>> Hey, what is up guys? My name is Matt Workman,
and I am the developer of Cine Tracer.
If you have not heard of it,
Cine Tracer is a tool for cinematographers and filmmakers
to plan visuals for commercials, feature films, television shows,
and of course, it is built in Unreal Engine.
Is anyone here an Unreal Engine developer?
Thinking about building something in Unreal Engine?
The title for this talk
I think is officially something about Cinematic Lighting.
It is going to be a little bit more
about the process of why I built this tool
and then how I built it in Unreal Engine.
There also happens to be cinematic lighting.
It is a little bit more like that.
Before I got into development in Unreal Engine,
I was a cinematographer in New York City
shooting music videos and commercials.
This is me.
This is the most impressive photo I could find of myself,
so I hope everyone is quite impressed.
This is going to have music in it, I think.
[MUSIC]
Yeah. This is a music video I shot.
That was a set photo from it. This was 2012.
We will wait for the music to calm down.
This is how I was planning in 2012.
I just want to communicate,
what are we doing here, for the director, for everybody.
I am using Google SketchUp, Google Warehouse,
all free assets, and this is my state of the art 2012.
I am a DP. I do not have a 3D background at that point.
2014, two years later, I am still shooting commercials
and I have used into Maya.
I think a lot of people use Maya for visualization.
I was watching videos from The Third Floor
in Halon.
Shout out if you guys are here or watching.
You guys are awesome.
I took a lot of inspiration from the previs work
from the film industry in Maya.
This was my Maya. That was really quick,
but I made cranes and different visualizations
to show what the crane was doing,
and they were literally cubes and cylinders.
It was not great.
But this is Maya Viewport 2.0 lighting,
real-time Playblast. Not bad.
Not bad, but just wait until the end
when we get into the Unreal Engine stuff.
That is way better.
Same kind of year I started building lights,
models of the real-world lights
and just trying to explain as much as I can.
This just keeps going. This is a top-down view,
so you have 2D CADs and 3D CADs all in Maya.
I built this system.
We did some betas with The Mill. I never released it though.
The Mill was actually VFX supervising this shoot.
But these are the types of commercials I was doing,
and I really liked doing the previs.
At a certain point, I liked doing the previs
and building the tools more than doing the shoots,
and that is why I am here today.
Here is I think the last demo from when I was a DP.
This called the TechnoDolly, and it is as close as you
are going to get to having a 3D Camera in the real world.
You literally can set keyframes,
walk somewhere, set a keyframe and hit play,
and it will just whoop, do the thing.
I got known for doing this. You see the logo. It is cheesy.
It said “Cinematographer Previs Artist."
That is how I used to do it.
I gravitated and directors gravitated towards me
who really liked planning. This was the director’s previs.
That is what I am walking into. This was my previs,
and that is The Mill’s TechnoDolly rig.
They sent that to me. Thank you so much The Mill.
This is my background.
I am trying to do this, and I am getting known for it.
Other people want to do it, but it is really hard.
Maya is a pretty significant time investment to do it.
This clip keeps going.
This is me setting the actual keyframes.
But I am so into this that I really want to dedicate
my full-time energy into building tool sets for this.
I believe this wraps it out.
You can see that we have set these keyframes,
and now the TechnoDolly is going to play them out.
They are repeatable. You can do passes of them.
These are the types of shoots that I was coming from.
We planned the crap out of them.
You planned them, you present them to the agency,
you present them to the director,
you revise them, and you do it again.
In this type of production, planning is really important.
Next situation here. Excuse the crappy slides here.
I liked this so much that at a certain point in my career,
I started a company called Cinematography
Database, and all I wanted to do
is keep developing the software for myself
but then also for other people that want to start to use it.
I start the company, all the social medias,
and I start making a plugin called Cine Designer,
and it lives in Cinema 4D. We move out of Maya.
This video is a little bit newer, but 2015 to 2018,
I am doing a lot of social media.
This is a Twitch stream I think. On this video,
I am relating real world light readings into Cinema 4D,
and I built the system so that they kind of match.
Eventually, we move into path tracing.
This is with Redshift. Holler, Redshift.
They are over there.
We have amazing lighting. It is looking really good.
But the issue is that this still takes
a ridiculous amount of time to learn.
This happened.
That is a 3D skit of me dancing. We are going to wait for it.
That is a 3D skit of me shooting me dancing.
I am having fun with this,
but it is still way too difficult
for most cinematographers to get this deep into the workflow.
It is a lot of work.
Eventually, Epic Games actually reached out to me.
They had been seeing the work I was doing.
They were like, wouldn’t it be cool,
maybe, if you brought it into Unreal Engine?
Spoiler alert - it was cool. It is cool.
I started my very first Unreal Engine project.
Cine Tracer today - which you have not seen it yet;
it is coming up
- is literally pretty much a third person Blueprint template.
Anyone ever open that up? That is where it started.
It is still very much based in that,
but we have done other stuff.
We eventually early released on Steam.
This is the early days.
This is one of the first things I ever posted, same 3D scan,
same third-person Blueprint running around kind of goofy.
Brought the lights in. These are LIDAR
scanned. A church in my area that I was messing with,
and I am starting to figure out,
well, what can I do in a real-time game engine
that I could not do in Maya?
This is definitely one of them. This is just messing around.
I posted this video on social media kind of as a joke.
This was not my life yet,
but the response was kind of overwhelming.
I keep going. I bring that same technocrane from Maya
into Cinema 4D and I decide that it would be cool
if you could drive it like a car.
This was honestly a mistake. We were just recording stuff.
I came back and did it again to do it for real.
But we have physics, and it is real-time,
and we are moving Cameras like it is a remote-control car,
almost like it is on set,
almost like this is a live thing.
We are not setting keyframes or rendering, waiting.
No, we just do this right here.
This is being controlled with an Xbox controller.
I cannot think of anything more fun than this.
We posted this one online,
and this went viral for a long time.
This is all pre-release,
but it is good news that the videos we put out of it,
people like it enough to share it.
I am taking the same 3D scan here.
This was for Cine Gear,
which is a film-making conference.
I put this demo together.
It is just this Level of me playing instruments
and me filming myself,
because that is the only model I had.
I am just continuing to build out systems.
In this one,
I am starting to do what you do in the Unreal Engine,
which is attach Objects to each other.
It is parenting, basically.
We are doing dynamic parenting of these Objects together.
This is called a C-stand.
It is kind of a complicated thing,
and we are doing it in the game though.
Here, I am getting into lighting,
testing out the different cinematic lighting,
and I’m designing a system in game
where you can tell the Characters
to walk around and lay down.
We are making this really simple for people.
That is the idea.
Here we are, September 2018 we release on Steam.
It is the worst thing you have ever seen.
It is like one map, so buggy. But it has the general shape.
People have been watching the development,
and luckily within the first month,
we have thousands of users around the world
and they are primarily filmmakers.
Every day after that, I am adding features,
literally every day.
And almost every day, I am posting a video like this.
This is just like a highlight reel
of some of the cool videos we have.
I am just trying to bring the functionality
that we have in Maya and Cinema
and just bring it into a really simple package.
Unreal Engine gives you all these tools to do this.
That was our in-Camera IK system,
and this is a live shot. None of this is prerecorded.
It is all just screen capture live recorded.
Shout out, Reallusion Character Creator, they are over there.
I am using all of their Characters
when we are doing facial animation like this.
I am trying to make just really simple controls.
This will eventually work
perfectly with ARKit for the phone
so you can just use your phone to capture it.
Look at that smile, perfect.
This is just a lot of experimentation.
If you have ever been on set,
there is a lot of this cable wrangling,
and I wanted to make a cool system to do that.
This is all Blueprints. Almost every one of these videos
is like I had an idea and in one day,
six hours in Blueprints - I could even prove it.
I did it on Twitch, a lot of it. You can bang these out.
Once you learn the system, you have an idea, you make it.
Some of them are terrible like this one,
but you can do it, and it is cool.
I have been doing this over and over again
for about a year and a half. This is right before ray tracing.
This is me trying to make soft lighting.
You typically have to bake soft lighting.
It is the only way. I know a decent way.
I know a decent rick. This is non ray traced,
and that is a pretty soft-looking light.
I will make a course and sell it to you
if you want to know how that works.
Terrible UI,
but this whole thing is just a moving project.
I did go to school a little bit for computer science,
but I have no game programming background.
I am not a trained 3D artist. I was a DP for 10 years.
I am just slowly massaging this together,
but it is my full-time job
and I literally dream in Blueprints still.
I had a great dream last night. It was the best Blueprint.
Cine Tracer RTX. This is my build today on Steam.
If you wanted to try it, you could.
That would be awesome. It is in Unreal Engine 4.22.
I keep it with the latest build as much as I can.
We have enabled real-time ray tracing.
We have designed new hybrid, rasterized and ray traced light,
so there is a little bit of both happening at the same time.
This is Cine Tracer with ray tracing.
This type of lighting is usually associated
with very long bake times. Maybe not in a small Level here,
but here we just do it all in real-time.
I am running on a 2080 Ti at my house,
so it is like high-end consumer.
But as you look through the Camera,
you look at the lighting quality, it is really nice.
This is really resonating with cinematographers.
This is why a year and a half ago,
I started building this, was to get to this point,
and it is coming together really nicely.
Having this lighting in real-time is great.
Look at the physics. We are in an interior now.
These are the hybrid lights. They have ray tracing on,
but there are a lot of parameters you toggle.
It is actually one rasterized normal light
with a ray traced light on top of it with certain settings
that kind of cancel each other out in a certain way.
But when you look at it really closely,
it looks like baked lighting but you are moving it.
So if you have not tried ray tracing in Unreal Engine,
it is awesome.
You should also package the project
if you want to really try it.
It performs a bit better packaged
than it does in the Editor. It is a small thing.
Most people do a lot of ray tracing demos in editor.
You get a little bit more if you package it.
For me, this is coming to form now.
This is not that long ago. This is in June.
As we look at this demo,
you can really see that this is cinematic lighting.
It looks like almost the lighting
we were getting path traced in Cinema 4D,
except each one of those single frames in Cinema 4D -
I let it cook for 10 minutes, normally. This is real-time.
This is like 30 frames per second.
I am just screen recording it, live operated.
You can move any of the lights. It is all dynamic.
Okay, cool. So right now we are in Cine Tracer
and I am using my iPhone X made by Apple
with ARKit to record my face and audio.
This is the first time I have done this in Cine Tracer.
And I am of course using my Xbox
controller here to, at the same time,
move the Camera and operate it like a real cinematic camera.
Yeah. So we are working on bringing this in.
this is actually two-year-old tech from Epic Games.
It is free. You want this?
You can go download it in the learning content section,
put it in your game, put it in your app.
It is free. I just put it in there,
and I am going to integrate it with the Reallusion Characters
so that anyone with an iPhone,
you can just turn on Cine Tracer,
you drag out a Character, you pick out your phone,
you start talking.
If you look at the render quality
for a certain application,
this could almost be final pixel.
I am not saying we are a virtual production platform yet,
but it is slowly moving in that direction.
I make silly videos, okay, but they do okay on Instagram.
This sets the tone for my application.
I was having a conversation with someone
who is trying to build something for enterprise
and you try to keep it more serious.
I am not trying to keep it serious.
I really want to show that this is fun, it is interactive.
Do not take it too seriously.
But at the same time, we can create great visuals.
I am trying to make it like a real-time film-making app.
I had some of that Unreal Engine popcorn.
Anybody have that?
It is a little bit like, do not before you speak.
Bad idea. I'll Let this one roll out.
This was actually previs for a job
I am shooting for Epic Games right now,
but I do not think we can show that at the moment.
Off the cliff.
That is a motorcycle from the Marketplace.
It is really easy to add motorcycles
to games now, really simple.
That is Cine Tracer. I think for this crowd,
I do not have a gaming programming background.
I am a pretty bad 3D artist. I can get by,
but a year and a half of really just chugging along,
I was able to take my previous industry knowledge,
put together a product.
It sells incredibly well. I am very fortunate.
I have a social media presence, so that helps a lot.
But Unreal Engine is so straightforward to learn.
There are so many Marketplace Assets
to bring it in and prototype it
that if you are thinking about doing it,
I think now is a great time. Cool, thank you very much.
I will hang out after if you have any questions. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]