Quixel Cinema 4d

[Jeannine Lander]

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Hello all, with Unreal Fest Online 2020 coming soon (July 14th), I thought I'd share some great cinematic settings for Unreal I have acquired over the past few years. There is a lot you can tweak through Unreal Engine's post-process settings to get visuals looking their best. With Unreal Engine 5 announced earlier this year and Quixel Megascans collaboration with Epic; realtime cinematic production is becoming exponentially more popular. The bar keeps being raised, and so must our quality settings (and render times)...

The majority of work I have done over the past few years has been realtime cinematic trailers, and I've acquired many hidden console commands, post-process settings and tricks to get the visuals looking their best. I hope these can be of use to some people and help you out on your own personal and commercial projects! I have used my own created scene below, which I quickly created using Quixel's Megascans and Mixer for the purpose of this article. As well as Quixel's own Abandoned Apartment project.

Firstly, here is a simple blueprint that you can use to execute console commands at runtime. I believe as of 4.25 Epic has actually added this functionality to the sequencer export settings, but for those in earlier versions, this may serve useful. Create this in an empty actor, and simply set it as spawnable on your master sequence.

Bloom is a great way to add more realism to the bright lights in your scene. Bloom is added to light cast by all lights within the scene. But also reacts to any emissive materials you have setup on your meshes or characters. Bloom will also integrate with some other post-process settings such as the dirt mask and lens flares. Overall, a must have on your camera settings, although in small doses! I usually tweak the threshold, so only the brightest parts of my shot are going to cast bloom, I then slide the intensity upwards until it looks 'right'. Usually landing on values between 0.5 and 3.

Unreal by default has auto-exposure turned on. One of the first steps I do with cinematics, even as early as the blockout stage, is workout how brightly lit the scene is; and its exposure values. I usually clamp the min and max brightness, then adjust the 'exposure compensation' slider, for easier results. As you can see below, without the scene exposure controlled, the scene lacks mood and depth.

Some people consider this an over-used effect, whilst I agree to an extent that it was perhaps over-used in its stylistic 'vintage look'; it can still add a really nice subtle effect to shots. Use in tiny amounts! I usually use a value of 0.1 - 0.3 for the best subtle results. It can also be used as faux digital / distortion effect when turned up really high (on a big monster stomp, or a big explosion)

A very situational effect, but it definitely has its uses. This effect reacts to other post-process effects such as bloom and lens flares. Where your lens has a flare, or excessive bloom, the lens dirt will kick in with your chosen texture. I ussually tweak this setting specific to each shot, depending on whether it needs it. It can definitely add a stab of realism during action scenes, or shots with a lot of dirt and dust. Values of 4 - 12 work well, dependent on how much bloom is in your shot.

Who doesn't love ambient occlusion? It really makes a scene 'pop' and adds a wave of realism. It creates contact shadows between meshes, and hides all those bland corners. Recently I discovered a new AO method, that must have flew under my radar in an unreal update? It is called GTAO, and aparently has a more realistic calculation method for the shadows. Whilst I'm not sure of the performance hit, it was my go-to method for AO in my most recent cinematic work, and will no doubt be used in the future. It seemed to create better shadows in areas that should be shadowed, and had less of the 'fake edge contrast' look that SSAO has. See below for yourself! You can activate GTAO by typing in r.AmbientOcclusion.Method 1 into the console.

When indirect lighting is calculated via Unreal Lightmass, you can change the intensity this has on your scene through your post-process settings. I've found that there are instances where you may have a close up, or a shot in a space that is just a little too dark. Bumping up the indirect lighting is a great way to add more natural light back into the shot, without it seeming fake.

Volumetric fog is a great way to add some realism to your scene. A useful command I came across was r.VolumetricFog.GridPixelSize. This changes the size of the grid calculations of volumetric fog, by defualt this is quite high so that it optimises frame rate. For rendering, we want to turn this down to increase quality. I set this to 3 and saw good results. r.VolumetricFog.HistoryWeight is also a useful command to play around with. In a scene with moving volumetric fog rays (through trees for example) changing this command gave a more realistic change in the fog, as it changes how often it updates. Although changing too small, did lose a lot of the softness and the rays became too harsh. A balancing act of trial and error found good results.

Thank you for reading! These are only a handful of the many techniques I use when creating cinematics in Unreal. I hope this serves as useful to some fellow artists out there. I'm happy to answer any questions. Ping me on LindedIn, or my email below.

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