Exploring an Animation Studio Cinematic in Unreal Engine 5

0:00 This video is sponsored by Epic Games.

0:01 Here's a question.

0:02 How many times have you personally gotten

0:04 to actually open up a real studio project,

0:07 like the actual files for that [music] project?

0:10 And if you have and you work at a studio where you get

0:12 to do that, how many times do you get to do that for another studio,

0:15 for another production that isn't your own?

0:18 It's pretty rare, right?

0:19 That kind of access is extremely uncommon.

0:22 But that's what I wanted to talk about today.

0:25 This is the Acom Animation sample project and it is

0:28 an actual production cinematic created by Agora Studio and the entire

0:31 thing was built in Unreal Engine which is very

0:33 cool because even if you've worked in an animation studio,

0:36 chances are you probably haven't worked at one where

0:38 you actually got to see inside an Unreal Engine pipeline.

0:41 One of the things that's so special about

0:42 this project is that the rigging of the characters

0:44 and the actual animation that was all done natively

0:46 inside of Unreal as [music] well as you know effects,

0:49 blueprints and the environment and the lighting and things

0:51 like that that are a little bit more common.

0:53 Even the characters here were made in Unreal.

0:55 And this whole thing is free to download.

0:56 It's on Fab, which is Epic Games' content

0:58 marketplace where we can grab stuff for Unreal Engine,

1:00 but we can deconstruct the assets to learn from them ourselves,

1:03 or you can even reuse these assets in your own projects.

1:05 If you want to play with these characters,

1:06 if you want to grab some of the props,

1:08 if you want to use the effects, it's all just there and you can use it.

1:10 And in this video, I want to show you 10 different things

1:12 that I've learned while working with this project

1:14 because there's so much cool stuff, half of which I've never even seen before.

1:17 And I just wanted to share that with you.

1:19 Now, just to be clear, I didn't actually work on the animated cinematic.

1:23 I was doing some work with Epic Games to create

1:24 educational content to accompany this cinematic so that if anybody

1:27 wanted to learn like the animation tools and sort

1:30 of more about the software of like how this was done.

1:32 I made a bunch of videos that live over on the Epic Dev

1:35 community and some of those videos are making their way over to YouTube,

1:37 which whatever is available for you to watch,

1:39 I'll have linked down below if you want to check out the actual cinematic,

1:42 the download for the project, of course,

1:44 the videos that I created to sort of walk

1:46 you through how to actually work with these project files

1:48 and to understand everything that's in there and like what

1:50 was used and the tools and that kind of thing.

1:52 And of course, I'll have links down below to my animation courses because I

1:55 do teach animation and I also teach software and I've got classes for Maya,

1:58 Blender, and Unreal Engine,

2:00 including some upcoming classes on creating animated cinematics.

2:03 And so, if any of this is the kind of thing

2:04 that you want to be able to do on your own,

2:05 I'm going to have links down below for you to check that out.

2:07 Now, with that, let's go ahead and dive

2:08 into the 10 things I learned [music] working in this project.

2:11 Number one, planning with 3D animatics.

2:13 Now, when I say planning with animatics,

2:15 you can actually draw inside of Unreal Engine.

2:17 There's now a built-in tool called Odyssey,

2:19 which is a fully featured 2D animation program in Unreal Engine,

2:23 and you can use it in context of a 3D scene.

2:25 You can actually draw your stuff on these little cards,

2:29 and you can move those cards through space.

2:30 It's not exactly the same as Blender's grease pencil,

2:32 which is like objects in 3D space.

2:34 So, it's different, but it works with UML's camera system.

2:37 And here you can see you can actually move through the 3D environment,

2:40 and you can see those cards moving around, right?

2:43 like you can actually see if you play it from outside,

2:45 they'll go ahead and slide if you choose to do it this way.

2:47 And so this is one example of how you can do 2D previs or 2D

2:52 planning and storyboarding and that kind of thing

2:53 to create an animatic that works in 3D.

2:56 So you actually can do quite a bit

2:58 of the actual 3D layout planning while you work.

3:01 Next up is the time warp.

3:02 And for this this moment where everything goes slow motion,

3:10 there are two ways to actually get slow-mo in an animated project.

3:14 If you've ever done it before,

3:15 one of those methods is just to key frame things in slow motion.

3:19 Just animate it slow.

3:20 And that's what they did here.

3:21 But there's a second way.

3:23 If I take this shot with the fighting and we have the spin attack,

3:26 wah, and then we have this bam that punch right there.

3:29 I'll take this punch and let's go ahead and add slow motion to that one punch.

3:34 I'll go and add a time warp curve.

3:35 You can do play rate or time warp.

3:37 I'll just do play rate.

3:38 That one I don't think gets very much love.

3:39 So, I'll go ahead and just hit uh key frame on this.

3:41 And what this is is basically saying what's the speed,

3:44 the play rate, the rate of play, right?

3:46 We're just at one.

3:47 But if I want to slow that down, I'll back this up a little bit.

3:50 Let's go ahead and say that here

3:51 we're playing normally and a couple frames later,

3:53 maybe by this point I'm going to go down to like 0.1.

3:58 And I'm going to use my curve editor.

4:00 In the curve editor, you can see a little bit better that I

4:02 basically have a play rate of one up here.

4:04 Meaning that whenever the keys are up here, time moves normally.

4:07 We just hit play.

4:08 But then you'll see that right here,

4:11 things slow down and then they'll ramp back up.

4:14 And so it's it's just a quick way to control the flow

4:17 of time to add slow motion with a handful of keys.

4:21 That way you don't have to necessarily animate everything really slow.

4:25 You can sort of make that decision later.

4:27 and just slow things down or speed things up.

4:30 And it's just a it's a cool little feature.

4:31 Now, next up is the effects.

4:32 One of my favorite sections and some

4:34 of my favorite stuff that I found on the project.

4:36 There are a number of different things that they've done with effects.

4:40 Now, these things like these scorch marks, the laser bullet holes.

4:43 These are actually done with what's called decals.

4:45 These are basically stickers that if I take one and move it around,

4:49 you can see that the actual scorch mark and the bullet hole

4:52 are two separate little assets that can be moved around at will.

4:56 Let me go ahead and try to grab this and show you.

4:58 So, you can just use these, duplicate them, and create more.

5:02 Right?

5:03 So, really quick and easy way to customize

5:06 your environment with these little effects things,

5:08 and you can animate them to turn on and off visibility.

5:10 The other thing I thought was really,

5:12 really cool is it would actually animate the surfacing of those assets.

5:16 Let me show you.

5:17 It's this part of it where he's actually

5:18 running and he's getting shot by different blasters.

5:20 the actual like laser fire in some of these shots are they're

5:25 2D animated like drawings on a little plane in front of the camera

5:29 which if I come really close to the camera you can see

5:32 the lasers right so these right here if I go like that you can

5:36 see what it kind of looks like these little 2D effects are

5:39 are handdrawn but if I look at the thing he's holding right here

5:43 there's only one scorch mark and as I move back this way you

5:47 can see that more pop up right find a good frame right there.

5:51 This one is showing up right now.

5:53 So here, if I scrub around and we find these moments

5:55 where the actual little impacts happen on the door like right there,

6:00 this one just showed up.

6:01 We actually have those decals popping up.

6:04 So they're being spawned in on this frame,

6:06 but also the emissive color is being animated.

6:08 So if I crank up the intensity,

6:11 you can see that we're actually animating the shader to be

6:14 like on and bright for just a brief moment, right?

6:17 Right.

6:17 So, if I go, you can see it go pow, right?

6:21 And it turns off.

6:22 So, not only are they being used for set design,

6:24 they're also being used and attached

6:27 to the thing he's holding with shader animation, which I think is super cool.

6:30 I want to mention here this floor being destroyed.

6:33 This is very cool, too,

6:34 because if I leave the sequence and just click on the floor asset,

6:38 this floor asset was actually pre-built with this shot in mind.

6:43 There's actually a little check box here that says broken.

6:45 Yes.

6:46 And we can turn that on.

6:47 And so that gets enabled through this little blueprint that gets made.

6:51 And we can look and see how this was created by opening up that blueprint.

6:55 Now, you don't need to understand blueprints to appreciate this moment.

6:58 Here you can see that there's basically

6:59 just a little thing that says, "Hey, broken,

7:02 it's it's code that says if it if the checkbox says yes, then show damage.

7:06 If the checkbox is not checked, then then don't do it." And if you look in here,

7:09 you can actually see how this was done.

7:11 There is just the actual little piece of floor that they're swapping out.

7:16 So this is the floor asset overall.

7:18 This is a different floor asset that they

7:21 are showing visible when the floor is not broken.

7:24 And then here they have the part that they swap in when you check the box.

7:28 So they have just this little spot that swaps between a broken or a not broken

7:32 thing um which was like a manually created

7:35 piece of broken geometry which is just really smart.

7:38 So you can have one floor asset with a little spot that you know you're going

7:41 to break and you can have a little

7:42 check box so you can easily control the destruction.

7:45 Now little debris pieces are still animated on top

7:48 of that but overall one frame to have the explosion.

7:52 That's great.

7:53 Love it.

7:54 Now please indulge me.

7:54 I have one more effects thing to show you because I

7:56 just love the effects in this project here in this shot.

7:58 As these lasers are flying by let's take a look at one of these lasers.

8:02 Actually multiple of these lasers.

8:04 This asset is the blueprint for laser.

8:07 This right here is a 2D handdrawn effect.

8:11 Now, what it's doing, which, you know, we can move around and we can rotate

8:15 and do things with, but it's got a point light.

8:17 There is a light attached to the actual handdrawn sprite,

8:21 and that's why it's a blueprint.

8:22 It's just these things kind of lumped together,

8:24 kind of like a pre-MP in After Effects, if anyone's familiar.

8:26 But anyways, you've got this handdrawn thing with a light.

8:29 And you can see here that the light just has a color.

8:31 It's orange.

8:32 And the laser itself has these different parameters that they've built in.

8:35 So they decided, okay, we have three types of colors.

8:38 This orangey gradient, like a warm white, and then this like electric blue.

8:42 And those are the colors being used for these three different pieces,

8:45 the three different parts of the drawing,

8:47 like the core, the flames, and then the lightning.

8:49 And then what's really awesome about how this was built is this is actually

8:53 just a set of different drawings being

8:56 cycled frame by frame through the Niagara system.

8:59 So if I go look at this, this is the actual texture file that was created.

9:02 These are the different frames that loop

9:05 and cycle to create the fire thing, the laser.

9:08 So here you can see there's three distinct colors.

9:09 There's like the bright core, the outer flames,

9:12 and then the the lightning piece that eventually is all being

9:15 used to separate the orange from the white and the blue.

9:19 And you've got these different pieces that they can control independently,

9:22 assign certain colors to.

9:24 is you could retexture or recolor them

9:26 with that thing I showed you earlier how we came

9:27 in here and we said I had this as uh so maybe if I want to retexture

9:30 this and turn this into something like reddish

9:33 I could hit this button turn it into like

9:34 a red laser or if I want the lightning to be like green for some reason I can I

9:39 can do that I can make it green lightning if you want to mess with this you

9:42 can actually go into the sequencer here and you

9:44 can grab one of these lasers we can actually

9:46 see the point light element so we can

9:48 control the intensity and change how bright it is

9:50 or we can go to the actual artwork element

9:53 and inside that you've got all kinds of different things.

9:55 For example, we can mess with the sprite index,

9:57 which if I go ahead and just switch some stuff around,

10:00 this will allow us to manually animate

10:03 which of the different sprites we play with.

10:05 So, if I set this from zero, one, two, three, I think there's five total.

10:10 There we go.

10:10 And then back to zero.

10:11 I'll try to do this really fast.

10:16 You get the idea.

10:17 But you can actually handdraw an effect, use it as artwork, as a sprite.

10:22 I don't know how to do all this from scratch.

10:24 This is not my territory, but it's just so cool.

10:26 It's so creative.

10:28 There it is.

10:28 I don't know.

10:29 Baked animation sequences for both evaluation and sharing.

10:32 The big thing with this down inside these subsequences,

10:35 we have the actual control rig like animation data.

10:38 So, if I go find this character, I can twirl it down and we've got his layer.

10:41 And here's all the key frames, right?

10:43 I can click on them.

10:44 I can see the controls and I can see where the individual keys and curves live.

10:49 You know, what's been keyed where.

10:50 But we don't actually need all this live stuff cuz you can

10:53 see if I move around things like his hair have live dynamics on.

10:56 That's great.

10:57 But once you're done with all that work,

11:00 we don't necessarily need to keep all this just live

11:03 in the engine for other artists like lighters and effects artists.

11:06 Like they don't need to access the key frames.

11:08 They don't need this extra computation or access to this stuff.

11:11 And depending on the pipeline,

11:12 it might actually be easier just to have them not deal with any of it.

11:15 And so what you do in that particular case,

11:18 what they've done in this project at Agora is it would take

11:20 this animation work and they would bake it to an actual track here.

11:23 So we say, you can see here it says baked animations.

11:26 So if I go in here, we have beta.

11:28 And in this particular case, he no longer has his rig.

11:31 He's not a live character anymore.

11:33 He's just a skeletal mesh with an animation track.

11:37 And this animation track is really, really lightweight.

11:39 Needs to mess with.

11:40 So, if I just disable it, turn it off, he no longer does anything, right?

11:45 So, you can easily control and, you know, disable characters,

11:49 and you can see how quick it is to load and unload stuff.Oop.

11:54 Unreal really likes when things are in this mode because it's just super simple.

11:58 And you can see when I scrub, he doesn't have the live hair stuff anymore.

12:01 It's like the baked down animation.

12:02 So, it's the perfect format to share between departments.

12:05 And if you happen to have anything that's

12:07 a little bit buggy as you're developing your project,

12:09 this is a really safe way to have the actual like,

12:12 you know, live animation rig always accessible,

12:15 but you're just constantly baking out a version

12:17 that's also set up as a subsequence.

12:19 So you can easily access either copy.

12:22 Animators can jump into their work

12:23 with control ring section or other departments

12:25 can just use the baked animation stuff and mute what they don't need.

12:28 They had a specific Python script that they

12:30 created to do this on the fly really quickly,

12:32 but of course we can just rightclick and and do it the normal way.

12:35 just a smart workflow that I wanted to show the light manager.

12:38 So, there's a lot of lights.

12:39 There's all this like glowing stuff.

12:40 All these lights are on the top of the room down the hallway and so on.

12:45 If you wanted to change all this stuff individually,

12:47 that's going to take a while.

12:48 But here, you can just select the light manager they set up.

12:51 And by selecting that, there's just all these different settings.

12:54 So, you can adjust the red light color as well as the red emissive color.

12:58 So, if we just say, "All right, I want these all to glow." I have white.

13:01 I didn't mean to have white, but you saw how easy that was.

13:02 So I can just switch to something else.

13:04 I can also turn off the alarms.

13:07 Any I'll reset these back to normal.

13:08 So instead of having to do all this stuff individually, light manager blueprint.

13:13 Genius idea.

13:14 Another thing in case you've never seen

13:15 it is the actual organization of the project.

13:18 This is something that I I just think everyone should get to take

13:20 a look at at some point is how any studio sets up their actual cinematics.

13:26 This one's a little bit more involved with a specific naming convention.

13:29 Like all these folder names are not super helpful,

13:32 but that's pretty common in a lot of industry productions.

13:34 You use numbers instead of names because you rearrange things.

13:37 You change the the story.

13:39 And so, you know, it makes it just a lot

13:41 easier to organize stuff with a numbered naming convention.

13:44 But then beyond that, if we actually

13:46 look at the cinematic in the individual shots,

13:48 jumping into a subsequence, you can actually see how things are split.

13:51 Now, I've kind of hinted to this already, but you've got effects,

13:53 you've got a lighting, you've got all these different things separated.

13:56 So, if I want to take the lighting and mute it,

13:57 you can see what the lighting is actually doing

13:58 for this particular shot as opposed to the general lighting,

14:02 we can turn on this shot's lighting.

14:04 Just like that.

14:05 And so, just how they've set up the project, I think it's cool.

14:09 The way they did it is unique.

14:11 Every studio does it differently.

14:12 And so, it's worth really diving in and taking a look at, which of course,

14:16 if you want a guided tour, that's what my videos are for down below.

14:19 But, one of the things I really wanted

14:20 to show you is our next number, the camera rig.

14:23 If I come down here, if I come over here,

14:25 I can show you the actual camera asset.

14:27 So, there is the actual camera,

14:29 but instead of just animating the camera, grabbing it and moving it,

14:32 they actually have a whole control rig set up

14:34 to to mess with the camera through uh control rig.

14:37 So, you've got these different controls.

14:39 We've got the root control, all move, move control, camera control, handheld.

14:42 You can separate different motions.

14:44 So, if you want to do camera shake on one,

14:46 if you want to do sort of a handheld thing on another,

14:48 keeps it clean, but it's a really interesting workflow.

14:50 I hadn't actually seen this particular camera rig set up in Unreal before.

14:54 And if this is something you find helpful,

14:56 you could actually take this asset and move it into your other project.

14:59 So, if you enjoyed this and you're like,

15:01 I want that, you can just move it into other projects

15:03 and you can use this just like all these other assets.

15:05 This one's simple animation key frames to actually be able to look

15:08 at the actual data of what controls on the characters were keyed at what point.

15:13 You can see the cheats that were used to create the cinematic.

15:16 For example, this shot that seems like the characters

15:17 are running by the camera from wherever they're coming from.

15:19 You can see that the character is actually just running from a wall.

15:23 He's not coming from anywhere because the camera doesn't see it.

15:25 So, it's fine.

15:26 So, it's just a good way to see the little tricks

15:30 and things that have been done to to sell the shot.

15:33 And you can see all these different robots running around.

15:35 You see that this robot's in a T- pose until he

15:37 snaps in because he's really not doing much until he's needed.

15:40 So, you don't have to mess with everything, just what the camera can see.

15:44 You've probably heard this before, but anyway,

15:46 that's just another thing here that if you want to check out,

15:48 you know, how did they get a certain look?

15:50 How many frames did it take to do something?

15:51 Are they using FK?

15:52 Are they using IK.

15:53 If you really like the like wiggly quality of this robot,

15:56 you could come in here,

15:57 grab one of these controls and take a look at how they did it.

15:59 So, we can come in here to the the up and down.

16:02 And there's like up, down, up, down, up, down.

16:05 Right.

16:05 So, that's that's the curve right there for that like wiggly chest

16:08 on the robot and all this like overshoot that he's got as he fires.

16:11 So, if you want to learn more about actually animating these characters,

16:15 you can come look and see what the animators were doing and intentionally

16:18 dig in there and learn something new

16:21 about animating like a big muscly character,

16:23 the quadriped running around these robots that are kind of like stringly.

16:27 It's really cool stuff.

16:28 And so, these are just a few of the things I wanted to show you in this project.

16:31 Obviously, there's so [music] much more that you could learn by, you know,

16:35 downloading and going through this yourself.

16:36 If you're not familiar with Unreal and you don't even know

16:39 where you'd begin to like deal with all of this, again,

16:42 that's what's going to be linked down below,

16:43 as well as the actual download link for this project,

16:46 the videos that I made for Epic that actually walk

16:48 you through and help you understand like what's going on here.

16:52 And if you want to go even deeper than all

16:53 those videos go and really understand how [music] to animate,

16:56 how to work with Unreal's animation tools specifically,

16:58 or how to make cinematics,

17:00 how to actually get into telling stories [music] in Unreal Engine,

17:03 I've got all my classes linked down below.

17:05 And I've got some of those new classes coming out very soon.

17:07 So, make sure you check out the link down below

17:09 to my courses [music] and join the wait list if you haven't already.

17:11 That way, you're the first to know when these new classes come out.

17:14 And of course, a huge thank you to Epic Games for sponsoring this video.

17:16 Everything you've seen, Unreal Engine, this cinematic project,

17:19 the videos I made for the EDC,

17:20 all that stuff is just free for you to check out as resources to download.

17:24 But I hope you enjoyed the video.

17:25 Thanks again for watching.

17:26 As always, I'm Sured and I'll see you in the next video.

17:28 And happy 2026, by the