Recreating this shot from DUNE in Unreal Engine + After Effects

Published on January 7, 2022

After Effects Tutorials, Unreal Engine Tutorials

Camera Tracking, compositing, Environment

Unreal Engine Environments

Creating environments with Unreal Engine 5 is pretty easy to do. And it’s a lot of fun too! This allows you to create custom backgrounds, which can be used with your greenscreen.

The biggest struggles are going to be to make the blending of your greenscreen shot and the Unreal Engine background realistic. Here’s where Adobe After Effects comes in as it has better tools for compositing.

3D Camera Tracking

In an earlier video we tried out live 3D camera tracking in Unreal Engine. And although it works, it does come with some issues. On top of that, you’ll need a tracking system like the Vive VR Base stations.

So for this video we figured out a different way, making 3D camera tracking more accessible to everyone. Adobe After Effects has a build-in 3D Camera tracker. We used that to analyze our shot.

Now we just need to figure out a way to bring the tracking data into Unreal Engine. It’s not so easy as we need to go through a different program first. You can use Blender or Cinema4D for that.

And then from your 3D application, we can bring the tracking data into Unreal Engine as Lorenzo explains in the video.

Storyblocks

Big thanks to Storyblocks for the support on this video. Their community driven library helped us again in this video to seamlessly blend our green screen shot. We download some dust and flare assets.

Storyblocks is very affordable and there’s a download plan for everyone.