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what it's like to be on the moon keep watching
welcome to vfx explained the show where we take a look at vfx from blockbuster films music videos or
viral videos and try to recreate them in today's video i'm going to recreate the moon landing
a trip not only through space but through time toward a world
untouched by the evolutionary processes of earth that's one small step for man
so in 1969 the apollo 11 hit the surface of the moon well at least that's what we're told there
is a lot of speculation that the moon landing has been fate but is it though i'm going to
try to recreate the moon landing scene with visual effects let's see where we get i gotta
say today's video is going to be pretty exciting because i'm going to be working with unreal engine
and i'm pretty excited about it because i haven't worked with it but i wanted to work with it for
so long now okay so now let's open up unreal engine 5. the most amazing part of this is it
has an amazing and big community to learn from so if you ever get stuck you always find a solution
when using the software and it's also free to download so why wouldn't you give it a go because
this software gives you so much opportunities for creating visual effects so the first thing that
i have done is create a landscape so you have all these tablets and you can just literally
go into the landscape mode and start creating a landscape you can sculpt it and detail it
the way you want just like you're working with clay it's so user friendly and so easy to use
that it feels like you're playing a game while you're actually working on a complete environment
that you're going to end up using for a game or a movie after that you can obviously texture your
landscape but what you can also do is actually load a displacement map and in this case i
actually ended up importing a displacement map of the moon so i actually searched for a height map
of the moon optimized it for unreal engine and imported that and that gives me back something
like this so with this you really see all those craters in the moon and that looks fantastic
so then for the texturing you don't have to create your own pictures because unreal engine actually
gives you free access to their complete library called quixil bridge and it's now integrated
in unreal engine 5. when you open qixel bridge you can quickly see that you have tons and tons
of materials surfaces and foliage that are ready to use and that are completely integrated in the
software so i just search the material that i like and i just click download and i add it to
the software then it brings that into the software and i just edited a little bit of that texture to
desaturate the colors to make it look more like a moon surface and apply that to my landscape
so now the landscape looks good but it doesn't look very detailed and i only need a small space
to actually look very detailed because the rest i'm going to film from far away so here
nanite comes in really handy so first off i just searched some simple rocks on the bridge library
and i imported them into my project and then with the foliage tool i just imported these small rocks
into the foliage and then you can see that i can just brush paint over my landscape and start
detailing it with stuff that i just place over there so whatever 3d model i place in there
i can scatter it around the entire landscape after that you've done all the detailing stuff for
the smaller object you can start importing some bigger rocks and again with nanite you have these
real high polygon counts 3d scanned rocks that you can import from quixil bridge and they just
look photoreal immediately so i imported these rocks into the library and just placed them
all over my scene and i just searched for some variation you can also download some ground to
just to separate up the ground and make a little bit more variation in your scenery and again i
just edited the textures to look a little bit more desaturated then like in any software you
place your lights your hdri map and you should have something like this so how easily was it
to set up something like this and you have like literally infinite possibilities for environment
so if you're ever doing green screen work i don't know if i'm going to be using anything else
but in real engine because rendering this scene literally two seconds a second i don't know but
it's it's really fast so now i want to import a 3d model and animate that 3d model so i have the
apollo 11 lander here i imported that in cinema 4d and i optimized my model a little bit and i also
combined all the meshes just so i have one solid model with all the textures applied to it and
all i have to do is export this model to unreal engine 5 and here i can just link up the textures
again and i immediately have my final result of my lander so it's really simple to import 3d models
as well and now you can start animating your scene so to do that you have to create a level
sequence so i don't want to create a game i want to create a sequence i want to create a cinematic
so with this level sequencer you can bring in your camera you can bring in your lander
or your apollo 11 and then start keyframing the position of everything and yeah just parenting the
camera underneath the apollo 11 to get a shot for example like this or yeah just from far away and
zooming in a little bit because you have complete control over what camera
you want to use like in real life which is really amazing and in the end by playing around with the
software every time i wanted to do something just looking up that specific thing i needed to do
and little by little i ended up creating an entire scene in a very short amount of time
yeah mom i know i should have called you i arrived safely on the moon yeah yeah i i ate my sandwiches
i want to talk a little bit more about unreal engine you might already know it as a game engine
but recently it's grabbing more and more attention towards the filmmaking industry and that's because
you're basically creating a hyper realistic game and then you can use that in your vfx pipelines
so for example the mandalorian they're not using green screen anymore they are using these 360
led panels to replicate the scene and the scene usually is being recreated using unreal engine
when it comes to debt and the most important thing for me is that render times are essentially
history because you're rendering in real time as hence it's a game engine you're creating a game of
your movie so this allows you much more creativity over your camera angles and stuff like that
because you don't have to worry about rendering hours and hours and hours to get your final
result also two new releases they have done you might have already heard from them with all these
new games being released unreal engine announced nanite and lumen and what exactly is nanite well
nanite is allowing you to import high polycon 3d models in unreal engine without a problem so now
polygons don't matter anymore because they're calculated in a completely different way
optimizing the speed of the render engine and you don't have to worry about optimizing your models
because before you had to keep your polygons to a minimum and if you wanted to create detail in
your 3d model you needed to actually put that in the normals or in the textures of your model
and fake all the 3d detail that you would have on your object you might have seen that in games when
you're walking closer to a wall and you're looking at a specific angle you can see that the wall is
actually not displaced it's not coming out it just looks like it's 3d but it isn't and that is
now history with nanite and the other introduction is lumen lumen is how i understand it a completely
physical and procedural lighting system that allows you to light your scene in real time so you
can move your light you can actually see that the shadows are moving and that the light adapts to
the scenery and your camera and stuff like that before you had to all catch that beforehand
and now it feels more realistic and it acts more realistic and the cool thing is before i started
with this project unreal engine actually announced unreal engine 5 beta so it's currently still in a
beta but i wanted to test it out because they have so much exciting stuff coming for the filmmaking
industry well for us it's really important as well for the game industry but with this update you can
now make photo real renders in unreal engine in real time so that's insane so i'm still very new
to the software super excited to get better and i would love to see what you can create so you
can always tag me on instagram at inisla and i'm super excited to see what you guys can come up
with and that's it for this video so yeah i hope you enjoyed it if you did give this video a like
also be sure to subscribe to the channel and hit the notification bell to stay notified when
i upload new videos apart from that i hope to see you in the next one until then create epic videos