Hello everyone,
First of all, if there is a better place to post this question, let me know and I’ll try and post it there. For now, this seems like the best place to ask, so let’s get into it.
While I am very familiar with 3D programs and have used many of them in the past (from Blender to 3ds Max), I am still very new to Unreal Engine 5 and many of its ground-breaking features. That being said, I would like to ask you guys if something would be possible in Unreal 5 and how I may go about doing it.
To explain, I’ve had the goal for the past few years to make my own CGI dinosaur film like Jurassic Park. It would include everything from a T-rex chasing me down my neighborhood street to raptors chasing after other people, and pretty much anything else that’s reasonably easy/possible. I’ve tried completing this project in the past, but models and animations have really been my biggest problems. Sadly, I’m not the best modeler or animator, and not only would I need to source very high-quality dinosaur models, but each of them would also need to have relatively flexible animations. The problem is that these models can run hundreds of dollars and as a student in college (going for my bachelor’s degree in environmental science), I really don’t have the ability to spend that much money on something that can’t really be resold. That being said, I was very intrigued when Unreal Engine 5 came out with its photorealistic graphics, a large marketplace with many high-quality models, and its limitless number of fantastic features. In addition, many of the animated dinosaur packs looked amazing and were very cost-effective!
Having downloaded Unreal Engine 5 and played around with it, I can see how it has limitless potential to make CGI near seamless. Instead of spending hours simulating a real light environment with believable shadows in Cinema 4D, I can just press ctrl-L and move the sun until I get the lighting I want. Obviously, I’m sure there would be more work required to make the lighting realistic, but Unreal definitely has the possibility to make CGI way more seamless than it was in C4D.
Unfortunately, I’ve run into a problem. After preliminary research, it doesn’t seem that Unreal Engine 5 can motion track models to video. For example, in C4D, I would put my video in the motion tracking tab, scan it, and then had points I could motion track my models to. In the span of ten minutes, I would have a dinosaur (albeit of a terrible quality) motion tracked to the street in front of my house. However, I haven’t seen or heard about anyone doing this. The best I could find was people putting themselves into an Unreal scene, but my goal is to have 3D models in the real world, not real models in a 3D world.
Overall, I wanted to ask everyone for their thoughts on this. Is what I am looking to do in Unreal Engine 5 possible? Are there other features or plugins that I don’t know about that would make this possible? And if Unreal can’t do what I want it to, how may I go about completing this project? To summarize my question in one sentence, how can I use Unreal Engine 5 to motion track models to real video clips for CGI applications?
Thanks to everyone in the community for reading my post and all replies are very much appreciated! Looking forward to reading all of your responses!