Rendering in Unreal Engine

Another fun week, especially as we are finally tackling character animation!

Up to this point, I’ve played around in After Effects and Cinema 4D, but rendering from Unreal Engine is on another level. C4D is great because I have a character rig made by the very talented Alan Towndrow. With the power of alembic files I can render my animated character model and material channels so I can place and texture them in Unreal Engine.

With Redshift, this little three-second animation would take me about 60+ minutes to render assuming I can get to 1 minute per frame. Unreal did the whole thing in less than two minutes!

Add a little camera shake with Red Giant and boom, I can finally do a kick flip (kind of).

I did run into an issue with blurry renders when first attempting to render from the Unreal sequencer. The best method I found for getting better quality renders was to render with the Movie Render Queue, using all of the techniques designer George Nischal outlines in the video below.