Unreal Engine 5 For Beginners: Learn The Basics Of Virtual Production

What you'll learn in this Unreal Engine 5 course

The basics. Start a blank project for film and video with the starter content, move around the viewport, and learn the Outliner, the Details panel and the Content Browser. Move, rotate and scale actors with snapping grids, build a wall from a cube, and apply materials and lights.

Outdoor scenes.

• Build an atmosphere from a directional light, Sky Atmosphere, Skylight, Volumetric Clouds and Exponential Height Fog, then save it as a reusable Blueprint.
• Sculpt a landscape, or import a PNG height map, and give it a material.
• Download free assets from Quixel Bridge: paint grass and flowers with the foliage tool and turn on wind, add Nanite rocks and decals, and bring in trees from the Epic marketplace.
• Remove what the camera never sees, and stack rocks to hide the landscape surface.
• Give the scene a look with volumetric fog, god rays from light shaft bloom, and a post-process volume (bloom, exposure, chromatic aberration, color grading, film grain).

Interior scenes.

• Block out a hollow studio from geometry boxes, cut windows with a subtractive box, and turn the result into a static mesh so sunlight stays outside.
• Dress a saloon with Quixel assets, dirt decals, a floor material set per surface, and photos in picture frames.
• Light it with spot lights and a rectangle light, build an emissive material for the bulbs, soften shadows, and mix color temperatures for contrast.
• Understand why Lumen puts red crosses on lights, and how to fix it with static lights and a lighting build.

Characters, cameras and virtual production.

• Create a MetaHuman, import it into your scene, and drive its face and head from your iPhone with the Live Link Face app.
• Place Cine Camera Actors, set lens, aperture and focus, and animate three cameras with camera cuts in the Level Sequencer.
• Track a virtual camera with your iPhone and record it with the Take Recorder.
• Key a green screen shot inside Unreal Engine with Composure, from an mp4 file and from a live feed.
• Control a virtual light from real DMX lighting over Art-Net.
• Render with the Movie Render Queue: Apple ProRes or EXR, anti-aliasing and warm-up settings, 4K output.

How the course is built

There are 25 lessons with a total runtime of 5 hours. Most lessons end with something for you to practice before the next one, such as arranging chairs and a table in the first scene, or playing with the sky atmosphere settings. The last lesson asks you to build your own landscape or interior, add virtual cameras and keyframes, and render three or four shots as a level sequence.

The project files come as a split zip archive in 9 parts, about 17 GB in total. Jordy says in the lessons that the project holds a separate level for each lesson, so you can open the level that matches where you are.

Who this course is for

This is a beginner course. You do not need any Unreal Engine knowledge, and a basic understanding of video editing helps. It suits you if you want to make cinematic renders, or if you want to learn how virtual production tools like camera tracking, chroma keying and DMX lighting work.

It is not a 3D modeling course. Jordy points out that Unreal Engine is not modeling software, so you build scenes from free Quixel assets and the shapes built into the engine. The iPhone tracking is a hobby setup, and he says it is not what professional studios use. The DMX lesson is aimed at people who already know DMX, and he suggests skipping it if you do not.

What you need

• Unreal Engine 5, installed through the Epic Games launcher, and an Epic Games account (used to sign in to Quixel Bridge).
• A computer that can run the engine. Jordy works on a fast machine and shows how to lower the scalability setting if yours struggles. He also warns that MetaHuman is heavy on your computer.
• An iPhone for the face capture and camera tracking lessons. Jordy says the Live Link Face app only works with iPhone.
• For the live chroma key lesson, a camera, a capture device (he uses a Cam Link) and a green screen. For the DMX lesson, DMX lights and a network.