Animation Studio 1

Project 2 - Specialisation Development | Final Submission

Learning Unreal Engine for Film & Television

First complete render in Sequencer

FirstHourInSequencer_002_Raytrace-Render.mp4

Breakdown

Using assets provided by the Unreal Engine Learning Portal I:

  • Added a character to the scene

  • Attached animation to the character

  • Animated the position and rotation of the character to move it within the scene

  • Animated other objects such as a statue and scene cameras

  • Activated fire effects with the sequencer

  • Activated blueprints which cause the rocks to fall

  • Edited and rendered all shots with Sequencer

Breakdown

  • Blocked out the scene using simple primitive shapes to plan composition and use as placeholders for assets to be imported later

  • Created the ground by using the landscape editor

  • Added grass using the foliage editor

  • Imported assets from the Unreal Engine marketplace and replaced the placeholder shapes

  • Used a Post-process Volume actor to create camera effects such as depth of field, bloom, light shafts and colour grade the scene.

Learning how to layout a scene in Unreal Engine

Indoor Environment Scene with Raytraced Lighting

Breakdown

  • Modelled the main room layout in Maya then imported into Unreal Engine

  • Added materials from content packs found on the Unreal Engine marketplace

  • Added raytraced lights

  • Used non-raytraced lights and an exponential height fog actor to create light shafts from the window and roof lights

  • Rendered in sequencer

IndoorEnv_02.mp4

Short Video made from an Outdoor Environment made in Unreal

Breakdown

  • Used the blueprint brush plugin in the landscape editor to sculpt mountains

  • Sculpted the rest of the ground plane to create a bumpy landscape

  • Painted grass and flower foliage assets to create grass fields

  • Added in assets from the marketplace including, high detail trees, birds, a snake, fencing and water.

  • Created a 30 second video using sequencer to edit cameras and animate birds flying across the scene

  • Added a post-process volume to create effects such as depth of field, lens flares, bloom, light shafts, chromatic aberration, change the colour grade, add ambient occlusion and tweak baked global illumination.

Project Files

Reflection/Post-mortem

Since a long time ago, I have always wanted to try using Unreal Engine because I've seen it being used more and more in the animation and film industry so I decided to learn how to use it for this project.

I made an account with the online learning portal and started the Film and Television Learning Path course for Unreal Engine 4. The tutorials didn't really go much in depth which was a bit disappointing but there was a lot to cover so I get why they only glazed over a lot of topics. Some of the lessons were just one hour of watching someone from Epic Games talk about the material shader system in Unreal Engine which was extremely dull and had no practical element to it.

Other lessons needed project folders to be downloaded which meant my hard drive filled up very quickly and I was deleting other files to make room. Some project files ended being over 50GB big because of asset packs that were downloaded into it.

Another downside is waiting for shaders to compute in a scene when opening it for the first time can take over an hour.

There were many frustrating parts to learning Unreal Engine but there were some parts that I really liked about the engine:

  • Creating scenes in real time means I know what the final product will look like straight away, no waiting for images to render.

  • Lots of post-processing tools meant I could tweak the final look and create fake details like extra ambient occlusion to add depth to the shadows and also colour grade the image before exporting.

  • There are heaps of assets available on the Epic Games marketplace, many of them for free. The Quixel Bridge materials are also all free for Unreal Engine users.

  • Blueprints are very powerful since they are a visual way of coding which adds heaps of creative possibilities however the tutorials I did only lightly glossed over what they are. because learning them in depth would most likely take months to years to get good at using them.

I also had many rendering frustrations as the raytrace engine was slow and my GPU was not powerful enough to handle it sometimes. However, the normal render engine is very fast and still looks very good.

In the future, despite my constant frustration with Unreal, I still want to learn more about how to use Unreal for creating short animated films. There are things like exporting animation from Maya to Unreal and using other virtual production tools to composite live action video into levels in Unreal in real-time. The next version of Unreal Engine will also include a new lighting system called Lumen, which generates real-time global illumination and doesn't require lightmaps to bake which will save plenty of time and increase render quality drastically.

Unreal Engine 5 will also include a new LOD system called Nanite, which automatically regenerates high poly meshes based on the distance to the camera with almost no performance impact. This means artists can import extremely dense 3D models into a scene without retopologizing them. This feature easily makes Unreal even more appealing to use as a 3D software package because no traditional 3D software like Maya or Blender can do this kind of thing on the fly in real-time.

In conclusion, what I've learnt over these past weeks, is that Unreal Engine has many quirks and little things that may just not work properly at times, but once you get past those issues it can become a powerful tool for quickly making a high quality video product. Hopefully Unreal Engine 5 lives up to the hype and fixes most of my grievances I had using UE4.