 Hey, what's up everybody? So I've been learning Unreal Engine for the past couple of weeks, and I have made my first Star Wars fan film. I'll put a link in the description so you can see it on my channel. And this video is going to be a quick overview of how I did that with Unreal Engine and DaVinci Resolve for the color grade and the editing and the sound design. And here's how I did it. Check it out. All right, so let's get started, sort of at the end here with the finished product and DaVinci Resolve so you can sort of see what we were going for here. And then I'll go back and show some of the Unreal sections and how I made the scenes that we put into DaVinci Resolve. So anyway, as you can see here, this is the main timeline. Spoiler alert, this is only like two minutes long. So if you haven't seen it, there's a link in the description. Go ahead and watch it and then watch this. I mean, it's not really a spoiler, but anyway. So these are all the different scenes. I think I counted maybe the 10 or 11 scenes that I had to create for all of this. So I started out, you know, having all those laid out. I'll also put a link in the description and potentially up in the top corner with a playlist of how I created the story to begin with. This is actually a redo of a previous story that I did with my kids as a live action type thing a year or so ago. And so I wanted to redo the same story as an animation, something I had envisioned back then and one step closer to it at this point. So there's a playlist that kind of talks about using the story circle and how I created this quick little simple story and pieced all of it together, broke it all into different scenes. And then so this is another interpretation of that type of storyboard. So anyway, all of that is laid out here. As you can see, these are some pretty simple cuts. I did use some of the basic Star Wars transitions that you see in the movies, some of the basic wipes that people consider that cheesy, but for Star Wars, it's kind of a must have, right? And then there's some titles. So basically, this is the full layout. I do most of my affecting on an adjustment clip where I will add a little bit of camera shake or I will use film convert nitrate to kind of add a film emulation look to it. And then I will color grade the individual clips. I'll get back into that in just a little bit. So let's switch over to Unreal and I'll show you a couple of my levels and how I created the cinematics. All right, cool. So over in Unreal, this is one of the levels. This is where the Jedi has landed on the planet and is walking from his a wing to the Sith temple. And so you can see here, this is the camera movement, just a straight push through here following him up. And then the camera is going to kind of pan up so that you can see where he's going. This was not really a scene that we had in the live action version previously. I just kind of had one of my kids kind of looking through the trees like he was in the woods or whatever. But at any rate, this is a pretty cool steam effect. I think I got this on the Unreal Marketplace. The same with all of the models. I think the only things I created were maybe the lightsabers and a couple of other little pieces of the environment. But speaking of environment, these are various trees that I put into place here. And as you can see with this, let's see if I can get this to switch out. Let's see. Yeah. I'm always so terrible at navigating. So as you can see, though, I only filled out what the camera needed to see. And this saves a lot of time. There's no point in building environment that the camera is not going to see for cinematics. Now, if you're making a game, obviously, that's different. You want to open world or something. You have to put stuff everywhere. And that's something I'll probably will get into next. So let's see. Let's see if it can switch back to the camera view. So anyway, as you can see, and there's a little bit of wind moving the trees, clouds, some of these sun rays coming through like that. So this is basically the type of thing I would set up. I know that I need to have this. What's the camera going to look like? I did a little bit of an animation of the guy walking, you know, that type of a thing. So let's open up a different level. All right. So this is one of the lightsaber battles. I kind of wanted to, you know, do a little bit of this, but not too much of this. Like I said, you know, we're in the intro. I really only wanted to spend about a week or so on this so I can move on and do something else. And this is not really like my life's work or anything. This is just, you know, a way to learn how to animate these characters and to use different parts of Unreal. So at any rate, you can see that I have a couple of different animations strung together here. These are some sword finishing moves that I bought on the Unreal Marketplace as well. There is, you know, it's kind of, they're matched. You have an attacker and a victim type thing. So this is my camera movement swiveling around this guy here. You know, this was really kind of to add some action and so that, you know, to kind of hide some of it as well, because they're not exactly timed up. This is a great part right here, though, where he just goes through him. So, you know, this type of thing, it wasn't very difficult to do once I learned how to retarget the animations to this skeleton. There's another video on my channel where I talk about how I did that type of thing. And there's, you know, other, you know, videos out there that kind of show you how to do that retargeting type thing. Alright, so here is another one that is from Outer Space. And I believe that I've got this space skybox or something also on the Unreal Marketplace. I kind of, you know, went into this knowing that I had a budget, you know, of, you know, a little bit of money so that I could get the models that I wanted and not spend so much time on trying to create these things, doing something that I'm not really all that good at just yet. So to start with, it's easier for me just to find some cool looking assets online, spend a tiny bit of money and, you know, put them into my own story. Saves me a lot of time when trying to create these things on my own in Blender, things I'm just really not that good at just yet. So at any rate, you can see this animation. This is where, you know, the jet is coming out of hyperspace kind of cruising across the camera does tilt, I guess, or a pan, whichever that's called, and he heads off down to the planet. Most of the animation on this one is, you know, the a-wing moving through space and the camera doing the pan there. So anyway, that's, you know, pretty much how I did these scenes. There is the one scene where I used a Niagara effect. I'll show that real quick, and then we'll move on to Da Vinci. All right, and so, you know, the final scene where the Jedi has found the Sith artifact, the holocron, and he's being sucked into the dark side. I used the same Sith holocron model that I used in the intro sequence here in the same Niagara effect and, you know, just kind of shot it for a close-up. I actually learned a lesson on this. I thought that I had saved a copy of the original intro sequence, and it turns out that I overwrote it with this, so I kind of lost that. But I have all the same assets here. I just have repositioned them for a different camera take in the same way that you would if you were, you know, resetting a scene for a different take if you were filming it with actual actors. What happens here, you know, the camera kind of has already paned in, and you can see a little bit of this Niagara effect here. Let me back up and show some of that real quick. This was pretty simple. Let's see what I did here. I think I found a tutorial online and my crazy terrible folder stuff here. Let's see, what did I call this? This is Niagara effects. So this is the basic system. These are just like, you know, little emission materials, little particles that are just kind of spinning around. Let's see here. Let me back out on this camera. Maybe it's a little bit better. Yeah, you can kind of see them there. I'll show a better clip of that in DaVinci. So let's get out of Unreal and we'll switch over to DaVinci Resolve. So one thing I did with this that I typically do when I'm filming videos like a music video for an artist or something is, as I'm getting the clips, I'll go ahead and start piecing them together in my video editor so I can see kind of how they're going to look. You know, if they're going to, if they're given the feel that I want, so I can, you know, kind of change things as I'm filming things if I need to and I'm not stuck with whatever I've already filmed at the end. So just in general, it really helped me to kind of do both of these things at the same time. So here is that Niagara effect I was just talking about on the intro sequence. Let's see. You can see it's pretty thick and spinning around this holocron here. And so this is where I actually got to use MetaHumans for this. Had an issue using it once I had attached it to a different skeleton. I couldn't quite get the live link to work anymore. I had to revisit that and see what was wrong with that, but I was able to use it enough to, you know, make it look a little bit better, you know, at some parts of the video. This scene is actually something I had recorded in the original version of this, you know, against a green screen. I was able to pull it into this and sort of, you know, have a dual purpose use for it for both versions. I was able to easily composite that on top of here. I tried to do this inside of Unreal, but I kind of ran into some issues with the chroma keying because it actually was against a black screen and not a green screen and the chroma couldn't really pick up the black for some reason. I'll revisit that a later and see if I can figure that out. You know, let's see. Here's the other scene. Obviously, I added some titles to this and DaVinci. Let's see. I don't want to give too much of that away. I want everybody to kind of watch this and see what they think about it. You know, leave me some comments. Hopefully they're nice comments. This is way, way better than what I was doing in Blender before, so I'm much more excited about this. So after I pulled my clips in and sequenced them, then I did a little bit of color grading on them. You know, for the most part on the ProRes clips, I just kind of did a little bit of a dip in the shadows and I kind of pulled back some of the highlights to kind of give that low contrast film type look. I may have boosted the saturation and done a little bit of other color adjustments, but in general, I was trying to be pretty fast on this and I didn't really want to spend a ton of time once it was looking okay. You know, another part of the sequence here. Let's see. So, you know, that's pretty much it. If anybody has any questions, leave them in the comments. I'd be happy to, you know, answer them there or if I need to, I can make another video, you know, explaining some more stuff in more detail. So anyway, thanks for watching this and I hope you enjoy the FanFum.