Now that my scene was set up, I could begin shooting the scenes, rendering them, and putting my final video together. I got on a call with Henry and he taught me how to set up and use cameras in Unreal. Firstly I made a folder for my shots in the content browser to keep everything organised, then went to the cinematics tab and added a level sequence. This opened the sequencer which functions a lot like the timeline in After Effects, which I was already familiar with. From the place actors tab I went into the cinematics section and created a cine camera actor. I renamed it appropriately, then dragged the camera from the world outliner to the sequencer. With the camera in the sequencer, I could start working on the shots. I changed the perspective to be from the camera and moved to where I wanted my shot to begin, then set a keyframe at the start of the sequence. I then moved my camera to where I wanted the shot to end and set another keyframe. When I played the sequence back I was able to see how the shot would look from the camera’s POV. I edited the camera’s positioning on the keyframes to get it just right, then extended the length of the shot in the sequencer and moved the keyframes (this slowed down the camera’s movement). When I was happy, I repeated this process several times to get all the shots I wanted.

After I finished my final shot, I began rendering. Since Unreal is a realtime rendering engine designed to be compatible with games, rendering is a lot faster than in 3D programs like Maya which are designed for pre-rendered video. Unreal still has options for pre-rendered video exports too though, and I chose to export my clips as image sequences to take into After Effects. To do that I just had to click the render movie button and change the options to render as a jpeg sequence and output to the folder I wanted. My first attempt needed to be redone, the image sequence exported fine but when the scene began to render, Rhys’ modular building broke apart and the pieces flew off into the sky. This was really unexpected since I didn’t actually animate anything in the scene apart from the camera, so I wasn’t expecting any errors like that. I looked online but couldn’t find anyone talking about this particular physics issue, so I asked my group members for advice.

Apparently this issue had affected some of them too, Jess told me she’d fixed it by deleting the offending objects from the scene then reimporting them from the content browser. Her theory was that I copy-pasted the same asset too many times and it caused a problem with the positioning (Unreal was trying to place the copied objects in the same position as the original). I tried following her instructions and noticed that my content browser included a skeletal mesh version of my asset and a physics object version of my asset. I dragged the skeletal mesh into the scene and set it up like I did before, and it worked fine. It seems the problem was that I somehow created a physics object which interacted with the other physics objects in the scene when the render began. I was able to check if my scene was working correctly by pressing the play button which simulates a game or scene running in realtime (mainly to let game developers see what their Unreal scene will look like to the player, but it also lets you see how the scene will look when its being rendered).

Once I’d fixed that with Jess’ help, I was able to render out all my image sequences and take them into After Effects. AE allows you to import image sequences and it automatically converts them to video clips, which makes editing easy. Looking at my footage, I redid a few shots and changed the speed or angle to look more like I wanted. After that I picked out a song to put in the background, I wanted something that fitted the futuristic vibe. Maybe some kind of EDM or vaporwave? I ended up choosing Above All by HOME because it was royalty free and fit with the atmosphere perfectly, as well as being a genuinely good song.

The last thing I did was to add text to the end of the video to credit the Unity store asset artists and the song artist. I typed them in After Effects, then experimented with the text animation tools until I found a setting I liked. It scrambled the text like a computer trying to guess a password in a movie, I thought it’d be fitting for the cyberpunk theme. I added my keyframes and after looking over the video, I exported it with Adobe Media Encoder.