Chapter 20: Using Sequencer to Construct Your Final Scene

We now come to the end of this book, and I hope you have enjoyed the journey through all the topics with us. In the previous chapters, we created all the custom content for this final scene. All we need to do now is put it all together in our final scene using Sequencer. All our hard work is about to pay off. We will combine the character animations we created together to tell the story and we will work with camera animation and camera cuts in the same scene.

We will also learn to migrate our content from other project files we might have created or used in this book. The final project file is provided with this chapter if you want to study my setup afterwards at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Unreal-Engine-5-Character-Creation-Animation-and-Cinematics/tree/main/FullFinalUE5Project

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Importing all the scene assets and positioning them in the scene
• Importing...

Technical requirements

In this chapter, we will need to work in Unreal Engine (UE) 5. You will need the following to complete this chapter:

• A computer that can run basic 3D animation software.
• You need to have installed UE5. You can download it from https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download.
• A basic understanding of how to navigate the UE 3D user interface. If you skipped ahead, this was covered in Chapters 6, Exploring Unreal Engine 5.
• You need to have completed Chapter 17, Creating Three Simple Animations for the Robot in UE Sequencer, Chapter 18, Importing Motion Capture onto the MetaHuman Control Rig, and Chapter 19, Motion Capture Editing and Cleanup Using Control Rig and Sequencer.

Importing all the scene assets and positioning them in the scene

If you used different UE projects files and folders to create the content in this book, we now need to combine them into one project for our final scene. It all needs to be available to us in a single project in UE. Luckily, UE makes that process easy with the Migrate tool. Even if you created all the content in this book in one UE project, it is still good to know how to migrate content between UE projects.

Migrating UE content between projects

We are going to start by creating a new project in UE5 for this last scene. If you already have everything in the same project, you can use this as a reference in the future, whenever you need to combine content from different projects into one.

For the purposes of this exercise, we'll migrate the content that we created in Chapter 19, Motion Capture Editing and Cleanup Using Control Rig and Sequencer, first:

1. Create a new UE5 project by opening UE5, then...

Importing animations onto our characters

Importing animations onto the skeletal meshes of our characters is the next step in Sequencer. This will add the cleaned Mocap for the human character and the animations we created for the Robot Drone and Alien Plant to the characters in Sequencer.

Importing Mocap animations onto the MetaHuman

First of all, we probably need to discover how long our sequence will roughly end up being. That is why we'll import our animations onto our human character first:

1. For now, move the Alien Plant and Robot Drone out of the way, by selecting them in the viewport and moving them. This is just so that we can have a clear view of our human character. You'll notice that her feet are going through the floor, as shown in Figure 20.24:

Figure 20.24 – Moving the robot and plant out of the way

2. Delete the MetaHuman_ControlRig track under the BP Sci Fi Girl item in Sequencer by selecting it and pressing...

Creating cameras and animating them

As far as the cameras are concerned, I will leave it up to you. Do whatever you want with them. However, if you want an example, you can study what I did in the FinalScene_tutor level sequence (included with this chapter's resource UE project).

But you probably want to know how to work with cameras in Sequencer in the first place. Here's how to set up multiple cameras and then create camera cuts between them in Sequencer. These are just the basics, but you can do most things you would ever want to do with cinematic cameras with these simple tools. There's much more that you can do with a camera and shots in Sequencer, but that is beyond the scope of this book.

To create a camera and animate it, please execute the following steps:

1. First, we need to add a Camera Cut Track to our sequence to store and manage our cameras and camera cuts. You do this by clicking + TRACK at the top of the TRACK window and then selecting Camera...

Rendering our final scene

You'll also be happy to learn that this last step is the easiest one. In this last step, we will render an AVI movie file of our scene that can be uploaded and shown to your friends on social media if you want to:

1. Next to the camera icon on the main Sequencer menu is a film clapperboard icon. Click on that to open Render Movie Settings, as shown in Figure 20.58:

Figure 20.58 – Render Movie Settings

2. The Resolution is 1920 x 1080, which is full HD, but you can render it bigger or smaller if you want to. Select an output directory for the movie to be saved to, and then click Capture Movie.

This will render the active time range of your sequence from the Camera Cuts track point of view. It might take several minutes for this process to complete, depending on the speed of your computer.

3. Once completed, navigate to the folder you specified as the output directory to find your rendered final movie...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to migrate content from different projects into each other. You learned how to attach different objects and props, such as armor, to character animations. We prepared character and level assets for our final scene. We also imported a cleaned-up Mocap onto our MetaHuman character and stitched them together into one sequence.

We did the same for custom animations on our Robot Drone character and made the background come to life with the swaying animation on our Alien Plant. We then covered how to work with multiple camera cuts in Sequencer and how to edit and animate them. Finally, we rendered the result into a final AVI movie file.

With the skills you learned in this book, you can now create your own custom 3D content and animations and create your own stories inside UE5. You can let your imagination run wild and your only constraint is the time and work it requires.

We feel so honored that you took this journey with us. If this...