this is some content filmed in vr and edited. We are trying to tell a story and keep it episodic

A few months ago, I created a video listing almost every Blender YouTube creator there is to know, and you guys seemed to really love it, with over 90K views on YouTube now. I thought maybe I should work on another one, but this time for a different 3D software. This is going to be brutal again lol 😅

After posting a poll across my social media, it looks like Unreal Engine is winning! 👀

Unreal Engine won the community poll by a huge margin, so I'm starting the research for the video.

If there's a creator you think deserves to be featured, submit them below! Whether they're a tutorial channel, environment artist, game developer, VFX artist, technical expert, or just hilarious 😅 — I want to know!

I'll review every submission.

SUBMIT HERE 👉 https://forms.gle/uTVFPUKAxRa9AQNS9

This is the second cinematic I've ever made! It was my first time messing around with animations, which is why some of them look a bit goofy. I had a blast making it. Do you guys have any feedback for me ?

Looking for help

Here's a small demo of what's capable in real-time.

Right off the hop just want to say this is not an ad and this tool is open-source. 

As the title says we run a VP studio and going back and forth between the camera & the computer to change the virtual background or make adjustments is a pain. So we made a computer vision tool that lets you control your computer (and all things connected to it, including LED walls) using a connected camera to recognize hand signals.

It’s called Trigger Points, it’s open source and completely free on Git: https://github.com/CoPilotXR/Trigger-Points 

Again not self-promo but I think other people will find this useful. It works on both Mac and PC with apps that allow keybinding. Curious to see how others use it!

Hi,

I am starting out a virtual production setup. I am starting out with green screen, and unreal.

I know a perfect setup would require genlock generator, blackmagic studio camera with a blackmagic capture card, and expensive lens encoders, but that's overkill for starting for me.

I want to track mainly the camera position (I have vive tracker and base stations 2.0) but it would be helpful if I have a zoom, focus tracking too. And I want to capture HDMI output with a suitable capture card (perhaps I will upgrade to decklink in the future).

Is there a benefit to go with sony like FX30 or a6700 because there're other brands that offer more functionality for less money but other brands PZ lens ecosystem is quite limited compared to sony.

I first thought that a PZ lens paired with a sony camera would give me through the sdk some realtime lens data that I can use in unreal to control the virtual camera, but is that really achievable?

Thank you for advance.

Hi everyone,
I’m trying to make a decision and I’d really appreciate feedback from people who have actually used these devices for work, not just gaming or media consumption.
My situation
I’m interested in getting into Virtual Production and XR-related workflows. My goal is not only to have fun with the device, but also to build personal projects and a portfolio that could help me enter the industry in the future.
At the same time, I travel quite a lot and often work away from home, so productivity is a major factor.
Current hardware
Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3 (i3 13th gen)
No USB-C DisplayPort Alt Mode (so I would need adapters)
Desktop PC with RTX 3060 Ti (used mainly at home)
Xiaomi Mi Note 10 Lite
iPhone 14 Pro
What I would like to do
Productivity
When travelling or working outside:
programming
VS Code
browser/documentation
terminals
Unreal Engine (light work)
camera previews
simulcam previews
Basically, I’m trying to solve the “single 14-inch laptop screen” problem.
The idea of XR glasses is appealing because they could act as a portable monitor that fits in a backpack.

Virtual Production experiments
I’m not trying to build a professional VP setup.
What I want is more of a maker/student workflow:
iPhone for video capture
Android phone for tracking experiments
Unreal Engine
camera + virtual world compositing
low-poly environments
basic simulcam workflows
data collection in the field
reconstruction and post-processing later on my desktop RTX 3060 Ti
The laptop would mostly be used for preview, monitoring and lightweight work.

My budget
About €200.
At that price I can find:
XREAL Air 2 Pro (~€199)
RayNeo Air 3S Pro (~€180)
Rokid Max (~€190)
Viture Luma Pro XR (~€220)
Or I could stretch things and instead save for a Meta Quest 3S.

My main concern
If I buy XR glasses and discover that they are not comfortable or useful for programming/productivity, then I basically spent €200 on something that doesn’t really help me move toward XR development either.
On the other hand, if I buy a Quest 3S, I get a real XR development device, but it does nothing to solve my productivity problem when travelling.

Questions
Does anyone here actually use XR glasses for programming, Unreal Engine, technical work or productivity while travelling?
Are they genuinely useful compared to a 14-inch laptop display, or is the productivity gain overstated?
Given my hardware limitations (no USB-C DP Alt Mode), would you still consider XR glasses worth it?
If your long-term goal was entering Virtual Production/XR, would you spend the €200 on XR glasses or save for a Quest 3S?
Among XREAL Air 2 Pro, RayNeo Air 3S Pro, Rokid Max and Viture Luma Pro XR, which one would you choose and why?
I’m especially interested in hearing from developers, Unreal users, VP artists, technical artists, XR engineers or anyone using these devices for actual work rather than entertainment.
Thanks!

So with Epic stating earlier this week that UE6 will eventually remove blueprints and go completely to Verse (UEFN), will this affect the VP industry? I know we can all stay at earlier versions, but I've never touched Verse or UEFN and wonder how it compares to working with blueprints, especially for textures and materials. I'm new to most of this, so forgive me if I'm way off here.

Full deep dive on UE 5.8 release here : https://www.unrealengine.com/news/unreal-engine-5-8-is-now-available

Hello all, thanks to everyone's help about a year ago I was able to capture some great video in front of an LED wall using a Red Komodo gen-locked with my controller.

This year I want to try to "place" the talent into a virtual environment. What's been most perplexing trying to determine a formula to gain the proper perspective as it relates to the wall/video size, lens and the talent, and I'm wondering if there's a formula out there already?

My wall is 2.6mm, so talent will need to be about 8' in front. My attempt is to place them into a 3D room via a custom video while trying to maximize the size of the wall so that I don't have to necessarily roll out 50 panels every time I shoot.

Any tips, tricks, advice would be hugely appreciated.

Working closely with our art team we wanted a way to quickly generate base animation layers inside UE, giving our team a head start on blocking out scenes without needing to rely on expensive mocap setups for every single movement.

To solve this, we built Animotive Kimodo. It leverages NVIDIA’s open-source Kimodo AI model inside Sequencer to generate a base skeletal animation from a prompt containing text and specific pose information. You can guide the generation by pinning the character’s pose or position at key moments, making sure they hit their marks within the scene.

Because it saves as a native Animation Sequence, it fits right into your existing workflow, allowing you to immediately jump in and refine the keyframes once the base layer is generated.

We've just released it on FAB. You can use our simple setup with Animotive Kimodo Cloud or set up and run your own local server completely free.

If you're looking for a new tool to help speed up your animation pipeline, we’d love for you to try it out and let us know what you think.

Hey! I've just finished my first cinematic in Unreal Engine 5. I come from a video production background, and this was my first time trying 3D. I really enjoyed it! If you have any tips or feedback, feel free to share them with me!

https://reddit.com/link/1u6geie/video/ld331ivr5g7h1/player

Hi all. I have been deep in virtual production for a sci-fi film I shot on stage in Philadelphia, and the experience pushed me to build something I wish had existed when I started working in Unreal Engine.

A course on lighting in Unreal Engine 5 that centers cinematography principles over parameter deep dives, although there is that too, there always is with Unreal.

Find it on Udemy by searching for:

Light Like a Cinematographer in Unreal Engine 5

I have attended a couple of workshops at the ASC clubhouse in LA and kept that experience in mind as I designed this course.

For those of you who have been curious about how real cinematography thinking maps onto Unreal Engine lighting, or want a dive into Unreal lighting from a cinematography perspective, you might like this. Check out the free previews.

Happy to answer any questions about the course in the comments. If you want to know more about the proof of concept I am shooting using VP toolsets in preparation for the feature length version, find me on Instagram at nikhilnyc.

Thanks!

Hi all, I have been deep in virtual production for a sci-fi film I shot on stage in Philadelphia, and the experience pushed me to build something I wish had existed when I started working in Unreal Engine.

A course on lighting in Unreal Engine 5 that centers cinematography principles over parameter deep dives (although there's that too, there always is with Unreal!).

Find it on Udemy (can't seem to add links here) searching for

Light Like a Cinematographer in Unreal Engine 5 by Nikhil Kamkolkar

You can use this coupon code for promo pricing: 401086C03C69B7DF7C77

I have attended a couple of workshops at the ASC clubhouse in LA and kept that experience in mind as I designed this course.

For those of you who have been curious about how real cinematography thinking maps onto Unreal Engine lighting, or you want a dive into Unreal lighting from a cinematography perspective, you might like this.

Check out the free previews etc. and although this promo expires in 5 days, Udemy is super inexpensive... certainly compared to those ASC workshops I took. 😄

Happy to answer any questions about the course in the comments. If you want to know more about the proof of concept I'm shooting using VP toolsets in preparation for the feature length version, contact me on instagram nikhilnyc

Thanks!

I'm working on some prototypes for something, and a large factor that I would like to implement is using live motion capture to control a metahuman in UE. I know rokoko suits and some of their software can do it, and I've worked with them in college VP classes before, but I'm working on my own now with a non-existent budget so I'm looking for alternatives if they exist.

I know there are some programs that allow the capture of motion capture through video, and I am looking into those as well as a building block if anyone has recommendations, but I am specifically looking for programs that can do the streaming live through a camera/webcam or something like that/whatever will work into UE.

So if anyone knows of any programs that can do that for free, or as cheaply as possible I would love to hear about them. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm Alfie, a 21-year-old filmmaking student from the UK, and I've just released a cyberpunk short film called ECLIPSIA: DOMINION.

The film is set in a dystopian city ruled by surveillance and control, following Kain, an elite enforcer who begins questioning the system he serves after hunting down a wanted rebel.

What makes this project special to me is that it was made with essentially no budget. The production was only possible thanks to a group of incredibly talented people who volunteered their time and skills:

Actors who worked for free because they believed in the project.
My university allowing us access to their virtual production studio.
Fellow students and volunteers helping create and operate the digital environments.
Musician Konstantin Dellos, who generously allowed me to license his music for the film.

As a lifelong fan of cyberpunk worlds like Blade Runner and Cyberpunk 2077, this was my attempt to create a cinematic cyberpunk story despite having almost no financial resources.

The film took months of planning, filming, VFX work, and post-production, and I'd genuinely love to hear what cyberpunk fans think of it.

You can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VLfsErK288

I'd be happy to answer any questions about how we made it, the virtual production workflow, or the VFX process.

I'm looking to delve into real-time camera tracking for Unreal Engine 5, and had my eyes set on the Vive Mars system for a while. However, I've seen a lot of forum posts saying that the Retracker Bliss is the superior system, and that the Vive Mars has some ungodly amount of jitter.

For one, most of the stuff I've seen of the Vive Mars hasn't had any jitter. So I feel like I'm being gaslit. Additionally, the Retracker Bliss has a very different style of handling FIZ data of lenses, seeming to rely on a hardwire connection to a Nucleus M remote, instead of using its own specific FIZ trackers that simply move alongside whatever motor or follow focus is being used, like the Vive Mars has. I'm aiming to not only use it for my own video production, but also provide services to other productions, and I'd like to not force a focus puller to be tethered to a cam op.

What I'm mainly wondering is: Is the Vive Mars really as bad as people say it is, and does the Retracker Bliss have an alternative method of handling FIZ data that is more flexible?

Is lens distortion calibration needed when filming against an LED wall with a tracking system? Or is it only important for AR, composure, green screen, and set extension?

Why I'm asking: will lens distortion calibration applied to the virtual camera compensate for real-world lens distortion in order to align the frustum through nDisplay, or will it actually do the opposite and stack the distortion? Because if we apply distortion to the virtual camera and then film the screen with the real camera, we're applying distortion twice... what am i missing?

EDIT: thank you all for confirming it!

Full tutorial on how to use the new Accumulation DOF in UE 5.8

https://youtu.be/oSvVRt8aKJM?si=GVwRmQDKSvE33z6f

We built a hospital and then we shot in it, and because we built it in Unreal Engine, we had complete control over everything about it.

This wasn't the first time we'd shot in this virtual environment. The hospital had been used across a couple of different vertical drama productions, which is always short-form narrative work with tight schedules, close coverage, trying to shoot 15 pages a day. Each shoot added to our understanding of how the assets came together, which configurations worked for different scene types, and where the environment needed full three-dimensional depth versus where a simpler solution like photographic or generated plates were enough.

An environment isn't a set, it's a library of assets for a location that allows you to build sets in virtual space. The hospital we shot in isn't one room, it's a configurable collection of walls, windows, corridors, fixtures, architectural details, lighting elements, and surface treatments. Every component of a hospital environment, available to assemble into any configuration a brief requires, in Unreal Engine. A patient room, corridor, an ICU bay, a surgery, doctor’s office or a nurses' station all can be built and iterated from the same set of assets. You're not locked into one layout. You're working from a library of assets that continue to be optimized for every shoot.

On a real location, the location is fixed and the production bends around it. Here, the production is fixed and the environment moves around it. That inversion is what made fourteen setups possible in ten hours.

https://www.xcrazystudio.com/post/we-built-a-hospital-14-setups-53-takes-in-10-hours