Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

By : Henk Venter, Wilhelm Ogterop
5 (1)
Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Character Creation, Animation, and Cinematics

5 (1)
By: Henk Venter, Wilhelm Ogterop

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) offers beginners and seasoned professionals the ability to create detailed movie scenes with realistic human characters using MetaHuman and combine it with custom props and environments. It also comes with built-in industry standard animation tools to develop such scenes in a fraction of the time compared to old methods. This book takes you through the entire 3D movie production pipeline using free (open - source) software. By following the step-by-step, beginner-friendly tutorials in this book, you'll learn how to create your own custom 3D assets in Blender and texture these 3D assets in Quixel Mixer. Next, you'll take these completed 3D assets into Unreal Engine 5 and use them to build a virtual 3D movie set for your 3D movie. You'll also populate your 3D movie set by using Quixel MegaScans assets and create and customize your own photorealistic human character using MetaHuman Creator and UE5. As you advance, you'll discover how to rig, skin, and animate these 3D assets and characters using Blender and UE5's new Control Rig. Finally, you'll explore the process of setting up your movie cameras and animation sequences and rendering your 3D movie using UE5's Sequencer. By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have learned how to combine different elements in UE5 to make your own movies and cinematics.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Part 1 Creating 3D Assets
7
Part 2 Building Your Virtual Movie Set in Unreal Engine 5
13
Part 3 Character Rigging for Animation in UE5 with Control Rig
19
Part 4 Animation in UE5 Using Control Rig and Sequencer

Chapter 3 : Let's Sculpt an Alien Plant!

In Chapter 2, Modeling a Robot Drone Character, you learned how to utilize Blender's excellent modeling tools to create a Robot Drone character.

Modeling tools work great for mechanically shaped models (such as our Robot Drone), but when you want to create a model that has an organic form, 3D sculpting is the best method. That's because it is much more intuitive to use 3D sculpting tools to shape organic surfaces.

This practical tutorial will teach you how to create an organic model for your 3D movie set. So, let's learn how to do this by sculpting an Alien Plant model! These plants would look amazing in your Alien Planet Surface 3D movie set.

In this chapter, you will learn how to sculpt a mesh in Blender, as if it were a piece of virtual clay.

You'll be guided through the complete 3D sculpting process, which will start with setting up the reference image and the block-out stage of your model.

Next, you...