Unreal Engine 5 + Midjourney & Skybox AI

1. Introduction: Welcome to this course entirely dedicated using Unreal Engine 5 with AI tools like MidJourney and Skybox AI. We can't stop the changes happening around us, but we can expand our skills and take advantage of the opportunities that new technologies offer. Before we start, here is a quick overview of the course structure. We'll begin with the fundamentals of Midjourney. You will learn how to generate AI images and use the tool effectively on Discord and the website. Next, we'll install Unreal Engine five, download marketplace assets, and explore the navigation system to streamline your workflow. Next, you will learn how to bring AI generated images to life by turning them into cinematic shots within Unreal Engine five. You will then learn the fundamentals of Skybox AI and how to enhance your scenes with HDRI textures directly inside UE5. Thank you for choosing one of our courses. Feel free to ask any questions. We are always here to help our students and constantly update our courses. See you in the next chapter. 2. Fundamentals: Welcome in this Unreal Engine 5 Midjourney and Skybox AI course. I wanted to tell a few words about the midjourney itself. Midjourney is an AI power tool that creates stunning images from text descriptions you simply type what you want to see and Midjourney generates a unique artwork based on your words it's very popular among artists designers and anyone who enjoys visual creativity is widely used for fantastical landscapes futuristic designs and surreal artwork, but it can also generate almost anything. Whether you are artists or you are just curious Midjourney makes it easy to turn ideas into beautiful visuals in just seconds. You can see examples of some of my pictures created in midjourney by using different prompts you can use midjourney on the discord as well you have right now option to use it directly on the midjourney page we are going to create images in both ways so first we start with the discord and then I'm going to show you how you can use the midjourney page because it has very nice new functions. Okay let's start with the Google I'm going to search for a discord to work with midjourney on discord you need to download discord on your PC and just follow the instruction. Once you will log in you will see the specific discord tap as well you can go to the majority directly this is how the starting page will look so you can sign up or obviously you can log in if you have the account. You can go with the Google or it will ask you to go with the discord so actually. Even if you are going to use midjourney with discord just to download your pictures probably you need to use the page as well. And majority from time to time has some option for free generation but mostly actually paid software of course I'm not asking you to pay for it I have the standard plan. Which is quite enough for most of the artists probably and you can notice you have different type of the options here like fast GPU time also relax time its difference is just in the time of creating your images so the basic plan probably would be the best to start and just to get familiar with the software right, if you wanna create much more the standard plan is absolutely enough in most cases. Okay if you go to the discord you will see on the left this midjourney tab so if you click it you will notice a lot of different channels right you can start creating anything instantly if you go for example to some of these newcomer rooms like these newbies. But if you have let's say the standard plan you can do something else actually you can create your own server so once you click the green plus icon you can select the create server. I'm going to select create my own for me and my friends now you need to name it so let's just name it MJ course and once click create you will have your own server and you can use this server as your personal midjourney experience so how can you do that go back to the midjourney and on the right side you will notice the midjourney bot okay I already added to one server. So I will see option add app otherwise you will see add server so once you click it you will notice option to add to server and all you have to do is just select the new created server continue. Probably you will stick with default settings authorize and if you are human of course it will ask you to confirm that information basically you are good to go and now if you go to your own server it will be basically like your own private channel right and the way you're going to use the minority is by prompting specific comments so if you type slash you will notice imagine blend describe settings and info and I'm going to explain all of them in the details in the next lectures. 3. Discord version: Welcome back, in this lecture we'll focus on using discord with my journey first select option settings so slash s settings when you when you press enter you will see different options we can have control over, right? So first one is the row mode second is the stylized level of your picture so you can go from very low to very high as well you can use specific prompt if you look you will see this minus minus, s, space, 50 which means is probably is the stylized med okay also you have the personalization options which is mostly available for paid plans. You have public mode you can disable that if you have the private server also you have the variation mode and on the bottom we'll have the turbo mode fast mode and the relax mode it depends of your plan in most cases fast mode is absolutely enough. OK and let's just try to create very random simple picture right as well I'm going to use this midjourney model 6 you can use different models like the older one as well you have the Niji model which I'm going to show you in a second which can create anime, cartoon more likely styles of the images but we'll start with the newest one which is 6.1 okay and just type slash imagine and now you will see this prompt window and here you can create your prompt so it's up to your imagination. You can create basically anything you want however there are some rules how to describe it so try to be very precise with your prompt for example if you want to have more detailed pictures it needs to be very clear information for the majority AI so for example here I want a cat plays football right that's quite white but in the same time I want to have this cat on a specific environment so I typed on Wembley Stadium and there is just one variation I want to add, I want specific ratio of our image so how you can do it you need to create the space between the last prompt. word double minus, minus, ar which is for screen ratio and then just type the ratio you want like 4 to 3 maybe 2 to 3 I'd like to have 16 to 9 and once you press enter the Midjourney will start to create your image and you are going to get 4 different version of your image and we can work with each of them later and just modify them, create the variation of them or maybe just upscale them and download it's just up to you okay so this is what we are going to get it's quite interesting however we selected the Model 6 so it will be most likely more realistic style of the picture. Okay there we go once you click it you will have the preview of them as you can see I didn't specify the ball I just decided to type football so Midjourney didn't actually create exactly what I wanted but that's the way how it works right so what we can do now we can go back to the settings and I'm going to change the model to Niji Model V6 just to show you how different will be the creation of the picture right now so we can just copy the prompt including our screen ratio parameters just paste it and when you press enter it will create our new version of four pictures but this time they will be created with this Niji Model V6 so let's just take a look okay it looks quite interesting the first image actually include the Wembley Stadium however again I didn't specify so it's kind of created the football but not really like European football but more like a style of the American football and now you have different options so below your images you will see U and V options the U is basically upscaling so U1 upscales picture 1 U2 picture 2 etc second option is the variation so let's try that one so when I click the variation midjourney will basically create the 4 variation of the picture you selected so in that case I selected the first picture as well you have option to rerun the whole creation OK let's take a look it's actually quite interesting there's still a lot of let's say hallucinations for example we have T-shirt for this cat something we didn't ask for also you can see the preview in the browser of this picture and you can zoom in to see the quality of it it's very hard to get the perfect picture on the first try so usually you will create few different version of the same image before you will be happy with the result so let's say I'm going to upscale the last version of it and once you upscale click the upscale you will see different option again it will have option to vary you have option to upscale subtle or more creative as well you have option to zoom out that's something I wanted to show you because that's very interesting so what Midjourney will create it will basically zoom out the picture and we'll create the area around our picture so we'll try to compile it into one picture similar way like you can do it right now for example in the Photoshop software you can do the same with the left right up and bottom side of the picture as well you can like any creation so you will have easier access later in your library. So as you can see this actually created very interesting version I like the first one just the logo is not really good part but it is as it is as well we can vary so let's try the vary strong option and let's just take a look what we are going to get as a final result. OK that's quite interesting as you can see we have a lot of hallucination the position of the ball is incorrect but again you need to try different prompt you need to be more precise to get exactly what you want in the next lecture I will show you how to use blend and describe option which is quite interesting so you can use the real picture and for example blend them with the version you will create in midjourney as well I prepared the list of the most important parameters which you can use at the end of your prompt and see you in the next lecture. 4. Website version: Welcome back I hope you created really nice images now let's go for the process how we can use the real pictures so we can select for example the pexels.com page which has a lot of free images I will use the 16:9 pictures so let's select something which is horizontal and for that specific example I will try to work with Forest Misty Forest picture okay so let's just look for something interesting that one is really nice this is also interesting but we need probably something better OK maybe that one OK let's try to download this one I don't want it to be too complicated so as for example you will notice how actually Midjourney is going to use this reference so what we can do first we can select option to describe and now you'll have the image or the link option so we are going with the image because we just downloaded the image right and just select our image then you need to click somewhere inside the prompt and press enter Midjourney right now we'll use our picture or real life photo to create the Midjourney type of the description including the camera types you see the parameters like AR we have basically the perfect description of this picture and not just one we have 4 version of them and how you can use it first of all you can use any of them and just create the your own variation of this picture inside the Midjourney as well you can add some extra parts of the prompt to this one generated base of the realistic picture so let's say I'm going to use number No.3 looks quite interesting maybe No. 2 yeah let's go with No. 2 as you can see we have option imagine this and now you can type different settings but I just forgot to change one options I go back to the settings already you know how to go to the settings and let's just change the ninja mode to the more realistic model V6 also I will try stylize very high so it will be more like video game style of the picture and now I can add some kind of the description which I want as you can see because I went with stylized high we have this minus minus s 750 option this is the way you can create this parameter as well directly inside your prompt so you don't have to go to the settings options so I added like let's say create Unreal Engine 5 cinematic style and I want to have the lumen lighting okay and just submit now we need to give Midjourney some time to create our picture again we are going to get four different variation based on your prompt but as well Midjourney is taking this picture as a reference so as you can see we went with stylized high so it's not super realistic it's more like a painting let's say maybe like video games kind of the graphic but I really like this style so let's open it in the browser we can zoom in and just like that in just few seconds we created four different very nice variation of the forest scene so let's try again I'm going to copy the whole prompt slash imagine paste and I'm going to add probably something more I want to have it more realistic so let's just type photorealistic cinematic style Unreal Engine 5 photorealistic as well I want to decrease the stylize to 250 OK it's similar but actually quite different style of the colors and of the picture itself so I will need to create more variation of our picture to get exactly what I want also there is one option if you click that icon it will move you directly to the Midjourney page obviously you need to log in before and here you will see the window create in that window you will see your option to download your picture right I wanted just quickly to show you if you are let's say happy with the picture you can upscale click the option to go to the page and just directly download your picture from there so let's say we're going to upscale picture No. 2 okay that one and you can just click Download Image if you decide it's good enough okay and what I want to show you next is actually the blend option so what I'm going to do I'm going to use the first realistic image as a reference and then I'm going to add the second pictures which I just downloaded and I will blend two of them together and let's see what we are going to get as a final effect so you can see you can select the image 1 or image 2 to add to the blend so the first image will be likely the base of your creation what I'm expecting is more realistic version of our picture but still I want to keep it in some kind of the stylize okay it looks much much better it looks very nice the only problem we have is actually the screen ratio as you can see it's not exactly perfect like we wanted but you can modify the picture in Photoshop Canva anywhere you want later still the effect is very good okay great there is one more thing I want to show you you remember I mentioned the remix mode if you select the remix mode and you decide you want to run around the whole prompt and you click that button now you will have option to also modify your prompt before you run your new creation of images so I can type for example people running anything I want actually it will be better to type it somewhere inside the prompt not behind not after our parameters right OK try different options of images and I will see you in the next lecture. 5. Creativity: In this lecture we are going to focus on the midjourney page you know how to use the discord right now so let's take a look at the page at the top we will have the option to explore as well you can see the top likes so any picture you will like directly will be moved to your likes folder and in explore you will notice different artists different people imagination created with the Midjourney if you want to see your own work you have to go to the organized tab and you will notice different options how you can structure your work so you can create for example folders for it as well you can create the profiles and you will have multiple type of the filters for example by the version by the image size as well you can select the one you liked and in the view option you can change between the square or the full image as well you can have the different image size basically the standard option and below that you will notice option chat here you will get some kind of the inspiration you can see different people's prompts for example in general chaos basically we'll see everything created up to the date and as well you can have access to the prompt craft window which is most likely for more advanced users again it's really good for inspiration uh before you start working with Midjourney on your own project then you have something new which is the edit option however to have access to it you would would need to have yearly membership or create 10,000 pictures on the midjourney as well everyone who was subscribed for the last past 12 months will have the access to it unfortunately it's not available for me however it's more advanced option so we not going to um discuss it and as well you have personalized options so if you have different plan I have just standard plan you can create your own midjourney bot and you can train it it can be very useful if you decide to work with Midjourney like something as a very important tool in your pipeline okay just take a look at some pictures which we explore if you look at them you will see three different icons right so one will be used as image prompt you can use the prompt from the image as well you can ... search for this specific image so let's try the last one so once you click now you will see different variation of the same prompt or the same image right in that specific example we have the pyramids so now I selected this image as you can see it was added to my window with the tab so I can use a style reference okay I can also use a character reference in that case we don't have characters so it's not good for us and the last option is use as image prompt and you can add something to your prompt right now and it will be created very similar way like we used the blending mode before so let's say I want to add the forest in autumn to our picture and if you go to the right you will open the window with different options as you remember in discord you have to prompt specific comment here on the page we can actually select the image size let's say we go with 16:9 you have the mode the standard RAW you have version like we remember we selected for example the Niji version you can use also personalized mode and then you have the stylized which is s from 0 to 1000, weirdness that's quite interesting especially if you want to create something very creepy I found it very very good and the last one it will be the variety just like on the discord right and obviously the speed of creating your picture so once we start creating you have to go to the create tab and here you will see your progress okay that's quite interesting so we actually have our autumn forest and we also have the pyramids in our picture right it's just example but you can clearly notice with some tweaks it may works really really good depends what do you need to create for your specific project okay go back to the explore and now we're going to use the second option which is edit prompt and you will see your prompt we'll appear in your window so let's say you will choose that picture you will see black and white brush strokes Studio Ghibli stylized minus minus stylized 250 right so you can actually see the other artist other people prompt and you can use them for your own creation now again you can change the um size of the image you can change all the settings it's just up to you so let's go maybe like 500 stylised and let's just try to create based on the prompt we got from the other creator's picture OK so third one looks very interesting I really like it it looks really really great so as you can see it's very interesting tool and Midjourney has basically infinite options as you can see I created few more pictures below and all of them has their own prompts on the right side and you can use this prompt so all you have to do on the page you don't have to copy you just click on the prompt and it instantly will be added to your window honestly I prefer to use page uh in the past it hasn't been so good mostly discord was like the best solution right now the page is very very good and many artists are using the page actually right now it's very fast we have a lot of the options and I really like the interface okay when you click any picture you created also you notice different options to work with this picture you remember like before so you have this option to vary subtle and strong then we can upscale with creative mode and subtle mode you can also remix your picture with small differences or larger differences okay when you click it you will see the your picture with the small top right top remix and you can just change your prompt then you have the panning option like we discussed on the discord so we can add part of your picture on any side you decide you can zoom then you can also re run and go with the editor if you want so I'm going to show you how it works with editor it's quite similar to the way the AI Photoshop works right now so let's say I want to replace some part of the picture so I go to the editor mode now I'm going to paint it let's say I'm going to paint this trees right with our brush and I want to replace them in our picture so all you have to do is just select the area as well you can add something to your prompt if you want so let's just type deep fog yep should be fine and we can add also the realistic and submit let's see go back to the create tab just to see the result and you can see midjourney is actually replacing the part of the images I selected with the new version of it so we'll have more realistic trees right now yes it looks much better you need to experiment don't be afraid to try different settings just create dozens of different pictures until you'll be happy with the final result and last one is use in prompt just like with the picture you can use the image option add to input as image you can use the style as well you can copy the whole prompt right directly here so as you can see using a page is very fast and is pretty pretty well optimized so now I'm going to use the style let's say of this picture I created before and once I click the prompt also I will add the prompt which is a Moody Misty forest in autumn covered in fog cloudy mist faint atmosphere and I'm going just to change the stylization maybe we can work a bit with the variety and let's let's see what Midjourney will create for us OK I like the result it's very interesting so we have now four different version each of them is interesting they are similar but in the same time much much different I like the way midjourney created it there are some hallucination between the leaves for example if you take a closer look you will notice like the red and the gray one doesn't actually compile perfectly but you can just rerun the whole process you can reedit it again and just do it as long as you were going to get the perfect one okay and for our project specifically I wanted to create something based on cyberpunk so the easiest way to do it I just went to the Google search for any picture from cyberpunk and I just made the screensave of it right and you can paste it if you copy you can just directly paste it into the midjourney in the top so it's going to be used as a reference right so use as image prompt that's the option I select or we can select use as a style reference so in that case let's just use it as a style reference I already created the image so I have already prompt as you can see I need to check the setting 16:9 and just let's just create it okay it's not exactly what I wanted it's much much different however as you can see there is a lot of options you can work with right so before I created quite interesting picture it took me like some time to find the perfect settings for it as you can see Cyberpunk City at night wide camera angle shot from road multiple neon buildings dark shadows UE 5 DSL camera cinematic lighting and they are the previous version and the final version is something like that and that's actually the one I'm going to use in our project as well I wanted to show you different prompt and the options I used to create some interesting pictures: 6. Install Unreal Engine 5: Okay first things first, let's start by downloading Unreal Engine 5. Type Unreal Engine in the Google search bar or simply just go to UnrealEngine.com. On the homepage you will see a download icon in the top right corner, click it to proceed. To get started you need to download the Epic Games Launcher and the download should start automatically, um it may take a while to load. Next just install the Launcher and follow all the instruction. As you can see I already have the Launcher installed So I move on to the next step. On the left side select Unreal Engine, and you will see the latest version during recording the course it was 5.5 you can click on the right top corner to select the version I have two version installed as well you can navigate to library and here you will see the engine version option so you can add any engine version you want in most cases probably you're going to use the latest one when you scroll down you will see and when you click that window um you can also remove it I don't need it anymore and you will also see the options so before you install it you can select what do you need for example if you don't need Android iOS on Linux you can just uncheck these windows as you can see it will save you a lot of space on your drive and a lot of time for your installation. 7. Create UE5 Project: Welcome back now we are going to create the Unreal Engine project so if you open the Epic launcher you will see different version I'm going to use 5.5.1 once you click in top right corner it will launch it okay it will take a moment and you will notice the Unreal Engine standard project creation window so you will have your recent project and what we need we need to go to the games and I want to create a blank project because we are going to start completely from the scratch we don't need the first person or third person option because we're not going to create a game select the blueprint also you can add the starter content the version we need is the desktop obviously select your project name and on the left side you need to select as well your project location I suggest to create separate folder for your Unreal Engine projects that's exactly what I did and once you're ready you can just click create it will take a moment to initialise your project once it's opened you may see the window new plugins are available you can click Manage plugins so you will have direct access to all the plugins probably you're going to use in the project for now I'm going to close it and I want to change the project actually settings so when you scroll down from the edit window you will see the project settings and I'm going to search for SM6 just be sure you have the SM6 selected we're going to need it for our project as well you need to type Lumen and we need to have lumen in global illumination and reflection as well use hardware ray tracing when available just select this option obviously only if this available on your graphic card OK this is how the simple basic empty project looks and we're not going to use that environment on that level but actually we are going to create later our own level but before we need to add some assets to our project so go back to Eoic Launcher click the FAB window and it will move you to the fab.com page okay here we can notice the free assets you can get every month and we need to go to the Unreal Engine settings okay just select Unreal Engine and I want you to add to your project character so type Paragon and you will notice a lot of really good quality ready for game characters they are free to use and they are perfect example to use in our project so we need that one Belica but I already have it in my library I'll show you how it looks if you don't have something in library you will see option add to my library OK so now I'm going to select the character we need because it was added so I will see already view in my library or view in the launcher so let's just select option view in launcher I know it's quite confusing now it moves you back to your epic launcher and what you need to do you see that window FAB library just need to refresh all your asset and when you search for your asset we can type we can type Paragon I believe so you will see I have a lot of this characters because I use them in different project they have very good quality they have animation now you need to click add to the project you will see that kind of the window and you will have option show all projects because sometimes may happen that the asset is not compatible with your project for example asset may be not available with 5.5 doesn't mean you cannot use it so select the project the one you create you want to use it and select the latest version compatible in that case it will be 5.4 and once you click add to the project the process will start the asset will be downloaded I already downloaded before so in my case it will go very fast but usually it will take some time this one for example is 2 gigabyte size so it will take a moment before you can get it inside your Unreal Engine project also you can see the progress in the downloads window when you're ready go back to your project and I see you in the next lecture. 8. UE5 navigation, hotkeys and fundamentals: In this lesson I'll show you how to navigate the Unreal Engine 5. If you already familiar with the controls feel free to skip the basics and jump to the more advanced functions. To move the camera or rotate the view hold down the right mouse button and move it in any direction, if you hold down both the right and left mouse buttons moving the mouse forward - we move the camera up, moving it backwards will lower and moving it left and right will allow you to navigate around the level, as well if you press the left mouse button and move your mouse you can move the camera freely. You can also change the camera speed, click in the upper right corner Another way to control your Movement Speed: Press and hold right mouse button and use "scroll" up to increase - down to decrease. and select the desired speed, however most often you'd use the keyboard and mouse to move. Hold down the right mouse button pess W to move forward, S to move backward, A to move left and D to move right, just like in games. Press E to move camera up and Q to move it down, additionally while holding down the right mouse button you can use the Z key to zoom out or the C key to zoom in. To return to the starting position release the right mouse button. You can also use the mouse scroll to zoom in and out, these are the basic functions for controlling your view, just try to play with it and test it. Okay, now let's move on to some more important program functions, clicking on the file will show you options for creating a new level, saving the level saving your progress, which is important and very good practice. There's also an option to import assets into the project or export the assets from your project. The edit windows contains the frequently used shortcuts, CNTR + Z for undoing action, It also has functions related to objects and projects elements like cut, copy, paste, duplicate or delete. The window tab is essential for creating a workspace, for example the Place Actors window can be activated here. I'll show you in a second, but let's start with the content browser. In the bottom left corner, this is your primary workspace it contains all the folders in the project giving you direct access to all of them. You should see every set of assets we just downloaded you can scroll down, open them Okay to change the icon size click settings on the right side and choose the icon size, you can also pin the content browser permanently. To do this just click Windows again and select Content Browser... Content Browser 1, now you'll have it pin. Similarly you can open and pin the Place Actors window, this will allow you to choose many useful elements such as shapes for blocking. In the cinematics tab you also find um systems like Camara rig crane or camara rig rail, You can see them there. Okay, in the Visual Effects tab you'll find post Process Volume which I will discuss in detail later in the Course and teach you how to use quickly & effectively Sphere Reflection Capture, Sky Atmosphere or Exponential Height Fog all will be covered in the Lighting Chapter, but you'll see how easily you can dramatically change the atmosphere of your scenes. Another important elements is the Outliner window, it contains all the elements used in the given level, every actor used in the level would be automatically visible in the Outliner Window. For example let's choose a basic cube, click and hold the left mouse button, drag the element onto the level area and release the button. The element will be added to your level and will automatically appear in the Outliner. You can also control the visibility as you see of this object by clicking the eye icon, this is very useful when you have elements that consume a lot of GPU power, you can temporarily disable the visibility. Now let's learn how to control this actor we already know how to change the view so let's start with Translate Object used to move the object in the X U and Z planes we also have the rotate and scale option. Click and hold the left mouse button, the selected arrow indicating and specific plane they move the mouse to move your object. We also have snapping function for very precise translation, as you can see it is enabled, let's change the scale and test how it works in practice. Distance in Unreal Engine is measured in meters giving you very realistic and accurate scale. Okay the next option is object rotation we control the change in position exactly the same way as with translation, the last function is scaling the object, you can scale as much as you want just test it. Alright to reset you can use the small arrow in details window which contains all the necessary information about the given actor you see the transfer tab you can also control the object's position in your lever here for example let's change scale to 4, if the lock is checked all values will be scaled automatically, then the rest set okay and we have also two option for controlling the actor's position in the project: Gizmo Local and Gizmo World. Why is this useful? Let's say I change the oject rotation and select the Gizmo Local option I will be able to move our mesh according to objects axis, choosing the World option the world will be relative to our object, test how it works yourself, okay to wrap up let's look at how to control actor using the keyboard press CNTR and then hold down the left mouse button now you can move the object along the X axis the right mouse button for the Y axis and both mouse button for the Z axis. Now let's see what happen when you reset our object position 0 position, as you can see our object has disappeared... however you can easily find that, select cube in the outliner hover over the level and press the F key, you'll be automatically transported to your actor and just to delete the cube press the backspace. Okay let's move on to the next UE5 features, click the icon in the upper left corner, on the workspace which will open Viewport options, here you will find options such as turn in Realtime on - off, shortcut CNTR + R, as well show FPS. Field of View and see how it affects your current view. Another option is Screen Percentage, if you have powerful graphic card you can comfortably work at hundred percent. Okay next explore the View Settings, the standard is perspective which is most commonly used, check out the other option and test them yourself now. Okay another useful functionality is the various scene View Options. Lit shows the scene in your normal light, Unlit without light, useful for heavy project. Okay as you can see the next one is wireframe - probably needs no explanation and personally I like to use as well Detail Lighting as it allows us to check and work on the lightning in our scenes. for example I'm going to use two shapes, see how in this view you can control the light. We basically covered all the basic function that you'll see in this course, of course in the following chapters I will gradually introduce new interesting information that will definitely be useful to you the future, many of these are tips and tricks based on experience which should help save you many hours of work and searching for information in tutorials or forums. Now we begin the best part it should be not only work but also great fun, as it is a creative process, and there is no wrong or incorrect effect here, everything is subjective and as long as you adhere to the basic principles the rest is just a matter of your taste. Okay let's see you in the next lesson. 9. Organize workspace: Welcome back in this lecture we're going to work in unreal open your folder with the project double click your Unreal Engine project file and first what I like to do and which is actually a very good habit I want to organize my workspace if you watch the navigation section or if you are already familiar with Unreal Engine probably you will do exactly the same so on the left side you will see our content browser there is our list of assets so we have this Paragon character as well we need to create the new folder so right click on the content folder create new folder I'm going to call it midjourney because it's the midjourney based project as well you can change the color of the folder it's much easier to navigate later so let's try maybe the red and inside this folder I will create another folder this one let's call it materials and we going to add another folder maps because I want to create the new map new level and inside the material folder we are create another one again I'm going to change the color of the folder will be much easier to work with them later OK and now we start with creating the new level as you can see this is our default random level so how you can create the new level actually it's very easy go to the left top corner click file and you will see option to create the new level and I'm using this option because it will give me opportunity to select one of four option and I want the empty level completely empty level so select click create and you will notice as the name of the level is obviously completely empty right so you can save your progress and the first thing we going to add probably is going to be the lighting and as well I want to save this level inside our maps folder so again click File Save current level s or you can click CTRL + ALT + S and we need to select our maps folder also I need to name it so let's call it MJ_Level_01 keep in mind in unreal we cannot use space so we usually are using the underscore okay this is our level and one more thing if I go to the project settings from the edit tab you will find the maps and modes option and here in default maps you can actually select the created level as the game default map and editor startup map what does it means anytime you open your project you don't have to load your level it will be automatically loaded for you the one you select so it will just save you a lot of time again so now we have our level ready we can start basically slowly populating it so go to the window tap and you will see option environment light mixer it will be actually env. light mixer and here is the fastest and easiest way to create your lighting you can select the view option so standard is minimal we can go let's say with the normal plus advanced maybe we can go with the normal and now we're going to create sky light directional light just by clicking it it will populate your scene with the lighting if you want to learn more about the lighting we have the full course which you can use basically to learn how to work with the lighting so um I'm going to show you some settings and some setups however it's not going to be super advanced as you can see we have directional light which basically works as a sun it imitates the real sun behavior we have also the skylight plus we have volumetric cloud and exponential height fog and you can control each of them each of these actors they are basically called actors lighting actors okay great so we created our first level now I want to add one more folder and this one I'm going to call meshes so while I'm doing it I want to show you how you can use different meshes in your project as well so for example this project is simple example how to create something but maybe you decide to go further and create something much more interesting so it's good to have separate folder when you can put all your meshes like you can download meshes from fab you can download meshes from different marketplaces like for example from Artstation or from Sketchfab as long as they are compatible with unreal you can use them in your project okay as well I'm going to check the frames per second so we can control the optimization of our project as you can see right now we have 60 frames so it's super actually optimized and see you in the next lecture. 10. Master Material: Okay let's continue inside the Unreal Engine open the window tab and you will notice different options first of them is the content browser if you don't see our content browser we can spawn it here also you can see the option to place actors by default it can be in your project if it's not you can open it directly from here uh the Place actor tab is like kind of the essential for the unreal you have a lot of different very important actors like for example shapes etc etera etc I'm going to move it just to the right side so it will be easier to navigate for just for now and I'm going to search for the simple plain uh mesh actually I keep it on the left side yeah it's okay so all you have need to do is just drag and drop into your level and you will notice in the outline this mesh is already added to your level okay I just reset the position the location of this mesh because I want to have it in the middle of our level as well I'm going to select all the lighting actors and when you click that that icon it will create the folder for them let's call the folder lighting okay the plane shouldn't be there so let's just move plane to the MJ level okay and when you click this small arrow you can organize it very quickly so all my lightning actors are inside one folder right now okay as well I can move these widgets down because you know we don't need them and this is our simple plane now what we can do we can check the location of the plane if you press the scope you will notice this is actually the engine starter content and the problem with the starter content is you cannot modify them so what you can do you can drag and drop into the meshes folder and here just select not move here but copy here option it will create the copy of the simple plane right so we have the copy and later on you will see I'm going to use it so you will understand later on why I copied that mesh let's call it plain square okay for now we're going to work with just standard engine assets okay then check this lock so when you change the one volume all the parameters will change okay so we need to upscale our plane so maybe we can go like three maybe even more and as you remember we created in midjourney the 16:9 ratio uh images so we're going to project these images just on the simple plane right I want to show fast and efficient process to create something interesting by using the for example midjourney so we're going to duplicate that one you can duplicate very simply if you press and hold Alt and you press and hold arrow and move it it will just copy your actor inside UE5 just rotated and I need to change now the the scale of our mesh as you can see it's one sided material so if I look from the other side actually it's completely transparent it's okay don't worry it's much better optimized we don't need 2 side material for the specific project okay let's just move it a bit and we can slowly start the process of preparing our background right so we going to create basically the flat background so let's make it 16:9 exactly like the screen ratio of our image now we can lock again our scale window so if I change it let's say to 8 it will keep the proportion right and in Unreal Engine if you are a beginner I will explain it very quickly to project anything on the meshes or basically any actor or object you need to create something what is called material and the textures we are going to use inside the material so our image from midjourney you cannot you can actually just move it and add to this mesh but it's not going to work the right way so we need to create the material right so when you're ready with your setup we can move to the next step right okay so as you remember we created these window materials so let's go there and we can select this green one material okay so right click select material I'm going to call it mm this is from the master material because that will be the master material which will have all the function and all the parameters inside and later I'm going to explain you why is it exactly called master material right so let's call it MM_background as well I'm going to create the new folder and this one is going to be for our textures so let's name it textures double click our material to open it and you will see the new window it may looks a bit overwhelming but don't worry it's actually very simple so as you can see you have some inputs like base color metallic, specular, roughness normal they are the most important one as well the emissive color and by a standard the Material Blend mode will be set up to opaque and that's actually something we can use and now if you press and hold T on your keyboard and you left click on your mouse you will create the node and the nodes are basically the part of the systems which is giving information to unreal what's supposed to be created or projected so texture node let's convert it to parameter when you right click on it we're going to convert it to parameter let's call it albedo which basically means in 3D language the base color and whyI created parameter? Because if I later modify our master material we can replace that texture with any kind of the texture we want but it has to be converted to parameter okay so now we're going to open our texture folder and we are going to click the add button on the left and on the top you will notice import to game Midjourney materials texture and we're going to import our cyberpunk base style texture okay so as you can see you can double click that texture to open it already you can see that Mip Gen settings is set to no minimaps which is actually correct okay you have another options but probably you going to keep it as it is by a random right you can also change the brightness and different values for our texture as well you will notice different channels right and now we need to use this texture inside our newly created master material so go back to the materials again double click to open it I just make this window smaller so we can see our content browser click on the texture node and when you scroll down on the details panel on the left you will see Material Expression Texture Base okay you can drag and drop or you can click this arrow once it's selected it will move material here and now we need to connect that with the base color so you will see the RGB output and just connect it with the base color and in the preview you will instantly see that our texture is or our image is actually projected you can change the preview for different type like let's say I go with the plane now you need to save it your progress and we can say basically it's actually ready it's good to go but now we need to add this material to our plane to our mesh right so when you scroll down in the details you will see materials option right so you can drag and drop like this or again you can select this and press this arrow to add it but what you will notice probably the rotation will be completely wrong so we can rotate probably or change the scale of our mesh but also we can create some kind of the system so right click search for the texture coordinate that's the first node we need that nodes basically give information to the Unreal Engine of the position of the of the texture in the level in the world selected and you supposed to see that kind of the red node okay now we're going to create something which is called custom rotator so search for rotator and you will see custom rotator I don't want to create anything complicated I want to keep it simple and fast because that's the goal of this course how to fast and efficiently create something very interesting using unreal and AI software so you will have this custom rotator so as you can see it has different inputs so the one we need to focus on actually is going to be rotation angle so that's all we need and now we have to create something called scalar parameter when you press and hold s and click left mouse you will create the scalar parameter and we need to give it a name so let's just call it rotation and we need to connect it with our rotation angle okay then connect your texture coordinate node with UV and the final rotated values just connect with our UV of our albedo texture if you are more advanced artist probably you will ask where do we have the roughness no where do we have the normal if you want you can go and create it that's okay absolutely fine this is also for complete beginners so they can understand the simple process of creating the materials okay so what does actually the scalar parameters um do so if you have scalar parameter and you click and create the material instance based on our Master Material as you can see right click on Material Master Material and create Material Instance I'm going to call it MI from Material Instance and also I'm going to add underscore inst okay what is material instance maybe just call it 01 that will be easier so Material Instance is kind of the child of the master material and the difference is huge because now I am now I'm going to add this Material instance to our mesh into the material slot and you can see there is a parent inside the material instance and the parent is obviously our master material but what you can do with material instance you can control different parameters so you remember we created this rotation right scalar parameter so now we can control it directly from Material Instance so you don't have to go every time inside the master material you can just open Material Instance you created and you can control it here and the best part is you create can create as many material instances as you want so for example we can create 5 version with different textures right or with different settings and your master material will still be exactly the same and will keep all the functions okay so let's go back to our master material and I want to add more variety to our uh texture or let's say to our material right now and I would like to have some kind of the control over the emissive color of our texture right so again I'm going to create scalar parameter just like before press and hold s and left click on the mouse let's call it emissive underscore intensity then we need to create the new node which is called multiply press M and left click to create the multiply and the B value is going to be connected with scalar parameter the output will go to the emissive and from the RGB from our texture we going to connect that with the a so now we can control the emissive power okay let's take a look as you can see in the example if I increase it it drastically changes the way the our image will look you can as well connect let's say red channel green channel blue channel it's obviously up to you I prefer for this specific example to use just the RGB so all the channels another node I want to create is called desaturation node so let me check it's not desaturation I think it's no it should be desaturation node it's just lagging a bit we need to give Unriel a moment why do I need this node I want to control the intensity of the color also inside our also inside our project okay it's called the saturation node sorry not desaturate it's called the saturation node okay and now we can connect it directly with our albedo node and connect with our base color and again I can create this color parameter and let's call it the saturation so higher the value the bigger the saturation will be for our texture so at random we can keep it at zero and later on we can control it inside material instance okay let's just test it as you can see if we go more than one it completely changes the way it looks also because we have the immense intensity right now you can just like you know tweak the values and find the most interesting the best look for your texture OK save your progress and we're going to also we can change the group for this scholars parameter for example so let's call this group texture and let's call it texture underscore control and you will see the priority the lower priority it means the scalar parameter will be higher in the here in material instance so we start with 0 this one we make the one this group select again now we can select and go set up for 2 now if you save and you open Material Instance you will notice all these parameters inside the specific group so let's just open Material Instance sorry material instance okay and as you can see you have texture underscore control group right we can also add our texture parameter to this group but I want to keep it separate so now I can control everything inside Material Instance if you press this arrow on the on the right side it will reset your values completely okay great one more thing I want to create one more parameter which is called contrast actually it's called cheap contrast RGB so go back to your master material search for the contrast add cheap contrast underscore RGB node connected with in from our albedo then connect the result with the desaturation and we need one more scalar parameter right exactly like before just repeat the process this one lets call it contrast and we going to add that to our newly created group and the priority will be 3 and you can test it here as well so this one is very very subtle like I can say so we don't need too much tweaks on the cheap contrast but if you want to work a bit with your picture I think it's a good to have it inside your material function let's take a look how is it going to work you need to activate it okay and now let's try I think it's even too much so maybe 0.1 yeah something like that okay so that way we created master material in this lecture and also you've learned how to create the material instance and why to create material instance because we are going to use them later during our course so I want you to try different settings just to learn just try to practice different option with emmisive intensity with the saturation as well with the contrast. OK and I see you in the next lecture! 11. Cinematics: Welcome back so we created our material we added to our mesh as well we created our level in the previous lecture okay now we need to create something called the cinematics right sequence so let's create a new folder inside our Midjourney folder let's call it cinematics I will change a color again okay and if you go up you will notice that small icon and here you will see two options add level sequence or add level sequence with shots we're going with the second one which will create something called the Master Sequence the master sequence is the main sequence which includes the specific shots right so you can think about it like a folder for other scenes alright once you click it you will notice the options so number of shots we need two shots we going to create two shots you can change the name I'm going to call it MJ we don't need suffixes as well you need to select the path for it so in that case it's going to be our cinematic folder and the duration of the shots obviously we can change it later but you can let's say 5 seconds should be fine right once you are ready you can click at the bottom the blue button create level sequence with shots what's going to happen next um also you may see the sequencer curve right now we can close it this is a bit more advanced it happens in UE 5.5 and what UE5 will create is the master sequence and you will have this two scenes okay so each of the scenes is like a separate part of the project right so things things I also need to change I need to go to the uh view selection and change it from default viewport to cinematic now you will see another options like just in Windows Media Player we can say so we'll see the end of the sequence the playback range start time as well you can control it you can change it as well you can see the frame rate right display rate so we want to work with 30 frames per seconds that should be fine and we have these two scenes right shot No. 1 and we have our shot No. 2 so if you want to open them you have to double click to go inside as well if you want to change direction you can right click go to the properties and you will see section range start which in that case is zero and you will see the section range end as well you will see the time scale which I strongly recommend to keep at one so let's change the range end to 200 and you will notice that the duration of our shot will increase right you can also do it by just scroll over the end of the sequence press the left mouse button and just move it left right okay so we have two option to control the duration of the scene let's just move the second shot to the right as well you see that red line so this is end of our sequence right playback range basically stop time so you can move it also you can put specific value like in that case I just made it 360 and this means it will have 360 frames okay so we have 30 sec 30 frames per seconds which means this whole master sequence will be 12 seconds long right now so when you open the scene what you will notice you will have already the camera created it's called cine camera actor as well when you press and hold the control and you scroll up and down you can move zoom in or zoom out in your viewport right that's very useful also shortcuts so we need to change the duration of the shot so I change it for 200 and frames and then you will see this top with the camera cuts you have to remember to change the duration as well of your camera cuts inside next when you select Cine Camera Actor you will see in detail step a lot of different option so the most important one is a film back also you have some lens settings but the film back basically gives you opportunity to select different types of the camera so the one I like to work and probably most people work is 16:9 DSLR which is likely full frame camera and then when you go back to the left you will see that very small icon and when you click it it will highlight it on blue which means now you will have the view from your cine camera actually okay so if you want to let's say key frame or save the specific angle and specific view from the camera you always have to keep in mind you need to have it selected highlighted on blue so now in the transform you see I just key frame that part of the shot so if I play if I play my sequence it will stay in the same place because I already keyframe my camera as well we have options like you can move to the front you can move to the and of the of our sequence you can move by one frame okay I'm not going to explain it in details we have the cinematic course which is basically like all about the fundamentals and all specific functions inside the sequencer in a unreal engine here I want to show you just the most important options so you can quickly and efficiently create something interesting using UE5 and Midjourney so let's try to find the perfect angle for our Camera and I see you in the next lecture. 12. Character animations: Welcome back in this lecture we are going to work with our character and I'm going to add our character to the shot we just created open the Paragon folder and select characters folder as well you can change the sizes of the folders if you want you can go to the settings and select the thumbnail size or you can click right mouse button and by scrolling up down you can increase or decrease the size of the folders right okay go to the heroes and if you open it you will see Belica Balicha I don't know and at the bottom you will notice the blueprint class and also you will notice the animation blueprint so double click to open the blueprint class and this character is actually game ready so it has everything prepared for the game and what is the blueprint if you are familiar with unreal obviously you will know what is the blueprint if you are beginner uh I can say it's the visual system for creating different functionality for your character basically any actor inside the Unreal Engine right so if I open it for this character on the left side you will see the components window and we'll have the camera attached to this character and we don't want this camera because we're going to create the static shots or the cinematics so we can just select it and delete it as well select the follow camera and delete okay now we can compile and save and once I click compile you will notice that we'll have the error so we cannot save it right now and Unreal Engine is going to help us so at the bottom you will see the compiler results and you will see what's the problem right um you will see in use bin on name no longer exist on node so when I click that it will show me the problem we have inside our blueprint so if we try to connect the nodes it's not going to work but because we are not going to use this character for a game but we going to use it just for static or cinematics we don't know need the full functionality so what we can do we can just disable the node press and hold ALT and click and now just try to compile okay as you can see we still have some information but actually right now we can save the blueprint so let's just save it go back to the viewport top as you can see we have viewport construction script and event graph so in viewport graph you will see the details tab on the right and the most important thing you need to change you will see the animation so by standard is use Animation blueprint we need to change it to use custom mode remember we need to change it to use custom mode and now probably that most of the work is already done we can just save it our characters prepare as well you can have preview of different meshes so inside the blueprint you can change the... view of our character right because this character have different outfits we can just take a look at them so that one is biohazard actually quite interesting what else we've got we have this polar polar strike OK that's really cool as you can see once I change the variation of our skeletal mesh inside our blueprint as well the materials are changing right below that okay this one will be Spider Witch that will be interesting and heavy armor okay that's cool however I think for our cyberpunk style project we're going to use the standard one yes I think that will be the best choice so once we prepared our blueprint now we need to choose the animation we want to use in our sequence so open this animation blueprint and here we can see the smiall windows on the top right so that's the one way you can go so we can select for example skeleton as well you will see on the right the asset browser right and here you will notice the list of different animation if you double click any of them you will open the Animation preview window so let's just select this ability and now you have preview for of every animation for this character and just keep in mind these animations are prepared strictly for the games so they are not actually the best way to prepare them for cinematics right but this character is free is very high quality is available for anybody to use I think is a perfect example you have multiple Paragon characters so you can use any of them it doesn't have to be the one I used for my project you can be more creative you can use two maybe three characters it's just up to you again this is example I want to show you how to use midjourney and UE5 to create something interesting so let's say I want to create really nice cyberpunk shot but it will be hard to create the character I exactly want in Midjourney because you don't have full control so you can use the unreal for it right and once you do it uh you can later on change the variation of your image you can modify your image for example in the Photoshop if you want or you can even create the full sequence that's something actually what I'm going to do and I'm going to show you how to do it very quick so okay we have the animation preview we probably uh right now okay let's just change the surface snapping that's also one more thing okay I changed the surface snapping for the helicopter and when I drag and drop it it should actually be in the position on top of our plane as you can see okay that's perfect just keep in mind if you going to use the process I'm trying to teach you and present you you cannot work too much with the different angles so actually your character and your camera should be front of the plane which is projecting our texture okay one more thing I'm going to add the character to sequence as you can see we can go on the left click add and we can drag and drop the character from outliner by the character I mean the our blueprint of the character okay and now you will notice that our lt Belich player character blueprint is inside our sequencer and we can control everything right now inside the sequencer okay I'm going to try to find a good angle now I keyframe it inside our camera and I'm going to click the plus button of our character blueprint and on the top you will see animation window and now you can search for the "emote salute" that's the animation I want to use it's up to you I like that animation I'm going to use that one okay and you will notice the new tab just appear with the name of the animation and instantly when you scroll you will see the animation is playing right we just have one issue here the duration of the animation is 170 frames so we need to decrease the duration of our shot okay because I want this shot just to be probably just that one animation maybe I blend the second animation later I don't know but for now let's just keep it 170 so we can change it by type 170 or we can move the end range stop right go back to the master sequence because we work inside the scene you can move it here or you can right click go to properties and change the section range end to 170 okay great so we actually prepared our first shot with the animated character and as you can see it's not ready but don't worry we're going to polish it in the next lecture now I want You to select the animation and prepare your shot see you in the next video 13. Scene No.1: Welcome back so we created our shot we added our character to our scene we added animation for our character now let's focus about our camera setting so if you are familiar with photography or classic photography you have very similar settings for example you can select the aperture you can also control the focus you can control the focal length which is likely uh obviously in a millimeters just like different type of the lenses used in film or in the photography for this shot I'm going to try to work with the 50 millimeters which is basically the human eye and any settings you will change just keep in mind you have to keyframe it okay and then let's go to the focus settings and standard one used to be the manual so we can change the focus by manual but for this particular shot probably I'm going to use different method I'm going to show you in a second as well you can set get draw debug focus plane right just to see where the focus actually is in the moment but we can use the tracking option so when you click the tracking you will see add actor to track click that little icon and then select our actor and once you do it you have to keyframe it just keep in mind if you don't keyframe it it's not going to work so again you have to select the actor tracking option in the focus select the actor and just keyframe it okay and now as you can see the our actor is in the main focus when we play our sequence right so for that specific shot I think it will be the best idea to go that way okay and now we're going to work a bit with our camera setting so the manual way to do it is basically changing the position of the camera in your viewport and once you do it then you can just keyframe it anywhere you want it will save the position of your camera remember we selected this small icon so as you can see this camera small icon is highlighted on the blue right near the sign camera actor so now I'm going to set up some angles something like that should work and don't worry about the lighting because we're going to work um with lighting in the next lecture right now we have to focus on the camera right okay now keyframe it so this is start dart shot and you can notice this lock icon here that's something which actually will create automatically the keyframe so if I select that um small icon if now I move this is our marker and I change the camera to different angle on different position it will automatically create me the keyframes when I release the right mouse button you will just see it will create the keyframe in our transformed tab okay something like that you see we have new keyframe and actually it's saved automatically so it includes the location also the rotation so for this part of the animation I'm going to change the angle again keep in mind it's not going to be super polished I just wanted to show you the process how you can use it very quickly and very easily with the Unreal Engine as well I selected looping for our sequence so if I'm going to play our sequence right now in the preview it's going to be in the loop right if you don't select that option it will end you have to go back to the start and it's just like you know a little bit annoying okay so now we have three different camera we can also move the keyframe if you want we can change it you have full control over the process in unreal which is actually great now if I play it as you can see it works like that okay let's just keep that scene and here when we wants to zoom out again I still have this lock the key is actually not the lock I think it's actually the key icon highlighted on blue which means it's active right so anytime I change the angle manually it will automatically keyframe it just don't don't forget to turn it off when you actually finish your work with the camera because if you go you know somewhere in the level and we start to check other asset and stuff it will automatically start to saving the position of your camera and it can get quite messy very fast okay cool and we need need few more angles just to finish our sequence as you can see I'm trying to be like in the front of our character and to the front of our plane with our midjourney texture right as I mentioned before actually I cannot work too much with the angles because it's going to look very very very bad so we can do it and we are going to do it later but with different system which we are going to use based on the Skybox AI OK it looks good something like that and we can just play and test it okay it looks really nice of course it could be polished but just for the presentation for this course I think it's absolutely enough as well you can expand the transform tab and you will find there another option but if you want to learn more again we have full cinematic course where we do explain every single details about the system inside Unreal Engine here I wanted to show you just the basic as you can see I deactivated this key icon right so now if I change the angle it's not going to save it automatically I have to actually click the key frame so we have pretty cool sequence obviously I'm going to polish it more and now is the time for a quick challenge for you try creating your own scene use character animation feel free to choose different ones than those I used in the example be creative and don't be afraid to experiment! 14. Scene Lighting: In this lecture I want to show you how to work with the lighting as you notice we have few actors actually five but we are missing one very important thing which is post process volume if you scroll around behind this plane you will see the clouds you will see the sky all the lighting in our level right the first things we going to change is exponential height fog so if you scroll down you will see option to select the volumetric fog that will drastically increase the quality of your shot as well you have different option for the volumetric fog for example you can add the second fog data just to present you the results let's just try 0.01 here we can increase maybe decrease to 0.01 as well so we need to test different parameters with different settings okay as well you can have a start distance you can basically control everything inside the details panel of this actor so let's try to keep maybe like 300 okay and next go to the window tab and here you will notice the window which is called World Settings that's something we need to add unless you already have it and type in Details Force and you have to select force no precomputed lighting this is going to basically restet all the lighting settings in your level and that's the first step of the process before we are going to add the post process volume now you remember the place actor window right? So you can type post process and just drag and drop the post process volume to our level you can move it outside of our view and then inside the detailed tab just type infinite and you need to select infinite extent unbound why? because post process volume we'll work only in the specific area of the size of the volume if you select infinite it will affect the whole level so that's what we want then go into the details and select the global illumination method right so you need to be sure we have the lumen selected right ray lighting mode we can actually select for project default for that specific project and you can get another options you can change them if you want as well the reflection is good idea to go with the lumen you can increase the quality just keep in mind the higher the quality the higher the cost of your project for the GPU right then we have also option for the bloom if I'm going to work with the static images or cinematics I prefer to go with convolution I also will decrease it a bit and the one option which will completely change the look of your uh picture will be exposure so by standard is auto exposure so go there and select manual exposure and at the bottom just uncheck the apply physical camera and just take a look how different it will looks right now instantly is a huge difference right I just make it bigger so you can see we are now much much closer to the really nice very cool realistic look of our picture and it took us 4 minutes not even okay now just focus on directional light and actually we shouldn't use directional light because we have the night scene in the shot so rest by realistic approach it should be some kind of the static light but we can use it and you can change the position of it just like you notice on the screen a moment ago by press and hold control plus L on your keyboard and moving your mouse you will change the position of the sign if your level right so we can use actually this directional light like kind of the imitation of the city lighting which is you know reacting with our character right so I don't want to make it too bright as well probably I'm going to play a bit with the temperature of it and you have all this function inside the unreal both already in so let's first try to find the perfect angle okay something like that should work as well you can add more lighting if you want you can add some kinds of the static lights all of them you can find in the place actor section so we have different types of lighting here if you want to learn more about the Lightning we have course dedicated to the Lightning in Unreal Engine as well where we do explain every actor every setup and different scenarios for the Lightning in open environment and even to different setups for the studio lighting okay now let's just try to change the shot the angle of the camera we are just going to play our scene yeah it looks really really really cool still it's too bright but you know it's just like for five minutes editing I think I think it looks really really good OK I will change the angle a little bit more again just to remember control plus L on your keyboard press and hold together and move the mouse in direction by the way to do it you need to select your directional light as a movable object sometimes it may be select as a static one okay now in the intensity I'm going to decrease it let's just maybe make it free and also you can notice that the directional light affects our our plane with our texture of the which we created inside the majority right so how can we actually fix it a bit we can increase a bit for example the Amissive and as you can see that's one of the reason why we created Material Master material before okay I want you now to create your own lighting scenario and I see you in the next lecture. 15. Rendering: Okay in this lecture I want to show you how to render your shot first things we need to check is the scalability so usually I work on the high or sometimes I work also in unlit mode but if you want to see your cinematic quality of the shot you need to select the cinematic quality as you can see I polished this shot a bit it looks much much better than before but I didn't make too much changes and here if you open the sequencer you will see the option to render you can see that small icon looking like a film frame so standard option is going to be legacy render it's okay but it's not the best quality you can get right so to get the best quality you need to use something called Movie Render Queue and to have it available you need to go to the edit window select plugins and inside the plugins you need to search for movie render queue so just type movie and down there you will see movie render queue also will have the render queue additional render passes for example if you want to render alpha channels you can use it as well it just depends what do you need now the unreal will ask you to restart so you need to restart your engine and we can move forward with the process as well I'm going to select the Nyagara support because in the next shot probably I'm going to use some Niagara effects at the end of the polishing phase okay once your project restart you can open again your sequencer and if you open the specific shot now just select the camera view and you go to the render settings option now you will have the movie render available so select it and it will open the move your underquay window on the right you will see the sequence be sure is the correct sequence as well check if the map is correct okay so as you remember our map is MJ_level_01 right so that's the correct map and if you press this arrow you will see two of our shots but we want to render only the shot 0010 okay now in the settings by a default you will see settings which to be honest are not really good because you're not going to render jpg and without any settings but the good information is I already prepared the ready asset so all you have to do is just download it extract the folder okay when you open the folder you will see two settings one is for PNG and second one is for EXR so just copy them okay open the folder with your project click the content folder and inside the content folder go to midjourney the one we created and I prefer to paste that in the cinematics folder just right click and paste both of them or Control + V doesn't matter now if you go back to your unreal project you will have the settings available so when you click unsaved settings go to the unsaved config now you will see two of them so probably we're going with the PNG EXR is more advanced it's just up to you but not actually I'm not suggesting for the beginners if you are a little bit more advanced or maybe you want to create something for Photoshop actually EXR is great to go you can also use Aces, but this setting is not for Aces just keep in mind so here the one thing you need to change in the output you need to change the output directory because obviously the file will have the directory saved according to my project right so what you need to do you need to change directory and just find your project on your drive okay so in that case will be UE5_MJ go to the saved folder and inside the saved folder I like to create the new folder and I like to call it render so it's very easy for me and for actually unreal to find the directory double click select folder okay and now you can just save it as well so click it save press it okay and everything is basically ready to go so you have PNG sequence you have different rendering settings you have anti aliasing long story short we have spatial sample count and temporal sample count they likely multiply each other the temporal is for moving object and the spatial is for the static object as well I set up some warm up frames for the settings and there you have something interesting which is called console variables uh depends of your GPU but the settings we have here is like screen percentage if you don't have very strong GPU you can just disable the screen percentage okay then you have game overrides and as you can see everything is ready to render the project shouldn't be heavy because if you are using just one character and just one plane and only lighting system the project should be very light so even on not super strong GPU based PC you should easily render it and once you click render your project will start render as a single images which later you can compile in software like Adobe or maybe in Davinci I prefer Davinci I think it's a really good free software as well to use it okay I think that's it so happy renders and I see you in the next lecture. 16. Midjourney: Welcome back in the next chapter we are going to start again with midjourney open midjourney in your content browser go to the explore window where you can find a lot of pictures created images created by another creators and I'm going to use this pyramids again use it as image prompt as you remember we have three different option maybe we can use the prompt only okay so as you can see I can type the pyramids alright and now just add it as a image prompt go back to the create and I want to create the desert uh environment basically for our second shot so we're going to create completely the new level as you can see I already created some images probably I will use one of them in the project and I will show you something different so I'm going to use two of them just like we did it before now I'm going to type desert and basically I'm going to copy the prompt from the second image and I will connect that with our pyramids um image right so I will just keep the side camera view 16:9 and let's just create it let's see what we going to get because I like the lighting from this pyramids um picture I wanted to show you how you can use it sometimes okay for your advantage so actually here it's quite funny because we got completely hallucinated pictures it doesn't make too much sense at all right so what I going to do I'm going to use another one image and I'm going to type pyramids in background and let's see what's going to happen so this one doesn't look actually bad this one doesn't make any sense we have some random person in the first image but here as you can see actually it worked so let's say you want to have pyramids in the background and still have the desert it could work actually for you if you do it that way okay I'm just giving the concept I'm just giving the idea it's up to you what you want to create but I want to go more into the that style of let's say the Utah Grand Canyon style something like that right so I created that kind of the picture and now I'm going to modify it add some variation to it and let's just take a look what midjourney will create for us okay actually it looks really nice that's something what we probably could use so I basically want a sand layer on the bottom of the picture so we can compile it with our shot we going to create inside and real engine and this one is really good as well I like that one so if you decide which one is good you can upscale it because we need as high quality as possible you can also use some external software or pages to upscale it even more I'm going to use one of them later in this course but just the free license okay I like that one so I think this one could be good as well that looks also interesting so we can just upscale and download few of them and inside the unreal once we'll have this master material in place we can create different material instances and just switch between them very quickly to see which one match the best our scenario right so I'm just going to upscale them and once they are ready we can download them yeah this one looks really good as you can see I didn't want it to be too stylized so I used stylize option only 50 and very little chaos option as well OK great we can download our pictures and we can use them later in our second shot directly inside the Unreal Engine and that's the last one okay I hope you'll create something really cool and I'll see you in the next lecture. 17. New Level: Okay in this lecture I want you to come back to the Unreal Engine 5 open your project I hope you created really cool images inside midjourney by accident as you can see I closed my content browser so to get it back go to the window and select content Browser move it to the left just to keep it organized okay sometimes happen and then go back to the map folder inside your midjourney folder and as you remember we're going to create the new level so again select the empty level create you already know the process then we need to add obviously the lighting actors right and now we are going to work not in a night scenario but actually in the daylight so we can go with normal visibility of settings and just add all of them that's it so instantly you will have all of them go back to the content browser okay save all will be untitled so cancel first you need to save us right so save currently level us give it a name so we can click on this one and just change it to 0 2 save cool so we have two levels and again I'm going to select the lighting actors put them inside the one folder let's call this for the lighting so it will be much more optimized okay one more thing uh you don't have to create everything again if you like something from other level so I give you example so I open the level No. 1 again I'm going to select the specific actors I can do it inside the outliner or I can do it inside the level if you press and hold control obviously you will select multiple objects and I can copy them by clicking Ctrl plus C I'll just right click and copy them so I want to copy pause process volume our character and our two planes right so just copy them open our 2nd level and just paste Ctrl plus V okay cool so as you can see we save a lot of time because we don't need to set up again the post process probably we'll tweak it a bit but we already have some settings we decided to use before so that's very useful right and now we need to change obviously our material as you remember we created master material and different instances so you can just duplicate the material instance change the name probably it automatically will be 02 we can duplicate it once more and now we need to add the texture so click the add window import and we need to look for our textures I downloaded three images from a journey so I'm going to probably test at all of them why not so let's just try how they going to work right double click to open it and as you can see we can just replace the one of the texture just like that okay just save it when you open the texture you can take a look how it works actually inside maybe you want to modify it it's just up to you they have already no mini maps option selected which is correct let's just open the first one material instance and add another texture to it okay so now we have two different variation and probably we're going to work a bit with some settings later right now all we have to do is just select our material instance and replace it in the material slot of our static mesh so go back to the materials select our material new material instance scroll down in the details and just replace it and voilla just like that we create completely different scenario for our shot it honestly took us maybe 5 maybe 6 minutes creating something like that in unreal for even skillful modeler on that quality of the shots if you even want to have only statics may take even few weeks obviously if you're going to use it for a games naturally you have to go that way but if you want just to have like you know one static shot or you want to create something which you're going to use later or maybe you want to add some kind of the cinematic shot you know and you don't want to spend so much time or you are just not the modeller just like that and you want to get it quick with the good quality that's one of the option how you can actually use the Midjourney in UE5 however later on I'm going to show you how you can also use the Skybox AI which is pretty cool okay so now we need to change the size of our plane and as you remember before I actually created the another mesh from this uh starter content um plane mesh and I'm going to show you later why I did it so now let's just take a look at the second material instance I just replace it inside the mesh and yeah it's hard to decide both of them are looking really good so have fun and see you in the next lecture 18. Megascans: Welcome back so we created another level you copied some important actors now we can open our edit window go to the project settings and just like before you remember the maps and modes option? We can change the default map to our MJ level_02 because we are going to work with that level once we start our project and I want to show you how to use something really cool about the Unreal which is called Megascans Megascans Quixel or Megascans Bridge how you can get it first you will need to get the plugin so the plugin should be already available inside Andrial 5.5 or higher version depends when you going to start to work on this course if it's not you can go to the FAB and you can find it directly inside the FAB right so um actually I will have it in my library already so I'm going to show you so you can see this is Pixel Bridge I can select install to engine however I cannot install it because it's already installed right so it makes a ton of sense so once you will download it and once you will probably restart your engine you can add this Quixel Bridge tab or the window to your project and click stay here don't click go to the FAB click stay here also you need to create the account and log into your account as you can see I already sign in why why go that way it's very simple reason the bridge megascans they have their own system for master materials material instances and this is honestly very good system and the textures they using like for example ARD texture PBR texture working very very well with their own material system so if you going to search for anything right now like let's say desert you will find a ton of materials you will find a lot of assets it all depends when you join the megascans if you did it before the end of 2025 you had the opportunity to get probably all of them for free and at that time it was around 18,000 assets so when you decide to download something you have option for the quality so usually the highest quality is not something you're going to use but the high quality is most likely absolutely enough also for cinematic project uh so once you select it once you download it and you click at you will notice the new folder will be created the Mega Scans folder will be created as well in your content folder you will notice Ms Presets folder which includes all the material functions and the materials connected with the megascans right so when you double click the material instance to open it you will see there is a lot of different parameters like for example tiling and other stuff you can control albedo metallic roughness right if you double click the parent material you will see the four main texture used here as well there is the map adjustment basically the material function which control this megascans materials of course if you want you can use only texture from megascans but what I'm going to do in this lecture I want to show you how we can quickly and to be honest with really high quality create the imitation of the desert surface right so let's start with the material I'm going to download one of the materials um but before I think I'm going to show you some 3D assets right so for example um because I'm going to use these assets so I need to take a look at the material for our ground which we'll somehow compile with them of course you can manipulate color a bit but it's a good idea to use the assets from similar pack so they are all in the specific packs as well you have some options for searching like you see okay you can take a look for the new the old damage also you can select them by the filter then by the size and as well you can save them as your favorite which helps a lot if you work on multiple project in the same time so as you can see I have all of them already saved as my favorite so megascans basically create the separate folder on your PC and once you use them in any project you just click and they will be added automatically right because they are already on your PC if you don't have them if you download them first time it will take a moment just to download so just like this one I will click download it will take you know a few seconds just to download then I need to select add to the project okay let's take a look for some other desert assets probably I will add that one maybe that one yeah it looks really good so we already have few of them we have some boulders we have rock formation one large rock as well if you double click on the mesh you can open the preview and actually see the quality and quality is actually great so mega scans are actually the real scans of you know the real nature so it's very hard to get better quality than you can get here again I'm not asking you to buy anything but if you have access you still can get a lot of them for free most of them they are paid now as a paid assets but still there are some packs which you can get for free like some trees you know some biomes maybe some rocks even the full levels so you can find them on the FAB or you can just take a look inside the megascans library inside your UE5 project okay now as you remember we use this mesh we just copy our mesh our plain square and now I'm going to replace it with this a starter content mesh you see I just replace the mesh the plane with our plane square what I did it because now I can modify it so first let's change the scale of this mesh I know it may be a little more complicated for beginners but trust me it's actually quite simple process and once you go through it you would just you know remember it forever so we want to create something very realistic right hmm so we don't want it to be flat and we are going to use actually the height map or you can call it displacement map for it right as well I'm going to change the size of our background plane right something like that should work yeah maybe we can try 32 just to match the same size okay maybe it's too much let's try maybe 40 even even bigger right yeah okay I wanted to be bigger because um I want our character to be in some distance from our from our plane with our midjourney image so it will give me opportunity to create some kind of the depth of the field right they're going to be super close it will be almost impossible to do that so okay now I added this mega scans material to our mesh as you can see when you double click you will have the first option which is tiling so obviously the tiling is wrong so we can increase it maybe like six now it looks much more realistic and good idea is just to take a look at your character scale and set up the material according to the character scale because as you remember the scale in unreal is just like in a real life so probably this character will be around 1 meter 80 cm maybe 70 so we can set up our tiling according to it I think it looks okay just save our progress as well we can change the color of albedo so let's just change it a bit so it will match more our majority image something like that I think we have very strong directional light intensity so actually this area in the middle is too bright but if you look on the side actually it's right now is matching our picture looks pretty good OK just save our material OK that looks really nice and it was very fast now if you go to the top on the selection mode select modeling option don't worry I'm not going too deep into the modeling I just want to show you one option if you go and select mesh option right I'm going to show you maybe uh in the wire frame okay so you will understand what I mean so in the wire frame as you can see basically we don't have polygons on this mesh right just like two of them so it's not going to work with this placement so what we need to do we need to remesh so you can select the target triangle count right so maybe we can go like 8,000 you can go even higher if you want but I think 8,000 will be good for this example and now if you check the wireframe view you will see how it basically divided our mesh into 8,000 of the polygons and another option we going to use now is actually our displacement option so let me check where is the displacement think it should be in deform right okay so if you go to deform you will see this place and now you will see complete mess and the reason is the displacement type by default is partly noise but we want to select the texture to the map because we have the displacement map from the megascans and displacement intensity let's just make it 4 and now inside the map you can add this one texture which you have the it will be called ORD and this texture is created from 3 different textures which they are packed on different channel so red channel is ambient occlusion the green channel is roughness and the blue channel is actually displacement map so we need to select the obviously the blue channel and now just add the texture and voila you just created really cool realistic looking ground right it looks like a real desert and again the point of this process using it with Unreal Engine is to make it fast so we don't want to spend one week to do it we want to make it in what possibly the full shot in one day and you can do it now I think it's too much again you can see we can increase the UV scale inside the displacement so I will increase it maybe I will decrease it to 2 I think still is too much too much because tiling was 6 I decided to go tiling six but we can go like 3 and 3 yeah I really like it it looks really good okay and once you click accept basically the mesh is going to be saved so good idea is to copy that mesh before you add displacement to it right so that's why we created this meshes folder so you still will have the previous version if you for some reason decide you don't like it you can delete it and you can go back and try to create displacement again so we have the base of our level basically we have the ground we have really nice picture in the background and now we're going to the next step which is going to be probably populating the shot with different meshes and again you can use anything you want I'm going to show you how to use megascans because I like to use megascans because of the quality and they are very easy to compile with the level so have fun and I see you in the next lecture. 19. Blending animations: Welcome back in next lecture now we are going to create the scene with our character so I want to add some animation we have in the pack of this character and again we are going to make the short simple cinematic scene okay just select our character I may rotate it a bit as I mentioned before I kept some distance between our background plane and the character so when we set up camera later we still can achieve a very nice depth of the field and now I'm going to follow with the process very similar like we did before but as you remember in the previous scene we had our character basically in a static position because we've been very close to the um our background um image from midjourney here I want to make kind of the site more likely video game camera and I want to present you the difference between using midjourney and actually the Skybox AI and I'd like to also create something more complicated so we'll add some elements of the environment for this shot okay go to the cinematics to MJ open our master sequence like you remember from the previous lecture we created two scenes right so now we are going to work with the second scene so again select the camera lock the camera view the camera icon must be highlighted on blue okay and I'm going to set up some simple camera for now next we going to focus on the character animation like I mentioned before this is character created exactly for the game so the animation are not exactly something you would love to use in cinematics right but we can work with it around okay first change camera to DSLR 16:9 now we go and change the some parameters of our camera like aperture and focal length I think we can try 24 millimeters camera so I'd like to keep a little wider shot try to experiment and find the best approach which will works for your specific shot okay okay it looks quite good let's just keyframe maybe I will go with 28 millimeter 24 I think is the wide okay now click add button add actor to sequence or you can just drag and drop into the our sequencer click the plus button and just like before select the animation you want and we are going to start with let's say this idle animation maybe Idle Relax and this time I'm not going to use only one animation I will use few of them and I will show you how to quickly blend them together right so obviously if we need more animation I need to change the duration of the shots so at the end I will type 360 frames so now we need to expand our camera cuts or you can use properties window to type the 360 frame as well you press enter as you can see it's all ready okay and we need to change here as well but as you can see section range start in a master sequence show us the actually the section in the master sequence so probably will be easy to just select and expanded manual way okay so we need to finish at 570 so let's just type 570 again this is my shot you can create something completely different so take it just like a template or maybe example right the point of this course is to show you the way how you can actually work in unreal and with some AI available tools we have right now and obviously the most popular I believe most popular is a midjourney as well is very good very good platform right a lot of AI tools are not that good like they are advertised however midjourney is getting better and better every month the same is with the Skybox AI I'm looking for it for a long time and it's getting better and better as well okay so now I added second animation as you can see we have another another tab so I want to keep them on the one tab so what I'm going to do I'm going to I think I'm going to delete it and I'm going to select the first step and just copy and paste that animation here and now how we can easily blend it if you just move it into the direction you will see that they are already actually blended together right that's the simplest the fastest way you can make it manually by weight right set up a bit as well you can go into more complicated process to make it looks perfect but this is not part of this video I don't want to dive too much into the details about it we have cinematic course when you can learn more about it and let's add another one so I'm going to use jog forward start animation and jog forward stop animation because the concept of my shot is the character is is let's say in a desert battlefield starting to run and stops and some action will happen probably I will add some VFX later like some rockets flying explosion etc and I think I will add also some footsteps VFX for our character to make it look even better okay and at the end I'm going to add again the idle animation so it will finish really really nice as you can see I can control the moment when I want to start this animation to start so oh okay I just move it up no no no that's not what I want okay this is just like first version, of course I'm going to polish it later but you see the point right so you can quickly blend the animation even if they are prepared for game ready character they are not perfect for um cinematics right also as you can see you can control duration of all of them with that top tap the gray one over the animation and let's just take a look how it works so now everything is basically in the place just let's say in the pivot place okay but the transitions between animation is quite fluent it looks really good we just need to now set up the transform points for our character right inside the sequencer so it will looks natural and we need to match the speed with the moment of the animation start so it's quite annoying I can say but it shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes to be honest right okay let's just add the transform you need to click the plus on our character blueprint you will notice the transform tap now a new keyframe also you can change the behavior of our transform keyframe so you can have linear constant cubic cubic is like the most most used is the automatic one and I think for this shot we are going to use the automatic okay now I'm going to quickly set up some transform keyframes so you will just see the whole process I will try to match the position of our character so it would be more interesting and actually more natural right keep in mind as the simplest approach there are other more advanced way to work with it right but actually the best way to work with the animation in sequencer and cinematic is to have the animation prepared exactly for the cinematics but if you don't have it and probably in most cases you will not have them you have to find out the way how to work with the game ready for example character like we have here now I need to find a good spot for our character when she is going to stop from the jog movement right I think that distance looks realistic and again you can move the key frame you can duplicate them if you want there is complete freedom okay I think I'm going to test it with one here okay that works really good it's almost perfect okay let's take a look at our sequence again later on we need to change the position as you can see I can move the plane that's much easier than just move the position of the character and as well once we start to work with populating the our environment I will show you different approach so you can use this plane with displacement and this material or we can go completely with the megascans assets and that's probably the approach I'm going to choose for this specific shot okay great now I have a quick challenge for you create your own unique scene explore different character animations and don't hesitate to use ones other than those in my example okay try to be creative and experiment see you in the next lecture. 20. Polish your Scene: Welcome back and let's continue the process of creating our second shot I hope you selected really nice really cool animations you blended them set up a basic camera angle so it will looks really cool I will just take a look again at something we created already and first thing I want to decide what angle of the camera I want to select before I start populating our shot because for cinematics or static images basically we need to start with the camera work okay because later on we just populate the places where we see our shot we don't have to create everything around so for example I just move our plane a bit down and as you can see right now if we add some depth of field it will actually will look already very realistic so go back to the bridge okay wait a second yeah okay I already downloaded some assets right so um as you can see I can start to populating our level with them you remember like we discussed the bridge how to use it in the previous chapter so you need to select few assets once you have them in your project you can just drag and drop them into your scene and you can control the position you can control the scale of them it's just up to your imagination how you want to use them in your shot okay so let's just have some fun right now and create something interesting together don't copy my ideas just take it like a template if you really like it obviously you may copy the same assets but I encourage you to be more creative be a little bold and go your own way to try to make something interesting as well like I mentioned before we can change the color of our materials color of materials of our meshes as well to match exactly the atmosphere we want so let's just jump into the process one more thing I like this background but let's just test the other picture from midjourney maybe it is going to work better right oh actually it's quite interesting to be honest still keep in mind for that specific scene at the end probably I'm going to use Skybox AI right so we going to use HDRI backdrop that's something we are going to work later on in the next lectures but for now we are stick with the midjourney and we trying obviously to create something interesting just with the midjourney I think it looks really really good as you can see I have the snapic option selected so when I add any asset I just reset the rotation in the details panel with that one I will change the scale it's really nice to have like two or three different layers of the depth of our environment so we have the background which is just the flat plain with the picture and we add some assets and meshes just behind our character we'll create kind of the illusion like the whole shot is actually completely 3D right so now I'm going to try the another approach so instead of using this playing with the master material I'm going to add some megascans meshes just rotate them change the scale a bit so we can create like this really nice surface desert surface we can call it like more a Canyon surface okay and yeah I think for that specific shot it even may looks better just a reminder if you want to copy any mesh if you press and hold Alt on your keyboard and left click mouse on any of the arrows X Y or Z and you just move it by pressing the Alt button it will copy your mesh so you don't have to go copy paste etc is much much faster and again as you can see I'm only focused in the areas which are visible from our camera angle right so it doesn't have to look great from any angle the only important for us is going to be side view camera why we follow our character running right okay it looks really good now we need to set up the position of our meshes so it will match our character position and obviously the next step will be creating the camera transform keyframes right so we'll have a very interesting shot now I will just select all of them you can click on the folder select and all descendants and that way you can move all of the assets you just added right which you have in the folder I just put them into the one folder obviously you need to perform that action inside the outliner okay so we are basically ready to work with the camera see you in the next lecture. 21. Camera settings: In this lecture I want to focus on polishing the camera movement so first we need to set up the focus settings just like before let's select the tracking option select actor add actor to track then keyframe it right you can see it our actor keyframe just below the camera component right now and the focus will be on our character blueprint right but because we don't have the fully free the environment the background which I mean the plane with the midjourney image it's not going to look super realistic so we need to add something so type in the details panel depth of the field and you will find two option Depth Blur Kilometers for 50% and Depth Blur Radius so you can use both of them to control the amount of the depth of the field in your shot okay it's not the perfect way to do it but if it's the only way sometimes so it's worth to know how to use it right so the second one dapth blur radius is let's say kind of the intensity and the first one describe the distance at which the blur should occur okay so let's just try different settings maybe we can go like 0.01 okay you instantly see the difference in the shot and we can control the intensity by the second settings now it looks much much more realistic right let's just move this key frame to the start of our sequence and I will go with 0.1 and maybe intensity seventy just for now should be fine okay we can obviously change it later when we'll have our shot ready okay maybe 0.2 & 30 should work good yeah something like that okay now we going to work with our camera so before I also as you remember we can change the mesh of our character so let's just try different version you can also do it here you don't have to go into the blueprint you can go to the details tab and you will see just in the mesh window you will see the skeletal mesh asset right so you can select different type of your character as well I'm going to lock all the animation and transform point for the character so by accident I will not delete or move them because I'm going to use this lock or the key option for setting up our camera right so as well if you expand the transform for the camera you will see option like location and rotation and you can manually or by typing some numbers change it as well so I change it to 0 because I want my camera to be completely front to our background plane and maybe we can use this hmm maybe biohazard would be cool yeah I think the color is there and it should just match with desert makes more sense right probably it would be kind of the camouflage for this type of the environment okay and now let's start to work with the camera again we have it locked so if we change the position it will create automatically the keyframe for us as you can see and now have some fun and try to create really really engaging shot if you want to learn more how to control camera how to add the shake for the camera like a blueprint shake or maybe use some more advanced system like rigrail or rig crane we have everything described in the details in our cinematic course so it's always worth to take a look but still I want to show you the basics how to work with it so even if you are a complete beginner you can easily after that lectures create something really interesting in Unreal Engine okay let's just play our sequence it looks much more interesting obviously this is just first stage so it needs some polishing but it's looking good right and we created it in like maybe 20 30 minutes only so instead of spending days or maybe weeks to create a full shot we just made it basically in like 1- 2 hours OK I'll see you in the next lecture. 22. Final Cut: Okay welcome back I hope you created something really interesting I wanted to show you my progress first if you want to preview change the scalability to cinematic so you will actually see the real cinematic quality in your shot I also worked a bit with the lighting I added some camera shake and the last polishing touch will be probably adding some interesting video FX to the shot but this is actually not part of this course anyway I'm going to show you the final video which I created which I rendered at the end of this lecture so as you can see we have some fog settings here as well I added more meshes like the like for example this dead tree basically the whole whole shot is polished but again just around is empty space and that's the problem I have to stick with midjourney only in this one picture behind us and in the next chapter we going to focus on the Skybox AI which basically will give us option to create 360 degree image which can imitate the real environment so then we don't have to worry anymore we can work with different angles. 23. Introduction: Okay now let's focus on Skybox AI type in your Google Skybox AI go to the page and you will see multiple images right so it basically gives you opportunity to choose your style and there is a lot of them you can have stylized option you can have realistic option more like a cartoon as well Skyfi so why is the Skybox Skybox gives you opportunity to create 360 degree images which you can actually download and save as a HDR which you can use later inside the Unreal Engine so that's just example one of them it looks great right and the way you going to create them is very similar to the midjourney so you can use prompt just to create anything basically you imagine so once you decide to log in or just sign up obviously you will have different option and Skybox AI is created by Blockade Labs so if you go to their page you will see that uh option okay and once you select it it will move you to the Skybox AI and here you will have also another information so as well you can start for free I think it's around the 15 free creation you can remix for example your realistic image to something like you see in the example as well you have very interesting plugins so for example you can use the unity plugin I don't see unreal plugin on the page so far maybe it's going to change you know once we start this course um but if you take a look you can have for example unity plugin maybe you work with unity as well so it can be useful for you and obviously this is not free this is paid software and the same is with the subscription if you want to just create HDRI maps they are different plans for it right so let's go back to the sky box let's get started and we can check the plan I think if you go to the login so as you can see there are a lot of options so you basically have the Skybox basic which is hundred generation per month um as well you can go with the Skybox Pro it's just up to you I've used for the scores completely free the intro option when I had 15 generation and that was absolutely enough for me right I had a lot of styles to choose from so it's very very interesting software and it's getting better every week so I really wanted to show you because many times you going to use HDRI maps in unreal and that's one of the more interesting way to do it see you in the next lecture. 24. Create HDR Images: Okay let's go back to the midjourney I will show you another option which we can use with the Skybox AI so what we are going to do now we going to create the image inside the midjourney so let's just try this one let's add some prompt and the prompt we need basically the main one is going to be 360 degree raw VR photo so then we need to select the widest ratio image size which is 2 to 1 in midjourney and once you click create you are going to get something like you see just here right and next step we'll be uploading that picture into the Skybox AI and try to create the HDRI map inside the Skybox based on our midjourney picture I hope it makes sense right so you don't have to use this approach but why not if it's possible right so midjourney is actually much better for creating the images so we can use that right so okay I like that one it looks really good probably we can just modify it a bit this is look king also well and I like that one yeah it's cool so try to create something interesting based on the picture we you created before and as you can see we cannot use any of them for the HDRI map is not going to work correct because the ratio is bad but we can use this picture add the prompt 360 degree raw VR photo and just try to create it something right now okay let's take a look at the final effect as well we can add probably something like we don't want humans right so add the no humans prompt and let's just start creating okay so let's say I want to actually use this one and you remember we can edit the picture so I want to get rid of the person which was created so just delete that and let's take a look great so we have four variation of this shot we can save one of them upscale it and obviously we'll need higher quality of that one so after I will upscale and download it from a journey probably I will need to use some external software or page just to even upscale it more it will take a moment again this is approach you can use however Skybox AI is good enough so you can just use prompt there and create something uh in the same time you know the only limit is your creativity so why not to use midjourney together with the other tools right actually that's a very smart way to do it especially if you created before something very interesting it will take you just few moments to modify it to this VR 360 degree photo and you can easily use it later with the Skybox AI okay now we need to download it okay I have a quick challenge for you I want you to create your own version of Grand Canyon in 2:1 ratio picture okay and I see you in the next lecture. 25. Skybox HDRI: Welcome back before we upload our picture to Skybox I want to upscale our image so I'm going to use freepik.com page I'm not promoting the page in any way I just found it interesting it's free to use up to I think 4K so I will upscale our picture you can use any software any page you want it's just up to you you can use Photoshop if you want it's just up to you I'm showing the free solution okay so once we save it just name it like VR so you will know what is the what is the picture exactly so I call it VR upscale and go back to the Skybox AI now I need to select the style so probably I go with something realistic and you can see different styles so for example you have the models right like realistic artistic style packs so let's just take a look at the model free realistic what we got here we have photorealistic cinematic realism detail render maybe cinematic realism would be good we can try okay and again you can prompt anything you want you can be creative as much as you want but we want to also use our image created in midjourney so just drag and drop and you instantly will notice Skybox will just create the 360 degree image inside the software right so again you can click upload browse the file and add any file you want okay but this file has to be prepared before the way we did it in midjourney actually is the best way to do it for the midjourney okay but of course you can prepare images based on the real life photos you can do it in Photoshop any software which you actually know how to use so okay now what I can add as well are some negative text also enhance prompt so I just added the simple prompt sunny day clouds on sky as you can see it's not looking really good it actually created something completely different we have some castle walls and stuff so again it's not perfect but it's worth to experiment and to try different approach probably if I would use better prompt it will create much more interesting uh picture for me so let's say you want to download the image so you have option to download it as a hdri 32 bit this is exactly the format we're going to use inside the Unreal Engine right once you click download it will take a moment these files are going to be bigger usually about 50 megabytes so don't be surprised it will take a moment okay and now we're going to create something just based on the prompt and let's just compare the final results right so we can keep the sunny day clouds and sky but we're going to use the prompt for the desert so maybe desert with cliffs around in the background we can maybe add the style style of Grand Canyon okay we have sunny day clouds and sky maybe we can add realistic prompt yes okay once you click generate it will take a few seconds and you will get the final result in comparison to midjourney as you remember in midjourney we always have four images created here we have one but still it's 360 degree right okay let's just take a look oh this is really nice I really like it probably the only thing I would like to change is the position of the sun to have like let's say it looks like a sunset right more likely I would like to have something maybe like 2 PM, 3PM that will be perfect for our shot but still I think we could use it as you can see I still have 10 images left so again in the free plan you can have I think 15 images it was at the moment I was recording this lecture it may change in the future I don't know maybe they will make even more or maybe they go the same way like midjourney went right so there will be no free creation anymore okay another version of it and this this time I created it using the picture again we have but I just add different prompt okay and that's another version with even more expanded prompt so let's just take a look what's going to happen if I'm going to use it also I added negative text which is water because I don't want any water in our picture right again experiment test try different prompts and just find the best picture try to create something really cool really interesting oh that's actually quite interesting not exactly something I want but it's cool right so you see how fast it works so the only way to get get HDRI map is just to create them by a real photography or probably buy them on internet right so if you have access to the Skybox AI tool I think it can save you a lot of time okay see you in the next lecture. 26. HDRI in UE5: Welcome back now we are going to use our picture inside unreal first we need to add the plugin so go to the edit window search for plugin and the one we need is HDRI backdrop now you need to probably restart your engine it will take a while and if you go to the place actor tap now you will have option to add the HDRI backdrop to our shot okay so this is something we created with midjourney and let's just try to use our environment we created let's call it studio small environment right uh and we are going to use HDRI backdrop instead so let's open our second scene hmm I'm going to turn off the visibility of our plane okay you can do it in Outliner just by clicking it and as well you can select for visible inside the details and if you turn it off it will not be active anymore in in the level okay and now go to the place actor search for HDRI and you will see the backdrop just drag and drop into your shot okay and you will notice there is a map it may looks a little different on my screen because I already added some effects some you know fog and stuff so by random it will be too different yes so let me show you if I turn off for example directional light or the fog as you can see this looks much much better right now so HDRI backdrop basically imitates the sky dome in your shot so what do you need you need probably only the directional light in most cases and the skylight obviously before we move forward I will just add this meshes to our Desert Meshes folder just to organize it a bit okay it's much better and the HDR backdrop is kind of the system which has its own parameters like for example emissive also you can scale it down and up okay so let's just take a look so first one is intensity so you can increase decrease is up to you by random obviously is 1 then you have the size so depending of the size of your shot eh on your scene you created you can control it as well we have projection center so for different maps I like to play with all of them as well you can change the position the standard position according to your thing right so I need to just move it down a bit and now what we can do we can actually import our images we created in Skybox AI and we can replace it with this default HDRI backdrop image so go to the folder go to the materials textures and we can add here our textures right so we have 3 of them I downloaded 3 versions it will take a moment just upload once they are inside the Unreal you can double click to open the preview and like with any kind of the texture you can control different parameters like brightness color etc so let's open the first one as you can see we have map gen settings from text or group actually we could change it to no mini maps but I don't think it's necessary for this example right so let's just keep it as it is okay we have also option here so that's correct HDR icon yeah that's okay let's just take a look at this one oh this actually look really cool probably that's the one I'm going to use so as you can see we need to work a bit now with the projection center maybe the size maybe the position just to make it look really good as well we can rotate it in our shot right so if I press option to rotate we can rotate it okay I go to the post process volume and actually that's something I set up when I'm going to disable it's not part of the course but I use something called LUT in the post process volume to create even better final visual for it okay let's just move it down a bit again we have to focus only in the areas when we have the camera right angle so it doesn't have to be perfect from every angle the only important part everything we'll see in our shot can you use it for games hard to tell probably it would wouldn't be the best option for games I rather recommend to go with the full 3D environment obviously but for static images for you know for some cinematics let's say you want to create really nice shot of sort of items or maybe a car right you can create really amazing HDRI HDRI image very quickly and just use it inside the Unreal right that's that's the really cool way to do it so okay again this is just my example keep in mind I didn't spend too much time to polishing it I just typed some random prompts if you would work more with the Skybox like you can do with the midjourney probably you can generate something really cool and as you can see I also disabled for now the exponential height fog and once I will start working with other settings probably it will looks much much better okay I think that map is not going to work well for us let's try this one yeah I think that's the one we going to use probably for the shot as well one more thing in the skylight you can also use the real lighting from your HDRI map if you select the Cube option cube map option you can use the same the map you use in the HDRI backdrop however if you using it with the hardware ray tracing you need to increase the intensity scale very very much like even to 20,000 to see any difference right okay see you in the next lecture. 27. Course Summary: Welcome back I hope you created something really cool I want to show you my progress so I decided to use this HDRI backdrop I also added some changes inside the directional light I modified the height fog a bit obviously I was using the volumetric fog and also I used some post process settings to get that kind of the image and if you play it you can just see it's not perfect obviously but it's I think it's quite interesting in the final images I will also add some VFX like explosion in the background and probably the footstep effects for our character so it may looks quite nice okay there is also one option I wanted to show you in the sequencer you can change the play speed so it may be useful if you want to work with your project as well it's good to optimize your project so I wanted to check how optimized is it going to be so as you can see still we are using just few props just few meshes and on my uh computer uh I still have only 25 frames right in the cinematic quality it's not bad but in the same time if you would have probably the full environment like you know video created it will drop instantly below that so we are close to the 30 frames depends on the shot again the character is very high quality so so it's actually normal I'm really glad you you went through all the lectures and you decided to create something really cool in Unreal Engine by using AI tools and summing up as of today fully replacing a 3D artist's work in Unreal Engine 5 with AI tools in my opinion it's not possible however mastering the tools can significantly boost your competitiveness in the industry midjourney and Skybox AI are just a couple of the many tools right that can greatly accelerate your workflow and there's no reason not to use them right especially as a source of inspiration and high quality references I envision this course as a kind of the open source project so over time I plan to add more solutions as they emerge as well as new lectures covering probably other exciting AI advancements that can enhance our worki in Unreal Engine thank you for being part of this course I'm really excited to see your feedback and your artwork you create in Unreal Engine using AI tools