that. We still don't have a texture onto our landscape. How do we do that? Well, we know that we can go over to our starter content right here, because in there we can find a folder called materials and there should probably be something in here called grass. Here it is. Like before, we think that we can just drag it onto the landscape, unfortunately, that's not going to do anything. That is because materials need to be applied differently to landscapes. With the landscape here selected in the outliner, we go to the properties. Just like any other mesh or model, a material is also a property from it. We can always change that from here. You can see here landscape material. If we open up the drop-down menu, we can actually see all of the materials which are already inside of my project, which are all coming from that starter content. We can just go ahead and just search for grass and it will locate that grass material. We can just click on it, which will be applied now to the landscape. Look at that, we got grass. We could also go back to our content drawer and just look for a material that we like, like the bricks here. I'm just going to dock the continent drawer for a moment, which is going to make it a little bit easier. I'm going to drag the bricks material onto the landscape material property. This is a second way of also applying a material. Of course, this is to have a brick landscape unless someone really wanted to put effort into that. But let's go back for grass. I will just take that again, it's right here, just drag that onto the material. By the way, guys, let me just go ahead and create a shape real quick. Let's create a sphere, drag them into the scene. This worked exact same way. If we select that sphere, head over to the details from it, we can also find again, a material option for that as well. I'll just have to look right here. We could also change the material of that sphere, but also going into this option, just browsing through all the materials that we have, such as this brick wall thing, you don't have to always drag it to your actual mesh. Looking good, I'm going to delete that because that was just a demonstration. Let's make this landscape a little bit more vibrant now with some foliage, some plants but that is for the next lesson. 6. Plants and Flowers: It's time to paint some flowers or some grass or whatever you want, some foliage into our landscape. But before we can do that, I first have to enable the foliage option in the engine. Hang on. [NOISE] It's up and running and everything seems to be stable. The engine is still going. Right here we have our landscape that we created previously. Now to add some foliage in here, we actually need some foliage. Let me just take off those glasses. [NOISE] Foliage is not something that we can find in the starter content unfortunately, so we're going to have to bring it in from somewhere else. Well, that's somewhere else is called the Quixel breach library. Now Quixel and Unreal Engine have been working together and they made it possible that there is a nice little button inside the program to bring in assets like foliage. Let's locate that. I'm going to go over to the Add button here on the top-left and from there we can find Add Quixel Contents. Click on that, which will open up a new window, which is actually some a marketplace, but this marketplace is free. That's right. You can see there's a market where you can just go and take anything that you want without having to pay for it. This entire library, let me just make that window a little bit bigger, is completely for free. You can see these very nice buildings, these rocks, these subway stations or whatever it is, forests, materials, we get decals which we'll get into in a moment. We got some more objects right here, some more models and of course, plants. That's the thing that we're interested in right now. We can also see here on the left side we get a menu with 3D plants. We can just click on that and we get a whole bunch of categories. I'll just say this go to it, see whatever you like and let's download a few. I'm going to take here the flowers. I really like those, so I'll just click on it, which gives me a whole bunch of different flowers that I could choose from. You know what, I actually like this one right here. [NOISE] I didn't know how to pronounce that. Let's me just double-click on it to open it up here in the side panel and I'm going to choose a quality. Do I want the low quality of that, the high-quality or the medium quality? Obviously, I want to have the high-quality because I've got a beast of a computer right here. Then we just need to sign in with your Epic Games account, which you also had to login with to install Unreal Engine. I'll just do that. I am logged in. If it's the first time you'll do that, you'll be prompted with a very nice message that says you get unlimited use completely for free. Yes, I agree to that. Get it now. I got it we can now hit on the Download button right here. It will now download these flowers onto my local computer. Once that is done, we can click here on the Add button. By clicking on that, it will import these flowers into my projects. If we go back to Unreal Engine, we should find a new folder here called Megascans, 3D_plants, and right in here we can find that flower that I've just downloaded. It comes with a whole bunch of files, as you can see, don't worry too much about those, we just want to download for now. Let me just go back to bridge, and let's download a few more. Let's also go for, I don't know, something like grass perhaps, these look nice. I think wild grass, why not? Hit downloads. wait until it's downloaded and when done, we can click on the Add button right here to also bring that into our project. Now of course, in the future, when you're going to start a new project, you don't have to redownload all of these assets. You can actually go here in the left column bar here to Local, and in there you can see everything that you've downloaded. Apparently, I also downloaded a few other things in the past, like this branch and this cabinet and everything. You will see all of that back. This is now stored on my local computer and so we can just select it from there and click on the Add button to quickly import that into our projects. I downloaded two different voltages right now, that is fine for me. Let me just close the bridge now, we can see both of these folders here now into our content browser. Now to start adding this foliage into my scene, we're going to have to go to the foliage mode. Before we do that, I just have to make sure that foliage mode is working. It is. Let's go up here to Select Mode and hit on Foliage. Like with landscaping tool, we also get a new panel here on the left side. Through here we can see all the foliage that has already been imported. We don't have to worry about the content browser. Let me just make that window a little bit smaller for now. Here are all the foliage plants, and we can select which one we'd like to start painting onto our landscape. We can select 1, 2, 3 or we can also just hit Control A, to select all of them and then hit the checkbox for all of these plants. This way we've got everything selected. Like before, we get a brush and we can just start clicking and dragging around to start painting plants, as you can see. We'll automatically mix all of these plants together. If we zoom in here, we can see our plants alive. It might take a little while to load, but you can see how good that looks. Automatically, it's going to randomize all of these plants together to create a beautiful landscape. You can see immediately how my landscape now has changed. This right here is looking way more realistic and if you look somewhere right here to this patch of grass which isn't actually grass, it's just like a flat material. This is the way that you should shape and create your mountains and everything. Like we've seen before, we can change the brush size, make it big if you have like big patches of mountain or something to fill them, or if you want to work more precise, we can also decrease that brush size. I think that is pretty obvious. Now, sometimes you just work on plant like one flower or something somewhere. Well, what you can then do is use a single tool right here. With selecting that one, we can just very simply click to add one single plant in there. Now it'll always randomly place one foliage piece from everything that you have selected. If you have something specific in mind, you're going to have to deselect all of these foliages right here, and then only select one, for example, like this piece of flower, wild grass thingy. I'm just going to click now and now I'm sure that it's going to add that one thing in there. I can't see it because it's very small. There it is. Let's go to a different mountain. Like here, all the way in the back, I want to do something special. I'm going to select again all of my foliages and enable them all. Now here on the bottom we can see that we have some more options when it comes down to our grass and flowers and everything. There's something very important in here that I want to touch. It's currently set to the default scale, which is the realistic scale as they were created, but we can also say that I want to have super big or super small grass. Well, that can be set in here. The minimum scale, for example, can be set to one and the maximum, for example, like five times as big. What's going to happen now, if I'm going to take again the paint brush right here, is going to randomly change the size of these plants while I'm going to paint them. Let's have look. Just paint them like that. Let me zoom in here to see it better. You can see that some of these flowers are bigger than others. You can see it here very well where we have, we just can take my select tool. You can see here these flowers are much bigger than these while they sit somewhere between one and five scale. That way you can get more random flowers and grass painted onto your mountains. Starting to look good guys. Let's go back to our original grass right here. Now let's say that we accidentally painted something that we didn't want to. Well, of course we also have an Erase button right here and Erase modes, which look exact same way, we just paint over it to remove the grass. There we go. It's all gone right now and we're going to have to start all over again, but that was just to demonstrate that there is also an erase tool. Let me just paint those back or hit Control Z perhaps to just bring them back to redo my action. Now these plants right here sit very static. They don't really move. There's no winds and it happens to be in the real world there is wind, so let's add some wind in there. Now to do that, I'm going to have to enable the wind option. There we go. Wind is enabled. We can now go over to our content browser right here, because this right here is the place where we're going to have to enable winds. But as I said before, materials are built out of different things, like different textures which we can combine together, but also things like programming materials which you notes, and that way you can give more functionality to your materials. Now luckily, we don't have to do that. The guys over at Quixel already did all of their work, we just have to enable winds. That's it. Now you're always going to find two materials; one is for when you're looking up close to the grass and one is for when you're looking far away. When you are zoomed out very far, let me just do that and just looking at your mountain like this, there's no use to render all these grass materials in a high-quality, that is just going to slow down your computer and you won't even see the difference because it's so far away. That is why it's automatically going to load two different materials. You can see it here happening actually. When I'm going to zoom in you can see that my flowers and everything are going to load in a second material, which is more high-quality, more detailed. That is why we've got these two options. I'm going to open up here one material, just double-click on it, and on the right side, we get a whole bunch of options. We can change the opacity, the translucency, the roughness and everything, but we're interested here in winds. We'll enable that option and then say enable winds. As we do that, we already get some wind animation, but we can even choose how much that wind has to be. We can increase its intensity, the height, the speed and everything, like is there a storm going on or is just a small breeze or something. That is up to you that you can change right here. For now, I'll just leave it at the default settings and you can see here already how beautifully the grass is waving in the wind and you can see that it looks much more alive, much more vibrant, much more realistic. We'll also do that for the billboard version. You can see it here, billboard and it's name, billboard is referred to as if you're looking from faraway, the low quality version material that is called the billboard, so I'll just double-click on that as well and also from here enable the winds. There we go. You can close that window again. We're going to do the same thing as well for the flower, so open up that folder, double click here on this material, scroll down, enable winds. There we go. Close that, and also for its billboard version so that if we zoom out that we can still see the flowers and everything move. Look at that guys, how cool this looks. There's winds. How awesome is that? Remember if you have downloaded the multiple types of foliage, then you want to enable that wind for every material that you have downloaded. That is how you can add foliage to your landscape guys, so go ahead and practice this right now. Make you're landscape more vibrant, more alive with plants, flowers and grass, and make sure to enable the winds. I'll see you guys back in the next lesson when we're going to talk about 3D models. 7. Importing 3D Models: Yeah, I know, but I have to demonstrate all of this. I'm sorry. I have to hang up, my student is back. Yeah. Call you later. Bye. That was my boss. Apparently, we've been stressing out the engine, but so far everything is still running good. The engine is going smooth, so I don't worry about anything. Let's have a look at 3D models inside Unreal Engine. As seen in the previous lesson, we're going to go back to the Adds menu here and then click on "Add Quixel Content" to open up Quixel bridge. From here, we can find all bunch of 3D assets if we go here to the menu on the left. There are a whole bunch of categories that we can choose from. For our example, the landscape, we're going to click here on "Nature" and look what that has to offer to us. Now here's the thing, Unreal Engine is not a 3D modeling software. We use dedicated programs like Cinema 4D, Blender, Maya, etc., for that. The only official options that we have is to create a cube and a sphere, as we've seen, but we don't really use that unless it's for a wall or something. 3D models, we either create them in a dedicated program, we download them from the Internet, or we download them from the free Quixel library. Let us look here for some interesting rocks that we could make our landscape little bit more interesting with. Maybe this here looks really good. I'm going to click on it and here on the right side, we're going to choose something else for the quality. Now instead of high-quality and I'm sorry that this here is a little bit bogged. You can see tundra, what comes from unrelated collections here, which is on top of my menu. But here on the bottom, we can see nanites and we're going to select that. Now, nanite is something that we can only use in Unreal Engine 5. It's one of those biggest new features in the new version. Nanite is basically the highest quality that you can possibly get. It's going to change its quality depending on how far away you are from the model and I'll show you guys that in a moment how that works. For now, just think about it to always choose nanite quality if that is available of course not all models have that available. It needs to be specifically built for Unreal Engine 5. Hit "Downloads" and let's look for some more rocks. I think that once you have selected nanite, it will be selected by default as well for the next models so we don't have to worry about it anymore. We can actually just click here on the quick download button on top. Let's download this one as well. Perhaps this rock looks really cool too, click the "Download" button. This one too, and one last thing here, this little patch of rocks. Here we go. What else do we have under nature? Maybe it's something else than rocks, I see some trees here. Now tree is something different. We are not going to find that back in the Quixel Library just yet. Maybe it's coming to it. For now, there's a different way to look for trees and bring them into Unreal Engine, but I'm going to show you guys that as well later in this lesson. For now, let's download some branches or something to create a more interesting scene. Perhaps this here, download that. Here's a small branch as well, let's download that too. I don't like these half-capped trees or half trees so we'll not download those. But I do like branches, so I'm going to go download this one as well, and that should be enough. Now, going back here to the menu, we have 3D assets, which we are in right now, but we also have 3D plants which you've seen in the previous lesson, the foliage. Then we've got surfaces. Now I won't download any surfaces, but basically these are materials. We've already seen how we can work with materials. You just drag them to an object or you assign them in the Details panel if it is for a landscape. The Starter Content Pack already has a bunch of things, but of course here you have a lot more materials and also a much more higher-quality materials. Now Decals, you can see them as solo textures. So you don't really need to apply them to a certain model or something, you can just let your texture float and decast it onto different models. I'll definitely show you guys how that specifically works. Let me just get something here, for example, under vegetation, let me get a decal of some leaves or something. These are by the way, 2D flat objects, these are not 3D. Right here we've got a bunch of leaves. Let me just download that. Now you can check out the progress of your download if you go here to the top and click on the "Download" button, which gives you the cue of everything and I see that everything has already been downloaded. No it's not, that's not true. There are two more elements here. The Tundra Mossy Boulder and Tundra Rock Formation are both still downloading. We'll wait for those to complete. Now once that is done, we can start importing them into our project. Let's go over now to the local folder here. On the left, click on "Local" and from here now we can see the collection of everything that has been downloaded onto our computer. Now at a certain point, you will have a lot of 3D Assets in here. Then you can use the filter option here on top to look more specifically for certain objects or 3D models that you want to look for. But okay, let's import these now into the project. I'm just going to hoover them and here you can see the "Export Nanite" option. You just click on that to add it to the project. I'll do the same thing for this formation. Also this branch right here. We've got this branch as well. We've got this decal right here. Let me just add that too, get some more branches. There we go. Everything should be imported. We can now close the bridge and we should see all of these downloads back here in the megascans folder. We've got them nicely sorted by 3D Assets, Plants, and Decals. Let's start with the 3D Assets. Just open up that folder and we can see a bunch of more folders, each representing a model that I've downloaded. Let's open up the first one Dead Tree and you'll see that always comes with a bunch of different files, it's never one 3D model. I'm just going to make this screen or panel a little bit bigger. On the bottom here, you can see what object that it is. This here is a material instance. Then we've got the static mesh, we've got three textures. The way that this is built is that we have our mesh, which is the model itself. Then we get three textures right here and those three textures are being mixed together in a material to create the correct look for the texture actually. This material right here is being applied onto the 3D model. Let me just show that to you guys. I'm going to drag in this dead tree into my scene, is going to load everything as I do so. Like the first time you're using a model, it will always load pretty slow but once it has been done, you can much more easily duplicate it and important new models of course. There it is, It has been imported and maybe at this point I might want to decrease the quality a little bit because my beast of a computer is eventually starting to get a little bit of trouble. Let me just put this to higher something of a quality setting. Here is my branch and in the meantime, you can see that these thumbnails have also been loaded. Here are the three textures by the way. You can see that it consists out of a normal texture, a normal map, and the UV map, combining these three together creates that material. If I select my branch right here, we can see more of it in the Details panel. You can see here under Materials that that material, this one right here has been applied to it. That is just to understand how these things are built. We've got our branch right here. It's sticking out right now. Let me just put that flat. I'm going to press the "R" key on my keyboard to turn that around and to lay that flat on the ground in the grass. This is actually looking really good. We have some more models like here we have this dry root thing. Let's drag that into the scene as well. Maybe this one is a little bit too small, so let's increase the size of that. I'm just going to move this to a different spot. There we go. We have seen this guys with the chairs. We know how this all works, we can just place it wherever we want. Let me just look for one of these rocks right here. They always look very good so we can just drag them into the scene. There we go, and position them perhaps somewhere right here, rotate them around and just like look for a nice spot. That makes sense. This is how you want to build out your scene. As you put in more objects like these, it starts to look more realistic as you can see right here. Now, what's up with that nanite guys, which I talked about before. Well, we can actually go up here to the menu. Instead of Lit right here, we're going to choose something different. All the way on the bottom, you can see Nanite Visualization and we're going to pick out triangles from here. This will show all the objects that are nanite compatible or have that nanite feature in them. If it doesn't have that like the landscape itself, you won't see anything, it's just black. But you can see here how these rocks have all of these triangles. That is the quality setting of that rock. You can see that the further I go away from that rock, that these triangles here start to change, they get bigger. The further they get away, the more the quality decreases. But that's a good thing because after all, we're going to need to work with performance as well. We want to have the best quality possible, but unfortunately, our computers cannot run that. That is why Unreal Engine needs to do something in terms of performance that we can run smooth or work smooth in Unreal Engine. Nanite is a solution. It features a high-quality asset when you're up close and still a high-quality assets from far away, although it has been decreasing in quality but we don't notice that. That adaptively changes so that the naked eye, it's still recognizes it as a high-quality assets. Let's disable that right here and set it back to Lit. The next thing I want to show you guys are the decals. Also we have those in the megascans folder, decal's right here, the leaves. Like I said, decals are not 3D models, they are just materials actually. They are textures that we can project onto other elements. Let me just drag in the material itself into the scene. There we go. Here we have the leaves. We can just bring it up a little bit higher to get a better sense of what's going on and we can take the rotation now of that object to rotate that around and that will change its projection. As you can see here on the floor, that is what it's actually doing. We can just rotate that and look for a nice spot that makes sense to cast these leaves on. It will cast its leaves or whatever onto everything on its paths, as you can see right here. Now if the decals are too big like the leaves in this example, we can go into the options right here. So in the outliner with the leaves, select it into the Details panel, you should find an option here that says "Decals Size". From here, we can change its size. Let's bring that down like this so it looks more natural like leaves. You might need to rotate that object a bit to get the projection right. We can see this arrow right here, which stands for that projection. You want to point that down like this. There we go. The box itself here around that Decal is not really touching the ground, so I want to bring that down until it touches the ground and everything else in its path. Now you can see that we are getting these leaves. Now sometimes that makes sense. On the ground it does make sense, but here on this branch, it doesn't really make sense that a leaf is wrapped around it beautifully. What you want to do is then just select that piece of wood right here. I'm going to go back to the Details panel and instead of scrolling through all of these options right here, I'm just going to look for Decal. You should find an option here. It says, ''Receives decals,'' which is set, enabled, but we can disable that and now it won't receive the decal projection. Definitely try and play around with that and see if these decals can bring more life, more dynamic into your scenes. That is in a nutshell, the megascans [inaudible]. But what if you saw something online, some 3D model or a friend of yours made one and said, hey, can you use that in an Unreal Engine? Well, of course, yes, we could also do that, but there are a few limitations and a few problems that will occur. Let me show that to you as well. I'm going to go back to my desktop because right here, I've got a model of a guitar and I'm just going to drag that into my Content folder, as we've seen before, into Assets where we also have the heightmap in. Let me just drag the guitar in there and go back to Unreal Engine. It should prompt me again like, hey, do you want to import that? Just say ''Import'' It's going to give you a bunch of options like how do you want to import this model. Nine out of 10, you just hit ''Import All'' to ''Import Models'' in there. Chances are that you will see some errors as you import some models. Oftentimes, you can just ignore them, sometimes, they do make sense. That's the thing when downloading models off from the Internet, you never know how optimized they are, and specifically how well they are made for Unreal Engine, because that is the problem that we're going to run in right now. Let me just go over to my Assets folder in which I should find my guitar right here. I'm going to drag into my scene. As you can see, it doesn't really have a material. That is because the material was not baked into the model and that is a problem that you're going to find a lot when you're just downloading something off from the Internet. Usually, textures are given with the model in a separate folder. You have your model and you have your textures, but if you go to import them into Unreal Engine, it's not going to recognize those textures because it meets a material. You're going to have to create your own material with those textures, which is something more advanced. This is not a solution. I'm going to delete the guitar. How can we get assets or 3D models off from the Internet for Unreal Engine? Well, super easy, you just look for 3D models that are made for Unreal Engine. There's actually a specific place where you can find those. Let's open up the Epic Games launcher. From here, we can go over to the Marketplace. This right here is a marketplace with a bunch of projects, 3D assets, blueprints, anything that you can imagine created by people like you and me, and we can just go ahead and put them on the Marketplace and sell them. Most downloads in here are paid, but you also have a bunch of free. Every month, you also get a bunch of free projects that used to be paid. There we go, a bike that we can just download and import into Unreal Engine and it's going to work straight away with the right materials and everything. That is a beautiful thing when you're looking for a model specifically for Unreal. Now, before we go to buy anything, guys, you do have to check here the supported engine versions. Most assets and 3D models are built for Unreal Engine 4, since 5 is still an early access. However, I found out that let's say eight out of 10, anything you buy or download for Unreal Engine 4 also works in Unreal 5. That's definitely a good thing. Whenever something is free, you can always just try it out. Let's just try that. This bicycle, let's hit ''Download Now'' and see if it works in Unreal 5. I've purchased it. Now, let's add it to a project. I click on here and it's going to say, hey, I didn't found any compatible projects because it's going to look for an Unreal 4 project. Well, we can just say here on top, ''Show All Projects'' and then click on our Unreal 5 project. It's going to say, hey, that doesn't work, it's an Unreal 5 project. Well, then you just say, it's an Unreal 4 project, but actually, it's an Unreal 5 project. We're tricking it into something there. [NOISE] Let's add this to the project. Click this button and it's going to download and import into your project automatically. Back to Unreal Engine. We should find the folder now, Bicycle. Every project is, of course, made up differently because these are just made by people like you and me, but usually, they are organized pretty well and we should find a folder here called Meshes. These are the 3D models. In Unreal, we talk about meshes. Double-click on that and we should find our bike riding here. Now, since this bike has a bunch of animations and such, we get some more meshes, but we'll just take the standard bike mesh for now and just drag that into the scene and you will see that we get nice materials here on the bike. We got the tire there, the metal and everything, all the colors, the textures are in place because it's been made for Unreal Engine. Now, I probably don't have the rights to use this bike into my course, so I will actually delete it now. [LAUGHTER] Unfortunately, I can't give that with you, but you get the idea guys. Just go through the Marketplace, see if you can find something interesting, and just use that in your project. We're going to delete by the way, entire folder or certain assets from Unreal Engine. It's going say, hey, these items will also be deleted from your hard drive, so be careful with deleting stuff from your projects. Let's hit ''Force Delete'' because I actually have used a bike in my [LAUGHTER] project, so it's just going to flip it out of there. I'm going to go back to the Marketplace and this time here, go to Browse on top. We're going to go over to Megascans, which comes from that library which we were looking into. All the downloads from Megascans are free, you can see that here on the bottom right, which is really cool. Here, you can see this project with the Megascans trees. It's, unfortunately, not inside the Quixel bridge yet, but I think it will come in there anytime soon. For now, we have to download it through the Marketplace, but that is no problem. We can find it here as well. We just hit here on Free. We're going to run into the same problem when we're going to say ''Add to Project'' It's not going to find our project, so we'll just say ''Show All'' click our Unreal 5 projects, and select version 4.27, which is the latest version from 4. Hit ''Add to Project'' which will now all download and be imported into my project. They're added to the project. Let's go back to Unreal Engine. Some are right here, BlackAlder under Geometry this time. We should find back somewhere, SimpleWind right here. Here, we can find all the trees and we can just drag them into our scene. Some very realistic trees as you do that. The textures have been loaded. There is our tree. You know what, this actually looks really good in the background. Let me just move that back somewhere right here. If we hold down the Alt key, we can make duplications of that tree, perhaps rotate that a little bit like so, so that it is not looking exactly the same. Let me just go a little bit closer here on that tree. There we go. We could make this row of trees or something. If we're going to take a look from here, it actually looks really good, like a real landscape with trees and everything, really awesome guys. By default, it already has some wind going on right here. But there's something really cool that we can do with these trees. If we actually select them, we can go here into the Material options. We have a bunch of materials like the actual tree itself, then the leaves, the branches, and everything. If we select leaves, for example, just double-click on that to open up it's material, and like we've seen with the foliage, the plants, we had wind options in there, we also have here some more advanced winds options, but we also have the seasons option. We could enable winter from here. If we do that, it has to load in some new textures. But as we do that, you can see here that this tree lost it's leaves because it's now winter. How cool is that guys? If we disable that again, the leaves come back as this spring or summer or something. You have a bunch of options in there as well. Definitely have a look around in there. But this is how you can add trees to your scene and just make your landscape a bit more realistic, a bit more vibrant, a bit more alive. Now, it's time to take it to the next level and actually start to create a landscape that looks really good and really realistic. It's going to be important how you place your elements and everything, but that is for the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 8. Realistic Environments: The problem is that the engine is starting to have a little bit of trouble, but that is because we've done poor optimization, so that's something that we're going to work on right now. Here's a landscape that we created prior, and as you can see things are still running okay-ish, but that's because of the beast computer. However, I do think that once I'm going to add more stuff in here, that it's going to get really troublesome for my little PC over there. Let's work on the optimization,. Now the first thing that I'm going to do is actually start creating a camera. We haven't done that before. Because I actually want to see which things can I remove from this scene. I'm going to make a shot from here, for example, maybe do like a little bit of a travel like that. Well, then all the grass here behind me doesn't make any sense. To get a better understanding of what we actually need in our scene, we're going to create that camera. There are two ways of doing that, I'm going to show you both ways. Of course one of them is going to be a better way to do it. The first one is to go back to that Add menu here on top, and from there go over to Cinematic, and right here we can find it as Cine Camera Actor. We're always going to work with the cine camera actor as we are planning to make animations, render those out, or to use it in a virtual production environments. Let's drag this one here into the scene. There we go. I haven't enabled my widgets, so I'm just going to press G on my keyboard in there, and you can see the camera now. Let me just say I bring it up a little bit. There we go. Here we get a view of what the camera is seeing now. Already you can see that my computer is having a little bit more trouble as I've placed that camera in there. Which is probably because the second viewport that we get here. If we select, by the way, something else like these rocks, that viewport is gone. But if we then select the camera back, we can again see that viewport. Here in the bottom, you can actually pin the preview of that. We're doing that. We can now select a rock. It can actually move it up and down now while seeing how that looks through the eye of the camera. That is one way of creating a camera, guys. We can go ahead and rotate this to get a different view or something. We are used to these controls by now, but it's still a little tedious to work in such a way. I'm just going to delete that camera like that. What I'm going to do here is actually just use my normal view port, the way that we've been working here the entire time to create a framing that I like. For example, something like this, perhaps. From this view, we're going to create a camera. What I can do now, is go here up to this menu all the way on the left, these three lines, click on that. On the bottom here, you should find create camera here. We're going to create a CineCameraActor. Clicking on that right now, it will create a new camera from where I was standing right there. That is much more convenient way of creating that virtual camera. It's the same camera by the way guys. Now we have a better understanding of what can be removed, so let's do that. I'm going to go over to my foliage mode right here, and I'm going to take the eraser to remove tool, and I'm going to select here all of my foliages that I have loaded in. Even if you want to remove certain plants, you also have to select them. That way, Unreal knows which plants do you want to remove. Because maybe you only want to take out all of these flowers in here, but keep the grass. Well then you can make sure to only select the flowers and de-select all the rest and then use the remove tool to remove those. We can now take the erase tool and I was actually talking about the wrong one. We don't use the remove tool with the erase tool, of course. We can go ahead and remove all of these plants here in the back, making it a bit more optimized as we don't see them, we don't use them in new ways. Makes sure you definitely, get everything. Everything here on this mountain, none of this is being used and that is just getting poor performance to the computer, and definitely, we're going to add more stuff in later on. Also see some weird patches right here, I don't even know what these are. [LAUGHTER] Probably when I was trying to explain what these tools do. Looking much better guys, I mean it looks the same, but maybe remove these here as well. It looks the same, but the performance will definitely be better. There are a couple more things that I want to do if I go back here to my select modes and look at my camera here. We can see that we get these weird lines here in the back. Well, that is where my grass stops and that is, again, not really looking so good. What I want do here is also make the grass thin out so we get more of a gradient from the grass and everything over to nothing. Let us go back to the foliage mode right here. I'm going to increase here the erase density. As I do that, I actually have to make multiple strokes in order to remove an entire patch of grass. You will see that if I do this now, still a lot of these plants will still stay there because of my eraser tool not working that well anymore, but that is good. This way we can create more of a gradient. We can play around with that density and try to get the edge out of there. That is already starting to look a little bit better. You definitely want to make sure to not see these lines right here from where your brush is actually ending. We'll try to remove that here as well. Decrease that density again. Really work on those edges right here, try to remove them. But this is starting to look a whole lot, much better guys. I don't care too much about this line right here as you probably don't see it, but if we go back to our normal mode, select that camera, we should not really see that hard edge anymore here in the back as we can see. That is a different way to optimize your scene, not only for better performance but also just for better and more realistic looks. What I can highly recommend, if you're creating one of these landscapes, is to just work with a reference photo. Go on Google, or maybe just walk in a forest yourself, or in a park, take some photos, bring it with you to Unreal. Just try to recreate that scene and really look at the details, like where is the grass? Where are the flowers? Where are the rocks and everything? Try to recreate that. It's really good practice. Now I think that we can all agree about the surface or the material of the landscape not really looking so good. It looks like a cheap video game, and that's also the reason why we will never just use one material onto a landscape and just go with that. You always want to use either foliage or 3D models to create your landscape. The only reason why we have a material applied to this is that we can see something underneath the grass. Now, very often we're going to work with a technique called Stacking. And basically, what we're going to do is just make a landscape out of 3D models. Let me just show you guys how that is done. We already downloaded a bunch of 3D assets or the mega scans library prior, and we've got a bunch of rocks in here, so let me just use some of those. Have I already used this? I'm not even sure. I'm just going to drag that into my scene, there we go. Basically, what we can do now is start stacking these. I will move them into a certain place, there we go. Rotate them and perhaps make them bigger, and definitely, when you're stacking objects like this, it might be a good idea to disable the grid for rotation and scale and everything so that you get more finer control over these objects. There we go, looking good. I might want to take like a different bolder now, let's take this one. Rotate that and put it in the back. Also perhaps scale it up, this is again, a very good practice to get used to the controls of placing objects and everything. As you can see, what I'm doing here is really stacking all of these objects, these meshes, and I'm not really leaving much place left for the material texture of the landscape to come true, which is exactly what I want. If you're going to take a look now through the camera, you can see that this is starting to look really good. What I'm going to do here is actually place a whole lot more of these rocks here on the site to really cover up this ugly mountain perhaps. Let us go further with that, we can make a duplication of any of these rocks as well by holding down the Alt key on your keyboard. You can see here that we made a duplication, so let me just move that into a different spots. Like we've seen with the trees as well, if you want to make sure that you don't see repetition in your scene always rotate your objects like this. The back of these rocks is something completely new, so you can definitely work with that. Also a good idea to make different scalings that also makes them look very different from each other. You don't have to be afraid that they overlap like this, just always look through your virtual camera and see that it is still looks natural and not weird like a rock sticking out of a different rock. But usually with all of these details, you're never going to notice that. What else do we have here? I see that we have another boulder right there, you drag that into the scene as well. Make that big, usually big boulders or big rocks go in the back. Let's take something else again, perhaps this bunch right here, Alt drag to make a duplication, rotate that, perhaps scale it up. There we go. You can definitely stick them into the floor as you can see, like this rock still works really well with the grass around it, even though that its surface is actually inside of the grounds. Definitely don't be afraid to do that or to leave out certain patches here, as you can see on the floor of that object here coming through the landscapes. Let's have a look here through the camera, see how that looks. Let me just bend that view again so you can see what I'm actually doing. Maybe this rock here is a little bit too prominent, so let's move that a little bit back, like this. This is looking good. There we go. You know what? This detail here that we created prior, I'm just going to leave that because [LAUGHTER] isn't making much sense anymore, but you get the idea of details. We're going to work with these more once we're going to create an indoor scene where it's going to make much more sense. Maybe one last thing here in the back, I want to have a bigger bolder here. I could download something new, but for the sake of this course, let me just reuse one of these, perhaps this big rock over here. Let me just make a copy of that to the back, I'm not sure even where the back is. There it is. We can see it here in the viewport. Scale it up. That's the big rock in the back. Look at it. Maybe bring that a little bit more to the back to really create some depth in there, there we go. This is starting to look really good guys, we are getting a nice landscape with some rocks in there that we've stacked, and also the composition is starting to look really good. Maybe from a top view or something, it's not going to make much sense or it looks really weird, but from the view of our camera it actually does, which we can see here through the viewport, it's looking really good. If we select that camera, we can see how it traveled looks like. If we are doing this or something, you can see that we get this nice parallax with these rocks in the scene, looks really good. Now one last thing that I'd like to show you guys is when we're going to go back to our foliage mode right here, let me just uncheck or unpin the view of the camera, and we're going to paint new foliage again. I'm going to take here my paintbrush, maybe make that brush a little bit smaller, and what we can actually do now is also paint onto these rocks. Let me just add some flowers or grass or whatever I'm doing here onto the rock, and you can see here that they are now applied to it. We're not only limited to the landscape itself, we can also draw them on top of models. This could be particularly very handy if we're going to make a close-up of a tree or something, you can see here where the tree actually aligns with the landscape, it doesn't really look good, so we might want to add a few grass patches or something in there. For that I'm going to make my brush really thin like that, and I'm just like draw around it, draw around the tree like that, and this way the tree blends in way better into the scene. Now unfortunately, we cannot really paint foliage on a vertical space, but we can really paint them well around a tree-like that. Well, we could, if you really want to, like add a piece of grass here on a more horizontal piece like here. [LAUGHTER] We could paint them on a branch or something, that could work. I mean, there's also foliage of leaves, and that way you can paint your own leaves to a tree, that is up to you. But just know that you could add foliage to 3D models as long as they are on top of them and that's on the site. This is a technique that you guys can practice, and it's also something I want you to do now before you're going to hop into the next lesson, and that is to start stacking all of these different objects that you downloaded off from the Quicksort library. See if you can create an interesting landscape without actually showing the surface underneath. You know some artworks have been made without even creating a landscape, but just by stacking 3D models on top of each other. It's a very easy way to add a little of detail onto your surface, as you can see right here. Here we can see much more things going on as we look right here, and that's of course because all of these rocks and everything, these trees, they are made with real photos, and that is why these graphics look so realistic. That is in a nutshell how you could optimize both your computer by just removing stuff that isn't in your camera frame, but also to optimize your scene to make it look more realistic. Perhaps think about adding these rocks or trees all the way in the background in your scene, if maybe your mountain is looking too squared, you want to take the edge off from that. Go ahead and practice that now, create a nice little environment, and once you're done, once you feel comfortable about the look of your scene, then come back for the next lesson when we're going to talk about post-processing and actually do things like color grading a little bit, giving it a specific look. We're going to create god rays, which everyone is excited about. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. [NOISE] 9. Post Processing: Now can I start this lesson by saying what an amazing job that you've been doing so far? Just think about it, when you started this class, you knew nothing about Unreal Engine 5, and now you are creating these beautiful landscapes, you're playing around with the sunlight, you're training rocks, trees and everything, and it looks so realistic, so good job with that. Keep on going because I'm really proud of you. In this lesson, we're going to talk about post-processing. Now, the way that I see it's post-processing is much broader than the post-processing volume, which is just what elements inside Unreal, which we'll talk about soon. Post-processing to me is everything that creates a loop inside Unreal Engine. We have created this landscape, now we've got these rocks and trees and everything, and we can give different looks to it, and that's why it's called post-processing. Now, we've already seen some tricks with this when we created our atmosphere here. Here's the blueprints with all of our atmosphere elements in there, and I'll just go over them one more time. We have the sky atmosphere, which is the actual atmosphere, there we've got the skylight, which is a reflection of the light bouncing back from the atmosphere, there we've got the volumetric clouds, which are the actual clouds in the sky, there we've got the exponential height fog, which is the fog we can see here in our scene, and finally, the directional light, which is actually the sunlight. We know that we can change settings from within the sky atmosphere, bringing it up, down, change the scattering of the particles in the atmosphere and all, and that can create different looks. But there's one thing here in particular which is really going to make a very big difference when you're treating out your scenes, and that is the exponential height fox. This is definitely something that you should pay more attention to. It's going to make a little bit more space here for my details panel because we're going to work more in here with that selected. We already know that we can change the density of the fog introducing more or less, but something very important that you should always enable, and that is volumetric fog. I thought that we did enable that in the beginning of this class, but apparently we did not, or at least I forgot to. But you're going to see now that in this scene where we have all of these mountains and everything now, how much of a difference it's going to do when we're going to enable volumetric fog. Let's just have a look. Look at that guys, what's happening now is this sunlight actually interacting with all of that fog. Without having this enabled, you can see the fog more as a 2D elements, while as we enable that, the fog is now more 3D, actually volumetric taking up the space in the landscape, so the sunlight is going to interact a whole lot more with that. Now we can really start to play around with the fog to give it a particular look. Because apart from the density options that we have here on top to introduce more or less fog, we could also go ahead and change the scattering, the light scattering on the fog particles, and that's going to give way different results as you can see right here. Instead that there is now less fog, there's still the same amount of fog, but it's just scattering the light differently. We can even give a color to the fog, maybe there's some chemical poison in the sky, then we can give that some pretty green color or something, just look at that. Now, it's time to close your windows. Or maybe it has more like a blue color, you can see here what that does to your entire steam looks really cool. There you have different ways of giving a particular look to your seam. We also have the viewing distance like how far can we look into the distance before the fog is actually going to take over here, and you can see beautifully how the color is also going to interact with the environments. Now, one last thing here is the directional and scattering from the exponential height fog. A very interesting setting because this is the first touch from your sunlight to the fog and we can change how that should behave. What was really interesting is that we can actually change the color of that. We can click on here, set to black, and we can make that a little bit brighter, for instance, and perhaps like add some red color to it. You can see here in the distance what that actually does. This is the first touch of the sunlight here into the fog, or maybe make that more blue or something. You can really play around with that and see if you can create an interesting look, like there is error chemical clouds, not good for us, but it is looking pretty cool. Now, with the inscattering exponent, we can choose how far that first touch with the sunlight has to be, or how far that chemical cloud should come. Really cool. Definitely play around with these settings, for now I'm just going to reset them back to default. Now, let's have a look at the directional light or the actual sunlight because there's something really interesting with that that I'd like to show you guys. I'm going to bring my sunlight here behind the trees, there we go. What we could do now is create these God Rays, something that we all want to do. Definitely, if we are getting started with Unreal Engine, the first thing everyone does is just create God Rays. That can be done here with the directional light selected, we can look for the light shaft bloom right here, just enable that, and there we go, we get light shafts. There will occur a problem where the sunlight is flickering so we can't really actually use that when we're looking directly into the sun, but just look at it if we are going to move the sun behind the trees. If we don't actually see the sun, but just the light peeping through, we could actually use it, and we can see these very nice God Rays here, which of course we can increase. We can just scale up the bloom, have more God Rays, change the thresholds, and there you can see now what that does to the tree looking really good. We're going to work with that as well when we're going to create our indoor scene, we'll have a window there, and of course, when the sun is coming through that window, we want to see these God Rays. Those are the big set of things that we can do with our outdoor lighting or atmosphere as I call it. Let's have a look at a second way to do more post-processing, I'm talking about color grading or adding some visual effects in there. That's going to be done with the post-processing volume which we can create from the top here, head over to ''Visual Effects'' and from there choose post-processing volume, just click on it to add it to your seam. Now, as you can see here, the post-processing volume is a box, until when we move inside of that box, we can actually see what's happening. With that post-processing volume selected, we go over to our details here and we can change a whole bunch of options. You can see here that we've got bloom, we got exposure settings, chromatic aberration, and so much more also color grading options in here, a lot of things that we can do to really give a certain look to our seam. Let me just do something real quick here guys, I'm going to go over to bloom, enable that, and also increase the intensity of the bloom. As I do that, you can see here that my entire seam gets way more bloomy. But if I'm going to move now out of this box, you'll see that the bloom is gone. The bloom will only be applied now within that box, which is often used for in games when you're walking from one level to another or something and the look has to change. But for us, we just want that post-processing to happen over the entire landscape where we don't have to fumble around with the scale, we just have to look for one specific option nice here under the post-process volume settings, we can find infinite extent. Now, you can of course also just use the search box on top and just look for infinite extent and just enable that, and now if you move outside of this box, that bloom effect is still present. Actually we could go ahead and just ignore that box, it's there, but we don't need to mind it. What else can we do apart from bloom? Let me just reset that because it's starting to look really ugly this way. We have exposure settings, we could set this to automatic exposure right here, and this means that when we're going to look into the sky, you can see here that my exposure is changing, is available loop down, it will get brighter again as my exposure is automatically adapting. We can also set that to manual, of course. Now it's dark and that's because we need to enable the compensation to set a certain exposure level like this, maybe you'll want it to be a little bit dark like that, but now it will stay fixed. Whenever I look up in the sky or look down, my exposure won't change, and so I'll bring it up a little bit more. Next step we have something called chromatic aberration, also really cool. By enabling that and increasing the intensity, you can see here that we can add chromatic aberration. Oftentimes when you want to use that, you of course do that very subtle, just like little bit of chromatic aberration to take the edge off, and again, making it look a little bit more realistic because after all, every lens has some chromatic aberration. Next up we have some camera options, but I would suggest to set those in the camera itself because once we're going to work with multiple cameras, maybe one should have a wider opening aperture while the other might be more closed in, that could be different if you're going to work with different cameras. Next up we've got lens flares, which again is something that we're going to set specifically for each camera because sometimes we want to have a lot of flares, sometimes we don't want that a lot, so that is specific for each camera. See the post-processing volume as something global, something that you want to have across all of your different cameras, of course, your entire seam. That could, for example, be something more like color grading. Let's check out that option right here, such as a temperature, like what temperature do you want it to be? We can set a certain white balance like make the entire seam more warmer, now it's Mexico and we can also bring it down, now it's the North Pole or something. [LAUGHTER] But we also have some other controls here, let me just reset that back into global. We can add more saturation, for instance, if we bump this up or decrease the saturation and make it more like an old movie or something like that. We can increase the contrast as well, here we have that contrast option, make that more flat. We can really give it a particular look, which is really cool because I start color grading this even. If you go into the different tones, such as the shadows, mid tones, and highlights to really make specific changes in those areas. We could even load in a LUT as you can see right here, so I color grading LUT. I don't have any right now, but here's the option where you can just load that LUT in and it will be applied to your seam. Or perhaps if you want to color correct your seam more like film, then you have that option in here as well. This here refer to the colors of film, the slope, the toe and the shoulder, which is your s-curve or maybe you want to make them under letter with that. But that's also a different way to color grade your shot or your entire seam as you go through these options. Let's scroll down even more because we've got some more interesting options here like film grain, we could enable that and just increase the film grain. Let me just pump it up really high, there you can see it now, there's film grain going on entirely over my seam These are settings that you want to have across all of your cameras set globally and you can even fine-tune entirely how that drain looks, so that is really cool to have that option in there. That is in a nutshell how the post-processing volume works and how you can give a certain look to your seam, but keep in mind that also things like your atmosphere, your fog, the sunlight and all, can also help to create a specific look if you go through those settings. We've now already gone through most of the basics of Unreal Engine, which is really cool, let's take it a step further now and go a little bit more advanced by creating an indoor scene in the next lesson. We're going to stop working in our landscape, if there's something lastly that you want to test out or try out, do it now before we're going to start with the next lesson and create an indoor seam and have a look at more of the advanced features as long as the engine can hold it. 10. Create a Virtual Studio: All right guys, time to take off your jacket because we're going to leave the outdoors and go inside. This here is where we left off. We created the landscape and everything. You've already seen a ton of the basics here of unreal Engine. Basically, you know all the tools right now to start creating stuff. That's what we're going to do right now. So here in my levels folder, I'm going to right-click, choose new level, and that is going to be less than 10 already. Let's open that up. As always, it's saying blank level without anything in there. So let's locate that atmosphere blueprint and drag it in there. Now of course, if we are talking about indoor scenes, we might not need an atmosphere in the sunlight unless you're going to work with windows in your building, then it's always a good idea to have that. You know what, even if I would create like a subway station or something without any windows, I always like to have my atmosphere or my sky in there just to have some light to work with. We know that we can't really model inside Unreal Engine. That is why I'm going to go back to the Add menu here and then go to Add quicksort contents. We've seen this library before, or we can download a bunch of 3D models, but also things like materials and details and everything. That's what we're going to do right now. The great thing about the quicksand library is that we can also find here on the left side collections. You don't have to go through those but you can actually look for interesting things like this avatar, just click on that and you can see here this is what someone made using these assets here down below. So you could go ahead and download all of these assets and try to recreate one of these scenes right here. So that is one way one doing it. We can also go back to the Home tab right here and click then on 3D assets. Here we actually have a category called interior. Clicking on that we have a whole bunch of these very old interior sets, such as these wooden chairs and doors and walls and everything. It seems like we can create this old bar with that, like this lunar something. So let's do that. I'm just going to download a whole bunch of these assets, which I've actually already done, because it actually takes a little time to download all of this, to import it all into your project. So to save time, I already went ahead and just press that Download button here on top. Then I can find them all back here in my locals folder and from there import them into my project. Now, a couple of things that I also did was actually downloaded some grass, a really old grass because I think it's going to be really cool to see some grass coming through the planks or through the windows or something that really makes it old. Also a whole bunch of objects like this spoon right here, or these bottles, these flasks and everything, there's a little cactus here because when it comes down to interiors and definitely like an old saloon, it would have a lot of mess in the background. If you're creating something more modern, it can be more tied, more cleaned up. Again, if you don't really know what to do, look at reference photos or videos that you can find everywhere online. There's something that we're also going to work with here are decals a lot. What I have right here are some leakages. These are no materials, these are decals that we've seen previously and we can stick them onto a wall or something just to have more of a dirtier look to the environments. I'm also going to look for, I'm actually going to go back to my home tab right here, go over to decals and perhaps look for something like debris or something just to make the floor a little bit more dirtier. Because once you're going to stick like wooden planks or something onto there, we don't want it to be clean. It's an old saloon, so let's look for dirt to put on the floor like here perhaps some ash, like someone who really didn't want it to use the ash tray. Let's download this one here, the pile of ash and add that now to my project as well. What else do we have perhaps under dirt, you might see something interesting like here, like wet soil, maybe that could work. I always say just download a whole bunch. You don't have to use everything that you've downloaded. Also while you're creating these interior sets, you're always going back and forward between your library. You download a bunch of stuff, you insert that into your scene. You might think about something different, like hey I need a bench or something right here, then you go back to the library, look for that bench, import it, etc. I think that we have enough we can close the library now and we should find everything back here in my mega Scans folder, 3D assets here are all the folders. Now it becomes really big guys and really unorganized. It's going to be really hard now to look for models that we can work with. Let's talk a little bit about the content browser filters. So I'm going to enlarge this panel here a little bit to showcase that better to you. But right here we have a button called create an asset filter. If we click on that, we can create a filter. For example, we choose static mesh, those are the 3D model. So when I click on that, it will reveal all the static meshes here within those folders. Of course, it will only show the meshes from the folder that I have selected. So it's not going to show anything for my starter content folder right now. The cool thing is that we can disable that filter by just clicking on Static Mesh and it will actually stay in there because we've created that filter. So if I need to go back to it, I can just click on it again to show all of my meshes. Let me just disable that because I also want to make a filter for my materials. Now, here comes a problem guys. Let me just go over to my surfaces folder, which shows all of my materials. For example, we have this Flaked Paint Wall and let's open that up. Like we've seen, a material always consists out of multiple textures and what nuts to create that specific material. But if we take a look here at the name on the bottom of that material, it's not really a material, but a material instance. The difference between a material and a material instance is that the instance version gives a more user-friendly interface to the end-user to change certain stuff about the material. So if I double-click on that, we know that we can change here the tiling and everything and the roughness and what not from that material. To create all of these options, we need to create a material instance, which I'm not going to bother you with, but just know what it is and that it's there because people from Quixel and from other libraries will make use of material instances to give you the better controls. So when we are going to create that filter, let me just go back to my main folder here of the mega scans and create a new filter we don't want to create a filter for material as it won't find anything. We're going to go over to the materials sub menu here and then choose material instance. Click on that and now it'll show all the material instances from within my mega scans folder, which will also be the foliage, so maybe if you are only looking for the surfaces that you've downloaded off from the Quixel library, you're going to have to click here on the surfaces folder to display all the material instances from what you've downloaded. Now, decals are actually also material instances, so we don't need to create a separate filter for that. Just make sure to select that folder and it will display all of its decals right here. Now as we're going here through our content browser, let me just set that back to Static Mesh and click on 3D assets here, here we can see everything. These thumbnails might be too big. Maybe you want to see or look at these meshes from a different way. Well, we can change it as well here from the settings menu on top. Click on that and you can see that we have a bunch of different options, like maybe you want to see these in a list, or maybe you want to change that to columns where you don't want to see the thumbnails, but you'll see more of the metadata from it. We set that back to thumbnails like maybe or tiles actually, we set that back to that option. Maybe the thumbnails are too big. Well, there's also an option for that. Go back to settings and on the bottom here you can see thumbnail size is currently set to medium, we can make it even bigger, set that to large or maybe too huge like that, which gives you a much more detailed view of what the models are about. But we can also set that size to something like small and that way we can see more within the same window. That is in a nutshell, how you can use your content browser more efficient. Now let's start creating that interior design. I'm going to start by looking for a wall and I should find something right here. A saloon wooden wall and just drag that into my scene. There it is. Let me just make some more space. There we go. Now one of the problems that you will start to see a curve when importing 3D models like these, is that they are not always closed entirely, such as these walls right here. If we look at the other site, you can see that we can just peep through it. That's going to be a problem because let me just import very quickly here in plane. We can see better what's going on under Shapes, plane. Just drag that into the scene, there we go, and just make that a whole ton bigger for the wall to stand on. By the way guys, here, this wall, if you wanted to attach that to your surface, just select that and hit the End key on your keyboard which will bring it down on that surface plane. That's a nice extra tip for you to know. Let me just cast my sun here. Let me just change the position of my sunlight so that it actually goes now through the wall. You can see here in the shadow that something is not right. We're casting light through the wall and that should not be the case. Definitely not if we're going to design four walls and a roof and light still comes through it, that doesn't make sense. There are a bunch of ways to fix that and there's no real right way to do it. Anything that works for you, anything that delivers a good result is a good way to make it. That's the thing about Unreal Engine. But I will show you my workflow which I think is the more convenient way of working. Now, one way which is not the correct way but I will show it to you anyways, that is now by creating a new cube and we can just insert that into our scene which can block out the light. You probably already know what I'm going to do right now, and that is just make this new wall behind my real wall. That way, we are blocking out the sun, as you can see here. Is that a good way to do this? Maybe for something small, but there's a much better way to do that and that's through the help of geometries. I'm going to just delete everything here in my scene. Get rid of the wall, get rid of this, and the plane as well. We're going to locate the geometries and it's hidden a little bit. For that, we're going to have to go over to the menu on top, choose Window, and from there choose Place Actors. Click on that, which is going to open up a new window. Basically, this allows us to find certain things much quicker. It's the same thing as the Add menu here on top where we can choose to add lights or shapes. We can find those options back in here as well. Like here are the lights and here we have the shapes, but we actually just have some more menus and more options in here and through this window right there, such as the geometries right here. Here we can find the same things back like the box. You might think, isn't that the normal box that you were talking about before? Well, no. This is a geometry box which is apparently something different and unreal. It comes with a whole bunch of more options which we're going to look at right now. Let's just start by dragging in that box into the scene. Here we have it. A box, nothing really fancy about it. But with that selected, going here into the Details panel, we can see that we have a little bit more options. For instance, we can change the size of that box very easily. Perhaps set that to 2,000s, and perhaps, I don't know, 1,000 high or something. There we go. So we have a nice little box right here that we could work in. This could be our studio. Well, not really, because if we're going inside of the studio, you'll see that we have that same problem of it not really being hollow, but we have an option for that.So with that box selected, let me just go back out to show it to you better, we can actually find an option in here that says Hollow. Click on that and you will see that a new option will appear now which is Wall Thickness. It's set to 10, which is enough for me, but if we now go inside of the box, look at that, we've got a studio. How awesome is that, guys? This is a great way to block out light, and you might be thinking now, Jordi, I can still see light coming through. That's right. With geometries, we have the problem that light still comes through, but we can very easily fix that by transforming the geometry into a mesh. There's a very easy button for that here in the bottom here, it says Create Static Mesh. When you click on that, it's going to ask you to save that because every static mesh is an actual object within our project. We can give that a name, for instance, Studio, and then hit Create Static Mesh. You can see now how the light changes. It's now pitch black in my studio, pitch dark, and if we go outside, you can still see that the sunlight is still there. That's the way that I'd like to work by actually creating a studio. Now, I hear you think, Jordi, what about windows? I like to have a huge window where the sunlight can come through. How can I create a hole in my box? Well, for that we shouldn't have actually created our static mesh yet. So I'm going to hit Control Z to undo that action so that my box right here is still a brush. I'm actually talking about geometries. We're actually talking about a brush right here. Transcoding your box into a static mesh is the last step that you want to do. You first want to create your windows, your entire interior, and then you want to transform that into a mesh. Now, to create a window is very easy. We are just going to drag in a second box into our scene. It's right there. We can actually choose now that this box needs to work as a cutout. With that selected here into the details panel, you should find an option called Brush Type. It's currently set to additive, but we can change that to subtractive. By clicking on that, the box will disappear because it's going to eat everything away in its path, and you can see that we'll do that as well if we're going to drag that box into our wall. There we go, we've got a window. Of course, we can make that bigger like that, make our wall bigger, and the light will beautifully come through it. Now, let me just change the sunlight so that the sun is actually shining it's light through that window. If you look behind this, there it is, the light through the window. That is how you can create a studio with Windows. Now, really important is that when you're creating a studio like this, is that you're going to place everything in a folder. We already have two boxes right here. I'm actually going to select both of them, create a new folder, and call that studio. The reason for that is that once we're going to transform this into a static mesh, is that we need to select all of those brushes and then go over to create static mesh because it needs to combine all of these boxes together into one new element. Once we're going to create walls, and tables, and whatnot in here, you're going to get a real mess in your outliner so that is why it's so important to keep everything that creates your studio, that does not mean perhaps other geometries in your scene, but just your studio, the outer building and the windows in it, that you place that into one folder. Be organized. You know what to do right now. Go ahead and create your studio box, perhaps already try and play around with that window, and download a whole bunch of stuff from the Quixel library. When you're done with that, you come back for the next lesson where we're actually going to build our interior scene. 11. Design an Interior: All right, let's start building the interior set and we're going to create this old saloon or something like that. Now creating an interior is very straightforward. We're going to start off with walls, and we've talked about them previously as well. We're going to drag them into my scene like that, rotate them around. There we go, reposition them the way that we want, and let's duplicate this wall, hold down the Alt key on your keyboard as you drag it out to the right side or anywhere else, then we can go ahead and select both of them with the Shift key, select it and again, Alt, drag, and now we've got four pieces of wall right here. This is how you just want to continue to build your interior set. You just drag and drop different 3D models and just try to create something that looks good. Again, you can use a reference photo or something that you might have seen somewhere in the real life, which you grab the photo from. That could definitely help with inspiration. Let's create that window right here because that is something more specific. Let me just make a little bit more room for that window. I have one right here. There we go. Let me just rotate that around, 180 degrees, and also bring that in place. By the way guys, we have these three accesses right here on which we can move these panels or objects around actually. But we can also select two accesses at the same time. You can do that by just hovering your mouse in between two, and now we can move this around on the x and y-plane. But we can also move it around on the x and the z-plain like that, or to y and the z. I never know what the x and the y is. I think everyone has a problem with that. [LAUGHTER] If we then press the Enter key on your keyboard, it will again snap to the bottom plane of your words. Definitely, also something to play around to it. Let's place our window somewhere in here. Something that makes sense like that. I don't really know, with the wall next to it. We've got a window. Now we actually need a window through it, and we've seen in the previous lesson that works. I'm going to go fast over this. I'm going to create a new box that goes right here, and we're going to make sure that that box here is set to subtractive so that we can move it here into that wall and actually cut a piece out. There we go. Now it actually seems like a window through which we can see lights. It's as easy as that. Now important, let's give that a good name so we know what we're doing. This is a window and I'm going to drag that into my studio folder because when we're done with our interior design, we're going to create a mesh out of our studio. Then we're going to bake the windows and everything [NOISE] together. Now a couple of very important things, guys, when we are going to take a look outside here through the window, we can see this studio here. Here's also something that isn't truly correct. Let's fix that as well. I'm going to look here for an outer wall, I actually downloaded, something like that. Right here I should have a wall. Let's take this one. There we go, rotate that around, and let's place that outside now, like that. Now it seems more natural like the outside of the building. Much better. Don't worry too much that might be sticking out right here into your studio. As you can see, we are working with these panels right here, so they cover up that anyways. Maybe I'll also want to cover up the top for maybe if I'm making a shot for more below or something. Let's duplicate that wall, hold down Alt, drag that above R which I've set to rotate my objects. There we go. Try to really make yourself comfortable with all of these shortcuts and everything to quickly move around objects. As you can see, what I'm doing. Creating interiors is a really good way to get more familiar with moving around objects. There we go. Now it looks a whole lot better here from the inside, we actually have a building that we can look through. Analysis is something that you want to continue to do. I also have this bar somewhere. Here it is. I can drag that in as well. It's a modeler bar which you can download off from that quick library, really cool, and drag that to here. We can even extend that by adding a duplicate to it. We have this corner of the saloon bar, rotate that, and add that next to it. If you've ever played the same guys, is basically that. It's really fun to build out your scenes like this. Look at that. We've got a bar, now it just needs some drinks. I have a couple of bottles here which I can just place here on top of my bar like that. Always try to have enough differences, so if you're planning to make a saloon-like I'm creating right now. Don't just look for one bottle and you're going to duplicate that around. Always look for different bottles. Like even though these two here are very similar, they are a little bit different here, as you can see at the top, they have indifferent cork on top of them, and that is eye for detail. If you do that, it just creates more realistic scenes because nothing is ever twice the same. Also good to act like a different ball is perhaps in there. There we go. Now talking about chairs and tables and everything, that's going to be the exact same thing. I have a couple of chairs somewhere right here. You can see that I have three chairs and two of them are very alike, but yet still they are a little bit different. That is what makes good design. It was also really fun if I'm going to add a table in here, and I also have a very nice long table somewhere right here, a dirty old wooden table. It's perfect. Let's add my chairs here around that table. There we go. Don't place them too nicely. Definitely not for a scene like this. Like one chair should be a little bit further away from the table. The other one not. You know what's so typical about these old saloons? They have three chairs. The fourth one is a completely different chair, like this white chair right here because one of them broke so they had to take another chair from somewhere else. There we go. This looks way more realistic and if you would have four of the exact same chairs in there, definitely again for this type of scenery. We're going to create something more modern and of course we're going to have four of the exact same chairs which are very clean and everything, but that is not what we're creating right now. We have some stools which we can set here in front of the bar and everything, so just continue with decorating the scene that you want. We are going to place some stuff here on the table and everything, but that is up to you guys. You know how it works right now, it's really nothing more than that. Now, once we're going to start with laying down our floor which we are going to need a texture for. There are a couple of ways to do that. We could actually use our studio itself. In this case there's also no problem with doing that. Let's just go ahead and select the floor right here and you can actually see here that with geometries we can select different planes of the studio which was not possible with meshes. That means if I now go and take my material instance filter and I'm going to deselect static mesh. I'm going to look for something woods. I thought that I downloaded something. Let me just select my surfaces folder here so that I'm in the correct one. We have this cracked wooden floor, I can just go ahead and drag that onto that plane. It will be only applied to this plane so that means that we can have different textures on each and every plane of that studio. The texture isn't really looking that amazing yet. With that selected we can actually here again, go into the settings and you'll see that we have a bunch of surface properties right now. We can rotate that around, you can see here that my plunks are now into a different position. By the way, if you are getting crazy of this surface being selected and that yellow color just covering up your material, just press the G key on your keyboard. It's going to hide all of the widgets and the controls and everything but you still have it selected, so that way you can see better what's going on. We can go to rotate that now 45 degrees, you can better see what that does to my floor. If these plunks are maybe too big we also have a scale option here and you can lock the scaling so that two values will scale proportionally so that you're not going to stretch your materials. Let's perhaps set that to something like, I don't know, four, and let's see what that does and apply. You can see that now my plunks are bigger, just make sure it still makes sense. Maybe these plunks are too big, let’s set that to two, which is a little bigger than before, but this still looks pretty natural. We could also fan it around because maybe you want to make sure that your plunks start somewhere that makes sense. Your first plunk should start here with the wall, so we can use these fan controls right here to move the floor around and try to make sure that the edge of the first plunk or something aligns with the wall. You can use the little arrow to go the other way around. The way I’m pressing here the 1-56 value, if you press the 140, it will just be bigger step, but that's just the difference between these. But that's an easy way to control your material. It's actually better to do that right in here in the surface property of our studio instead of actually opening up that material as we've seen before you start changing things in here. Because if we do that, we are actually changing the material itself. So that means if I'm going to apply this to multiple surfaces, it will have the same settings everywhere because I'm making changes on the source. But if I'm going to make changes here on my geometry plane, I'm only going to make changes for this specific plane that I have selected right now. Next up is going to be like a bigger wall on top of that because I want to create this little balcony right here. In order to do that, I'm going to create a box again. Just drag that into your scene right here it is, and I'm going to go ahead and go into my details panel to change the size. Where is it? Right here. The x can be something like 10 because it's just a thin wall or it's actually the Y. You see, I never know what a difference between y and z. Let's just make that a whole ton bigger guys because it can be like a big wall. Perhaps a little bit bigger like that. We can move that into place now, plays out on top of our other wall like that. Because this one right here it's not going to be a 3D model that we download off from the quicksand library, we're actually going to use this plane to give a material to it. This is starting to look good. The reason why I'm not actually using the scale option, by the way, to change the size of that, you can see here what that does to the texture is actually stretching it, which is not what we want. We actually want to make the box bigger and not scaling bigger, so keep that in mind, which is why we're using the controls here from the details panel. Let's look for something to add a texture to it like the flake wall. Just add that to it. Looking okay-ish. When it's changed the scale, most definitely we set that to something like a length four. Let's see what that does. Looks good. If you are going to add materials to pieces of wall that we need, we're going to create new boxes or new geometries. But for something like the floor which can be entirely exactly the same, we can just add our material to that. Now, what if I want to make some sort of a query door here in the back, that means that I have to move everything aside to make room for that new query door. There are two ways we can do that. We can select our entire set, just move that a title the up, or we can also just move up our entire studio. That's the big advantage of doing adult virtually. The real studio here I can't move this, unfortunately, but we can in a virtual world, so let's just select an entire box, the studio, and I'm going to move it. Where's my move tool? Right here to the right side, and there we go, we have made room for it. As you can see here, a window state perfectly in place because I did not select the window or the cut out in my studio, so I can just go ahead and move that to any place, I can change the height, or the size, or anything from that cube, all of my cutouts will stay at the right place where my interior designers at. Of course, we can also move the cut-out if we select both of these right here in the studio and the window, but, of course, usually you don't want to do that. One last thing that I'd like to show to you guys before you are going to make your own interior set and that is the pivot point problem. Let me just copy here this chair to demonstrate. There we go. Right now the pivot point is right here on the bottom and the middle of a table. I'm going to take my rotation tool. It will also rotate around that pivot point and sometimes that's fine, other times it's tedious and you want to have it in a different spot. To do that, we're going to take back the move tool, hold down the "Alt key" on our keyboard, and then click and drag with, "the scroll wheel button." I know that's a weird way of doing it, but that's how unreal one says to do that. Again, you can always change our shortcuts, but let's [LAUGHTER] just do it how it's set by default. I'm holding down that weird button as I'm dragging that anchor or pivot point to a new spot. As you can see now, if we take the rotation tool, we can rotate around that point. Now, here's going to be the problem. If I'm going to click away and then re-select my table, you'll see that my pivot point has been reset back to default, and that is because we have not really saved it. What we've done was a temporary way to change the pivot point and sometimes that's fine. Sometimes we just want to temporary be on a different spot so that we can rotate around that point, other times we want it to be somewhere permanently. Well, to do that again, hold down "Alt key" drag your pivot point to the spot or place where you want it to be. Let's just take the corner, doesn't matter. Now I'm going to right-click on my pivot points. Go over to pivot, and from there say, set as pivot offset, click on that and now you will see if I'm going to deselect the table and select it again, that my pivot point is still there, and I can go ahead and rotate around to the corner. With that, last tip it's now up to you to create your own saloon or maybe something else, it really doesn't matter. I'm going to go ahead and finish my saloon, which is going to take like three or four hours. I know it seems very simple as you're just dragging in a bunch of 3D models interior scene, but it actually takes a lot of time to really find the right spot and to make it look realistic and all. Again, that's why you could work with reference photos or videos, but this isn't an essence what you want to do. He's dragging a bunch of stuff and make sure that they are set at the right spot. Go ahead and do that right now and then come back for the next lesson where we're going to take a look at what I have created and I'll show you around in my new interior and show you guys what I've done. Thanks for watching. No, I should be right here. Seriously, it takes a long time to design something like this. But you know, it's like the seems, it's a lot of fun. 12. Interior Overview: You're back. Hi. I'm sorry for all the mess in my engine studio. Anyways, I've been working now for, I think, three or four hours on my interior saloon. Let's have a look at what I exactly did. Here it is. You might think by yourself, Jordi, did you really spend four hours making this? Well, there's a lot of work that goes into it. Let's zoom into the details and just have a look at what I specifically did to make a scene like this. First of all, right here we got a table with some chairs around it. I already gave you guys a tip of always working with inconsistencies. Definitely, we're working in an environment like this where there needs to be more dirt and junk around in the scenery. Of course, that's going to be different when you're creating imaginary worlds. We've got some stools over here at the bar and you can see, they are definitely not aligned well. I've also rotated them around to make them appear more random. Here at the window, I've actually also added some foliage as you can see. These are painted in just like we did with the landscape. That way it seems like the grass is like growing through that window, which is funny. There we've got the bar itself right here. As you can see, I reuse the table that was standing over there in the middle. But I've made sure to add a rotation to it so that it doesn't seem the same. Let me just quickly show that to you guys. I'm going to make a copy of that table. What I did was have one stand here, made a copy of it like that, and then just rotated that 180 degrees around. Now it seems like I have two different tables. The same thing with the barrels that I created here in the back where we have that little corridor. Also here, I made sure that none of these barrels are aligned perfectly. You can see the gap here in-between this barrel and this one which is not the same as these. Also when you put two barrels on top of each other, minor details, but just make sure that they are not standing exactly in the middle but always slightly to the left or to the right. Try to look for inconsistencies that make up a world or an environment more real. As you can see here in this corridor, it doesn't really look like a real saloon anymore, but like an actual studio. Also on the other side of my saloon, I still don't have any textures here, but that's okay as long as I'm not planning to use that site, why should I put time and effort into it? If I only want to fill in this way right here then that is more than enough. I also created this balcony here on top, and those were again created using geometries here. We've got one plane over here and then a second one right here, which is taking care of the cut-out and I can't even select it, it's right here, balcony cutouts. There again, we get a practical example of how to use these geometries. We also have some barrels here beneath the stair. Again, if you want to make it seem like these are different barrels or buckets, what you want to do is rotate them. Well, I'm going to make a duplication of one, make sure that you rotate the second one, and now you get a whole different new barrel just made out of the same material. Let me just delete these two. That's how I went further. We have some more chairs here underneath the stair and something very typical with chairs, you want to put them on top of each other like this. Again, you see the asymmetrical in here, they are not perfectly aligned, I've made an offset and the rotation with them. Also, let's have a look here at the cups that they have. This is like a pretty cool detail that I've worked on. We can see here the cups which are stacked upon each other. If we would just take a cup, there we go, and start stacking them, you will start to see that it looks very unnatural because they are stacked too perfectly. What I did, again, I've rotated them a little bit around like you would actually see cups in your cabinets. They are always stacked like this, a little bit slant or something on top of each other, which just makes it look a whole lot more real. Basically, that's what I've done and I see that this one right here is floating. Let me just put that on the table. That's it for everything that I've made. All of this came from the QuickSort library, super easy, you just drag and drop it into your scene. The time and the effort is mostly spent in where should I place it? Now let's talk about decals. I've used many decals in this scene to really take the edge off. You can see all of these floating widgets right here, which are actually called billboards. These billboards right here, they represent these decals. Basically, what they do is they just cast a certain texture onto other materials or meshes. Let me just take a new decal just to show you how exactly that worked. We have seen it before, but I want to show that again to you because decals is a very important part of Unreal Engine. Let me just take, for example, this dirt pile right here. Now, the first thing that you'll notice is that we're going to drag this into the scene. It wants to be applied as a material to the geometry. I'm not sure if that is a book or not. Anyways, I'm going to hit Control Z to undo that action. What you want to do is always drag any of the decals onto an actual mesh, like for example, this stair pole right here and then it works, then it's okay. I'm going to place it somewhere else right here so we can see it better, what's going on. We can see this arrow right here, which is the cast of the decal. Basically, that's just a flat material as you can see. But from looking at it from the top, it does feel like something more three-dimensional. Anyways, we can rotate that around and anywhere that heart arrow is pointing to, it will be casted to. Let me just set on my raster for the rotation. Let's say that we want to cast this onto the wall right here. What we don't want to do is rotate that 90 degrees this way and 90 degrees that way. There we go. It can now bring that closer to the wall and you will see that it will be casted onto it. Now, you will always see the stripes right here and that is because the thickness of the box that goes around the decal cast right here. Let me just put this back a little bit. We can use scale options to make that box smaller as you can see and now the casting area will be a whole bunch smaller. Let's now bring that casting box again against that wall. There we go. It will now reveal itself. That is definitely something to play around with the first time that I worked with decals. It was also a little bit of a frustration that I just couldn't get them right, but eventually, you will. You just need to place a lot over your scene and it will become more clear to yourself how exactly they work. But essentially that is what I did. I'm going to remove this dirt on the wall as dirt doesn't really make sense. But all of these dirt pieces here, like this entire dirt here on the wallpaper, let me just uncheck the view of that for a moment, but you can see here how that is just a decal. Of course, if you don't want your decal to be casted onto something like for instance, I think it was this decal that I had right here, I didn't want it to be applied to the pole of the stairs right here because it would just stretch out the material and just didn't really look good. With that selected here, this pole, I can go into the details panel, search for decal. Actually from there make sure to uncheck received decals. If I check that, you can see here what that looks like and that stretch is really looking bad and I didn't want that, so that's the reason why I unchecked that option. For any other mesh in your scene or 3D object where you don't want your decals to be casted on, make sure to uncheck that option. I used also many decals in the corners, and you'll see that here at this bar because if you think about it, dirt always goes to the corners. As we walk into a room, we always push the dirt to corners into edges. That's definitely something to pay attention to. I also have some rubble here around this pillar. Also here in the corner, you can see all of this dirt, which makes sense for this scene. That's pretty much it. By the way, you could also work with 3D models. Right here, I just laid down some bricks, which also act as some rubble or some dirt on the floor but of course, the big up that we have with 3D models is that they are 3D. If we look at from here, we actually see some more volume to it rather than with the leaves and everything here on the grounds like they are still pretty flat. I'm also not a really big fan of using doors as decals. You can see that these here look very flat as well, definitely from here because these are just texture doors, but I just couldn't find any good ones in the Quick Sale library but since they are up there on the balcony, which I'm planning to use in the background somewhere, it's okay. The problem is just with using 3D models, if you want to create something like this here, this is a decal, but if you want to make that, you actually can, I think. You can find all of these objects back in the Quick Sale library but you're going to spend a whole lot of time creating a simple patch like that and then you need to wonder is it really that visible in the back? That's up to you. How much time did you just want to spend on to it? But I also just did here, you can find here as well, this here is a pile of rocks and it doesn't really make much sense. You can also see here at the transition between the rocks and the floor isn't really that great, but it's okay because again, it's in the back. We don't see it that good. Definitely not when we're going to work on lighting, which is for a future lesson, but this is how in a nutshell, I created my environment. I hope that was clear. It was just really boring showing you that entire process but here it is. One last thing that I'd like to show you. As you can see, I found some of these picture frames in the Quick Sale library, but unfortunately, they are missing pictures or paintings or whatever you want to put in there. Well, we can actually go online and look for photos. You can also with your camera just take new photos if you want to and let me just locate that. I'm going to go to my desktop. I have a folder here called Photos and I'm just going to put them into my project folder. So here under Contents, let me just drag all of my photos in there like that, then go back to Unreal Engine. It's should prompt me that I have imported something and it is not doing that. What we then have to do is manually import them. [LAUGHTER] Let's go over to the Adds button here on top, say Import to/Game. I'm going to locate my Project folder photos and here just select all my photos and hit "Open". There we go. Let's put them in a folder. It's so weird that it didn't want to sync up. That's the thing with Unreal, you never know what you get. [NOISE] Photos. Wait, here it is. The Photos folder [LAUGHTER] but it's empty. I'm not sure what just happened. Anyways, that was a good tip as well. If it didn't automatically import and you're going to have to do it automatically. Let's put it all in there in the Photos folder and move there. Here we go, photos. Photos will always be seen as textures, and we know that Unreal Engine actually works with materials which could exist out of multiple textures, but that's okay. All of that happens automatically in the background. We could actually just straightaway use these textures and let me just show you how that works. I'm going to create a new box under the geometry option here. Drag that into my scene. There we go. Let's go to the Options and just move decal here and make that a little bit thinner, something like five. No. [LAUGHTER] Always doing it wrong. Five on the x-axis, there we go. Let's just try and make a surface that fits here into my picture frame. Actually, I should have not made these picture frames slanted just yet because now I have a lot of trouble trying to fit it in there. It's always better to first work straight. Have your two objects on top of each other and then start rotating them together always better. Let's further try and match this surface here into my picture frame. I might need to move my picture frame a little more, up like that. Looking good. My box sits in the frame. We can now go ahead and actually add the texture to it, and you know what? I had this beautiful picture of myself, [LAUGHTER] as you can see. But let's start with something serious. These horses. I'm just going to drag that onto the surface. As you can see here, automatically, Unreal will create a material and it's going to apply a material to it. If you open up that material, you can see here that did something with notes, that more advanced thing that I was talking about but it's all doing that automatically in the background, so that is great. We don't have to worry about that at all. There we have it, some horses and we can go ahead as we know, we can bend that or move that to a different position. This is actually looking pretty good. Now, I want to do a couple of things with that painting. First of all, we want to make sure that the photo itself is part of the frame, so we're going to attach them or link them together. I also want to make sure that the decal, there's dirt right here is not applied on to the painting itself. Now, in order to do that, we're first going to have to transform our geometry into a shape, a static mesh. I've already shown you how that's done, but let's do that one more time. I have my box here, my brush selected, my geometry, and in the options, we can choose to create a static mesh and we're going to call that the Horses_Mesh. [NOISE] Hit Create Mesh is going to add that into my folder but now since that is a mesh, we can now also find options in here under decals, receive decals, yes or no. This is an option that we didn't add when it was in geometry. So maybe the same thing here as well with the frame. Maybe not receive that dirt. It's a nice photo. We want to see it in our scene. There we go, looking good. Now there's going to be a problem when we want to attach this photo to the frame because if you noticed, we can't really drag that into the frame as there are so many layers in my project already. How do we get started with that? Well, easy. [LAUGHTER] We just select the picture itself and I'm going to right-click right here on the Horses_Mesh and I'm going to say "Attach to" right here. We could search for that layer somewhere right here or we can just use the picker. Click on that and now we can click here on that frame. There we go. It's now part of it. If we now select that frame again, you will see that my Horses_Mesh is attached to it. If we take the picture itself now and move that to a different spot, they will always be linked or attached to each other. They are now one. I'm going to do that as well now for the other picture frames that I have right here and over there, also stick a photo in there and definitely want to have my own face, just look at it. I want to have that in my scene somewhere. It's going to be gorgeous. In the next lesson, we're going to create a Meta-Human. That is something really cool, something really fun to play around to it. After that, we're going to light out our interior scene. Now the reason why we're first going to make that Meta-Human, and so that we have a person standing in that scene, which is going to be a little bit more easier to create our interior lighting. [NOISE] I'll see you in the next lesson. I need coffee. [NOISE] 13. Create a Metahuman: [NOISE] No. it happened guys. It eventually did happen. The engine is melting. We did something that we shouldn't do. MetaHumans. I have to fix this. But how can I fix this? Just maybe if I press the right button, it might come together and the engine might restart. Come on. It's working. [NOISE] My boss is going to kill me. There, now he can't call me. Anyways, we're going to work with MetaHuman right now, guys. MetaHuman is a way to create 3D characters, but it's something so new that it doesn't always really work and your computer is going to have a hard time with this, and that's the unfortunate thing about MetaHuman. But still I find it very important to just have a lesson about it because I do believe that it's the future. MetaHuman is not on-point right now, but it probably will be in six months or a year from now, so let's have a look at how MetaHuman works, the basics. Here's the interior from which we left off from their previous lesson, and I've also added all the pictures here into the frames. There's me. We've seen how to do that in the previous lesson. Now let's have a look at where we can import our MetaHumans. Again, we go over to the menu here, click on "Add" and then from there choose "Add Quixel Content". I'm going to maximize this window, and on the left side, we can find a MetaHumans. We get a bunch of presets. We can just go ahead actually and choose any of these presets and import them into Unreal Engine, and we can simply do that by just selecting any of these, for example, this one, and here click on the bottom on Download and then Add, just like the 3D assets work. But we can also create our own character, and let me show you guys how that is done. We're going to click here on top to say, Start MHC, which stands for MetaHuman Creator, so click on that, which is going to open up your web browser. Now the first time we're going to open this up, it's going to ask you to connect your Epic Games account with MetaHuman, and of course, we want to do that, so hit "Allow". You now want to log in, again, with your accounts. Now, MetaHuman is still an early access, so you have to sign up to request access to it. The good thing is that everyone who requests it can get it, fill in the form and hit "Submit". MetaHuman is going to load and you're going to find out that if you're going to try this yourself too, that your computer might have a lot of trouble with basically everything. [LAUGHTER] That is because MetaHuman is still in its early stages. In a couple of months from now or a year or something, I do believe that it will be at some point where the performance is going to be better and we won't see any more of those meltdowns right here. So if you are having trouble right now, don't feel bad by skipping this lesson, or at least watch the lesson, see me do it so that you know what MetaHuman is about, because I do believe that in the future, it will become something bigger. Here we are. On the left side, we can find back all those presets. These are the same that we saw inside the bridge application of Unreal. But of course, we can also start creating our own. Now the idea is to start with a preset. Look for a person that looks like you or maybe like the person who you would like to recreate. For example, for me, that could be Ettore. Just simply click on that preset MetaHuman, which is going to load it, and you are going to see this warning message right here, which says that this character uses some assets which will only be displayed at LOD 0 and 1. LOD stands for level of detail, and I'm going to show you guys what exactly that is once we're going to load in the MetaHuman. For now, don't worry too much about that. So with that selected, we can click on "Next". That is going to bring us to the Customization tab. Basically right here, we can change anything about this character. See it as an RPG game that you're going to play and you have to create your character first. Well, it's the same thing, but much more advanced. On the bottom here, we can choose to start sculpting, so clicking on that reveals a bunch of points, which we can just drag around to change the shape of the face. This way, we can make that person look a little bit more like me or someone else you know. It's actually really fun to start playing around with this as you can really change anything that you want, like change the nose, everything, the ears, you can see that we get many points to start shaping the character. On top here, we can see the quality setting. It's currently set to medium. We can change that to Epic if you have the guts to do that, because yes, it will load even slower, but let's try it. We can always change it back. From here, we can change the skin color. I think most of these options are pretty obvious. We can make this character older if we want to with the texture. We can add freckles in there, change the density of the freckles. I will first have to select a preset and change the density of that. If we want more or less, we can go over to accents. For example, if we want to have like more red colors here in my cheeks, I can select the cheeks and add more redness to it. Or perhaps my eyes, I can make them a little bit darker, like that. Even the iris, for example, we can change the color to something more like bluish, which are like my eyes. We can change here to color balance. We have so much options here to really change how the character should look. So I won't go into much detail. Even the teeth, by the way, the length to the teeth and the color and everything [LAUGHTER] I could even give myself makeup. Let's do that. Let's go over to eyes, and I really like this here, dramatic smudge and perhaps make that something like blue or something. I don't know. [LAUGHTER] I don't know why that I'm doing this, but I consider it as me in the future. Who knows? Maybe my mid-life crisis or something. Perhaps lips, I don't know. We can give some color to my lips. Let's go for blue as well. Fits my eyes, doesn't it? [LAUGHTER]. The heads, the hair for that, maybe some different hair.. Maybe I want to go for, I don't know, something more like this in the future. Who knows? There we go. This looks like nice hair that I might want to go with. Of course, the color, the eyebrows, the eyelashes, the beard. We can't forget about the beard guys here. This is more me, or maybe this here, this is more me, like an unshaven and uneven beards. There we go. This is looking pretty much like me. [LAUGHTER] You get the idea, guys. Just go ahead and play around with it. It is very user-friendly and self-explanatory. It's just like an RPG game, you make a character. Now one last important thing here on the top, you can click on "Studio" to set a certain or a different lighting, also a different environment, for example, here downtown nights, and that way you can see your character in a different lighting environment. But yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's go ahead and rename this character, which we can do here from the top left. Click on this pencil to edit Ettore, ensure how to pronounce that to Jordy_Future. That's not me yet. We don't have to save anything. We can actually just go ahead and close the browser. There we go, and we're now back into bridge, and from here, now we should be able to find our MetaHuman. If it updates at least, maybe go back out of this menu, go to Local, and I'm back to MetaHumans. There we go. Now it's loaded. We can see a new tab, which says, My MetaHumans, click on that, which will reveal the one that I created, Jordy_Future. Now, what you have to do is download that model and then import into Unreal Engine. Fortunately, that takes a whole lot of time. Yes, expect to wait like half an hour at least until everything is loaded in. So I don't want you guys to sit through the pain while I just sit here, watch my screen and just watch the time pass by, so I already went ahead and actually imported this character right here, Aoi. I downloaded it already and I've already imported it into my project. It's right here after you have imported it and your folder has been created, MetaHumans, and from there, you can see the character name, Aoi. Just double-click on that to open it up, and right here is the blueprint class. Now here's the thing about MetaHumans. They are within a blueprint class, and we've already talked about blueprint a little bit. They give functionality. That's the great thing about these MetaHumans and why they are so great, because they are prepared, they are ready to start animate, to even do motion captures, width, etc. and I'll even show you guys in the next lesson how you can make your characters talk using your iPhone, which is truly amazing and super easy to do. But for now, let's see how we can bring this character into the scene. Simply drag that blueprint class into your scene like that and wait it out. The first time you're going to do this, you want to go ahead and drink a coffee or something, wait it out for half an hour. But I've already done that, so it's a little bit faster, and as you're doing that, it's going to say like, hey, you're missing a couple of plug-ins, and you can see that it's already asking you to enable plug-ins like Live Link, which is used to motion control this character, so you can wear this suit where you can just go like dance around and your character will also perform those same movements. For now, I will just hit "Dismiss". You don't have to enable that if you don't plan on using that. There we go. Here's our character. The first thing that you will notice now is that the hair of my character is gone. But once I move closer, the hair will appear, and that is the LOD or the level of detail warning that we were getting previously. Previously, we've already talked about nanite, where if you would zoom out in your scene, models would automatically change your amount of triangles so that you will retain a good performance inside the engine without losing quality or visible quality. If your models are not built out of nanites but more than a classical way, it will work with LODs, and you have several levels of LOD. The first one is LOD 0, level of detail 0. That is when you stand close to your character. Then if you move out to the back, it will go to LOD 1, or level of detail 1. If you zoom out even more, it will go to LOD 2. Every model will have like nine different variations depending on how far you are from the character. Currently, things like hair is not supported yet in anything further than LOD 1. That's the reason why we have to be up close with the MetaHuman. Actually, we can preview those LODs if we look into the mesh. Let me just quickly show that to you because it is definitely something to better understand what it does. So with a blueprint selected right here, we can see the entire structure within that blueprint, which is of course the body and we have to face, the torso, legs, feet and everything else. With the face here selected, we can go over to the Skeletal Mesh. Double-click on that to open up this mesh, and from here, we have an option on the top that says LOD Auto. We can set that to 0 to see the LOD or the first level of detail. But we can also set that to something very high, like seven. This right here, I know it looks very ugly, but if you're standing way back, it actually looks pretty good. That's the entire reason behind LOD because you don't want to have the best quality for every model if your camera stands way far back somewhere. Performance is important as well. Let's set it back to auto and close that window. We get the idea. Now that we have this character in our scene, what can we do with it? Well, I find it something very useful to start lighting out your interior, because that way, you have a reference, and if that reference even looks like you, it's going to be much easier to composite ourselves in with a green screen, which we're also going to take a look at later in this class. So that is in a nutshell what MetaHuman is and how it works. Now, in the next lesson, we're just going to have some fun by actually doing some motion capture with our face and making that MetaHuman talk. It's actually super easy to do, so I'll see you in the next lesson. 14. Face Motion Capture: Motion capturing my face and bringing that over to the MetaHuman. How cool is that? Well, it's actually super easy to do, so let's get started with this really fun and short lesson. Now when we imported the MetaHuman viewer already prompted with a message saying, "Hey, we need some plugins in order to make the MetaHuman work." If you have dismissed that instead of clicking on enable those plugins, we have to go to the plugin window to enable them back. Let me just show you where that is, on the top here, click on settings. We've been here before to change the project settings for if you want to change your key bindings and all, and it's right here, you can find an option called Plugins, clicking on that will open up the Plugin Library. From here, we can just enable any component that we need. Now by default, a whole bunch of plugins have already been enabled because we picked out a blank video production project instead of a blank game production or game development projects, which on their end is going to enable and disable other plugins. Now by default, you don't have that motion capture to plugin enabled, so let's look for that. Just search for live link on top, that is a plugin that we need, and here it is, live link. Let's enable that and you also want to enable live link control rig, which already seems to be enabled early while I was preparing these lessons. Then you want to click here on restart now, every time that you're going to enable or disable plugins, you need to restart the engine, but that's okay, everything is still running fine. With live link enabled, we can now close the plugin library, we can now go over to the window and top, go to Virtual Production, and from there find live link. Click on that, which will open up a new panel, and from there we have to select the device that is going to capture the motion. In this case, that device is going to be the Apple iPhone. Unfortunately, it only works with iPhone, and that is because the app that we're going to work with is called Live Link Face, which is created by Unreal Engine to make this whole process super easy. Of course, you can start creating your own blueprints and all and make sure motion capture suit from any brands work with Unreal, the MetaHuman is already prepared to do that, but again, you're going to need knowledge on how blueprints work, or you just use this app and you don't need to create any blueprints. Let's open up the Live Link Face and straight away you should see yourself, which is weird mesh, which actually is the motion capture. Now we're going to have to go to settings here on top, tap on that, and you'll see here live link on top. It certainly says Jordy iPhone, tap on it, and right here you will find add target. Tap on that, and you want to put in the IP address of your computer that is running the Unreal Engine. Now there are multiple ways to find the IP address on your computer if you have absolutely no idea where to find that, well, here's one way of locating it. If you go back to the settings, then go into project settings, we can scroll all the way down here and locate UDP messaging right here. Click on it, and you'll find here unicast endpoint, whatever you want to make sure that this here is enabled, otherwise, things might not work, but by default, it's already enabled so no need to worry about that. But anyways here unicast endpoint, there two always default IP addresses in there, one with all the zeros and one with 127, and then the last one here is the IP address of your computer, in my case, it's 10.0.0.60. Don't change anything here, let's just close that window because we need to enter that IP address into the app. Let me just do that, 10.0.0.60 there we go. Click add, and now you should see your iPhone appear in the live link window. If it doesn't, then it's probably like a firewall issue or something, so try to look at your network settings, but it should, it should appear in there and there's nothing else that we need to do. Just make sure that it's there. What we can now do is simply select the MetaHuman itself, and here on its settings you'll see link face subjects, and if you open up that drop-down menu, you should see your iPhone in their, so you select that, and we're also going to select link face heads. These are two different emotion trackings, one is the face itself, the expressions, and the other one is the head's movement. Now also in the app, you have to make sure to go to the settings and make sure here that stream head rotation is enabled, otherwise it won't stream the head's movement capture. Everything is set, we can now go into the simulation modes. We are currently here just in the editor mode, the mode in which we build our environments, but on top of here, we could start playing the game or go into simulation mode. Now if you click here on the menu, we actually have some different options on how we would like to simulate this. We can start simulating it in a new viewport as a standalone game. Obviously, these are for when you're developing a game, but we are using Unreal Engine for something different. We're usually going to just pick simulate, click on that, and there we go, we are now in simulation mode and look at this. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] This is so cool. It just works straight out of the box and it's so fun to play around with. Look at me, that's me, that's my MetaHuman and I can just turn my head around, it will just follow that movement, I can talk and it will also follow my expressions and all, really fun to play around with. Now, let me talk a little bit more about this whole simulation mode. Let me just put my phone over there. To go out of this simulation mode, and I can just talk to you guys like this now inside of the screencast, but anyways, to go out of it, simply hit the "Escape" key on your keyboard or click the Stop Simulation button, which will also take you out. These are the two different modes, editor mode and simulation mode. But why is there a simulation mode? Well, we just can't do everything in editor modes and to showcase that better to you, let's create an object with some gravity. For instance, this chair here in the back, I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more on that. Let's say that we want to let that chair fall, maybe that's part of our scene. Now if this chair would fall in the editor mode, then it's just impossible to create your environment. We don't want everything to keep falling as we are building something. Now by default, if we go back into simulation mode here, that chair won't fall and that is because we haven't given any physics to it yet. Let's go out of the simulation mode, now with a chair selected here, we can then go into the details panel and you should find an option here called Physics, and here we have the option to simulate physics. Now unfortunately, we cannot enable that option because we haven't set any collisions yet. You see, an object or a 3D model, just flies through other 3D models, it doesn't have a collision. We need to give an area to that chair to tell Unreal, "Hey, this area has to bump into other 3D models and not go through it." Now that can be done from within the mesh itself. If we scroll up here, we should find static mesh right here, if we double-click on it, we should see the chair itself, and on top here you'll see an option called Collision. Click on it, and so you have a couple of options. I'm just going to pick the very simple box collision, and as you will see, that will just draw a cube around my chair, and that is going to act as a collision box. Now obviously, you want that to be a little bit more precise, so we could add multiple boxes in here to go more around the legs of that chair and everything. But for this example, that box is fine, and also you need to keep in mind that the more collision boxes you create or the more complex that becomes, the heavier it will also be for your computer, and we've seen with the engine what that can bring, Let's save this mesh right here so that the collision box is saved within the mesh. Close that window, and now we should be able to enable that simulate physics option. There we go, and we could even set a certain mass, and that's going to define how heavy that object is and how fast it should fall down. A chair, what is that, I don't know, 20 kilograms or something? I'm not sure. Anyways, if we go now into the simulation mode, you'll see that the chair will drop and fall on the floor, so that's the reason why we have a simulation mode and an editor modes. Now already good to know is that once we're going to make an export to actually render this out as a movie that we can use, it's something like premiere to edit with. It's always going to run through that simulation modes, so if you want to film something like a chair that is falling, don't worry, once you've set everything correctly and it's working in a simulation mode, you can also be sure that it will be captured once you're going to render out your video. That was the basics of live link, how we can use that, and of course, the difference between editor and simulation mode. In the next lesson, we're going to play some lighting because let's be honest, this indoor scene looks like crap. 15. Interior Lighting: Wow, we're already halfway through the class. Did you realize that? ****, time flies when you're having fun and you are already doing an amazing job so far. Just think about it. You know how to create an awesome outdoor scene and now an indoor scene like the saloon. How awesome is that? But unfortunately, this saloon right here looks ugly. That's because it's missing lights and that's what this lesson is all about. Now before we are going to place any lights in the scene, we're going to have to make sure that the sunlight from outside is not casting its light through my studio to indoor and I've talked about that before. We're going to have to transform the geometry into a mesh in order to do that. So I have them right here into my outliner. You can see the lower window, the upper window, which are the cutouts for these two and now we've got the main box or the studio itself. So we're just going to select all of these geometries right here, then head into the details panel and right here you should see the option to "Create a Static Mesh". Just click on that, and we're going to give that a name because we're actually going to create a 3D model from this. Let's call that studio and hit "Create Static Mesh". There we go. You can see that the lights now are going out and that is because a mesh does not let light through, but a geometry does. There we go, we learned something new. Now you might think Jordi, it was so easy to work in this environment while we still had light, you took it all away. Well, no worries we can always go up here to the menu and instead of Unlit, we're going to set it to Unlit. Now our environment looks even more ugly, but don't worry, it's just a temporary solution so that we can work further. So let's start by creating our very first indoor light. I'm going to create one here underneath my bar. This right here should be a nice spot to have a light right there. So in my content browser I actually already went ahead and download something off from the Quixel Megascans library. Let me just look for static meshes and I should have when you search for it, a light somewhere right here. There we go. So let's just drag that into the scene. There it is. Now this here is just a Static Mesh. It does not emit any light. It's just a model, that's it. If we look inside, you can also see that there's not really a light bulb in there. That is because we have to create that ourselves. But let's start by adding an actual light in this fixture. We can go here to the Menu on top, say add to the project. We're going to go over to Lights. Here we have a whole bunch of lights that we can work with. But most of the time we're only going to work with these three, which is the Point Light, Spot Light, and the Rectangle Light. Let's use the Spot Light for this fixture right here. Let's drag it into the scene on top here of the light. That's going everywhere. There it is. So let's say bring that in place, there we go. As if it seems like it's coming out of this fixture like that. You can see the cone, that is where the light is going to fall and it's going to cast this light right here in this environment. Now we can't really see anything right now and that is because we are in the unlit view modes. Let's change this back now to lit since we actually do have a light right now. There we go, we can see a light being cast here, on the floor and everything on my bar, and it sits here in this fixture. Now it's still pretty dark. I can't really see much. So let's add a post-processing volume in here so that we can set a manual exposure. Maybe we should have done that earlier. So let's quickly go here to Add Visual Effects and then Post Process Volume. Drag that into the scene. The first thing I want to deal with this post Processing Volume is make sure that it covers the entire scene. So under the Unbound option or the Infinite Extent makes sure to enable that. We have seen this previously in this class in our outdoor scene. Now we can go ahead and look for exposure somewhere, right here, we're going to set the Metering Mode to manual and the Exposure Compensation we're going to change that until we see something here. Maybe set that to a 20. There we go, we can actually see something now that is good. This here is a start. We have our light this here is the arrow where it points to and we have to make sure that it really sticks here nicely in that light so it seems like it's coming out. This is looking good. We have a light that is casting lights, so if you look from a distance; Let me just turn my sun around because it's interfering with my light. You know what? Let's make it night. There we go. This is working. If I'm going to deselect the light, we can actually see that light beam coming out, which is by the way created with the exponential high fog, which we have in our custom atmosphere blueprint. If we go over to the Exponential Height Fog right here and play around with the density. It is right here, the fog density, we can introduce more or less of that cone. If there's no fog. If we set that to zero, we of course don't have that cone and only the surfaces are being lit up. But you know, that cone is nice, definitely in a saloon like this, so let's just increase that. There we go. "Press G" on your keyboard to hide all of these billboards or widgets and you know from a distance this looks okay, this is good. But if we go up close and we're actually going to look into the light, hey, we do see lights coming out of this light fixture, but we don't actually see a light bulb. So that doesn't make any sense. Well, that light bulb is something that we have to create ourselves. Now, in order to do that, we're going to have to go back here to the Add menu and we're going to look for shapes and simply add a sphere in here. So let's drag that into the scene, and that sphere is going to be way too big, so let's say decrease the size of that. There we go. That is going to function as the light bulb, plus also place it nicely here inside of the lamp. It will always take some going back and forward, and by the way, if it's too hard to see, always disable "Lit" and go back to "Unlit". It makes things easier. All right, This looks good. This could be a light bulb. Now let's go back to the Lit modes. There we go. It's not really actually casting light. It's just a sphere sitting there mostly catching light instead of emitting light. So that also doesn't look really good. Well, that has to do with the material. So right now if we select that sphere and go here into the details panel, you can see here that by default, a basic shape material has been applied, which is just a white color that's it. But we're going to have to give it a different material, a material that emits light. Now unfortunately, there's no one-click solution for that. We're actually going to have to create our own material. Don't be too scared, it's actually not that hard. I'm going to disable here my filters and go back to my a root folder, the content folder. By the way, here is our studio mesh for if you haven't seen that yet, anyways, I'm going to right-click in here or again, you can also go to the Add menu, that's the same menu. From there I'm going to choose to create a new material and I'm going to name that my light material. There we go. We can already go ahead and apply that to the sphere by simply dragging it here into the materials option. There we go. It's now been applied, but it still doesn't emit light. That is because we have to change some things about this material. We can either double-click right here to open it up, or we can double-click on the material itself in the Content Browser. There we go. Now, don't get scared because, yes, this year is a node, the kind of thing that I was talking about. If you have to create a blueprint or a material, you're going to have to work with nodes, which is like the coding system behind Unreal Engine. But the node structure that we're going to create right now is so easy that you don't need to fear. Also it's a good introduction to nodes actually, just to get an understanding of how this could work. So we have to input something here into all of these properties of the material. You can see here that we have one option called emissive color that is going to make sure that the material can give lights. So we need to input something into the emissive color and that is going to be a color. Let's right-click, and that is going to reveal all of the different functions and elements that we can use to combine them together to create a node structure to get functionality. But in this case, we just need a color, and that color node is actually called a constant. A constant actually means a value. If we take the normal constant function right here, we can input one value such as 10 or 20 or whatever. But you can also go for something like a three vector constant, which is a thing that we are going to choose. This allows us to input three values like RGB, red, green, blue, and together creates a color. With that note, we can simply double-click on it to choose any color and we're just going to make it white. There we go. Hit Okay. Now all we have to do is drag here the note into the emissive color, and that's it. If you now move this window a little bit down and save that material, you will instantly see the result, but a bim, but a boom, our light bulb is giving light. Now you might think Jordy is not giving enough light, I want more light out of my material. Well, here's the thing, materials are not used to actually create light. It emits light, and if we move it closer here to the lamp itself, you can see that it actually emits light, but that is not how we should actually use it. If you want something to actually give light, you use a light such as the spotlights that we've previously created. Let's close here this material window and let's organize things a little bit better here in the outliner. This right here is the actual lamp. We enable and disable that you can see it disappear. In there, we actually want to attach the sphere, which is the thing that gives light. Let's drag that into the lamp, there we go, and also the spotlight. This way if we now just select the lamp and move that around, you will see that everything moves with it. These three elements should always be attached to each other. It only gives you a better organization, but again, also better to move things around. So we can now go ahead and actually make duplications of this light. Unfortunately, it will not make a duplication of the entire group. You actually have to select here all of these three layers and then Alt drag to make a duplicate of all of them. So now we have two lights, and that's simply what I'm going to do in my entire scene. Just add a whole bunch of lights to give light to the scene. Now I want to show you guys one more thing, and for that I'm going to go back to my unlit view mode and maybe perhaps go here in the back. Let's add some fluorescent lights If I go back to my mega scans and then turn on my static mesh filter and look for lamp, I should have something in here. There we go, a fluorescent ceiling light. Now of course, we don't want to use a directional light in this case because this thing is long, we need a rectangular light and we've got that as well. Go to the Add menu on top, go over to Lights, and from there you will find the rectangular lights, drag that into the scene. There it is. Now the rectangular light, we can rotate this by the way, is going to emit light here from this inner rectangle, and the outer rectangles are going to be it's flags, just like a film lights. So we can go ahead and go into the settings of this light and we can actually change the barn door angle here as you can see. There we go, making it more focused. We can also change the height and the width. What you want to do is make it match with the light fixture. As we're putting this light here into this fixture, we want to make sure that its size is also matching with that fixture. Don't make it too big or too small, but make sure that it fits, that it makes sense that maybe there are two fluorescent tubes in there emitting the lights. Here we go. This is looking good, I guess. My barn doors are not the exact same size as you can see here, so maybe I want to close those as well. There we go. It's always a matter of going back and forward and seeing how it looks. Let's turn on the lit view mode again and see what it gives. There we go, plenty of light we got right here. Maybe I want to decrease my exposure a little bit from the post-processing volume. Let me just look for exposure right here. Set that to 15 or something. It looks better. Let's select that light again. Let's scroll down. We have some more options here like the indirect lighting intensity and also the volumetric scattering intensity. These two options mean how much it's going to interact with a fox. So that means that also you can set that individually per each light. You don't have to increase the global fog to get more of these cones, but you can also set that for every individual light by increasing here the volumetric scattering and perhaps the intensity of that scattering. Let me just reset these two, and of course we've got the normal intensity, like how bright should the light be. We can change the color maybe to something more orangey or to even be more precise, instead of the light's color, you should also have a temperature setting somewhere. Let me just look for temperature. There it goes. So instead of a light color, we can also choose a light temperature which resembles more like the real-world. Should it be warm or should it be very white, more bluish? I mean, most of these settings really speak for themselves, and I would just say go through them and see what else that you can change to make them fit more into your scene. One last thing that we have to do and that is again, makes sure that there is a fluorescent tube in that light. This time don't create a sphere but a cylinder. So drag that into the scene. That is a way too big cylinder, so let's decrease the size of that. There we go. Stretch it out, rotate it around, and put it into the light fixture. Again, set it to unlit. Sometimes that's just easier to see what you're doing. I want to scale that a little bit more like that position. I see that we can actually insert three tubes in here. That is interesting. One, two, and three. They don't give light just yet. Let's go back to Lit mode. Let's locate our material again. I'm going to deselect my filter, go back to my content root folder, remove my search of lamp. Right here is my light material, and I can actually go ahead and select all three of these tubes and then apply the light material to the material option right here in my details panel. There we go, and but a bim, but a boom, we get fluorescent tubes and important to make sure to attach this here to that ceiling light, this one right here too. There we go. Let me just collapse some of these. There we go. So this here is now my entire light. All these other actors are attached to my light fixture, and this looks way more natural if we look into the lights that are actual fluorescent tubes and they're really cool. I think this looks great if we now go out of this corridor and look through it from the saloon, we have this hall way where we have some light going on. But I might want to make that a little bit more dirtier and maybe give it more of a green tint or something. I can just change that with the light color, of course. That is how you can light out an interior. What I'm going to do next is just place a bunch more lights in my scene, and in the next lesson we're going to fine tune the look of my interior a bit more by working more with the post-processing volume as well as the fog to really make my scene stand out and make it look cinematic. 16. Realistic Lighting: Oh, hi. I was just calibrating the engine and always telling it that this here is the mesh, that this right here is the shape that we created with the emission material onto it, and here's the actual light. We get the point. I went ahead and just put my entire interior seen full with lights as you can see, I've done nothing else than just doing that. Let me just set that real quick to unlit so that you can better see what's going on in here. Here are all my fixtures. Now actually, you don't always need to work with fixtures, of course, definitely in places like these here you can just have your light stand there because if you're making shots like this, you don't really see the fixtures so keep that in mind as well. Always think about optimization. The less objects that you need, the less light that you actually need to use, the better. Let me turn that light. Let me just set that back to lit because we are running into a couple of problems. Even though that it's starting to look better, it's still not looking great. That's because it's missing fine detail. Locate the custom atmosphere blueprint that we created in the beginning of this class. We're going to go over to the exponential height fog right here. There are a couple of settings in here that we can change to give a drastic different look to our interior scene. We know what most of these settings already do like the fog density, just simply adds more fog. Let me just set that to something like 10 to really give you an idea what that does. But this doesn't really make it better. Let's have a look at some other options. I'm going to scroll down and I should somewhere, find this option right here, the emissive and the extinction scale. Let's start off with the extinction scale. This option right here is going to make sure that the lights are going to interact more with the fog in the atmosphere. By increasing that, you instantly see here that we are just getting much more illumination across the entire room just by increasing that value, and you can also see here that the lights are getting these strokes as they interact more with those fog particles. This already looks a whole lot better. Let me just remove all the widgets or the billboards by hitting the G on my keyboards to get a better view. Let me just reset that value again and set it back to something like 10. Just see the before and after, how much better that is. Definitely for a scene like this, like this old saloon, this fog really helps. Maybe this is a little bit too much. [LAUGHTER] Let's set that to something like six or seven. There we go. Much better, keep it subtle and then the next option is the emissive color. Click on that to change the color of the fog. Now I would never really go and really change the color like this because that would really make it, let's say artistic. [LAUGHTER] What I would do is really keep this simple. I'm just going to keep my color at white, maybe a tiny bit of orange in there, but not too much, and really bring down here the brightness to all the way on the bottom. Then maybe a tiny bit up, not too much. This is just going to brighten up your scene a little bit more. Definitely, if you think that it's way too dark, this is a great way to just make the exposure in general, in those shadow part just a bit more clear. Let's hit "Okay" then again, let's have a look at the before and the after I moved to reset that value, this is the before control Z to undo my action. This is the after. That's up to you at how bright you want to make your scene. But these two settings from within the exponential height fog are super important for interiors. If we take a look at the shadows like here with a chair and a table, these shadows are pretty hard. The same thing with the stairs over here as well and at my bar too basically any shadow is very hard. We want to soften those shadows. How do we do that? Well, for starters, let's select all of the lights in the scene. I'm going to go here into my outliner and simply search for light, which is going to bring up my folder lights and of course in their show all of the lights, to be even more specific, I'm going to search for spotlights. Again very easily, select all my spotlights individually. There we go. Make sure that I have all of them selected. I can now make changes to all of these lights at the same time because these are the same actors. They are all spotlight, so they have all the same properties. We're going to look here in the details panel for source radius, and it should be right here. This is going to make sure to get more softer shadows and let me just zoom in a bit more. For example, here on my staircase. If you don't want to see all the cones here in your scene if that is bothering you just press G on your keyboard. We still have all of our lights selected. We just don't see the wireframes, the billboards, and everything. So it might be better to work with. Let me just increase the source radius to something around 30 and see what that does. There we go. We can now see that we've got way more natural, softer shadows. This is occurring everywhere since we've got all the lights selected, a table is also looking a whole lot better and as well here at the bar, you don't want your shadows to be too soft because after all, we're still working with spotlights and not indirect lighting. But this is starting to look a whole lot better and when we think about soft shadows, let's have a look at the sunlight coming through the window. These shadows still look pretty hard. Now, this is a sunlight, It doesn't have a source radius, so there's a different option in there to also get soft shadows. Let me just undo my search here on top and I'm going to go back to my custom atmosphere and select my sunlight, which is the directional lights. Instead of source radius, we're now going to look for the source angle. It's a minor detail, but it is a difference. Let me just increase that to 30 perhaps again, there we go. This is maybe too soft. Let me just set that to 10. This is starting to look better. You can see now how much of a difference this is doing to my scene. Definitely, with all of this fog and everything with a low sunlight, we shouldn't have these hard shadows. This is making much more sense and we can even choose the angle of the soft lighting. This is really going to have an impact here on reflections like the chair and everything. Here's an option underneath the source angle, we can find source soft angles. Let me just increase that to something like a 100 or something. You can see here what that does here to the reflection of the chair. It's much less hard, it's much softer now. These two settings are definitely something to play around within your sunlight, the source angle and the source soft angle, and that is almost it actually, you can see how much better the scene is looking right now, which is these minor settings. Now the last thing in terms of look that I want to talk about and that is more in terms of the color of the light. What I always like to do is to work with color contrasts or a difference in color. As you can see here, we have three different colors going on in my scene. Even though we have this overall warm tone, this does not per se have to do something with Unreal Engine, but just with cinematography in general. Now what I've done basically is creating three different layers of lighting. We have the warm lights here on top, which you can see here, these illuminate the room in this interior and then we've got this balcony here on top, and I've worked a little bit more colder lights. I actually used the color temperature. Let me just have a look at what exactly that I worked with if I select this one one, look for temperature. You can see that I set these at 3,800, while these here in a normal room are set to 2,800, which is a lot warmer. That way we're getting some contrast with the foregrounds and the backgrounds. To break that even more, you can also work with practical lights. Practical lights are lights that are visible in your scene, such as this standing lights right here. What I did with that light was actually set to the color temperature even warmer, set that to 2,300, and that way we're creating even more contrast between the global lights, the balcony lights, and in this practical light right here. To tip it off, we have this separate room here in the back, which actually doesn't have to do anything with the normal interior, the saloon itself, this here is a corridor in the back. This could be like a filthy storage room or something. We have this ugly fluorescent light set up there, which we created in the previous lesson. I made that green that filthy fluorescent lighting color and that is giving me this color contrast over my entire scene, which is really great. If all the colors of the lighting would be the same then the scene would be pretty flat. Now, do make sure not to mix too much colors with each other. You don't want to mix pink, blue, orange, and reds and whatever together. That is just going to make it a clown show. Choose a particular look like in my case, that warm look, and try to work with that work with colder and warmer lights to retain that same look and feel. That is it for lighting that should give you a great-looking scene. Now, let's talk about problems. There are two problems in this scene which need to be fixed. The first one here is you can see some of these lights have actually these red crosses through them. Well, we need to fix that and I'll talk about that in a moment. But first, let's have a look at a second problem that we have and that is this wall. You can see the green lighting coming through and that is because this wall right here is a geometry and is not a mesh. The same problem that we had with the studio in general, where the sunlight was casting its light through the walls of the studio because it was a geometry and it's not a mesh. Also for this back wall here, I'm going to select that it's right here upper wall back. Let me just delete my search in the details panel and locate the create Static Mesh option right here. Click on that and this name is good. Hit create static mesh and you will now see that the light here, It's fading away, it's not coming through anymore and that is good. You don't per se have to transform every geometry into a static mesh. But if you are running into problems like these, then you do have to, go around in your scene and see if there are any light leak somewhere and fix that by creating static meshes. The second problem are these red crosses. Now, in order to start with explaining what's exactly going on in here, I I to explain lumen a little bit. Essentially, lumen is the new thing within Unreal Engine 5. This is making sure that we get real-time reflections, which was not possible before. Let me just showcase that better to you guys. I'm going to create a new shape right here. Just a cube is fine. Place that into my scene, there it is. Let me just bring that to the front. There we go. I'm going to shape this as a bounce board, which we could use in the real world or something. Then rotate that a little bit. There we go. If we now bounce light into this shape right here, it will also be reflected onto my meta-human, and let's do that. I'm going to take a spotlights, bring that into my scene. There we go. I'm going to rotate that so that it points against these bounce boards. I'm going to make that cone a little bit smaller. To get this hard lighting. There we go. It is being casted onto them bounce board. As you can see, the light is not interfering with the metahuman itself. It is casting its light only on the bounce boards. Now let's increase the intensity of that light. Where is that control? Right here. I'm going to set that to something like 50. There we go. You can see here what that does to my metahuman. We have set that even higher to a 100 or something. There we go. You can start to see how my metahuman is starting to light up more and more, and that is coming off from the reflection of this bounce board, which is really cool. In an essence, that does mean that we can actually use Unreal Engine, just like you would laid out a scene in the real world. You can use bounce boards. Sounds really cool and all, but Lumen also has its own problems. Let me set that even higher here. I don't know, something like 500 to really make it pop. You can already start to see my metahuman flicker around a little bit. This right here, what you're seeing, what it's occurring is lumen. Lumen is very nice on paper, but in reality it's still comes with many bugs, ends with many artifacts. Definite things like hair still has a lot of trouble to catching up these reflections to make all those calculations. Now that we understand that, let me just delete this spotlight right here and the bounce board. And then we understand that what's going on with Lumen, we know what's going on in the entire scene right here because every single light right here is doing that. In real-time, it's changing the reflections. If I take one of these lights and move it around to a different position, it's going to calculate in real-time what needs to happen with those reflections. That is the power of Lumen. But at the same time, it also has its limitations. At a certain point, Unreal will say, hey, these are way too many reflections happening right now and I have trouble to calculate this precisely. Also you're going to notice that performance in Unreal is going to drop tremendously. There's this rule inside Unreal Engine that says, hey, you cannot mix more than three lights together. Now you might think, I'm not mixing any lights, they're all separately standing here. Let's select all of the lights. Let's see how much they're actually interfering with each other. We can actually, here in the Lights folder, I can actually right-click on it, go over to Select, and just say, All Descendants. There we go. We'll make a selection of all the meshes inside of that folder. Let's have a look at all the cones. As you can see, these lights are interfering with each other. The cones here are overlapping, and that is giving us that problem. When there are more than three lights overlapping with each other, Unreal will say, hey, there is a problem with this light and it will just add this red cross through the light saying there's a problem with this one. Does that mean that you have to fix this? Well, no. You can ignore that error if you want to without having to worry. It's just that the reflection calculations will not be as precise. But is that something that the human eye can see? If I press G on the keyboard, do you see that my lighting reflections are not precise? I for sure can't see it. In my case, I could ignore that issue. But the second problem is performance. My computer is still runs it pretty good, but once we're going to start adding more and more lights in here, performance will start to drop tremendously. Now there are two ways to fix this problem. One is by changing the radius or the cones of these lights because we don't want them to interfere with each other. For instance, if I select any of these lights here, you can see that they have these cones where the lighting is going to be casted to. You want to make sure that one of these cones is not interfering with a second light. This one, you can see that these two here are overlapping. We could go ahead and change the inner cone angle, or the outer cone angle, set that to 30 or something. In this way, they are not interfering with each other. Well actually, they still are. If you are going to take a look below the floor, they still will. Even if your floor is blocking lights, Unreal is going to take a look at the cone itself and if that cone is going through your floor, well then they are still interacting in some way. Also we want to decrease the length of that cone, which we can do from the option called Attenuation Radius. Maybe set that to 500 or something. There we go. Now they are not going through, or at least they are not interfering with each other anymore. That is one way of fixing it. The problem is not really fixed because we have so many other lights in the [LAUGHTER] scene. They're just all colliding with each other, so I have to change the cone of every single light so they don't interfere with each other. But then again, do we really want that? Because that is also going to change the look of our lighting. This is not an ideal solution. You can see here that I'm losing the light on my floor. I'm just going to hit "Control Z" to undo my actions. I don't want to do that. I have my light, I like it, I just wanted to fix these red crosses. We could also disable Lumen, in a way. Not really disable it, but just say to Lumen, hey, do your job, but just don't do it in real time because after all, that's the problem. The real-time issue. What I'm going to do is select all of my lights. I'm going to perhaps search again for light. That's always easy. Look for all the lights in here to select them. There we go. We have now selected all of them and we can make changes to them all at once. You can find here an option in the Details called Mobility. We have three options, static, stationary, and movable. It's currently set to stationary. That means that the lights or these actors, but the way we have this option with meshes as well with almost everything, that these meshes or actors are fixed. They are stationary. They are set to one position and they will stay there. But they have the ability to change in properties like the intensity you can change during the scene, or perhaps the color or the light, anything like that that still affects Lumen in a way that it needs to make changes in real-time. Now the third option here, movable, is the same as stationary. The lights can be brighter or dimmer during a scene or change color, but also move in position, so that means that this lights can perhaps swing around or suddenly stand on a different spot. Again, Lumen has to calculate these reflections in real-time in order for that light to do all of that. Then there is the last option or actually the first option, and that is static. I'm going to click on it and instantly you can see all of these red crosses disappear. What we're seeing now is, this light is static. It's on a fixed position, but also its intensity, its color, none of the properties will change during my scene. That means that Lumen does not have to make any real-time calculations anymore. Now you will see an error here on the top-left saying that the lighting needs to be rebuilt. Basically what Unreal is asking now is, hey, can I make my calculations for the static lights to get really good reflections and everything and just keep that in my memory without having to change it afterwards in real-time? Well, okay. Let's do that. Head over to the Build menu on top, and from there, select either Build All Levels which is going to build everything like the materials and everything and all, but that is going to take long. We only need to build the lighting actually, because that is what Unreal is asking us to do. Let's click on that, which is going to build lighting. This can take a little time, so let's just wait for that. In the meantime, let me answer a question that probably pops into your mind right now, and that is why should we then ever use stationary or the movable option? Well, we've seen previously that we can go into the simulation mode if you want something like a flickering light in the background, which can be created using blueprints. Or you want a light to actually move around in that simulation modes, then you need to set it to either stationary or to movable. Sometimes you want that. Perhaps that corridor lighting, that green fluorescent light that I have in the back, maybe I wanted to flicker that because it's a broken lights. Of course I'm not going to set all of my lights to stationary then, but only that specific light. That means that Lumen only needs to calculate its reflections for one light and not all of them, and we know that we can interfere three lights maximum with each other. There we go. The lighting has been built, everything is looking fine. But again, guys, don't worry too much about that red cross, I just explained it. Because the first time that I saw it I was also getting crazy trying to look for an answer. But actually, you don't have to worry about it as long as you don't see any flickering or any weird artifacts or anything like that, you don't actually need to set them to static and built the lights. All right guys, thank you for watching. [NOISE] Hello. Hey boss. The meltdown. No that was Josh. I had nothing to do with the meltdown. That was Josh from Unreal Engine 4. You know Josh. Yeah, okay. Bye. [NOISE] Thanks for watching guys. See you in the next lesson. 17. The Virtual Camera: We've been building some really cool scenes until now, but how do we actually turn this into a movie because after all that's the whole reason why we're here? Well, for that, we're going to need a virtual camera to capture the scene, and that is what this lesson is going to be about. Now, there are a couple of ways to create a camera in our scene. The first one is again by going up to that add menu on top and then selecting Cinematic and from there we can choose Cinema Camera Actor. This is the one that you always need. Drag it into your scene. Now, the cinema camera has a bunch of options for us to change things like the bouquet or the focus or the exposure settings, all stuff that we're used to with physical cameras. If this is one way of creating a camera, what is the second way? Well, I'm just going to delete that camera because the second way is better. I'm just going to move my normal view into an angle where I would like to have my camera sit. Let's perhaps say right here. This could be a nice shot from up here. I can then go over this little menu here on top, click on it, and you should find an option that says create camera here. Of course, again, we're going to choose CineCameraActor. The normal camera actor's by the way the very basic version of that, but we would want it a little bit more options. Click on that, and if we now zoom out of this corner, we see our camera there in the dark. Let's perhaps set my view back to unlit so that we can better see what's going on. Maybe perhaps push that a little bit out of the wall. There we go. Now, you notice that once we have that camera selected, we can see a preview of what the camera is seeing, but every time that we're going to select something different in our scene, that preview is gone. Now, in order to make that stay there, select your camera and make sure to pin the preview with this little button down here. Now I can actually select one of these chairs and move it around while still seeing my adjustments through the view of the camera, which is really good. Now, this view right here is pretty small, and every time that I want to change my framing, I need to select that camera and use these angles right here to move it around, to rotate it, not really user-friendly. What we can also do is look through the view of the camera instead of using this little preview window, and we can do that by changing here the perspective. Click on that and you should find your placed cameras in here, the CineCameraActor. Just select that and your view will change into what the camera is seeing. Now I can just right-click my mouse and I just move around with the worst keys on your keyboard, just like we do when we are moving around in the world itself, but I'm actually controlling the camera right now. I can place it somewhere else, like right here, for instance, let go, then go out of the camera view by pressing the Eject button here on top, which is pretty funny, and now if you move back, you can see your camera standing over here. That is a great way to look through the camera as you can see it. By the way, you can always change this back to lit if you want to, you also get a better view of what the camera is seeing, and we even have an option. If we go back to a perspective instead of choosing the default viewport to change that to cinematic viewport. Let's see how that looks through the camera. Go back to the menu and select CineCameraActor 4. As we are now in a cinematic viewport, we get an actual view of what is being recorded on the camera. That is a good. Let me just go back out of here and let me just change that back to default viewport. There we go. I'm going to create a couple of more cameras, perhaps like one close up somewhere right here. Go back to the menu, say create camera here's cine actor. There we go. Maybe one more. Let's take an overall total shot or something like that, back up to the menu and say create camera here cine actor. This is always how I create my cameras. It's much better than dragging them into your scene. We got three cameras now in our scene and you might be thinking like, "Jordi, how can I view all of these three at the same time because this is not really useful?" Well, no worries. Unreal has an option for everything. If we go up to the right corner here, you can see that we have more viewports, and if I click on that, you'll see four different viewports. I can actually select that each of these viewports needs to be a view through the camera. It's totally set here to the back, like it's using the perspective by default, but if we click on that, we can change it to camera actor 4, we can change this one here to camera actor 5, and then the last one here to camera actor 6. Now, I have actually a view through all of these cameras, and at the same time, I can also use the bottom left viewport just as my normal controller to move around in the scene, so this is very useful. Of course, we can also set again that cinematic viewport for each camera. There we go. Also for this one, set that to the cinematic viewport, and every time that we do that, we need to change the cameras, which is, I think like a book or something. I'm not sure. Let's first set all these two cinematic [LAUGHTER] viewports and then choose the cameras because it's going to reset it every time that we choose that. There we go. Now we get a view through the cinematic viewport of every camera, and we still have like the normal scenery or the normal level that we can work in with. We can grab any of these cameras, move them around like that. You can see here that it's being updated here with the camera that I have selected. Maybe you have a second monitor and you might be thinking, "Can't I just have my normal work area in big in here and then all of my cameras and different little viewport on my second monitor?" Of course, like I said before, unreal things about everything. We're going to maximize one of these frames here. You can see this button right here that says maximize. We can either do that for every viewport or we're just going to choose the normal one in which we are working. Go up to menu on top, select "Window", and from there choose "Viewports". We can then open up another viewport, let's say viewport 2, which is going to open up a second window. This works exactly the same as this viewport right here. We could, for example, say, hey, this one here needs to be camera 4, this one needs to be camera 5, and this one needs to be camera 6. Now we can just drag this window over to my second monitor if you have one. Or of course, you can also maximize one of these if you're only working with one camera, and that way you get a full screen view of what's happening through the camera. That is it about camera controls, how you can create a couple of them and how you can move them around and how to view them properly. Now let's have a look at some camera options. There are not that many options and I think most of them are pretty self-explanatory. Let's work here on this camera, for instance, or perhaps this one here. This more close-up camera, I think it is going to be a little bit better to demonstrate things on. With that camera selected here, you can see in our outliner that we now have these 3D cameras. By the way, they have very weird numbering to it. It starts from four. That is because before I started recording this lesson, I was preparing myself and I already created three cameras, but yours should say 1, 2, and 3. By the way, you can also rename these to close up [NOISE] or medium shot. Let me just quickly do that, like this is long shots. [NOISE] What do we have in here? This here is, let's say, extreme close up. There we go. These are named very wrong. [LAUGHTER] Let me put them all into a folder. I'm going to think about a better name for them the next lesson when these names are going to be more important. Cameras, put them together. There we go. Where is my cameras folder? Right here on top. Let's go ahead with that extreme close-up, which isn't really an extreme close-up just yet, but we're going to make sure it's going to be one. Within the details panel of that camera, we can find back a couple of options, like the film back. This is the size of the film which things like eight millimeter, 60 millimeters or perhaps like APS-C, Full-Frame, Micro Four Thirds. That's up to you what you want to choose. Then we've got the lens settings, and this is something pretty interesting actually. We can choose from a preset, such as a, is it a zoom lens or is it one of these primes? For instance, when I choose this 50 millimeter prime, I could actually no longer change the focal length. You can see here that it's locked. Well, that is because if we open up the lens settings, if we expand that property, you can actually see here what is being set. We are locking the minimal and the maximal focal length with these two settings. It's both set at 50. If I would set this to 10 and 70 or something, I am able now to change what the actual focal length should be. I can go to a maximum of 70, or I can go to a minimum of 10. The same thing goes for the aperture. What is my minimum Fstop, and what is my maximum? I can then choose a value between these two, which is the current aperture. I can set this to 1.8, for instance. There we go. We get more of a shallow depth of fields. Definitely, if we're going to zoom in to set that to 50, you can definitely see what's going on in here. Let me just by the way change my perspective through the view of that camera, which is the extreme close up. This way I can move around like that, and make a better framing or something. That's just something to keep in mind that you need to set what your lens is about and then you either choose what the actual settings of your lens are currently. I'm going to just collapse that setting again and let's look a little bit further to focus settings. We've got a couple of focus settings. It's certainly set to manual. That means that if we change this value right here, we can choose where the focus needs to be. You can see here my viewport and things are changing. Not really useful. We can also use a picker right here to actually select an object in the scene like the chair, and it will actually set its focus to that chair. It's not going to move back, of course, it's going to keep its focus distance at that point which I have selected. At a certain point that chair becomes out of focus. But I can also change here the focus method to tracking. If I do that, I can also again select an actor in my scene. Let me just do that. With that picker, select that same chair again, and now it's being tracked to the chair. If I'm going to move forward, it's going to make sure that it stays in focus the same when I'm going to move back. Really cool. That's mostly it about the camera's settings itself. We also have things in there like the exposure and all. But you need to ask ourselves the question like, "I'm I going to set the exposure through the camera, or am I going to do that through the post-processing volume like we've seen previously?" You have to see the post-process volume as the global setting. This is a setting for all of my cameras. If you have one certain setting that needs to be set specifically for one certain camera, then you need to set that within the camera. Usually, I don't really touch the exposure settings of my cameras, but just use the post-processing volume for that. But some other things that I might do is things like flares. We can see an option here on the bottom that says bloom. This needs to be set onto create flare, so we can enable that. We have a couple of different methods to say what kind of bloom that we want, and of course the intensity. We can increase that to get more or less bloom going on in the scene. With bloom enabled, we can also go over to the lens flares, which should be right here. Enable that and increase the lens flare. Of course, we have to look into a light. Here it is. We've got the sunlight. Here you can see we've got nicely lens flares, and the more that I increase that value, the more lens flares that we get. But this might be something that I don't want or don't want as prominent for every camera. That's a reason to set it in the camera itself and not in a post-processing volume. You can also change a color for that lens flare. Maybe there should be like a blue tint or something really cool to play around with that as well, and of course also the exposure setting, not unimportant because once it's going to work with something like bloom and lens flares, your scene is also going to get brighter. Again, a reason to overwrite the exposure settings of your post-processing volume. Let me just enable that here, set the metering modes not to automatic but to manual. You always want to choose manual by the way, and then set the exposure compensation to something that we can still see something, but that it remains dark. You can see here how beautifully these lens flares follow the movement of your camera. Unreal is always going to look at your camera first, what are its settings of the camera, and then it's going to take a look at the post-processing volume. You can't override the camera with the post-processing volume, but you can override the post-processing volume with the camera, if that makes sense. That is in a nutshell, the camera. There's nothing really more about it. You can go through all of these settings. We have like chromatic aberration as well. But we've seen these things in the post-processing volume. They are mostly the same. We just set that for each camera individually in here. That was already it. In the next lesson we're going to start animating these cameras and that is where it's going to start getting interesting. We're going to set keyframes, move them around to make very cool dolly shots and things like that, really awesome. I'll see you guys there. 18. Camera Animations: All right. Let's continue, guys, with lesson, what is it, 17 or 18, perhaps? Wow, just think about it, all the cool stuff that you've already learned. It's amazing. I got myself a coffee, so I'm super energized for the new lesson. I have created three cameras and I've also named them properly this time. We have one here which is pointed at the table, more like a close-up. We've got one here underneath the stairs, and we've also got one here up the balcony over there. So three really cool camera angles. What we want to do now is animate these cameras, and maybe also an object in our scene. How can we do that? Well, we're going to go back here into our content browser because we're going to have to create something called a Level Sequencer. Again, we can do that from the Add menu right here or what I usually prefer is just to right-click into my content browser, go over to Animation, and in here you should find Level Sequence. Click on that, which is going to create a new file. I'm going to call that my animation. The most original name ever. Let's double-click on it to open up that Sequencer. As you can see, we get a timeline. If you've been working in something like Premiere or After Effects or anything like that, you are familiar with these controls. Now by default, your Sequencer is empty. That is because basically anything that you see in this entire scene or anything that you can see in the Outliner can be animated. If that would already be in your Sequencer, it would just be too much. What I'd really want you to do is add the actors in here that you want to animate. So you want to specify those. There are two ways to do that. We can click here on the Track button and we have a whole bunch of things that we can do, such as the Live Link Track, which we'll talk about in the next lesson. That's going to be really cool by the way. But in most cases, you're just going to go over to Actor To Sequencer. That means that you're going to pick out something from this drop-down menu, which actually just represents your Outliner. You want to move that into the Sequencer or you can also just select here the three cameras in your Outliner and just drag those like that into the Sequencer. There we go. I'm just going to collapse these cameras. They are now all three here in the Sequencer as well as an extra layer, and that is the Camera Cuts layer. If you have accidentally removed that because it is actually an important layer, don't worry, just go back to Track, and from there, you can choose Camera Cut Track. Just click on that again and it's back. Now by clicking on the camera icon next to every layer, we can look through that camera here in our viewport. Here is the stairs camera. We've got the balcony camera on top, and you know what? Let's set that back to Lit. There we go. Of course, also the table camera. Finally, we've got the Camera Cuts angle. Currently, we don't really have a camera defined yet, so I'll click here on this button on "Camera", and we can choose any of the cameras here that sit within our Sequencer. Let's start, for example, with the balcony camera. There we go. We can now see that we are cut to this angle. We can move forward in time. Then, for example, change that to camera to the stairs, for example, underneath the stairs. You can see here that automatically a cut is being placed and we cut from one shot to the other. We can, of course, also move that edit up to the left or to the right to make that shot take longer or shorter. If you want your Sequencer to take longer by the way, or your timeline, just increase here this value by zooming out. There we go. We are now defining more frames that can be created. We can move up this endpoint here to the right. There we go. Now we have more space. Let's also drag out the Camera Cuts layer here to take up that entire space like that, and maybe be little bit further down here or somewhere. You want to cut to the table camera. Now we can cut from this angle, the balcony to the stairs, and now to the table. That is how Camera Cuts work. We can go back and forward, et cetera. Let's now start with animating these cameras. I'm going to go over to my first shot which is going to be the balcony camera right here. We're going to have to select the camera here in the Sequencer, expand that property, which is going to show some of the basic properties of that camera which we can animate or change, such as the aperture, the focal length. That means that we can also zoom into our shots and everything. If you don't see the right property in here, you can always click here on the CameraComponent here on the right side on Track, which is going to give you more options like maybe you want to change the Filmback or the Focus Setting or anything like that. Unlike most editing programs where you already see all the properties that you can animate off a certain layer, in Unreal you actually need to choose which property that you want to track. I think that is a good idea, otherwise, your Sequencer would be a huge mess. By the way, let me just enlarge this window so you can see better what's going on in here. That's really why we're so interested in these settings right here. I can just collapse the CameraComponents or I can also just delete that entire setting. Because like I said before, you can keep it clean in here and only track those properties that you want to animate. Let's open up the Transform property and you can see here some of the basic settings like Location, Rotation, and Scale. I don't really need the scale because you can't really animate the view of the camera, maybe the camera itself, you can, but that's not really going to change anything. Let me just delete that as well. There we go. It's clean now. We got two things that we might want to animate. Here on the right side, we can see the key frames. We can create one for the X, Y, the Z, and perhaps also for the Rotation. This works just like any other VFX or editing program. You create keyframes for a starting position, you move forward in time, and then you just change any of these properties. Maybe you want to bring the camera a bit more to the front, maybe bring it down a little bit like so, and perhaps also play around with the Rotation. Let me just do something like move more here into the angle of those barn doors, if I can do that. There we go. Automatically, keyframes are being placed as you change these values in here. Now if I playback here the sequence, you can see what that camera movement does. This here is my first shot. Let's also do something now with the stairs camera, which is the second one that we cut to. By the way, guys, you can always change these cuts. If you want them to start earlier, you can just move up that cut right there. Right now before the animation stops, we already cut to the next shot. You can see that here. That is up to you. You can also select any of the keyframes or all of them, and move them up more to the right or more to the left if you want them to align with the Camera Cuts. But let me just collapse here this camera, and I'm going to now select the stairs camera, expand that property, again, perhaps remove this, and as well under the Transform, the Scale. [NOISE] There we go. Let's just do a very simple travel or something. Maybe also enable the Rotation properties, go forward in time. I usually always enable all of the properties. I might not use all of them, but that way I have freedom of whatever that I do. Let's move this camera up a little bit more to the right side, and perhaps tilt a little bit. What is that? The pitch. There we go. Let's have a look at that. A very beautiful shot. Wow. Don't forget to drink coffee in the meantime. You don't want this to get cold. [NOISE] Let's move these keyframes up. I want them to align with the cuts. Over here we've got the table camera, so I'm going to collapse stairs camera, select my table camera to get a view of that here in my viewport, open up that property. You know what? Maybe let's do animate like to zoom or something, the focal length. In order to do that, I do have to change something here about the settings of the table camera because it's currently set here at my Lens Settings, that it's fixed at 50 millimeters. I might want to change that to, let's say 40 and 60 or something. That I have some playroom between those two values. Now I can also change the value here. Otherwise, I wasn't able to do that. You can see here that even though that I'm zooming far beyond 60 millimeters, it is locked at that 60 millimeters because of the Lens Setting. That's definitely something to keep in mind. Let's hit the back G like 50, or perhaps start at 40. I'm going to create a keyframe for that in the beginning, go forward in time, and change that to 60. [NOISE] Now we get these zooming-in shots, dramatic on the table. We'll also go to Transform, and let me just delete Scale. Let's play around with the Location as well in the beginning of the shots, X, Y, and Z. I always do all the keyframes and go forward in time. I want to change that a little bit, perhaps, let's move the camera to the left perhaps a little bit. Maybe, I don't know, a little bit to the back. Oh yeah, we can create that. That Hitchcock Zoom. Look at that. Wow. Isn't [LAUGHTER] that looking great? Maybe, perhaps add a little bit of a roll to it. There we go. A pitch, a yaw. [LAUGHTER] There we go. Let's play this back. Look how dramatic that shot looks. [LAUGHTER] Wow. That's basically it, guys. We have now animated our three cameras. [NOISE] We have to select here the Camera Cuts angle, and that way we can also see [NOISE] the Camera Cuts. Let's play this back and see how our scene [NOISE] looks. Wow, this room from the stairs, really fast shots. Then we've got the slower shot from underneath the stairs. Finally, we have that Hitchcock dramatic zoom. Looking great, guys. Now, maybe this is dramatic because one of these things are floating. Let's do that as well. Perhaps like the little ashtray or something. I'm going to drag that into my scene as well. There we go. Make some more room. Let's start that animation from all the way in the beginning. I want to work with the Location and the Rotation again, set a keyframe for it. Oops, my keyframes are set somewhere in the middle. Let's select them and move them up to the left. Don't worry about that, guys. If you have your keyframes positioned wrongly, you can always move them around. I'm going to go to the end and I'm going to change the properties in here. Bringing up that ashtray, and I'm going to rotate that a little bit as if it's floating in space. The yaw, I'm just doing something. [LAUGHTER] Let's see how this looks. Look at that. Wow. It's already starting in these shots, but we don't see it, so there's no use of having [LAUGHTER] that animated in the beginning. You know what? I'm just going to move up all of these keyframes to here because there's no use [LAUGHTER] to have them over there in the beginning. There we go. The ashtray is going up and it's rotating like it's alive, like it's floating in space, or some kind of magic going on. Look at that; the ashtray. This shot doesn't make any sense, but this shot looks dramatic, and there's a reason for it because we've got a floating ashtray. Look at that. This is how the Sequencer works and what I want you guys to do now is go ahead, place a couple of cameras, animate their position, rotation, perhaps add one of your 2D objects in there as well. Make that flow, do whatever you want with it. I want you to get a good feeling of the Level Sequencer. You come back for the next level when we are going to automatically animate all of these things. We've already seen how we can capture our facial motion and bring it over into Unreal. We can also capture the motion of an iPhone and bring it over to the camera. That way we can control the camera with our phone. How cool is that? Well, that's for the next lesson. Cheers. [NOISE] 19. Camera Tracking: You've already been having so much fun inside Unreal Engine, now it's time to get frustrated. The idea is to use our phone as a camera controller so that we can use its gyroscope to move around, forwards, backwards, even use some controllers on our screen to actually control the virtual camera inside Unreal. Sounds really cool on paper, but unfortunately, all of this is so new that it's actually super booked. I'm going to try and show it to you guys. It's actually super easy. I just really hope that nothing goes wrong. We're all going to bump into a few issues and I'm also going to show you guys how to actually solve them. What I have right here is a live animation sequence. I'm going to open that up. We've seen it in the previous lesson, how this works. I've just placed some keyframes for that ashtray, which we also animated previously. Let me just zoom in a little bit more on that. What I've just done is just letting that float up. What I'm want to do is with my camera follow the movement of that ashtray as it goes up. But I want to have that real handheld camera motion to it, so that's where the iPhone is going to be really useful. How do we set this up? Well, first of all, we're going to have to go back to that live link menu. Go to the Window on top, go over to Virtual Production, and from there, locate Live Link, click on it to open up the panel. Now, this time on the iPhone, instead of opening the live link face app, we're going to open up the live link Vcam app. This one is also made by Unreal Engine and can be downloaded for free from the iOS App Store, hence like previously you want to set the IP address this time the app is going to ask you immediately for that before you can start using it. Now, don't hit Connect just yet. This is one of the first box that we're going to run into. Just open up the app, that's the only thing that you have to do and already set the IP address in there. That's it. We're now going to go over to source here in the Live Link panel, and then choose a Message Bus Source. We should be able to start seeing our iPhone in there. If it doesn't, close the app, open it again, do that a couple of times, perhaps hard close the app and open it back. There we go, it appears. That's one of its first box. Just open and reopen the app a couple of times and you should see it in there. Click on it, and it's been added to the live link. That's done. You can close live link right now. What we're going to do next is still not hit Connect because that is going to break everything. What we want to do next is create our virtual camera. Now we're not going to work with a normalcy camera actor, we're actually going to work with a virtual production camera actor. We can find that back here in the Adds menu on top. Go over to Virtual Production, and in there we can find a VirtualCamera2 Actor. This is the one that we need. Drag that into your scene. There we go. Rotate that a little bit and put it in place. It's not really that important where exactly it sits because we can use the controller or the iPhone in a moment to position the camera better. There we go. This is fine. Now let's connect the app to the virtual camera. We're going to go over to the settings of that virtual camera actor. You should see here in the components, you should see something called Vcam, are going to select that. One of the first settings is for virtual camera and of course you want to set that to enabled. The next thing that we're going to do is change the live link subject to the iPhone right here. There we go. Now scroll down, still don't click on Connect because it will give you an error. We're going to scroll down, and we're going to locate your outputs. If you can't find this option, you just have to expand here the output property, then expand index, expand output, and make sure that that is active as well. There we go, and you'll see that your interface will change a little bit. Don't worry too much. We can now hit Connect on the iPhone, and if everything went well, look at that, we can now start controlling the camera. How cool is this, and where is that table? It's right here in front of me. There we go. There is the ashtray. Now a couple of things guys, you can see that we have this UI right here, and you can actually use that to control a couple of things. For instance, on top we have the lens settings, so if we tap on that, we can zoom out. Now if the interface is too small on your phone, you can also just use your mouse and click here in Unreal Engine itself to bring up certain settings, and all that is up to you. If you have an iPad, by the way, that might be a better option since it's a little bit bigger. But for now we're using the iPhone. If you tap it away here on the bottom, we have that option here to bring up these joystick controls. These allows me to move around in this scene, go back and forward. You can see how sensitive these controls are. We can position our camera better now, maybe rotate it a little bit. There we go. We can go a bit more down. It is super sensitive. Just play around with those joysticks until you have a framing that works well for you. A way to control the camera, I'm going to hide those joysticks. On the right side, we have some more options here, for example, the focus setting. We can use here the manual focus and it has a really useful tool that is going to cut off anything from a scene that is not on focus, really nice, so that way we can look for the focus on that ashtray like this. You also have an autofocus, which is that little rectangle with a dot in the middle. If we enable that, we have this spot in the middle, which is going to make sure that always anything in that spot is in focus. If I move my camera up to the back, it will rack focus to the back to a cactus or to that little corridor over there, maybe back here to this thing or this little bottle right there. Really cool, really useful. But now let's say that we don't want to use autofocus, nor we want to use manual focus. We want to track a certain object, so they move backwards like that ashtray stays in focus as well as if I move forward. Well, we've seen that previously in this class where we can set the focus to track a certain actor in our scene. Unfortunately, we can't do that with the app, so we're going to have to do that here in Unreal itself. What we're going to do here is locate my camera. It's all the way down the bottom right here, the virtual camera. From there we have like all the normal options such as we can change the lens in here as well, and we have the focus setting. You got to notice that if you want to change here the focus method from manual to tracking, that nothing really happens. It's going to reset itself every time again. The reason for that is because the iPhone is overriding that. I'm just going to lay this iPhone down for just a moment. [LAUGHTER] It's going to overwrite that every time. We're going to have to say like, don't overwrite the focus. Luckily we can do that, so don't worry about that. I'm going to select my Vcam back in here and scroll down. You're going to find a whole bunch of modifiers right here in the modifier stack and are still one there called lens. This one here is going to control everything from the lens such as the focus, the zoom to focal length and everything, the aperture, so you want to disable that. Once you've done that, we can select back like the roots, the camera itself, and then go over to the focus settings right here, and now we can set it to tracking. Look at that. Now we are able to use the picker to select that ashtray in the scene. There we go. It seems like I have selected the bowl. It's not the ashtray, so let me just look for tray. [NOISE] I think it's this one. There we go. That is good and we should still see we can still track, move forward, backwards and everything. It's really cool that you can actually move back all the way like that, [LAUGHTER] and then come forward again. Really nice feature. We are set. Let's do a recording now. We already have in our content browser, like I said before, we have that live animation sequence in which we have that bowl. If I just move that ashtray, so we just move to this side. We can just move that ashtray up, and we can follow it like this. What you want to do is actually record our movement of the camera into that sequence. We can do that here from the take recorder, which is automatically going to be active. In fact, I can't even close that Window. If I tried to do that, it's going to be warning me every time, like, "Hey, you can't close that, you don't want to do it because you have your iPhone connected", so it should be open on your site. Here on top we have a drop-down menu to select the sequence that we want to record into, and it's called live animation sequence, which I have created before I started this lesson. For some reason, my actor to track is against set to that ball in the back and not to the ashtray. Those are the typical box that you're going to run into while you're working with Vcam. Again, look for tray, the ashtray. I want to focus on this one and not the bowl in the back. I hope it's good now. It's still working? Now it's working. There we go, looking good. We're almost there. The last step that we have to do is define what we're going to track. We can do that from a take recorder right here. Click on "Source", and from there choose the actor which you are planning to track. Or we can also very simply just go into the outliner, look for that virtual camera, drag it into the tape recorder, and now we can start recording. Normally we should be able to use a record button here in the app itself. You first have to unlock it and then we can start recording. But unfortunately that doesn't really work. It will record something, but it won't really play back my sequence where I have the animation of the ashtray. We're going to have to use the record button here, all the way at the bottom here, inside of my sequencer, and from there say, start recording. As I do that, it's first going to warn me like, "Hey dear. Are you sure you want to start recording?" Yes, otherwise I didn't press that button. As I do that, it's going to count down. There we go. The countdown has started and my ashtray is going up and I can just follow that with my iPhone. Looks really weird if you don't know what the person is doing. There we go. We have recorded everything, and here is one of the, I want to say first box, but we've already encountered a couple. Here's one of the third afford box that we're running into, and that is that we now lost connection with Unreal. Every time that you are recording and you've stopped recording, you want to select your camera again, and you'll actually see here that we have two cameras now, every time that you will record, it's going to create a new actor. I find that very frustrating, but anyways, you want to select either one of these, [LAUGHTER] doesn't matter. Go to Vcam, and then just basically set the output active off and back on. There we go. Now everything works again. Every time that you notice that your camera, is it really feeding through anymore or you're tracking doesn't work, just make sure to disable and enable one of those settings and it will restore back. But okay, we don't need that anymore, we have already done our recordings. I'm just going to put my phone down. Let's have a look here at my sequence here. What happened in here? I'm going to select here, the camera cuts, click that camera, so that we can view what that looks like. You can see here that we beautifully follow that ashtray as I'm moving my cameras. That is working perfectly really good. The problem though that we are having is that we still see the interface around it, which is weird. That's because the interface is something that we need to put on and off. Even when we are going to render this as a movie, we will still see this interface. Of course, we don't want that and we're going to have to change that in the original virtual cameras. Not the one with the lightning icon next to it, which comes from the level sequencer, but this one here, the original one. Go over to Vcam, scroll all the way down here where we were before, where we set active off and back on. We want to make sure actually that this is set off once you are ready to do your final rendering. Once that is being set off, you can see here now that the entire interface is gone and everything is still in there, so the entire camera movement and all, we can just set our perspective instead to default viewport to cinematic viewport. Let's play this back one more time. Look at that guys. We have just done a real live camera tracking using our phone. Of course, I do have to mention that this is more of a toy. In the industry, filmmakers don't actually use their phone to do camera tracking and such. They use pretty expensive equipment like a Vicon system, which costs at least like 50 or $60,000. There's a reason for that because of course your phone is not that trustworthy. We are working over the Wi-Fi here, so there are some latency going on. It's not that precise and all, but I think it's just really nice to make online videos or something which, or just to learn more about Unreal Engine and how all this tracking works without having to purchase expensive equipment. It's time to go to the next level with virtual production because that's essentially what we're doing right now, doing real-time capturing and all. Then in the next lesson we're going to do a real-time green keying. That's going to be super interesting as well. 20. Offline Chroma Key: All right guys, we are really going to enter some scary territories right now by doing a live green keying inside Unreal Engine 5. Now, unfortunately, there are some bugs but I'm going to show it to you guys anyway because I hope that in the future, Unreal will fix these issues and by then you already know how things are done. We have our character, our scene right here, and we want to do a green keying or a live green keying. I'm also going to show you both things. The first thing that we have to do is load in our green screen chart. To do that, we are going to need a media object. Go into your "Content Browser", right-click, go over to media right here, and choose media player. It's like a little television. Click on that and it's going to ask you if it also needs to create the media texture, and yes, we want that. We just do that, select that option, hit "Okay", give your media player a name, let's call it Green Screen, hit "Enter" and at the same time that media texture here is also been created. What are these two files? The media player is going to be your source video, whether that is in offline MP4 or that it's a live stream coming in from the camera. Then it's going to take that image and put that onto a media texture. You actually want to use that texture into your compositing later on. The media player itself is just the source media. Let's start with that. Double-click on "Media Player" and from here we can load in the green screen. Now let's first start with an offline file and you can already see one right here. It automatically detected that I have an MP4 in my project, that is nothing more than this right here, Jordi Greenscreen, if I double-click on it you can see what that file actually is, a simple MP4, and I already went ahead and just imported that into Unreal Engine. You can just put it into your assets folder or something, drag it into your content browser, just like that, and automatically it will recognize that. We can just double-click on it to enable that file. There we go, it sits now inside of that media player. Since this is a pretty short clip, I'm going to make sure that it's set to loop, otherwise, it will just play once and as you can see now, it's just a blank screen. Hit "Loop", double-click on that file again to load it again into the media player and now it should stay looping that file. Great. We can now go ahead and save this. Unfortunately, we always need to let the media player stay open. We can't close this window or otherwise your texture won't be feeded with the media player. They're just going to minimize that window. As you can see now here, the media texture also shows that video now, which is great, and we can use that texture to composite ourselves into the scene. How do we composite herself into the scene? Well, that is done using the composure plugin. Again, head over to the settings on top, we've seen it before, go over to plugins and from there, look for composure. I already enabled that because you need to restart the engine and we don't want to wait for that during this class. Once enabled and Unreal has been restarted, we can then go over to the window menu on top, go to virtual production where we also found live link but this time we're going to choose composure compositing. Click on that which will open up its dedicated window. Composure is literally that, we're going to compose multiple layers together to create something new. In this case, it's going to be the background or the scenery itself, together with the green screenshots, this almost literally works the same as after effects. You already have your different layers and you're working in a composition. Let's create that composition in here. Right-click, choose "Create New Comp", and we're not going to attach a blueprint to it, we're going to keep it simple and just choose for it empty comp shot. There we go, we have our comp. If we select that comp, you can see here that a new window will be activated, some camera window, a preview. It's currently empty because we don't have anything sitting in that composition just yet. Let's right-click here on this comp and say "Add Layer Elements", click on it. The first thing that we want to add to it is the media plate, which is going to be the green screen video. Click on that, you can see it now if we expand the comp that the media plate sits in there. Let's right-click one more time on the comp, say add layer elements and that is going to be a CG layer. But basically what we're going to do is make sure to use the background scenery as the CG elements. You can see it as the background and the foreground. Super easy. I'm going to make a folder for that because it's starting to get a little bit messy here. Select immediate plates like the CG elements and the comp because it will be adding those three layers into your outline as well and I'm going to click here on "New Folder", and let's call that Greenkey. There we go. It says grenkey, I mean green key. Let's start with the green screen itself. Select "Media Plate", and go into the details panel. Right here you can find media source and as you can see, it's asking for a texture. We can just go ahead and drag that texture here that we created previously into that property like so. There we go, we now have our green screen clip inside of that media plate, which is great. Now how can we remove that green? Because of course, that's something that we don't need. Well, if we scroll a little bit down here within the details panel of that media plate, we can find the chroma Keying option under the transform passes. If you can't see these options here make sure to expand transform passes. Here it is chroma key. That means you can also do other things like blue key or whatever, but it's usually going to be green key. Right here you can find the key colors. Click here on the plus to add a key color. It is going to ask you, of course, what color, and if you actually click here on this button next to that color option, we get a new window, which makes it easier for us to select the color. Let's click here on the green with the color picker and it's gone as you can see now. We can close that window and there we go, I unkeyed out. If you need to fine-tune the keying itself, we can scroll down again and under material parameters again, you might want to expand that property, you have more controls to change the keying itself. If we increase that or decrease, you can see here what that does to my face. This way you can more fine-tune the keying itself. I'm still left with this little green edge around myself and that we can remove with the pre blur kernel size or increase that to get rid of that little line. There we go, looking good. Of course, never expect a tool like this to do perfect green keys. There's a reason for that we use After Effects or something like that to pull the perfect green key because those programs just have a lot more possibilities. I would also always suggest to do your green keying in a dedicated program and not inside Unreal Engine. But of course, if you want to do a live streaming, then you do need to do that light green keying, which of course is never going to be as good as if you would do it offline but I think that is pretty obvious. We're set, we are keyed out. Now let's have a look at the CG element, which should be the background. As you can see here, it says missing camera so that means that we need to create one. Let's make a nice framing of our metahuman right here because the idea is to stand next to it. Then we're going to go over to this little menu on top and choose "Create Camera Here", "CineCameraActor." There we go. We have a camera and I might want to change like zoom a little bit more of that camera, set the focal length to 25 or something. This is good. Let's also set the focus to the MetaHuman. There we go. You know what, I'm actually going to jump into my camera real quick. Let's go over to perspective and change that to the "CineCameraActor" and that way I can better align or change by framing using the normal controls. Now you are going to see a huge performance decrease. But again, we are working in an early access program here. Maybe if you're watching this course in the future, it might be released and these things might be fixed. But okay, we have a framing in my ID is still stand next to the Metahuman. Let me just eject from that camera view and I'm going to drag my camera as well into the green key folder to have everything organized. If we now select CG elements, you'll see that it will take that camera automatically. Now if you have multiple cameras and your scene it might take the wrong one so we can define which camera specifically as well we can just do that by selecting the CG element layer and going into the details panel, look for composure and look for inputs then and you should find an option here that says "Cameras Source." It's certainly set to inherited which is the automatic thing. Or you can also say "Override," which allows you to target the camera actor. I only have one in my outliner so far, so I'm going to select that. This is a second way of selecting your camera. Now the first thing that you might notice is that, my colors are way different than my actual scene looks right here and you are right, that's again, one of those backs of composure and unfortunately, there's no fixed for that. I do have a tiny little fix for it but it's not really a fix, it's more like putting a patch on the wounds. Anyway, that bug has to deal with lumen which is something completely new inside Unreal Engine, and mostly has to deal with reflections. You're going to see less of these artifacts when you're using composure and in an outdoor scene and in landscape, indoor, you're going to see more of these bugs. But again, all of this is so new, so I'm pretty sure that all of this will be fixed once Unreal Engine 5 is going to get released. Our inputs have been set for both the CG elements, which is the background or the camera view, and the media plate, which is the actual green-screen clip. If we select the comp layer right now, we shouldn't be seeing these two together. Well, not really. Here's where it gets a little bit complicated. I know that I did promise you that we're not going to dive into blueprints and notes and everything, but there's just no other way around it. We are going to have to create a couple of notes, create again our own material, just like we've done with the emissive material to make this comp work. Let's select the comp and let's go into the Details panel again. You want to look for the Transform Compositing Passes. There are currently no layers in here for the transform passes. We're going to click here on the Plus icon to add an element that open up that or expands that property that has been created. Right here you can find a material option. Open up the drop-down menu and go over to Create new material. You can also apply an existing material, but that's not really going to work. Let's create a new material, and it's asking you to choose a name for that. Let's call that GreenKey_Composites_Material. Hit "Save". There it is. Here's the material. It's already looking at that material right now that's automatically being applied in that property, but it's not really showing much. That is because we need to change what that material actually has to be. Double-click on it to open up that material. Here we have those notes again, which we are pretty scared of. But don't worry, it's quite simple to do this, and I'll explain it the best way possible. First things first, we have to define what material that this is. This time, it's not a surface material which we have set right here. We're going to change that to a post-process material. By doing that, all of these other options will be gone or will be disabled. That makes it easier as well as we can only work with the emissive color, so you can't really go wrong with that. Now let's move a little bit up to the side because we're going to have to create two different new notes in here. I'm going to right-click to open up the Note library. We're going to look for the TextureSampleParameter2D. This is the one that you need. Click on it. Now the name of this note is going to be very important. Let me just make a little bit more room here with this window. There we go. Like one of these notes, we're going to create two of them, should be named to the cg_element and the other one to the media plates. Let's call this one here media_plates1, which is the name of my green-screen clip. We can click away, right-click, and we're going to try that again. Look for TextureSampleParameter2D, click on it, which is the same thing and we're going to change the name instead of parameter. We're going to make sure that that is set to cg_elements1. If you rename these layers, you need to rename them as well as here in your material. We're almost there. We just have to say like these two layers need to be on top of each other, just like in an editing program. To do that, we're going to right-click again to create one more note and that has become being cold over. You can see here that this is a note coming off from exposure. It's specifically made for that. Click on that to create the over note. Now it's just a very simple matter of connecting the RGB Alpha into A, which is going to be the top layer, and the RGB Alpha of the background into the bottom layer or B. Don't take RGB, you want to take RGB Alpha. Finally, take RGB Alpha as the output and connect that into the emissive color, and that's it. Now we can go ahead and save that. Click on "Save" for that material. If we make some more room right now, there we go and select the comp, there we are. We have our green-screen clip playing back in the scene and it's going super slow because composer is really decreasing the performance here of my computer. Perhaps I should set the scalability not to cinematic now, but something like a medium, perhaps. There we go, it's playing back. They don't worry about all the flickering and all that's the book composure, [LAUGHTER] but also because we've decreased the quality of course. But we're in the scene. Look at that. Perhaps I want to put my meta human on the other side. Let me just pin that preview window and things really trying to get smaller here. Let's select the meta you and you just like shove it up a little bit to this side. Rotate the guy. There we go. We're standing next to each other now, look how tough I am. They're always talk previously about that patch on the wound or that little fixed to fix the lighting and all in the Composer window. Well, that has to be done in the material as well. Let's make that window a little bit bigger here, so we have some more space to work in. I'm going to right-click in here and look for multiply. Multiply is a note that really does that. It multiplies a value. I'm going to click on it to create that note. It says like, hey, I'm looking for two values, like you multiply A by B and this here is going to be your outputs. It's as simple as that. What we can do here is bring the values of the CG elements, the RGBA into multiply A, right-click again, and I'm going to look for constants. We've already worked with that with three vector constant to create that emissive material because we can use the constant as a color. This time we're only going to use constant for one value. You can see here it's a very simple note. We can just insert one value in here, and let's set that to one, for instance, as simple as that. We can now connect the constant to B. What's it going to do is multiply what's coming out of the cg_element value with one. That's just going to be the same thing. Meaning if you multiply 8 by 1, you get 8. But we're going to use the output now and we're going to connect that here to B. We're taking a little bit of a detour instead of going directly into the B value here from the background or the cg_element, we're first going into the multiply, we are multiplying that by a value, and then we're going to output that again into the B. If we now change the multiply to something like 0.3, like 8 times 0.3, I don't know what that is, but it is less than eight. Let's now go ahead and save that and you will see here that our composure, the background, will be decreased in exposure. That was the patch on the wound that I was talking about. Is it going to fix the problem? No, but it might help you a little bit. Now, you want to think like Jordi, like, what's the use case of this now? We can do a green key and all, okay, but what can we actually do with this? Because after all, we are seeing this like this book. Is this useful? Well, I actually do have a very good use case for when you're working with a green screen and you want to compose yourself into unreal engine, but that has to do with live green keying or setting up your lights around your green key to match with your environment, rather than to work with an offline file like this MP4 right here. But that's for the next lesson. We already know how to set up the composer and everything inside unreal engine. The only thing that we have to change the source of the media player to the live feed. It's going to be a short lesson. Thanks for watching. 21. Live Chroma Key: Green keying. We're going to continue this lesson with a live green key. So inside Unreal Engine. I have not changed anything. We still have our composure going on right here with the offline MP4 video clip in there. We want to swap that out with a live camera. In order to do that, we need to figure out a way to bring the signal of the camera into the computer. I think the best possible way to do that is with one of these little things right here. You might want to come closer. This right here is called a Cam Link. It's a little dongle which has an input of an HDMI, which means that we can insert the camera output in there and it transforms out into a USB, which we can plug into the computer. Let's do that. We can plug it in right there into the computer. This right here is coming off from the camera. I actually have a wireless transmitter because the camera is pretty far from here. But you could also just pull the HDMI cable directly from your camera into the Cam Link. Of course, there are many different brands out there, so you definitely don't meet the Cam Link for instance, but it definitely one of the more popular dongles. All right, let's go over to the Green Screen Studio now. Follow me guys [NOISE]. Here we are. Genic, our standard is already standing here in the Green Screen Studio. It's basically happening now as the camera shooting Genic standing in front of that Green Screen while it's transforming that signal wirelessly over to the computer. Let's go back Genic mixture to keep standing right here so that I can plug you into the engine. [NOISE] We can take the helmet off right now. It's always dangerous in Green Screen Lands. We're going to go back to our media player right here, which we've created in the previous lesson. Double-click on it in which we can assign the source media file. It's currently set to that offline mp4, but to insert a live video feed, so coming off from that Cam Link, we have to go up to the menu here on top, click on that folder, then choose one of these capture devices, video. You should see in there Cam Link 4K. The Cam Link doesn't need any additional software. You literally just plug it into your computer and Unreal Engine will recognize it. I cannot speak for other brands, of course. Click on that and if everything went correct, there we go. We got Genic look at that He's live in the engine and so far everything is still running goods. Let's save that media file. Let's minimize that and let's see how it looks in composer, but it's really, that's all there is to it. Let's locate that comp file, right right it is. Select that, and There we go. Genic is inside the saloon. You're a Cowboy Genic. The green key is not that perfect so we might want to go back into the media plate layer and within the settings we can find back the Chroma Keying. We've all done this in a previous lesson, by the way guys. Here we can find Key Colors again, I'm going to reset that value to pick a new color. Let's select your background. There we go. If needed, you can always dial here into the details of that key because I see that we are eating a little bit out of genic sweater. We need to bring this back a little bit. That's right, Genic. But I'm fixing it for you. I'm fixing it. Don't worry. The key looks fine. We can now go ahead and select the comp layer again and to get a live feeds of Genic standing in the saloon with the Meta human next to him. Is this useful? That's, of course, the question. Because after all, the keying doesn't really look good, we're getting a performance decrease in everything. Is this something that we can use in the real-world? Well, the way that I see it is that this is a very good use-case of matching your light with that MetaHuman into the scene Genic standing next to that MetaHuman. We can go ahead and go into the Green Screen Studio and actually change our light adapted to the scene to really match it perfectly. Once you have that, I would, of course, suggests to make a recording of just the camera without a Green Screen, capture Green Screen shot and bring those two into something like After Effects or Premiere or any other video editor to do your green keying and there, which gives you better results and also better performance. But you'll have the perfect lighting match. Of course, if we want to do live streaming, then you can use this inside Unreal Engine. When you select your comp layer here in the outliner, you actually have this Maximize button on the top right and your preview window of that comp, by clicking on that, it will maximize that frame and you can bring us into a second monitor or something and use that as a feed forward you're live streaming. I was going about live Green Screening. Genic, thank you so much for standing there in the Green Screen Studio. By the way, tell our students how great of a job they're doing so far. You're doing great students. Have you heard that? You're doing great. Thank you so much for watching guys. In the next lesson, we're going to do something with DMX. I know, it sounds scary. [LAUGHTER] 22. Setup DMX: It seems like all of the systems in the engine are still running good. That is great. That means that we can continue with the next lesson, which is about DMX. Not only a rapper from the '90s, but also a network to control lights. I'm going to keep this lesson short because DMX inside Unreal Engine is super easy, but also super-complicated if you don't know anything about DMX. DMX itself can be a whole different course. If you have never worked with DMX before, don't feel bad for just skipping this lesson, or just watch it by leaning backwards. Don't bother too much by storing into your brain. But who knows? Maybe in the future you are going to work with DMX. Then it's very useful to come back to this class and watch this lesson until instantly you know what I'm talking about. But in short, for those who don't know what DMX is. Well, right here I've got an iPad which is connected to my DMX network, and that allows me to control the lights. For instance, if I move this slider here up and down, you can see that it gets darker. I also have a few presets, like I can make it dark like this, I can make it more red when there's an error in my engine, or I can make it green when that error is fixed. Those are all things that I can do with DMX. I can also animate certain scenes, make them fade from one to another, even control moving lights that have a pin or a tilt or something to make them rotate around. I mean, we've all seen that when going to a concert. That was a simple part. Now comes the hard part where we are going to connect the channels and the universes into Unreal Engine. First things first, we're going to go up to the menu, Settings Plugins. We've been there before, look for DMX. This time we're going to need the DMX Engine. When you enable that, automatically the DMX protocol will also be enabled. You also want to enable the DMX Fixtures. These three are the plugins that we need. Once they are enabled, restart the engine and come back into your projects. We can now go ahead and right-click into the Content Browser, go over to DMX right there, and choose DMX Library and give that a name like for instance, DMX Library. There we go. Open that file up by just double-clicking onto it and right in here, we can insert all of the lights that we have; the real lights into Unreal Engine. But first things first, we're going to have to make a few settings to the project settings. I click on this button right here, which is going to bring you to the project settings. By the way, this is the same window. Then if you would go over to Settings here on top and then choose Project Settings, it's the same window, however, if you press here on that green button, it's already going to bring you to the right page from the left side. What I want to do here is set an input and an output. I'm going to click here on the plus for both the input and the output. Let's open it up, these two indexes. From here you can select the protocol. I am working with Art-Net, but some of you might be working with sACN. SACN is more broadly used. That's going to depend on what you have in your studio. Again, if you know what DMX is, this totally makes sense to you. But I have Art-Net here at my studio, so I'm just going to leave it at that. Then the Network Interface, and you want to select your own computer's IP address. I have seen cases in which the DMX won't work if you select a local host, one of these two IP addresses, which should also work but for some reason, it doesn't always do that. Just select your own computer's IP address, which is 10.0.0.60 in my case. I'm already going to do the same thing here for the output, set that to 60 as well. The last important setting is the Universe. I know that some people might start from Universe 0, unfortunately Unreal Engine 5 does not use 0. Like if you change that to 0, it won't work, it will change itself back to 1. Keep that in mind. If you have set your universe in your studio to 0, you want to change that to 1 if you want to use that as well inside Unreal Engine. Mine is set to 1, so I'm going to leave it at that as well as the output. Everything has been said, this is the only thing that we have to do. We can now just close that window. You'll see these two settings here appear in the Library Settings tab. We can now go over to Fixtures Type. This right here is where we are going to define all of our fixtures, just like in my iPad right here. Like here on the side, these are all of my lights, all of my fixtures. If I tap on any of them, you will see that these sliders change and that's because well, every light has different settings. Like some of these might be RGB lights, so they have more control, some might only have one color, some might have effects or something like that. The more things a light can do, the more sliders you have or better set the more channels you have. Here in Unreal, we're going to click on New Fixture Type and we can give that a name. For example, that's going to be here, let's call that Aputure_600D. That's actually the light that is standing right there that's illuminating me right now. On the bottom, we'd have to choose what kind of light that is like, is that a static light or maybe it's a moving headlights, like one of those lights which can move around for those dancing shows and such, or a strobe or whatever. But this time it's just a static light. We're going to keep it simple for this lesson. Then the next column is going to be to add a mode, so just click on that. With the mode we span a channel. If you are running an RGB light, you're going to need three channels at least, so red, green, and blue. But in this case we're just going to work with the Deming function, which is just going to make the intensity bright or dark. Now so in most cases you can actually just leave that at auto. The last thing we have to do is add the functions, so click on the Add Function button right here. For the first channel, what does it have to do? Well, it has to dim. If you're going to add more functions in here, it's going to add a second channel and by having here the auto channels span active, it's just going to adapt itself to how many channels or functions that you are using. But for this example, let's delete here the second function as we don't need that. It has been set to dimmer and that's basically all there is to it. The last thing we have to do is go into the Fixture Patch. On the right side are all of my available channels, and on the left side we have to add the fixtures to the fixture patch in which we can find the aperture 600_D light, which I've set before and by default might set itself to channel 1. But I'm going to look here in my iPad what channel it actually is. Actually, you need to look at your light at which channel that has been set. But for convenience, I'm going to look into my iPad and I can see that my dimming function here is set to Channel 60. I'm going to change that as well in here. Just drag that over To channel 60. Where is it? Right there. That is it. We can now go ahead and save that library and close that window. Now right here on top, you'll find a new DMX button. If you click on that, you can actually open up the channel monitor. By opening this window, you can see which channels are already active. As you can see, I've got much more lights here going on in the studio. But if we are going to change this value here of the intensity, now you should be able to see, there we go, 60. You can see it change in value. That means that the reading of the Art-Net's protocol here is working. Great. Now, how can we control a light in the scene? Let me just close here the monitor and we're going to add a new light into the scene because unfortunately, it doesn't work out of the box with normal lights. We're going to make use of existing DMX lights. Now, where are they? They are hidden within the engine folder structure. That should be somewhere right here behind me. But for convenience, let's look into Content Browser. I'm going to click here on the Settings button in my Content Browser and from there I'm also going to enable to show engine content. If I do that, you'll see that a new folder will pop up in here on the left sides, the engine folder, something that we normally shouldn't worry much about, but in their sits also the plugin folders. Again, I'm going to go to Settings, and now we can also enable the Show Plugin Content, which is going to show you another folder within the engine folder, which is called Plugins. We should find somewhere in here, the DMX folder, right here. DMX fixtures contents. Let's expand that as well. Right here we can find LightFixtures. Here we can find some blueprints. We have a moving headlights, we have a moving matrix, we've going to moving mirror, we've got a static light and that's actually the one that we're interested in. We have a StaticMatrix, a Static Strobe, and a wash light. Whenever light that you're using, you can just pick from here and drag that into your scene like that. Maybe here in a saloon, we are going to give a show where we have some cowboys perhaps like singing, playing the guitar, just having a good time. I want to have the spotlight right here, perhaps on this chair. Because maybe the cowboy who does guitar is going to sit here in that chair, so we have this nice light here set up. With that light now into our outliner, it is a blueprint. That means all the functionality has already been written for us. We don't have to do anything except for going into the details panel, locate the DMXLibrary in which you either want to go back to your content browser up here and just drag that DMX Library in there. Or you can also located it here from that drop-down menu DMX Library, the one that we have just created. The library has been loaded in. The next thing that we have to do is tell this light specific what light it is because we know that we can assign multiple lights into our DMX Library. It works just the same as the iPad app right here, which is by the way, Luminair or like a DMX control board in which you also need to set all of your fixtures in. Let's click on here and we should find our Aperture_600 D in there. Select that, and that's it. Seriously, that's it. How can we see this is working now? Well, we can do that by pressing "Play". Again, we have to go into simulation mode, and we've talked about that before as well. If everything went well, we can now take our iPads, control the real lights right here, but at the same time, we can also control the virtual light in Unreal Engine. Let's change the value here. Let's make it dark. Let's turn off that light. Look at that, my light here is off and Unreal Engine light is also off. How awesome is it to be alive right now, guys? Let's pump up the light, make it super bright. Wow, that is bright. But also look at that, in my saloon how bright it is in there. Wow. [LAUGHTER] This is really cool guys. If you know what DMX is you've already been working with that for years, probably like a new world is going to open for you right now because it's as simple as that. If you have RGB lights laying around, if you have moving lights or anything like that, you can also hook up your virtual lights up to your Art-Net or sACN. No, does that mean that we can also create fake lights? Yes, of course. You can of course create dummy lights on your iPad or on your laptop, whichever thing you're using to control your lights and you're going to set it to a channel that doesn't exist in your real studio. You can just fake lights, whatever you like. Now, they won't affect your real lights here in the studio, but they will affect your lights in Unreal Engine if you set the channels correctly. That is in a nutshell what DMX is about and again, if you don't know what DMX is, then this might be very complicated to you. But if you do know what it is, then you know instantly how to go further with this because it's the exact same thing as you would do on your iPad or on your computer or whatever, which you use to control your lights. With this lesson, we're already coming to the end of this class. That's a shame. Now there's one last lesson that I've left for you guys, or I say like a practical lesson. That is where we're going to bring everything that we've learned together into a final scene capture. We're going to do live camera tracking in front of the green screen, and at the same time we are going to control the lights using DMX and all of that while recording that, putting it into a level sequence. Then we're going to end this class by rendering it out as a movie, which is of course, the whole reason why we're here. Thank you so much for watching again, I'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Virtual Production Example: Hey, guys. Welcome to one of your last lessons of this class. I know it's a little bit sad, but this one is very fun actually. We're going to bring together some of the things that we've learned throughout this class and put that into a real life situation. So the idea now is to use the iPhone not as a controller, just use it as a tracker. Also, the DMX, we're going to control that as well as we're filming myself infront of that green screen. We're going to record with a real camera over there in the Green Screen Studio at the same time record an Unreal Engine and then afterwards a post-production like an after effects or premiere. We can lay those two shots on top of each other and do the green queue. Let's go inside Unreal Engine and set everything up, and this is going to be a little bit of a recap because we've done this before. Go over to the Window on top. We're going to go over to virtual production and then choose Live Link because the first thing that we want to do is link the iPhone to the engine. Go over to Source here on top. Go to Message Bus source and your iPhone should appear in here. If it doesn't, then that means that you haven't opened up the app yet, so do that. We're going to go over to the live link VCAM app. Tap on that and as you're doing it, you should see your iOS device pop in in the Live Link Window. Click on that to connect it. That's the only thing that we have to do. We can now just close the live link window. Next thing we're going to do is go to the Add Window here on top of the menu, then go to Virtual Production and we're going to take the virtual camera 2 actor. Bring that into the scene and perhaps move that up a little bit. It's not going to be that important because after all, the iPhone is going to take over its movement. Now in order for the iPhone to take over the virtual camera's movement, we need to connect them or linked them together. With that camera selected, go into your details panel and you want to click on VCAM, which holds all of those options. Here on top you should see virtual camera and you want to enable that. There we go. Then we can link here our iPhone to that camera, so from that drop-down menu choose your iPhone. Now one last thing that we have to do, that is scroll down and under output. We need to make this active too. As we do that, we can then click here on the "Connect" button. There we go. We should be connected to the Unreal Engine and your tracking should all work. Now since we're only going to use the iPhone as a tracking device, we don't need all of these controls in here and everything. So what I'm going to do actually now is simply deactivate that option. There we go. You'll find that we get this reconnecting pop-up right here. Don't worry, your tracking is still working. Let me just go out of the pilot view and you should see your camera floating around in here. There we go. Automatically, it will also create a bookmark. Don't worry about that, I'm actually just going to delete that in the scene. As we're moving around the iPhone, the camera is being tracked as well. Now it's our turn to place this iPhone in the Green Screen Studio and I'm going to need Janick for that. So you can go ahead, grab that iPhone, and actually place it inside of the camera. We have a special bracket for that and that way we can mount it sturdy onto the camera. As Janick is doing that, you might notice that our camera is gone. Where is it? Well, that's because he ran away with the iPhone, which is controlling the camera of course. I'm going to click on the virtual camera and try to find it. It's right there, apparently, in the dark. You know what, let me set my lit view back to unlit so that I can better see my camera. It's outside. Oh, wow. Then a couple of things that I want to do. In order to take over the control because that's essentially what I'm going to do, reposition that camera, we're going to have to disable a few things. With that camera selected, go back to your VCAM and we're going to scroll down because there are a couple of options that we want to disable for the iPhone to control, which we can all find back in the modifier stack. Right in here you should find an option called, where is it, thumbsticks. You want to disable that. As well as under I think index 5 you'll find that the lens options, I'm going to disable that as well. What that allows me to do is just select the root virtual camera here on top and set a focal length for myself. That is one thing that we can do. For instance, set that to 20 or something. [NOISE] I can go into the pilot view. Automatically I've gone into there, so I can now just right-click and use the worst keys to move around and actually create a framing that I like. Let me just set it back to lit to get a better understanding of the scene. There we go. It's a framing like this, should work. I think this looks pretty good. I'm going to eject from the pilot view and have a look. My camera should be at the right spot. That is perfect. Now something else that we want to do is also set the focus. We're going to set the focus where the actor is going to stand, but where exactly is that going to be? Well, we're going to use a little trick for that. I'm going to ask Janick right now to take off the iPhone from the bracket off the camera and actually place it on the floor where I am going to stand later. You can see here that the camera it's floating like a ghost around. There we go. It sits now on the floor. Now I'm going to mark that point, which we can actually do by creating a simple shape. Go up to the Adds menu here on top, go to Shapes and take something like the cylinder, dragging it to your scene on top of your camera. I'm going to decrease the size a little bit of that one, but I do want to extend that in height. There we go. This here is a spot where I'm going to stand. We've marked it. Now we can ask Janick to take the iPhone back off the ground and position it back into the bracket of the camera. You can see there the camera following that beautifully. It's always funny to see that happen. Now if we select the camera we should see the cylinder in our shots and we can go over to the focus settings which should be right here, focused methods, and we can set that to manual focus distance. Let me zoom in a little bit more in into that cylinder. Take the picker and let's pick the cylinder like that, which should put the cylinder into focus or a spot where I'm going to stand. Now one problem here, guys, when we're going to render out this movie that cylinder will also be in my shot, which we don't want to happen. So what we're going to do here is select that cylinder, go over to the Details panel and I'm going to search for a hidden in. There should be an option called under rendering actor hidden in game. Enable that and now we're telling Unreal that object should stay in there whenever we're working inside of Unreal, but once we're going to render you have to hide data object. You can actually already do that in the editor view if you press the G key to hide all of these billboards right here. That cylinder will also be seen as a billboards and it will be hidden from the editor. There we go. You can always toggle back and forth between these two views. Everything is set. We can now start recording. In order to do that, we're going to have to go over to the Window on top, go to cinematics and choose the tape recorder if that Window wasn't already open. Inside the tape recorder, we need to define which things need to be recorded, which obviously is going to be the virtual cameras. Let's drag that into the tape recorder, as well as the DMX which we're also going to control during the live recording. Now, we can't just drag in the static headlight in there because that is not actually being animated. It's actually more our DMX library which is going to do all of the numbers and the magic and all. We want our DMX library to be inside of the tape recorder. Now to do that, we're going to have to click here on "Source", from which we can also select an actor from the outliner, but we can also select here the DMX library. Just select that and just like with the static headlight, we need to select the library and to find which library that we want to work with because yes, we can make multiple libraries. We've got only one which we created in the previous lessons, so you just select that DMX library and finally add all the fixtures which were defined within the library here into the tape recorder. There it is, the aperture 1200D. We can now go ahead and press the record button inside Unreal Engine and I'm going to ask Janick to do the same thing, but then with this real live camera. As we're now both recording, I'm also going to ask him to bump the camera a little bit as it's standing on a tripod because that way, we're getting a synchronization point. We see a bump in the real camera, but with that tracker mounted on top of it we also see that back in our Unreal Engine shot. That is a real good point to sync the two shots together. Now it's time to go into the Green Screen Studio. Let's do that guys. Let's go over to the Green Screen Studio. No, I'm lying. This is a saloon. [LAUGHTER] That's right. I'm standing in the saloon right now, guys, and I hope that they're serving good drinks at the bar. I do hope so. Oh, no, a spotlight. Now I don't want to stand in the spotlight. I'm a little bit shy when it comes down to spotlights, so please turn that off. Thank you. You know what, I actually feel much more safe for inside the engine, so let me just go back to the Unreal Engine. You can hit the "Stop" button, Janick, and I will do the same thing right here inside Unreal Engine. Hit the "Stop" button. There we go. Now, where is that recording? You should see a pop-up right here, which if you click on "Browse 2" will automatically bring you to it. But it's now faded out, it's gone, so let's manually go to the folder where our recording is in. That is in the content browser. I'm going to go over to cinematics, a folder that has automatically been created by the tape recorder, open up takes and you should find that today date in here in which you've gathered all of your recordings. We only have one, which is Scene 1. Here it is, the level sequence. We can just double-click on that to open it up. Here it is, guys. If you scrub through, which you can see the entire camera motion happening, which is really good, but the DMX isn't working and that is because we need to be in simulation mode. Go on top here, we've seen that previously. We need to be in simulation mode to see the DMX. Let's also select the camera cuts view. There we go. Now if we play this back we should see our DMX working. Janick was here, I think, fumbling around a little bit. Let me just scrub a little bit forward in time. I think right here should be the right point, right cam inside of the frame. Here I'm talking about how nice it is in the bar with the drinks and everything. Somewhere right here, the spotlight should go on and I'd probably be a little bit afraid. I'm a little bit shy when it comes down to spotlight, so spotlight goes back off and I walk out of the frame. That recording went really well. We had the camera shaking there and we've got the DMX working, so that is great. Now it's time to render out this movie that we've recorded so that we can place our green screenshot on top of there, do the green keying, and have our final video. But that's for the next lesson in which we'll discover how rendering an Unreal Engine works. 24. Movie Rendering: Rendering, the last step of the engine and the last step of your creative process. In this final lesson, we're going to export our creation into an actual movie so that we can share it with friends or upload to the web. Going over to my Content Browser, we have a few sequences. Right here is the folder where we have the Life Animation Sequence and My Animation. Maybe I should have named them better. But anyways, these are the two level sequences that we created previously in this class. The first one was, My Animation. When I double-click on that, you'll actually see that we can't really play this back anymore and most of these layers are now in red. That is because we have the wrong level open. These were created I think in Lesson 18. If we go back to Content Browser, go to the levels where I have all the different levels in here and they are numbered by each lesson, so when you download this project, you can also easily open up each level specifically to the lesson. Anyways, I'm going to open up Lesson 18 right here. Double-click on that. There we go. Now let's go back to sequences and open up my animation and now you will see that everything is working. We can enable here the Viewport for the Camera Cuts and playback the animation that we created previously. Even though you can have multiple timelines or multiple sequences, they are always bound to a certain world or to a certain level. When you create a new level and a new sequence that is built within that level, you have to make sure to always open up that level. Now we have this beautiful animation right here as well as the other life animation, and we also did that real-life recording with the green screen studio over there. We want to render those out, export them as an actual video. How do we do that? Well, there are two ways of doing that. First, we go back to the sequencer. From here, we can actually find a button on top that says "Render this movie to a video". Now, when you're doing that, make sure to first click here on these three dots, open that menu, and make sure to choose Movie Render Queue. Now I believe that in the future they are going to remove the Movie Scene Capture because we don't actually use that. It's a very quick way of rendering something, but we can't really get the good quality out of that option. Make sure that Movie Render Queue is enabled right here and then you can click on that icon. A second way is also by going up to the menu on top, Window, go to Cinematics, and there you also have the Movie Render Queue right here. If you open it up through here, you actually have an empty render queue, but if you open that window up through this button right here, then it will add this sequence automatically into the queue already. If you want to add some more levels sequences in here, you can click on the Render button on top and then you can select the sequences that you would like to add to the queue, such as the Life Animation. Let's also add that one and also this one here, the Scene 1, Take 1 level sequence, which was created with a tape recorder from the previous lesson. We've got three sequences in the movie Render Queue so that means that we can actually render three different videos out from this. They're very important. Like I said before, every sequence here is linked to a different level. Of course, that's not always the case, but the way that I worked, it is that way because I created a new level for every new lesson for you to easily follow better. For my Life Animation, I know that we actually worked in Lesson 19. Then for the Scene 1, Take 1 capture, that was with the last lesson, so that's going to be Lesson 23 down here. That's going to be very important that you set the map correctly. Now it's going to ask us for the settings. Of course, just like any other program where we can render out from, it's going to ask us what format do you want? What's the resolution, the frame rate, and all those stuff. Well, for that we're going to have to click here on Unsaved Config. Just click on that, which is going to open up a new window and from here we can set the settings. First of all, comes the export format, which is by default set to JPEG which we can change by going up to the menu on top. Click on settings and add any settings in there that we would like to change or add. There are mostly two different settings that I would look at. One is either the Apple ProRes and the other is the EXR Sequence. Now, normally you should always take that ESR Sequence. EXR is a raw photo format. That means we're going to render it out as a photo sequence just like if you would render to a PNG sequence. You get the highest possible quality, plus the big benefit of exporting to a photo sequence is that, whenever your render crashes at, let's say frame 55, that you can restart to render starting from frame 55 and you don't need to render those frames before. That's definitely going to be very useful if you have to render for hours or even for days. Apple ProRes is a great alternative, but keep in mind that if your render crashes, you need to re-render your entire movie because you are exporting it as a single movie file. I oftentimes take a ProRes format if I know that my export will just take around five minutes or 10 minutes or something. For this example, I will just also take the Apple ProRes right here. That means that I can either disable the JPEG sequence. I can enable that as well so that we have double exports. That's up to you. Or we can also just delete that export setting. That's the same as disabling it all. Moving on. We have set the format that is good within the Apple ProRes. We have some more options such as the codec, for example. If 422 is enough for you, then you can just pick that. Next up we're going to add a very important setting to our conflict right here. But back to the plus settings button on top and this time we're going to add the anti-aliasing option to it. Now, anti-aliasing is going to give us a couple of options. First of all, we can overwrite the default anti-aliasing. Check that box and from there we can choose a different method. But these here on the bottom are all real-time anti-aliasing methods, and those are great for playing games. But when you are going to render out your movie, you don't need to have that real-time capability. I mean, you can go grab a coffee while you are rendering. That's the reason why we're going to set that to none and define a temporal sample count of our cells. For instance, 64 sample counts. This is what's used the most if your rendering is taking way too long. You can change that to something like 32, which is still pretty good. For the sake of this lesson, I will also just put it at 32. That is anti-aliasing, a very important setting. But then we have one more super important setting, which can be found down here. All the way in the bottom we have the Use Camera Cut for Warm-up. Before I'm going to explain what this is, let me first expand the advanced options and talk about the render warm-up counts. By default, it's set to 32. We can increase that or even bring that all the way down to a zero, which I would not recommend. You can just leave that at 32. Basically what that means is that the engine will render the first 32 frames but don't actually export that. Why is that important? Well, there are so many things going on inside the engine such as lumen, which needs some time to make sure that everything looks right. If you export your movie without the warm-up, you might see flickering going on in your scene or even your camera position might be completely off somewhere. That's the crazy thing about Unreal Engine and that's why it needs this warm-up. That's good that we have that set right here, but then there is one more important setting. Let me just make a little bit more space here. We have different camera cuts here in our sequence. Now, with every camera cut, that same problem would occur again. If we cut here from the balcony camera over to the stairs camera, we might see a sudden flicker for a couple of frames. Your lighting is going to act very weird or even your camera position might be through the floor or something. That's something you never know with Unreal, but luckily the option is there and we just have to enable to Use Camera Cuts for Warm-Up. Now it's going to pre-render every single camera cut here for 32 frames. Those were the most important settings. Now let's go to the last thing here, output, which is going to be pretty self-explanatory. We can set a resolution, for instance. Let's go for a 4K resolution. There we go. We can choose where we would like to export that. Let me just choose my desktop. There we go. Finally, we can give it a name or just going to take the sequence name. Let's just leave it at that. That's fine for me. We can set a custom frame rate if we want to. We can enable that right here. Set something else like 30 frames per second. Perhaps you want to have some handlebars. That is all up to you. But finally, something pretty important here, and that is Use Custom Playback Range. If this is disabled, it will just render out to the entire sequence. If you have that enabled, you can actually set a starting frame count. For example, we want to start at frame 55 because maybe your exporting was crashed at that point, so you can continue from frame 55. But for now, I'm just going to disable that option and just to render out entire sequences. Everything is looking good. The last thing that I want to do is go up here to the top right and say Save Preset. I'm going to click here and save as preset. That's going to be a preset file. I'm just going to call it ProRes Rendering. Hit "Save" and then hit "Accept" here on the bottom. You'll see here that the preset has been added to my first-level sequence. We can also set the same preset for the other sequences, so this one and this one as well. That is all there is to it. We can now hit the "Render Local" button to render on your own computer and not use a network or something. That's what the remote setting is for. Click on that and you'll start to see a preview if everything went right. This is the hard part of the engine. We have to keep an eye on it, that it won't crash, that it won't turn red, that we don't see smoke. That is going to be important. But you'll see here now a preview. This will always be a low-quality preview that you see here. If there is anything looking weird , don't worry too much. Wait until the end and you'll see how your final export looks. Right here on the bottom left, you can see the progress. We are a two percent of the first level sequence. Here you can see the sub-sample, that 32 anti-aliasing that we've set. So for every frame, it's going to make 32 calculations to get good anti-aliasing, and we get an overall view of at which frame count that we are currently at. That's it. Now just wait it out and drink a coffee or something. Where is my mug? Right here. It's empty. Let me just grab a new coffee. It's always dangerous outside of the engine, so make sure to put on your helmet. [NOISE] 25. Conclusion: [MUSIC] I'm pretty sad right now, but I'm also happy. It's the last lesson of this class, so I'm going to have to say goodbye to you, but at the same time, I'm super proud of you. You've learned so many new things within this class, just think about it. You are now ready to start creating stuff inside Unreal Engine, that is just so cool. Let's take a look at where we left off in the previous lesson, we rendered our three different levels sequences, and here they are on our desktop. Let's have a look at that animation with those three camera cuts. Here it is. [MUSIC] Now I think that came out pretty good and it's something that you can do as well. You've learned all of these techniques in this class and you're probably curious as well to see that live drinking shot. Well, here it is. That's right. I'm standing in the saloon right now, guys. I hope they're serving good drinks there at the bar. I do hope so. Oh no, spotlights. I don't want to stand in the spotlight, I'm a little bit shy when it comes down to spotlight, so please turn that off. Thank you. You know what, I actually feel much more safer inside the engine so I'm just going to go back to the Unreal Engine. I'm going to be honest about this one, it doesn't look super good. The biggest reason for that is the tracker. We're using our iPhone. Just think about it. Professional studios use equipment that costs over $100,000 just for tracking alone. Obviously, your phone can't do the same thing, but it's a very cool gadget. It allows us to super easily start doing camera tracking, and it's a great way to learn about the camera systems inside Unreal Engine. If you have an iPhone, definitely try and use that as a camera tracker, if not on a green screen, then definitely just use that to add some natural handheld motion into your shots. Now it's up to you, so put on your helmet, because you are going to work, you are going to create either an outdoor landscape or an interior using 3D assets from the Quixel library. Make sure to add some virtual cameras in there, add some keyframes, and make three, four shots or something, a nice level sequence. Render that all out as a movie and publish it here to Skillshare for me to watch so that I can give you feedback on your work. If you dare to tackle some of the more advanced techniques, such as live drinking, perhaps live camera control, DMX, well, then definitely try and do that. But before you do, make sure you put on your goggles, super important. Now, the engine is going to get pretty hot, so you definitely want to put on your gloves. Super important, you don't want to burn yourself, do you? Now you are ready. You are ready to enter the engine, the Unreal Engine 5. Jump in it, create stuff, and share it with the world, but most importantly, have fun while doing that. Thank you so much for watching and as always, stay creative. The engine, it's mine. [LAUGHTER] [MUSIC]