How to Make Your Unreal Engine Renders Look Cinematic

hey everyone welcome back the topic of today's video is cinematics or rather how to make your

renders more cinematic now i know that cinematic is a term that's kind of thrown around a lot

it's often it may or may not be misused for the sake of this video when i say cinematic i mean something

that's very filmic something very movie like something that you would actually believe yourself seeing in a movie

theater right it's that magical feeling you get when you see this beautifully

well-lit well-composed shot that just makes you just stare in awe and that is what we

want in our renders and fortunately it doesn't necessarily take all that much to make your shots

go from kind of mediocre to wow so let's jump right in so let's start off with the first thing

there is one thing that is very often overlooked in game engines like unreal and unity and that is frame rate

so because unreal is a game engine it has at least up until recently been used mainly by game artists and in

games the higher the frame rate the better get that sweet sweet 60 fps

or even 120 fps high frame rates have been prized by gamers time and time again so that's why you

see a lot of shots rendered out of unreal on art station and social media that have been rendered into smooth

60fps and while that can look nice it's not cinematic in the slightest because it

tends to look like a soap opera or worse a video game cut scene so here's the dirty secret

24fps no more no less for the love of all that is holy on this good earth do not render in 48 or 60 or

even 120 fps okay so 99 of movies out there are shot in 24 fps

for a reason and that's because of motion blur motion blur when shot at 24 fps and

assuming you're using the 180 degree shutter rule will provide the most natural and

cinematic looking motion blur you can possibly get so in real life with a real camera

shutter speed is what determines your motion blur right but what is the 180 degree shutter

rule the 180 degree shutter rule means that your shutter speed should be

double what your frame rate is so let's say your frame rate is 24 fps you should be shooting with a shutter speed of 1 48

of a second but unreal doesn't have shutter speed most 3d applications don't so in unreal to set the motion blur

correctly in your post process volume you need to set the motion blur value to 0.5 24 fps will give you the most

natural and most cinematic looking motion blur i promise you

so here we have two renders one at 24fps and the other at 60fps notice the difference that frame rate

and motion blur makes one looks like a video game and the other one feels much more

natural yes the 24fps one is more blurry but that's a good thing so just to give you an example of how

motion blur is very important in movies and tv shows is to look at these examples from the

mandalorian so pay attention to just how blurry most of these frames are so this is a

still image captured from one of their behind the scenes videos and look at these tie fighters they're

completely blurry because the motion blur the rocks and the mountains that are nearer to the camera are also

completely blurred out take a look at this next one as well the people moving

they're completely blurry once you get some depth of field in there some lens distortion

you've got some haze you've got some motion blur these images aren't very sharp at all

but they look very good so while you may not think that motion blur is a good thing it is

because all movies have motion blur and a ton of it as well yes as i said there are some movies that

have been shot in 48 or 60 fps but they are exceedingly rare we're trying to make our renders look as

cinematic and movie-like as possible and if you want to do that you need to

render your frames the same way you would shoot footage in real life rendering at a frame rate any higher

than 24 will give you a kind of a it's going to look like a video game cutscene

i i hate to say it and because we're already rendering in a games engine it's gonna look like a

video game and not a movie if that's what you want that's fine but that's not what we're going for here

so the only exception to the rule where you may want to be rendering in 48 or 120 fps

is when you're trying to do slow motion footage so let's say you want your render to be

two times slow-mo you need to render it double your frame rate so you need to render at 48 fps and then

you'll slow that down in post so that's 48 frames that were captured in one second will be stretched over two

seconds so next up is how film back and depth of field work together these two things can

make your shots really pop this is yet another little thing that game artists tend to overlook

because depth of field in video games tends to be a little bit annoying and it's

promptly discarded but do not overlook how powerful depth of field can be just think of any

movie where you have a close-up of two characters depth of field is very often used

creatively here and honestly depth of field is a great way to just hide all the garbage in your

background that's a field that's awesome for that but but now what's fill back film back

is kind of a term that you know you might not be familiar with fill back is essentially the sensor of your camera

so if you imagine like an actual dslr or a mirrorless camera the sensor itself that's what we call the film back and

you can choose the size of this in unreal this is also how you set your aspect

ratio in general at least in real life with a real camera the larger the sensor the better it is

this is why full frame cameras and medium format cameras are so sought after because they have a much bigger

sensor so go ahead and play with the film back settings in unreal and you'll notice

that the bigger the film back the wider your field of view is

so you may be wondering well how does this make my shot look better that brings me to my next point now

because suddenly your film bag is bigger you have a wider field of view this means that you can

now use a longer focal length and get the same field of view but get much stronger depth of field

now this is where things get a little bit weird and arbitrary but bear with me allow me to demonstrate

right here so here we are in unreal we've got a simple environment and a little character here so let's create a

new camera so we can compare the different film back results okay so i'm going to create

a camera by clicking on this button right here and now we're in this camera i'm going

to frame my shot like this something like that and now i'm going to select my camera

and in the details panel i'm going to move the manual focusing distance back on our subject here

so if you don't already know the manual focusing distance focus plane will help you know where

your focus point is right very it's super useful tip if you don't already know it and i gotta hide this so

now this is the framing that we got with our film back set to

right here 16 9 digital film this is the default setting personally i like having it set to 69

dslr and what happens when i click on this okay you'll see

suddenly a shot gets much wider this is different than just changing the focal length so what this does is it's going

to increase the size of your sensor so to speak so now we can get even closer to our

subject by be and get the same framing but because we've moved closer now to

get the same framing as before we need to adjust our focus again and since we're closer

the more you move the focus point closer to you the more your background gets blurry

okay so this is kind of a cheap way of accentuating your depth of field by getting a larger sensor up to a point

and that brings me to my next point focal length so because the 35 millimeter is the

default they are wildly overused they're boring it's not exciting you know when you want to get

really close to your subject you just get this weird distortion and it doesn't look very good it's not flattering to

the human face to have a 35 millimeter lens especially when you get up close so go

long go set it to 85 millimeters set it to 200 millimeters

and i have another example right here where i compare like a 150mm lens and a 35mm lens and the difference is

just pretty shocking so in this case let's take a look at our focal length so right now we're using in this camera

we have a focal length of 150 millimeters okay and if we get this very tight shot

very close up very personal look and with a very nice blurred out depth of field but look at the aperture the

aperture is f10 if i were to set this to 2.8 which is the default the background is even more

blurry okay so i'm going to leave this at f10 because that's the look that i wanted

but let's create a brand new camera i'm going to duplicate this camera here so we're going to call i'm going to call

this one camera wide all right and i'm going to go here and all i'm going to do is i'm going to

change the focal length so bring it down from 150 to 35 millimeters

and now you'll see look at the difference that we have here this is the previous camera 150 mil

versus 35 millimeter the difference is staggering it's just day and night right now of course we can try to frame the

shot the same way that the longer lens with frame right so we can move closer with the 35mm lens right

here let's do something like this up close and personal

something like that so this is the tight lens and this is the wide lens do you see the

impact that this has look at that difference between the wide and

the long lens it's completely different this is what i mean by understanding what focal length does

because it has such a dramatic impact on your shot so and this is at f10 if i wanted to have

this at 1.4 and i need to move the focus plane back here now

you'll see it's a totally different look right it's this can be the look that you want i'm

not saying that shouldn't be what you do but a lot of movies use long lenses for a

reason and in cg going with the long lens really helps help make things feel a

little bit more realistic so this right here is the best example i could come up with to really demonstrate

the effects of focal length and how it contributes to the final look of your shot so i'm going to go ahead and press

the play button here and we start off with a very wide shot and as the focal length gets longer

you'll notice how it compresses that background constantly now i know it's a little bit trippy to

look at but all i've changed here is the focal length and the position of the camera in order

to keep the framing of our character here the same so just to show you guys what

we're doing here is we have a focal length of 10 millimeters to start off with

next up we go to about 35 millimeter and last we have about 150 millimeters so looking at the difference here going

long really compresses that background it really accentuates your depth of field

it gives you a very different look pay attention to the foreground here foreground and the mid ground notice how

out of focus those are it's all that depth of field but here uh the foreground is not there's no depth

of field at all right we haven't changed the f-stop we haven't changed the aperture size

we've changed nothing except for focal length and the position of the camera so of

course you know as you go longer you need to back the camera up to keep the framing

the same right you know this requires you to really understand how focal length

works so i'm going to play this one more through for you guys just so you can get a better idea

of the effect it has on your shots go long okay a long focal length really goes a long way into helping you

get a much more interesting look it's just i myself rarely work with anything under

85 millimeters 85 is probably my favorite focal length ever both on real cameras and in 3d longer

focal lengths get up close and personal and they have the added benefit of really accentuating

your depth of field okay so f 1.4 on a 35 millimeter is not going to be the same as f 1.4 on a 200mm

lens go ahead and try it out and see for yourself you may be surprised and this brings me

back to another point to where all of this kind of ties together okay so

first we have our film back which affects our framing and we can fix that and change that with

our focal length but what about aspect ratio where does that fall into place

most movies we see nowadays are in a format called 2.35 to 1. 235 to 1 is the super wide

cinemascope aspect ratio that we're very used to seeing you've probably seen it a lot

you know with the black bars on the top and bottom of the frame this is a very popular look i'm personally i'm a sucker

for the 235 look i love it i put it i use it in almost all my renders just because i

think it looks so awesome now the reason why i think having this aspect ratio is so appealing

is because we instantly have the association with movies we've seen it in films we've seen it on

tv it's the immediate association that you have with it right does this mean that a movie has to

have the two three five to one aspect ratio for it to be cinematic of course not

no i mean i've you you can find some amazing looking films that have been in four three or sixteen nine what have

you two three five to one is just what's popular in trendy nowadays

personally i love it but it's up to you it's kind of one of those those little extra things that are really easy to

change and do or add to your frame you can just add two black bars on top of your thing

and it's going to kind of help a little bit so just because you've added those black bars in

the top and bottom of your frame doesn't really mean that your shot's automatically going to be

more cinematic now i pour my heart and soul into this lovely example showing you why adding

the black bars doesn't necessarily make your shot cinematic

need i say more you get the point now the last part of this video involves poke production and this is

quite easily the most important most overlooked and most underrated part of this entire process

i understand the allure of getting everything right in unreal getting everything right in your render hit the

render button post our station call of the day but you're shooting yourself in the foot

when you hit that render button in unreal and you get your frames out you're only

halfway done anyone who's ever worked in vfx knows that the work the compositors do

is the stuff of legends i can't tell you how many times i sent stuff to the render farm and

you know they were decent looking renders but after it goes through to compers

and poke production and color correcting and the colorist when i see that final result in theaters

or even in our daily meetings i am constantly just shocked at the work that post-production

people do okay color correcting and editing your footage in post

is so important god you you really need to start doing this if you haven't already

it is so critical to making your shots go from mediocre to amazing okay and unfortunately

there's not that much you need to do either sometimes it's just some curves correction a little bit of contrast

adding some bloom you don't need to be a super advanced compositor to really make your shots pop a lot of

what makes your renders look better is honestly crappifying them crapify is that a word basically you

need to add an extra layer of badness on top of it to really make it feel more real

by that i mean lens effects i don't mean that adding the jj abrams lens flares that's not what i mean

lead flares when used tastefully are amazing i'm talking more stuff like film grain chromatic aberration adding a

little bit of blur in post beginning your lens could be smudged or something it could be dust

there could be having some dust spots on your sensor there is so much

that happens between your subject and the center of your camera and that's the lens

there are so many refractive glass elements in there it's going to deteriorate your image however slightly

and that is what we go at in post-production so let's jump into davinci resolve

and see the main thing that i do to my renders to kind of give them that extra oomph

just a disclaimer here this is not going to be a proper color grading tutorial i will be making a video about this soon

so hit the subscribe button and the bell notification so that you don't miss it when it releases

so right here i'm mainly going to show you what it is i do and how i grade my images just to give

you an idea of my process so that being said let's carry on so now that we're in

the color page of davinci resolve you may be a little bit overwhelmed by everything

that's happening here it's like oh my goodness so much information what's going on don't worry you'll see

it's a lot easier than it looks so let's start off with a little before and after here this is the final graded

shot and this is what i got out of unreal now you'll see it's a little bit flat

a little bit boring the lighting is way too warm it's not very interesting to look at

right so now you'll notice the main elements are there the lights and from the right direction the

lighting is actually decent we got some bounce lighting coming here the main lighting is there

i'm just going to give it a bit more oomph with some very simple nodes here okay

so let's start off with the first thing i like starting off with my shot by bumping up the

curves adjustment as you can see down here we're just lifting up those highlights

lifting up those blacks adding a little bit more contrast with the help of curves

as you can see we're already seeing a pretty substantial difference here right a lot more oomph to it next down the

line is i like giving a little bit of color correction so you'll see here it's very subtle but you can adjust the

temperature globally of your entire shot okay i just because the shot was originally very

warm i like to cool it down just a little bit the next node is you'll see it's just

darkening with the help of a gradient so right here you'll see i can kind of just control um

parts of my screen like this so i'm really starting to paint with light a little bit

and i didn't like how bright the upper right hand corner of the screen was so i darkened that just a little bit so

next up as you can see it's going to be a radial gradient and this is essentially to add a vignette

so this vignette effect darkens the corners a little bit but also i changed the temperature because you can

see right here everything's way too warm i really wanted to make the edges add a little bit more color variation in there

really kind of cool down the corners of my shot to kind of help it feel a bit more

balanced right you can see it already feels a bit more neutral much

you know much more interesting to look at just by adding a little bit of color variation in there now next up is

glow now glow in davinci resolve is known as bloom in unreal so

there's different terms but they mean the same thing now you'll see i've added a very

selective bloom around the screen left here just like because we got a very strong

sunlight coming in and i really wanted to you know add a little bit more flare

there really it's really as simple as that just to give you an idea now next up

right here is a lens flare and that's my favorite thing now lens flare when used

tastefully is amazing um don't go full jj abrams with the anamorphic let's player all over the

place it just blinds you less flair when you tastefully can really make your shot look

way less cg way less fake and way more filmic when you use a real camera and you're shooting into the sun

all your blacks get lifted um you get a very distinct effect so let's toggle this on and see how it looks

all my shadows got washed out so you'll see i've got some some some refractive elements here some

little bit of flares here what you're seeing there is essentially glass elements inside the lens that are

being reflected and captured by the camera um the lens flare will also like i said earlier

we'll lift up those blacks and give it a much more realistic look so use this carefully okay so now you

can see we've got a little bit of flare coming in we have full control over the flare

settings here so you can control the size of the flare how strong they are

the lens flare tools in davinci resolve are amazing really good i believe these lens flares

require the studio version of davinci resolve but that's only 300 that's less than one year of paying for

adobe premiere pro just keep that in mind now let's move on to the next step and that's adding

chromatic aberration let's go ahead and turn on the chromatic aberration and zoom in and see what it's

actually doing okay so i'm gonna unhide this you'll see if i toggle it on and off you'll see

that we've got some red and teal halos happening around the edges right and it gets much

stronger and stronger add it gets near the edges of the screen so chromatic aberration is a very real

thing that happens in photography when you're shooting with real cameras but there's one thing that i really need

to make you guys aware about and chromatic aberration is not a global effect you can add chromatic aberration

in unreal in the post-process volume there's a setting for chromatic aberration and when you apply it like

this you'll see right away that it's a global screen space effect

and that's what you don't want i cannot stress enough how badly you do not want it because chromatic aberration

in real life only shows up in high contrast areas so just to show you an example of

real chromatic aberration or fringing in photographs i have a photo here that i shot here in

norway and you'll notice along the ridgeline of mountains again where there's a very

high contrast difference you'll see this blueish teal fringing or also known as chromatic

aberration showing up now you'll notice it doesn't show up anywhere else in the frame

except once again in high contrast areas so you see where there's like a very strong

ping of specular highlight off the leaf we get some teal greenish bluish fringing it doesn't

really show up anywhere else except in high contrast areas we're trying to go for something

you know photoreal as possible something that's as realistic as possible and chromatic aberration while it does

exist in real life it really needs to be applied tastefully

i cannot stress this enough so let's take a look at how i do this okay okay when i use chromatic aberration i

always apply it on first so you'll see we've got it it's very strong i apply it

globally everywhere at first but then here with the help of a mask i mask it out so that it only shows up

in the very high contrast areas so let's see for example right around the edges of master chief's

helmet and the bright sky okay i don't necessarily want it

here because there's no contrast so with this mask i can i basically just paint

where i want chromatic aberration to show up and it would make sense for it to show up here

it also makes sense that for it to show up you know a little bit here it's very subtle you'll see you might

not even notice it but it's there i'm going to show you guys this again in another shot so let's

take a look here as well i've got chromatic aberration showing up only in the very bright

contrasty parts of my frame right if i were to hide this you'll see chromatic aberration if i

toggle it on and off it's showing up everywhere like all you kind of almost have this anaglyph 3d

effect right we have all here in a building we have it globally across the entire frame and the

grass here that's no bueno that is not good you don't want

that i want it in select places so using a mask i've only have it showing up in the very

bright spots okay and that's how chromatic aberration really works in real life so

it needs to be applied carefully so see with the mask before and after we only have it showing

up in the very bright areas super important part when adding chromatic aberration so

last but not least involves film grain and film grain is one of my favorite things to add

it very much helps your shot go from pretty mediocre to like whoa this looks pretty good

it's a very subtle thing and it's not something that people always notice and i understand that adding film grain

may be a little controversial because photographers and cinematographers try to denoise their images and renders and

films as much as possible but they re-add that gray and after because grain adds a very organic touch to your

shots so let's go ahead here and add film grain using davinci resolve's

film grain plugin filled the film grain plug-in in davinci resolve it requires a studio license once again

um but there's lots of film grain preset pack that you can get for the free version of davinci resolve

i'm just going to show you what it does so right now you'll you may notice my renders straight out of unreal are

very clean and that's a typical thing with cg renders they're super clean there's

no grain there's no noise and this is usually a good thing you don't necessarily want a bunch of noisy

images but it doesn't feel like a photo because all photographs have noise even if you're shooting at iso 100

with a very good camera you're still going to have a little bit of grain across your frame that's just how images

are created so here i'm going to go ahead and add my film grain

and just notice the difference it makes okay like zooming in again i'm gonna go zoom in like crazy to 100 because this

is a 4k render but this is before and this is after

you'll see it adds a lot more texture and subtlety and just a little bit more organic feel to your renders right

in a highlight there tend to be a little bit less noise and thankfully in a davinci resolve plug-in you have

control here you can control you can add more grain in your highlight you can choose

to have less you have a lot of film grain controlled in davinci resolve let's take a look at another shot real

quick just to compare this here is without any grain and this is width i've

intentionally made it a bit stronger than i normally would just to show off the effect

but you'll see especially in distance ah it just adds way more texture and a little bit more

interestingness to your shot do not underestimate film grain film green is an

integral part of any movie pause your movie and you'll see there's always going to be a little bit of grain

there how much you add is up to you but personally i'm a sucker for a very

high quality film grain as you can see with a very few changes you can make your shots go

from kind of meh to very good and i understand that this may be controversial because

some of you may be thinking oh well that's cheating that's not shared out of unreal that's you know you've color

graded it processing involved i'm like well yeah of course because i understand

how powerful a good colorist can be okay like i've worked in film i've been floored and shocked and

gobsmacked time and time again after seeing someone color grade my renders

and i'm fully aware of why you should be doing it i've said this before and i'm going to say it

again the end result is the only thing that matters

i cannot stress this enough no one's gonna care if you did some color grading in post

after you're rendered because that's just what everybody does if you're not doing it you're basically

making your work not look as good as it possibly could let's just go through my other shots

real quick just to show you before and after to get a better idea of how powerful it

can be this is before straight out of unreal and this is after before and after moving on to the next

shot this is before straight out of unreal and after

before and after next shot this is straight out of unreal and this is after before after

next up straight out of unreal and it's an after before after and for the last shot

this is before and it is after before and after so just a recap of the main things that i like to change

and do in post involves color correction curved adjustments vignetting adding some more bloom

more controlled local bloom lens flare chromatic aberration and film grain now i know it sounds like a long list

but there's all these little things that really contribute to you know quote unquote the deterioration of your cg

to make it more realistic realism is not about having the sharpest cleanest best possible highest resolution render

a lot of photos and a lot of movies are really blurry and have all these lens effects and

understanding this is really going to help you make your cg feel a lot more realistic

and that folks concludes this week's video if you've done everything we've covered here including so feel back

depth of field frame rate motion blur color grading and post production if you do all of those things your

renders should be one step closer to looking a lot more cinematic than they did beforehand

so i hope this helped you out thanks so much for watching guys and i'll see you all next week