Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1521956
T E C H 43 S U M M E R Q 2 I S S U E Toonen. In Unreal Engine, Fraser could place characters and set pieces into the environment and see precisely how the sun- light and shadows would look for a specific time of day. Toonen added, "Greig has been working with Epic Games and Unreal Engine for a while now. There's a great project from Unreal called MetaHumans that anyone can use for free to make realistic characters. Greig worked with several Unreal Engine artists to create MetaHumans Lighting, a bundle of six lighting presets. So you can put your MetaHuman model(s) and any oth- er assets (like a set pre-built in 3D software) into a location and start to visualize lighting setups. You can work in real-time and light the entire scene with the same lights you'd be using on the real film set. You get a super clear idea of how it's going to look way in advance, before you've started construct- ing a single thing. It opens up the tools for everyone that's on set." USING THE BEST TOOLS Unreal Engine 5 is free to download and use, and the UE Marketplace has free assets, plugins, textures, blueprints, learn- ing tools, and other materials. "There's a huge asset library by Quixel that's free with Unreal. These assets were captured with photogrammetry. So artists captured images of real objects, like buildings, props, rocks, caves, cliffs, and so on, and created assets from those, which you can then use to build environments in Unreal," Toonen said. Assets can also be created in other visual effects programs, such as Autodesk's Maya, SideFX's Houdini, Blender (open- source software), etc., and imported into UE5. Artists can use their best tools for asset creation and aren't limited to only working within UE5. Learning UE5 — a powerful game en- gine used to create AAA game titles — won't happen overnight. In reality, proficiency might take months or even a year. Toonen admits to giving up the first time he tried to learn it. But after seeing how Unreal Engine was used for "The Mandalorian," he redoubled his efforts. The benefits of real-time rendering and lighting, virtual scouting, pre-visualization, and live com- positing outweighed the time commitment needed to learn UE5. "Just be patient with your progress. There are a lot of pitfalls at the beginning, but this is a tool that you can use for the next five to 10 years; it's that powerful," Toonen added. O n e o f t h e b i g g e s t r o a d b l o c k s f o r Toonen was understanding how all the sys- tems in the engine work together. "At first, I didn't know why what I was seeing in the viewport wasn't what rendered out when I tried to make a movie to put in my editing timeline. And it wasn't obvious why they were mismatching," he said. "That's why it's so important to understand the game engine side of things. The best way to start learning Unreal for filmmaking is actually to start by making a really simple game. If you skip over that first step of learning game development entirely, I can almost guarantee you're going to hit a roadblock and you're going to have no idea how to fix it because you just haven't used UE5 like a game engine." There are YouTube tutorials for learning UE5 for both game creation and filmmaking, a resource Toonen used while learning. But he warned, "Unreal Engine makes signifi- cant updates every couple of months, and if you're just jumping into Unreal, you have to go through the maze of old forum articles and pages. The troubleshooting resources for previous versions of Unreal don't always translate to the current version." The arduous challenge of learning a game engine for filmmaking led Toonen to start Unreal for VFX (www.unrealforvfx. com), a website that offers online training courses that teach the ins and outs of UE5. "It took me a long time to figure out Unreal Engine and to learn what I have so far. I want to help people shave off six months, a year, or even more, and shortcut them through that experience so they can get into the fun, creative parts of filmmaking using Unreal," said Toonen. H e a l s o h e l p s i n s t r u c t f i l m m a k e r s hands-on. Last year, he was involved with the Virtual Production Workshop hosted by the CSC (Canadian Society of Cinematog- raphers) and sponsored by IATSE 667. He worked with Pixomondo to design virtual backgrounds for Unreal Engine and helped teach filmmakers about virtual production on an LED Volume. SEE PAGE 53