Check out my short and let me know what to focus on to improve

The link to the video is above.
I work at a small school in an urban space that can’t get to many of the locations that we’d like to shoot. The AV class has become the Theater class as well and stories about “the school” are starting to get played out. I’m also the Comp Sci teacher so I’ve been working with UE4.27 and Premiere to help us start to do virtual production. This is my first piece to advertise for the virtual production summer camp so I can get the kids ahead of the game and build a couple small things to show off as we come back to school in the fall. So, I know the video is rough but what do you think I should focus on to get better at making this a better production? I’m thinking of going through some Archviz tutorials and see what else I can find to get into. The set was made with megascans as you can probably tell. I had to figure out how to increase the pool size since i went with 4k versions but I probably didn’t have to worry about that.
Any ideas on how to make future productions look better would be much appreciated.

Summary

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Good start.

Checkout the free assets on the marketplace to have more variety. They have monthly and permanent free assets that can be used in environments.

Try to make a larger landscape with some depth.
Refine your camera and object movements since they’re a bit jerky and unmotivated.

Consider getting reference photos of a scene that you would like to reproduce

Thanks much! I had some issues with image sequences not timing out correctly. I’ve had some say to use HAP codec for this. What format do you use for composited videos in UE4?

Try EXR format for images. Used typically for vfx, holds alpha but can also hold multiple images in one frame for layering.

Since i have exactly ZERO expirience with compositing, this will just be my personell opinion, of what i think, hurts the immersion.

For the background scene:

  • the sun ^.^ or is it the moon in a more evening scene? it´s really hard to tell, because i wouldn´t use a circle for the sun anymore, since UE introduced the convolution bloom (post process volume - bloom - switch from standard to convolution).
  • the clouds in the background, nothing particularly wrong (of course, there is always a better way to create clouds, may it be volumetrics, ot better textures, but since this is your first try, and since i am not good at clouds either ^.^ whelp, good enough), but the movement of them is really fast - as in, orcane or tornado level fast. :skull_and_crossbones: try to slow them down, since your main car sits there and there is zero indication of any wind movement in her nearby area (no wind influenced hair movement, or clothes, smoke and flames from the fire are typical for wind free zone). Remember, clouds are absolutely massive and far away, therefore appear to move way slower than they really do.
    So if i would have to scale your shown cloud movement to what i have seen in some storms here, then she should be in a tornado shelter :sweat_smile:

Dust clouds around the canyon area, that are created by the wind are a different story, they can move fast, since they are really close to the scene and camera.

  • the fire: personally, the chosen fire particles do not fit a smaller camp fire. There are some free fire particle effects in the marketplace, maybe you find some better fitting there, that you can use :slight_smile:

And one example of a tutorial, in case you want to try to create your own fire with Niagara:

Also the rocks around the campfire, their lighting don´t fit to the flames very well. It seems like, the light sits right in the center of the stone ring, illuminating only the part of the rocks, that face inward. But the flames are way higher and probably would illuminate the stones from above too. Also it sticks out, that the fire seem to have zero affect on the surrounding. Maybe try to place a cgi light in your cgi canyon to get some virtual fire light there too.

  • The UFO: i like it ^.^ only real problem is the beam of light, while having the intensity of a german WWII anti-aircraft searchlight /Flakscheinwerfer

all the light have no impact beyond the area, where it hits the ground. I guess, Lumen would help you with that, if you want switch to UE5, or just place some lights in your impact area, that help you create the illusion of some global illumination. A beam of light that bright will bounce off into it´s surrounding area, even if its just a little bit (however, it´s a pretty focussed light beam, but also in a pretty big area, so not sure, how exactly it would behave).

  • the compositing itself: hwat most sticks out, is that the hair is cut out with a really sharp edge, that separates it from the background. Ok, cutting hair out is always a nightmare, but maybe you can find a tutorial about how to create better masks, especially for the hair. I guess, the hair could also be a little bit translucent at some points, where its thinner, so that the backgorund can shine through.

While this here is aphotoshop tutorial, and also just for single images, maybe it helps you a little bit for what you can look:

Here is one, that uses After Effects to create the compositing masks, to put someone into Unreal. His hair looks pretty good, while also being pretty busy:

Not sure, how accurate the rest of the tut is for exporting, since the Movie render Queue came out, and he still uses Sequencer in that tutorial… But the compositing part looks really promising.

And, keep an eye out, that your mask is not to short, like in that part of your video ^.^

The head :upside_down_face: somethings missing ^.^

I guess, the hardest part would be to sync the real lighting to your cgi scene, but i would say, a bright light in the real world, thats pointed at her from the rear could help to match her lighting better to the light, when the UFO lightbeam is activated, and enlightens the whole area.

HAHAHA… yeah you’re pretty spot on with all of that.
I wanted the clouds to be moving quickly but it doesn’t match up very well when we get to a more somewhat serene scene at the end.
Also, yes her head got cut off… I needed to quickly get this finished to show my admin what I could do as i learned to put all this together. They wanted to see what we might do at the camp in a quick little clip. They dug it and now I can move onto refining what I’m doing. SO, things like the top of her head wouldn’t be left as is. I actually reshot the scene because the first time I had the light too dim and I ended up going back in and filming RAW.
I do need to work on my mask. I think I’ll spend a bit more time with After Effects because it seems to be able to make that green screen more clean.
At this point I’m trying to keep things looking good but not weighing down the work in the production since the laptops I’ll be running for myself and the camp aren’t horrible but they have 16gb of ram, an Nvidia 1060 and 2.2 ghz proc. I do have SSDs on each but they are setup in concert with an HDD. SSD is only 128 and gets filled pretty quick. May have to see about running things from the SSD either way.
That being said, I strayed from Niagara. The fire wasn’t the best one I could chosen and I wasn’t completely happy with it. I did find a library of explosions and fire in EXR format that I can use so I might do that in the future.
Thanks again, all really good feedback.