Creating Dynamic Shadows with Footage in Unreal Engine 5
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- čas přidán 25. 07. 2024
- Learn how to enhance your Unreal Engine 5 projects by adding dynamic, interactive shadows to footage with an alpha channel. In this tutorial, we’ll explore techniques for achieving realistic shadows that respond to light sources and create depth in your scenes. Whether you’re working on game development, architectural visualization, or cinematic projects, mastering alpha channel shadows is essential. Join us as we dive into UE5’s powerful shadow features!
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0:00 What up what up
0:20 Import Image Sequence
1:25 Media Player Setup
2:15 Material Setup
3:30 Contrast Node
4:20 Material Instance
5:35 Sequencer Setup
One more tip: I tried to insert the image sequence via "media plate" (must be enabled in the plugins) directly into the scene. Insert the media plate into the scene (a cube with a green plus symbol), then just find the playlist item in the details, set the path to the files and insert the media plate into the sequencer. This way I avoided several steps in your process, Unreal Engine did it for me. Of course, you then need to set dynamic shadows and change the parent material's Blend mode from transparent to masked
You are the best! Please do more virtual production tutorials.
Thank you brother 💪🏾
You're a legend Winbush!
Appreciate you Motion thank you 🙏🏿
Fantastic tip. Exactly what I needed, thanks.
Some advice from my project:
Multiple Lights: if you have multiple lighting sources you can animate the plane to move slightly instead, and the shadows from all sources will then be animated.
Only Shadows: you can also hide the video and still keep the shadow by unchecking “Render in main pass” in the rendering tab, and checking ‘Hidden Shadow” in the Lighting tab.
Great tutorial! Thanks!
Man... I cannot thank you enough for making these videos since x years (since 4.27 UE I follow you) - Thank you Winbush!!!!!
Yea man the good old days lol
Thanks for rocking with me for so long 💪🏿
I will be happy to watch the lesson about preparation, thank you for your work!
On how to do the green screen in Unreal you mean yea?
Great tutorials! Continue helping us with Unreal mastery.
More to come! 💪🏿
Hi winbush, just completed your unreal beginner course last week. Very excited to learn more about unreal. Thanks a lot for everything 😊 can you please add more in-depth tutorial on the materials nodes and niagra particles if possible? I’m actually interested in the live action + cgi and virtual production part of unreal 😅
Thanks again!
Great tutorials as always brother! I use this step as well but couldn't figure out the shadow glitch. I'll have to try this next time.
Yea I just literally figured that one out on accident I had keyframed my light with the auto keyframe when I moved it and noticed my shadows was moving so Im like ok that's how we trick the dynamic lighting to interact.
Thank You, Great tutorials!
You are welcome!
Great tutorial as always!!
Thanks buddy means alot!! 🤙🏿
THIS IS EXCELLENT 👏🏼
Happy to help 🤙🏿💪🏿
Nice tips ! Thank you
Glad it was helpful! 🤙🏿
Dude. This is awesome. Thanks for the knowledge!
You bet! 🤙🏿
Thank you so much for the amazingly clear explanation. You are fantastic.
You're very welcome! 🤙🏿
This was what I was waiting for I always wanted to see how to cast shadow from image sequences into unreal instead of me doing it manually cheat by darkening the image into another layer
Yea in typical Unreal fashion gotta take a few more steps to make it work but happy to share the process
Wow, thank you! This is exactly the walk through that I needed.
Glad it was helpful! 💪🏿
GREAT ! thanks WINBUSH !
Absolutely my friend 🤙🏿
Wow! Thank you very much!
Absolutely 🤙🏾
Hey thank you so much!
Happy to help!
God bless you winbush
Thanks so much brother 🙏🏿
Legend ❤
Thank you 🤙🏿🙏🏿
Tips on media render queue would be awesome.
What ya need to know on that end?
@@JonathanWinbush which console variables are REALLY important and usefull. Bunch of them are just mysteries to me and some of them might change a lot things for renders. But which ones are necessary, without waiting dayyyyys for rendering, like old precalc days! Thanks Master
Yes please. And thankx👌
Absolutely 🤙🏿
You're awesome man! That shadow issue's weird..
Yea I don't get it but glad I was able to figure that one out! 🤙🏿
Great tutorial! Thank you so much!
When the character moves forward or backward, his shadow does not follow as there is no depth information. Any solution?
Please tell me how to make a dynamic shadow on the water so that the shadow moves on the waves?
i was wondering if your able to attach to a player character and have the display follow them around. Thanks for the help and ideas
I'd imagine you could since it's on a plane mesh
Hey Winbush, can you please make a video on unreal engine rendering errors
Hi sir, is there anyway to exclude shadow, i don't want shadow to cast on other object.
Winbush! Would love if you could make a tutorial on how to add some sort of aura around the masked out character from the green screen video... do you think this is possible? I'm thinking like a trailing smoke that comes off of the character or some sort of glow around him. Maybe even a fire effect? Been thinking about doing this with my scene and I'm incredibly stumped
I feel like CGHow did this before in one of his videos he does a lot of particle work I'd check his channel out www.youtube.com/@cghow
Great job my friend! I have a huge favor to ask. A thing no one I've ever come across has covered. Could you PLEASE consider doing a video going over foot placement inside of Unreal Engine to make things look more real? The thing that always destroys the emersion in my green screen work is the moment people start walking, the feet don't look correct. Or is the only way to deal with this to have the foreground being real?
Yea it does help to have props in the foreground but feet are always a pain
After using the MF-Chromakeyer node in UE5.3, the color of the transparent background video is directly invalidated.. What is the reason? How to solve....
I found that the shadows only move if 1/ the lights are Movable, 2/ the plane is Movable, and 3/ the objects where the shadows are to be cast on are Movable. Hope it helps troubleshooting.
🤙🏿
It all looks amazing until Media Player shows you what it's made of the minute you try to render it in a sequence. Still helpful tip, yr the best Winbush! I hope we get an alternative some day to rendering image sequences if we want cinematics in Unreal!
Is it harder to playback 4k exr footage? Im havinb issuee with ny footage not wanting to play back on the material. Or whats the best compression for the exr?
I'm using 4k exr footage here. Is it not playing at all?
@@JonathanWinbush only when using 4k footage, maybe it's my PC not able to handle it cause 1080p works fine
@@JonathanWinbush I got it working finally, it would just lag up until I got it into the sequencer. Ty so much I was having so many issues trying to add shadows and this is such a fast workflow.
So that one node gives you all those parameters?
Yup yup
i would defo dont mind joining your paid courses on anything related to gaming / art industry
I have a paid course on School Of Motion but it's more around art since I'm a motion graphics artist. I have my free course on my CZcams channel as well
Looks like there's a bug in 5.3 where the mediaplate doesn't cast a shadow even with dynamic shadows checked.
uncheck ray traced shadows in project settings, worked for me
There must be something I am doing wrong here but I am not sure what that could be as it is a very simple process, but when I go to import my EXR sequence I create a new ImgMediaSource, select the path and select the first file, set the framerate, save and close... and nothing changes. I do not get a thumbnail of the EXR sequence and nothing after that step shows the actual EXR sequence either. I can confirm the EXR sequence works because it imports perfectly into After Effects, and individual images come into UE just fine. I am searching for a solution online but so far cannot find anything. Any ideas what might be the issue?
are you able to upload a video to youtube of whats happening?
@@JonathanWinbush I did post a reply with a link but I do not see it on here so I'm not sure if it was received or not, but if not I can try sending it another way.
@@timbrosius yea i have links turned off cause of the spam bots my bad
Is it on your page?
@@JonathanWinbush That makes sense. I had it set to unlisted but I just switched it to public so it is the most recent video posted. Thank you so much for taking the time!
@timbrosius ok I see it now. So question when you created your project did you do it as the broadcast template? I know if you use a gaming one it doesn't turn on all the plugins you'd need for broadcast.
I guess, it does not work rect light. I tried the same technic nothing changed
Maybe try adding a directional light just a little bright just to see if it helps trigger the effect
shadow problems - I also solved this by rotating the light, but I found another solution, without having to use keyframes for the light, so that I could still change the position of the light with ctrl +L. Just put in the command line: r.Shadow.Virtual.Cache 0
or to a project file DefaultEngine.ini
r.Shadow.Virtual.Cache=0
That's a good tip I didnt know that thanks!
Thanks super helpful!