#e33 camera mod

[paintharvest]

Camera mod in E33

I'll break down relevant information I found about cutscenes, editing, pose mode, and other tips I gathered about virtual photography on E33. There's a lot I don't know, but some of these could be useful. I hope it is for you.

I'll be using Otis_Inf camera mod, the Unreal Engine Unlocker (UUU) for Unreal 5. I use 5.7 up, currently at 5.7.7. Important Camera controls: The standard key bidings are: Insert - Enables/Disables camera Delete - Hides/Unhides UI Numpad 0 - Game pause Page Down - Slow mo game pause Page Up - Skip some frames in slow mo ~ - Open in-game overlay (unsure, I changed mine) If you need these to be different, set them up in the UUU under keybidings. To navigate with the camera, use the numpad and arrow keys. Reconfigure these settings as needed, like if you don't have the numerical keyboard. Some people just use their controller, which works as well.

The game behaves differently in cutscenes than it does in world roaming or battle. Keep these in mind: Cutscenes and Main Menu models are higher quality and ideal for close-ups. While Roaming in the world/Battle models have lower quality (they got lower lods)

The 2 companions behind the roaming character you walk around with have an even lower quality, so avoid using those for group pictures. They are scary. A solution is to clone the playable character and change the selected character, then, you have a better quality model for all of them.

Before we go into the world of characters and their posing, I'll explain the differences in selecting them. Selecting Characters and object in the world is pretty straightforward, you look for the center and you click on it, and you can move them around.

In Cutscenes, however, it's different. You need to find where their unbaked center is. There's no recipe for this, you need to click away the scene until you find a BP_Cine_Charactername. The good news is that they are usually somehow close to each other, click away the same area, or move around the camera until you find their hidden center.

During cutscenes, you can move, scale, and hide objects and Characters. But their eyebrows/lashes/beard stay in place if you move them. You can also add spotlights, but I'll explain that later in the next post.

If during a photo you see their eyebrows/eyelashes/beard in movement, as if they are moving at high speed, even if the game is paused. Here's what you do: Game pause is on> You turn on Slow mo Pause> Game pause off. This will keep the game paused, but it will unbug the body hairs. Use the Slow mo and frame skip to get slightly different expressions more accurately. Now, some of you remember in my last post, I said the depth of field (the area that blurs the background and focuses the character) was fixed during cutscenes, but you can change that UUU. This is also really useful for battles.

Under Post-processing, turn on DoF and pull it all the way to the left to disable it, so everything stays in focus and nothing is blurry. You can play around with these settings or use the superior version of it on Reshade. I'll get into details for this setting in the next post. I don't know how to make the superior version of Reshade work, so don't expect that one from me. (I have limitations, ok??) The next post will be pose mode, expressions, and editing.

[paintharvest]

Moving the environment and bones

Now I'll explain the bone system in this post, as the face from the previous one was a bit trickier to use as an example. I'll make a shot of Gustave with the kites in the ancient sanctuary. I already saved the poses and expressions I want, and I will import them. I start with loading my base on the root.

Now, there's something you've got to understand to help you with the bones replacements and editing That bone list when you go to edit pose may look scary, but it helps to understand the bone structure like a tree. A very ugly and weird one, but one nevertheless.

So the root is the base of the whole tree. Whatever you do at the root will affect the whole body. Now think of the spine bones like the trunk of the tree. We got 4 to 5 of them in the body of our characters. So if you change the spine area around the torso, it will only affect the upper torso + arms + head. Picture head, arms, and legs as branches. You can edit them separately, as they stay in a lower hierarchy. An arm edit will influence the hand and so on, just like the flow of a tree and it's branches and leaves. Fingers are leaves of a hand, which are smaller branches to the big branch of the arm, and so on. This is important when loading another pose. Look at the names and try figuring out what parts you need changed. You can select a bone that holds other areas and see what it affects, and plan your imports, you can always reset the pose. So, back to Gustave. I load in the head and arm I want. I messed up by loading the head on the neck instead of the face, so I had to reposition it. Then I load the arm I want changed in clavicle_r bone. I did end up manually posing it to my tastes later.

For objects in the environment, you can hide, reposition, rotate, and scale a lot of objects, but there are some restrictions. Some cannot be altered, usually objects that have their own movements can't, Static objects are what you want. You can even rotate and move the floor if you want. For this shot, I'll just move a few static kites. You click them and try to find their center.

Now I position Gustave where I want him, which is reaching for the kites. I also added lights to the scene. There are light settings inside the in-game overlay of UUU. I personally don't like this one, but it's worth exploring. I moved the kite more and framed my shot a few more times.

And these are the results!

I hope this helps some of you out there. Feel free to add to these posts for those far more experienced than me. Happy shooting!

[paintharvest]

Posing, expressions, and lights.

Continuing from my previous post on the Camera mod. There are a few ways to edit their pose, but let's explore the ones that are ready and make life so much easier later on.

Metahuman Face Expressions: If you're using recent versions of UUU, In your pose editor mode, you'll have these options. They are sliders with expressions that you can control. You can select an expression or even blend them together.

I loaded a smile from the animations and made small adjustments with the metahuman, so you can see how useful it can be to fine-tune or expand a facil animation you have already saved.

Animations If you don't have the latest UUU, you can still use the animation features. I used these for the upcoming examples, so don't worry about the lack of the metahuman expression in your camera mod. There's still plenty to do with it. If you click on the experimental options, you'll get a drop down menu.

The first drop down menu is the type of animation, we have body and face animations. The second option is the Skeletal Mesh, don't change that unless you want to transform the character into a cursed version of a Petank. The last drop-down menu is the animations.

Since all characters share the same skeleton, we got all the characters' animations, including even Nevrons! Now, there is a reason this is under Experimental: this can randomly crash your game, so... good luck (?) Now, sometimes I click the wrong thing and I lose all my progress while editing, that's why during pose editing, I uncheck the Reset actors on camera disable. This will guarantee you won't lose your pose if you accidentally disable the camera.

Let's make a simple photo with Julie and blend some expressions, all using Animations. I look through the facial animations. I find the ones I want and save both of them on the pose editor. I have a separate folder for each character. Don't forget to tick in Enable pose editing to be able to pose the character.

For my case, I want to give her the eyebrows from pose 2, and that's the forehead area. I type in Forehead in the filter camp:

With my pose 1 loaded, I will click Import subtree on a forehead bone.

Then I load my pose 2 into the pose 1 bones I want changed.

And I save this merged pose for later! Now I'll pick my body pose, decide on the perfect frame, and put it all together! I turn on the editor and Import the subtree of my new face under the facial root bone

Now let's use the UUU camera to focus on the subjects. The UUU has 4 configuration options for the depth of field. The top ones are the most relevant. The second one, the Depth of field f-stop, determines the size of the focus area. Look at picture 2 to understand. The bigger the number, the bigger the blue is in focus, meaning fewer objects are out of focus, the smaller, the narrower the area. The top option, Depth of field focal distance, determines the center of the focus, so you slide it to place the focus on your desired area. (The blade count is to make the bokeh rounder or more geometric, and I have no idea what the last option should be doing because it never seems to work)

Now, to focus on our subjects

Now we add the light. There are many ways of doing this, but this is my personal preferred method. You can also check this video by the creator of the mod. You add a light in the UUU and click the camera, you're now the light. Position in and set the values you want. In order to light up the characters, you need to check the light channel 2. Then uncheck the is attached and you will return to your original camera position.

Now turn the camera 90 degrees, pressing Alt and 1 or 3 on the numpad. Use the Reshade Vertical Previewer and frame your shot. Optionally edit the shot in Canvas, Photoshop, Gimp, or whatever you use. And here's the final result!

Now Reshade has a better DoF, but I don't know how to set it up, so maybe in the future I'll either update this or someone can chime in and add the information. The next and last post will be a shot with some subtle environment editing and a more in-depth bone explanation.