 Hey, what's up everybody? So in my last video, I was talking about Unreal Engine versus Blender for this Star Wars fan film that I'm using. I kind of knew Blender already to a very limited degree because I've used it for a few months now. I don't really know Unreal Engine very, very well, but it looks great. So I was really kind of torn, you know, which one to use for this. And I realized kind of in the end, you know, this is a use both type thing, right? And so what I want to show today is sort of the improvements from, you know, what I was getting from my limited ability in Blender with the EV render engine versus what I was pretty quickly in about a day to be able to do in Unreal Engine. I kind of want to show this, you know, to show that it's doable for people. You know, it doesn't take, you know, weeks and weeks and weeks to do something simple like this. You know, I've put out a few videos lately that, you know, the quality wasn't fantastic on the things I was doing in Blender. And I know this, I'm just learning and I tried to kind of frame it in that way. You know, I've had a couple of comments, you know, in different social media outlets that, you know, say maybe this isn't really good enough for you to be sharing and maybe you're right about that. But my thing these days is basically, you know, you share your successes and you share your failures. And so it's just as important for people to see, you know, your progress and that, you know, if they're in the same stage of their progress that, you know, it's okay, this is expected. This is how it's supposed to kind of look when you suck like I do lots of this stuff. I'm just learning as I go, you know, none of this stuff is a tutorial. I'm learning from watching other tutorials and I'm trying to, you know, link out to those tutorials so that other people can learn and this is just my own experience. So I'm going to share things that look like total trash. I'm going to show things that I think look pretty decent and show my progress. Hopefully in a couple of years I'll be really good at this and, you know, I'll be much more happy with the type of stuff I put out. So but for now, you know, watch it or skip it, whatever. I watch lots of Star Wars fan films that people do, you know, and there's lots of great ones out there. I try not to compare myself to those, you know, for one thing I've only been doing this for a very short period of time and this is just a side hobby that I do in my spare time. You know, there's great ones but, you know, the comparison really kind of kills the creativity for me. If I get too hung up on it looks fantastic, you know, and then mine doesn't look as good, you know, then it kind of makes me not want to do that. So I just have to get over that and just kind of put out everything and, well for the most part, put out everything and see, you know, see how it goes, you know. It's not like I have tons and, you know, of viewers on this channel anyway. You know, it's pretty low at this point in time, which I'd greatly appreciate anybody that's watching and, you know, if you want to subscribe or whatever else to this, you know, it's greatly appreciated. I'm kind of on a roll putting out a lot of Unreal Engine videos right now. So if you like that type of thing, you know, you might want to subscribe. Also still do some camera videos too. So if you're into the GH5 or the Blackmagic cameras, you know, subscribe for that as well. Anyway, back to the main point, you know, that this is YouTube and not Netflix. It's kind of the way I like to think about it. You know, this is, I'm getting ready to show you some crap, kind of what I'm building up to here. So, but let's start out with, you know, something that I did yesterday that I'm actually pretty pleased with. And so that is this. So I'm doing a lightsaber battle for my Star Wars fan film. I really kind of want to have a little bit of action in it. So I'm going to kind of sequence out, you know, two or three movements along with the sound effects and then kind of cut from frame to frame to kind of show that this battle is happening while the Jedi is trying to, you know, collect this Sith holocron or whatever this dark artifact is, what the name of this short film is. And so, you know, I'll start by showing the good and then I'll show the bad. So let's see. This is, you know, what I came up with yesterday. This is basically, you know, a couple of characters, you know, and you'll notice, you know, that's interesting. This is the next scene with some mega scans and this holocron item that I'm working on here. I don't mean to move that. But this came together fairly quickly, but I had to go through several different tutorials and several different paths to get this metahuman head attached to this other body that I was able to get online. I think these assets are from some other Star Wars thing or something. So I just wanted to replace the head. I thought the body was good enough. So at any rate, I'll link to some tutorials that I watched. I think it was DDubs, maybe that channel. The Fractured Fantasy, another channel, and the JS Films, that channel. Not a lot of people doing this type of stuff right now, which is, you know, kind of interesting. I would think it would be a little bit bigger. But it's very exciting to me. And so I'm going to do a lot more of this and check, you know, kind of join that group. And I probably eventually will figure out some things on my own and make some what I would consider tutorials. But for now, I'm just kind of raising up what they're doing and so that you can learn from them. And these are my experiences with this type of thing. So at any rate, what I did here was I took the Chandra from the Megahumans and Metahumans. It's been a long 24 hours. And I wanted to replace the body. So I think it was DDubs, maybe, or Fractured Fantasy. One of those, you know, shows how you can go into the blueprint here. And you can delete all of the things that are under the body. And then you select the body, and you basically put a different skeletal mesh here for that. And so I took my hero, my Jedi that I had, brought it into Blender, because I want to use both of these together and basically cut his head off, right? And so I just have re-exported this FBX. So I just kind of had this headless model, but still rigged to the skeleton that I had already remapped everything. That's a whole other process of doing all of that, which I'm not going to get into right now. Like I said, none of this is a tutorial. This is, but I will link in the description where I learned from a couple of the different videos of trying to piece together how to remap the metahuman skeleton to the mannequin skeleton, and then other skeleton, so that you can use these animations, which was another great thing that I learned how to do. And then just to finish this out, I've got this little lightsaber thing, this little simple two-object thing that I built in Blender. I found another tutorial that showed how to make this emission. Very easy to do in Blender, but not so easy to do in Unreal for that material. Once again, I'm not going to make a tutorial here, but if you want to know more about that, I'll link to that in the description. So let's see. We'll close this out. So basically, once I had all of that together, then I have this actor that I can put into my scene. And I did the exact same thing with the other one. I just didn't have to remove the head, because it's just this kind of Sith robot droid guy or whatever. So I think these are from the video game that came out recently. At any rate, good enough for me. Lots of this stuff is just good enough. You know, can I tell a story? Can I just learn how to use these tools? But something out that's not embarrassing. You know, that's kind of what I'm going for. My next step with this is to do the facial animation using the live link things that I've experimented with already. I've got a couple of videos I've already posted on the channel for that. My next step is to try to make the head and the mouth to have a little more expression as I'm doing these scenes. So, but basically to animate these, I've put these animations in here. I purchased some sword attack finishers, things on the marketplace, some animations, along with the normal. I think these are free, the pose animations and the animation starter pack. I think those are free, but I did buy this sword attacks just because it looked kind of cool and I wanted it to be, have something pretty, I wanted to have a kick ass lightsaber battle. And so I thought the best way to do this is just to kind of get one of these things that looks cool that someone else has already done. So, but the way that I was had to do this was go into the animations, you know, find whichever one I wanted to do. And then, you know, you have to retarget it to one of the skeletons. And obviously I've been playing around with this quite a bit. I've got several skeletons. And so one is for my bad guy, one is for my good guy. You know, these are other ones for the mannequin where I was just playing around. I'm going to cancel out and not do that for now. But for each one of these animation sequences that I want to do, I have to export it, retarget it for whichever skeleton is going to be playing that back. And then they become available automatically for you in the sequencer here. So you can go in, you know, to one of your actors, like this guy right here, for example, you can add another animation, they will automatically appear here as you retarget them. So that's a really kind of neat thing to me a little while to figure some of these things out. This is, I want to make this video as well for myself so that I can revisit it in a few weeks and say, how the hell did I do that? And I can watch myself explain it. So at any rate, this is kind of, you know, where I've landed right now. I'm pretty happy with this. I'm going to, like I said, do some more facial tracking. What I want to show next is the garbage that I came up with in Blender, with a couple of other models. And, you know, I don't know, I didn't spend a lot of time on this a few hours maybe, as you can tell, obviously, because it's complete garbage. But, you know, these guys don't even touch each other with their lightsabers from the animations that I was trying to use here. And I kept scooting them closer in together to try to, you know, maybe they'll, maybe they'll fight. And then I kept experiencing weird things like this, like where this guy's hand is just kind of jutting out to the side for some reason. So these weren't very good models. You know, I kind of regret purchasing those. I may, you know, attempt to get a refund on that. But at any rate, you know, here's our holocron. This is, you know, kind of a thing where I was mapping it out saying, here's what I want to happen. But man, it was going to take me a long time in Blender to make it look the way that I wanted it to look. And then in one day, in Unreal Engine, I was able to get what I've shown you before. So anyway, that's kind of the point of this is that, you know, I don't mind showing my garbage like this, because I can show that, you know, here's my next day's progress. And then my next day's progress and my next day's progress. And, you know, I'll keep at it. And one of these days, I'll be as good as it is, you know, one of these other guys like J.S. Films is doing some great stuff. Very entertaining. And he's just churning out videos, you know, so I'm trying to follow in that turning out some of these videos, people are watching him sometimes, you know. Anyway, thanks for watching this one. If you want to subscribe, please subscribe. If you like this video for some reason, click like. Don't click dislike, please. But anyway, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.