Setting up UDK for portfolio renders?

rob_beddall

Hey,

Anyone know how I would go about setting up a scene in UDK that would allow me to render out good quality pics of my character models and such?
I have quite a bit of experience in unreal but not with anything to do like this.

Is it just a case of building a small level, adding lights etc and then moving the camera around? ( is there a way to get a free roaming camera in game?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Or if anyone has an example scene that they could send me to have a look at then that would also be ace

cheers

CasperNilsson

Some tips

Type togglehud in console to remove the hud. then scroll away the linkgun.
Tiledshot 4 to take a bigger screencap that you later can resize to get a aa effect.
the file goes to your udk folder, ex C\UDK\UDK-2010-05\UDKGame\ScreenShots.
Fov 80, fov 100, fov 110 to change the field of view.
Type ghost or fly to get a freecam ingame, ghost to clip through meshes.

It can also be good to disable some of the default postprocess nodes in the UTPostProcess_Console chain.

rob_beddall

hey, thanks for the tips.
Though after playing around I think it might be easier to just get the grabs directly from the persp viewport. Do you know if there is a way to change the background colour on this from black to a mid grey?

cheers

moose

You can also set up a very simple matinee to have finer control of your renders. quick bullet point tut:

• in the Content Browser, click 'Actors' at the top.
• select Camera, right click in an ortho view (top), add actor > Camera
• Open up Kismet (K icon @ top)
• Hold M and click to create a new Matinee
• Right click @ the top, 'Add new Director Group'
• Select your camera in the world
• Right click @ bottom section in Matinee, "Add new Camera Group"
• Name camera
• to save headaches, select your movement track, Right Click & set toe World instead of Relative to Initial

Once you get this set up, you can position your camera. In your perspective viewport, click the Eyeball icon in the tray of viewmodes. This will enable camera snapping to selection.

Back in Matinee, select your keyframe for the movement track, which will snap your camera to the view. Fly it into position!

You can adjust the FOV in here as well, select the FOV track, and press Enter to create a new keyframe, right click it and set its value.

Finally, you need to select the director track, and press Enter to create a camera frame. Select your camera you named to put it in there!

The final bit you need to add is back in kismet:

• Add a "Level loaded & visible EVENT"
• Connect that to the PLAY section of the matinee
• You can also create a toggle Cinematic mode action in there as well to nuke the hud
• Drop a playerstart in your level, and rebuild all
• Play in editor (using joystick icon)
• tiledshot away!

dtschultz

Nice! Thanks, Moose. I was looking for something like this awhile back. I'll have to try this.

rob_beddall

hey, thanks for the info.
I'll try that out.
While I'm here though.... I was looking through the world info properties and I noticed some setting for a Rim Shader. Anyone know what this is and what it does, how to turn it on etc? I tried checking the boxes but it didn't change anything visually.

cheers

sebas

Also, it comes in handy to hold Ctrl+ any number key to place a 'bookmark' at that location. Then just hit the number key again and the camera will return to the position stored.

rob_beddall

hey...
that sounds like it's gonna be really helpful.. cheers.
Another quick question though if you would be so kind..
Is it in anyway possible to have the viewport display a lit - untextured - wireframe?
A bit like the view you would expect to have in maya / max while modelling? that would be really helpful for what I'm doing at the minute

Thor Sowards

rob_beddall wrote: »

hey...
that sounds like it's gonna be really helpful.. cheers.
Another quick question though if you would be so kind..
Is it in anyway possible to have the viewport display a lit - untextured - wireframe?
A bit like the view you would expect to have in maya / max while modelling? that would be really helpful for what I'm doing at the minute

type in viewmode wireframe or viewmode whatever type of mode you want to view in

here's a list of viewmodes taken directly from the udn

• BRUSHWIREFRAME – Renders scene in a wireframe view showing brush edges.
• LIGHTCOMPLEXITY – Renders scene using a special shader that displays the complexity of the lighting on (number of dynamic lights affecting) each surface using specific colors to denote the number of lights.
• LIGHTINGONLY – Renders scene using only the lighting information on the geometry.
• LIGHTMAPDENSITY – Renders scene using a special shader that displays the density of texels for the lightmap on each surface.
• LITLIGHTMAPDENSITY - Renders scene fully lit using a special shader that displays the density of texels for the lightmap on each surface. This is essentially a combination of the LIGHTMAPDENSITY and LIGHTINGONLY viewmodes.
• SHADERCOMPLEXITY – Renders scene using a special shader that displays the complexity of the material being used by each surface using specific colors to denote ranges of shader instructions.
• TEXTUREDENSITY – Renders scene using a special shader that displays the density of texels for the diffuse channel on each surface using specific colors to indicate the density.
• UNLIT – Renders scene with flat shading, i.e., no lighting.
• WIREFRAME – Renders scene in a wireframe view.

the full list of console commands can be found here
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ConsoleCommands.html

sebas

As long as I know, UDK wireframe modes aren't the best option since they only show tris (not quads) and some kind of 'wireframe overlay' is not available. You may want to apply some uv map as a texture, which doesn't look good in my opinion. Better use Max or Maya, if possible.

rob_beddall

yeah, that's what i've been doing. unfortunately, what i wanted was a wirefram from the exact same angle as the rendered view ( rendered in unreal). oh well, you can't have everything

Oniram

unless you're doing a full environment, if you want to render out a prop or vehicle or something in unreal, you can always take a high res uv wireframe and put that on your mesh. works out pretty fine IMO

rob_beddall

hey,

yeah I did think of that but for some reason I thought that baking the wireframe to a texture would be a massive ballache... completely forgot about the UV Snapshot feature in Maya. Such a schoolboy error. duh!

cheers.

movento

I'm having a problem when using the normal or tiled screenshot command. It looks like this:

sebas

@ movento: Maybe it's because of outdated drivers, hope it helps.

@ moose: Trying to set matinee but it's not working, probably i'm doing something wrong or i'm missing something with the director track?:
http://www.sebasmartin.es/Artfolio/Camera_Test.udk

Drumonman

movento wrote: »

I'm having a problem when using the normal or tiled screenshot command. It looks like this:

I think it has to do with how you open the console. I forget which one, either TAB or Tilde (~), one opens the console on a single line and shouldn't show when you used tiled shot. The other opens the console on most of the screen, thats why your shot look like that. At least that's what happened in my experience.

Lamont

Make TiledShot a keyboard press so you don't have to open the command.

Also, you can just hit a command and hit fly like above, bind a key to that command. Then fly around adjust FOV (if you set you camera up correctly) and snap pics all day long.

moose

//nm

moose

K, turns out the auto-update feature doesn't quite work as expected via udk Seperate issue!

Got your map open, you missed one part to get the camera to work:

Open Matinee, and expand the DirGroup, select the Director track. At 0 on the timeline, and with the director track selected, press enter on the keyboard to add a keyframe. Select your camera group "NewCameraGroup" from the drop down and add it to the list.

This will allow Maintee to know to use that camera as the viewport.



I also made your keyframes Constants, by right click > Interp Mode > Constant, for safe measure. Also, set your Matinee to bLooping within kismet (select matinee, it is a property checkbox).

sebas

Ok, now it's working... thanks!

cholden

Great info. Thanks Casper, but how does one "scroll away" from the link gun? Mine just stays there. I get the same results from simply running in spectator mode though (which also eliminates the need for flying).

Fun results though, barf!
http://chrisholden.net/highres02.jpg

seth.

cholden have you tried togglescreenshotmode you need to enter it twice for it to work but it removes the hud and weapons like a charm.

cholden

dope, thanks, seth.

ES_139

sorry to dig up an old thread but Im struggling to get to grips with cameras in UDK. I was following your advice moose but I got lost at add new director group action. Please excuse my udk noobishness its my first time trying to set-up a scene and im a bit lost, most things I was able to find out pretty easily but I couldn't really find any info on just setting up a camera and setting a viewport to that camera much like I would do in max for a simple render. Can anyone help me out with this?

sebas

@ ES_139: Some posts ago, I was a bit lost too setting up cameras in UDK... feel free to make a small test scene and upload it so we can see where the problem is or where you got stuck.

zxcman

Hi all!
I want to ask everyone about lighting setup in the scene for character rendering. Maybe someone has some demo scenes or smt like that. can anyone tell me some tips about that because I'm pretty new to UDK

Sir_Dillon

Hi there! I hope this thread is not yet dead??

I try to render screens for my portfolio.

I took the setup *moose suggested. It is actually forking quite fine until a few seconds after starting the game in the viewport, the view switches from the positioned camera to the player at the player start...

Now I dont want that because I want to tileshot from that camera position. Where is my error? Do I have to take care of some keyframes inside my matinee?

cheers to all!

Sir_Dillon

blankslatejoe

Hm...that might be because your matinee is just ...well..finishing. You could add a keyframe like....a minute into the matinee to buy yourself more time, or, on 'finished' you could wire it back to 'play' again (be sure to check the 'rewind on complete' option on the matinee kismet node). There might also be an option on the node to 'loop' the matinee, but I can't remember.

Sir_Dillon

Well, thats a bunch of hints I will go for! Thanks a lot!

CognizanCe

Hello everyone,
I figured I'd ask this here instead of making a separate thread:


To create UDK renders, is it literally just flying around in UDK and then taking screenshots?

(after clicking Play->Play in viewport or Play on PC)?

Obscura

Yes, but if you use the tiledshot command in the console, you can make bigger screenshots.

CognizanCe

Obscura wrote: »

Yes, but if you use the tiledshot command in the console, you can make bigger screenshots.

Cool, thanks.