Cinematics Specialists PLS !!!

[Castroy2009]

Hey there!!!

I'm a filmmaker with some 3d experience that wants to make movies in UDK with the option of having someone else make a game from the assets used if its appropriate.

I am going through the posted video tutorials here but my eyes glaze over when learning about building levels...., since my brain meat is small and doesn't hold much info i have decide that there are things i don't want to learn in UDK-

I want to light scenes, animate characters via mocap and tell stories

I do not want to learn how to build sets or make characters especially since there are many specialists others out there who are better than me.

Is there anyone out there on the same page as me? pls respond.

[percydaman]

as a filmmaker are you responsible for building the sets? Maybe not, but if you couldn't afford to hire some set artists, and you really wanted to get your movie made bad enough, might you pitch in and help create the sets? I guess what I'm saying is, how do you plan on getting to the filmmaker 'director' stage in UDK if you don't have a level? Time to either: learn to make the level yourself, pay someone to do it, or just quit the whole thing.

[Castroy2009]

Thanks for the reply !

I have somehow managed to make a feature length movie in a 3D program called Carrara (the project in in post production now in FCP which i am very familiar with) and I didn't build any of the sets or make any of the characters since they where either free or I purchased them online. Then there was all the stuff on the Google 3D warehouse that was good enough for what I wanted.

[Castroy2009]

Just to clarify my answer a little more. All I did was import models of scenes/rooms and characters then lit the scene and animated the characters using a mixture of mocap and my own basic key-frame animation skills. Then I did the camera placement and movement. it worked out well for me as I focused on my strengths.

UPDATE:

I found this great tutorial series after much searching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYiKV...eature=related

Next step asset importing.....,

[Castroy2009]

Hello! (echo- echo- echo)

Anyone there?

I have been looking around since my first post and found some good tutorials on the subject of kismet and marque.

I still would like to asks a boatload of questions to someone who makes cinematics for games.

I would imagine this is a seperate thing from the other jobs of animation and modelling as i saw a youtube clip of some people working at a game company.


Hello...., is this thing on??

[ffejnosliw]

If you have questions, ask them. No one can answer them until you ask.

[agentfx]

its going to be hard to find someone who wants to help you make movies with a game engine. I know someone doing that, and they are solo.
its hard b/c movies aren't what we enjoy making, esp the quality level you are talking about. I'd say stick to whatever 3d program you've learned and push that farther, find people who want to help you there. Moving assets from almost all major applications is very doable so you're not doing someone any favors making your movie in game.

I have to comment on your full length 3d feature make with free models. Wow. I can't imagine making something that way.

[darthviper107]

You need to ask specific questions

In any case, a lot of the things you want to do require the stuff that you don't want to learn (going from your original post)

You'd have to be able to build levels (like building a set), that is unless you're OK with the levels that are included

And for characters, there's one character that comes with UDK which is a robot, I'm not sure that will help much, so you would need to build new characters. And at the very least, you'd need to be able to create your own character animations for your movie. UDK has some general animations but for a movie you'd need more specific stuff. And if you plan to make money off of the project, you wouldn't be able to use the one character included anyways (part of the rules, you can use everything in UDK but the Skeletal meshes, which are characters).

[Castroy2009]

Okay, here goes!!!! and thanks in advance for reading this!

Question1:

Could someone give me a very basic workflow for creating a cinematic, like A+B+C= animated scene?

Question2:

Is there a way I can take a set from a premade maya/3DS/sketchup set like (the ones on evermotion) and import it into UDK?

Backstory: I like to focus on my talents which I think are story and camera placement.

I used Mark Bremmer's VTC tutorials for Carrara 7 and learned the basics of what I needed to know in about 2 weeks...., two very intense, coffee fueled weeks......, I was hoping to find the same type of tutorial here for UDK matinee but i find the primary focus here is dark and erie backgrounds and frag counts. I'm not great animator, but I know What i like and can fit my story to my skill level- and the ready made sets, characters and easy to import mocaps are a HUGE help!!! When I look at the eat3d tutorials its so focused on its own UDK-ness that its hard to figure out how I should make a scene where a guy is trying to convince his girlfriend to go to "2nd base" in a parked convertible on a hillside overlooking the city....,

[ffejnosliw]

1. Matinee is your friend for creating cinematics. Read through the CreatingCinematics doc. It should answer a lot of questions.

2. You can import meshes from external 3D applications, yes. However, you really don't want to import the entire scene in one piece. Your scene should be built with the same workflow, techniques, considerations, etc. that any other level is built with. Scenes are best built using modular pieces that are all placed inside of UnrealEd to form your environment or scene. You will run into serious performance problems and probably visual artifacts and other issues if you import the entire scene or large chunks of the scene as a single piece.

[darthviper107]

And for exporting scenes made in 3ds Max or whatever, you also need to make sure that they're the right scale, and the objects can't have too many polygons, and you'd need to setup the materials again in UDK.

There's really no simple workflow for doing this, there's tutorials on making cinematics, but those are based on the content that's already made.


I think your main issue is that you're going to have to create characters and animation yourself, and that takes a lot of work

[Castroy2009]

Thanks ffeejnosliw! I will read that doc.

Its just a little overwhelming where there is so much to learn and I'm trying not to fill up my head since I have limited free space left up there LOL!!

Could I get some clarification for your answer to questions 2 please?: It seems to me levels are huge maps in UDK. What if I just to import one small room, say like this one?:

http://www.evermotion.org/modelshop/...l-83/4335/0/0/

This would be the complete level with no skydome or any of that other stuff i see in the tutorial, like a movie set on a studio lot where they only build what the camera will be seeing and nothing else.

Nostrovia!!

[Castroy2009]

I think your main issue is that you're going to have to create characters and animation yourself, and that takes a lot of work

I have delopers licenses for the daz characters I want to use and was planning to buy/learn the Digimi game developers bundle to make and bring characters over to Actorx for UDK import...., at least that was the plan I have come up with so far....,

I'm in the middle of editing a movie which is a fulltime effort and can only do UDK learning on the weekends for the next few weeks.

Thanks for the help!!

[agentfx]

When I look at the eat3d tutorials its so focused on its own UDK-ness that its hard to figure out how I should make a scene where a guy is trying to convince his girlfriend to go to "2nd base" in a parked convertible on a hillside overlooking the city....,

eat3d tutorials are great, I saw part of the cinematic one and that's going to be my next purchase, it's great. Your going to have to learn some of the UDKness altho I'm not sure what that means.

[Castroy2009]

eat3d tutorials are great, I saw part of the cinematic one and that's going to be my next purchase, it's great. Your going to have to learn some of the UDKness altho I'm not sure what that means.

I agree that the eat3d tutorials are great, its just that they are solely primarily on game-making and not so much on the cinematic parts.

It seems to me that in UDK you could import all of the characters, mocaps/animations, and dialogue and create a scene where each character's dialogue or actions can trigger the next dialogue line or a change in the mood music, etc..., that seems like a very cool way to make a scene if it is possible..., the way I'm doing it now is to make the scene in Carrara, render, export, then import into final cut pro for the final integration of picture and sound/sfx., etc..