How to Create AAA Cinematics With Daz 3D Assets & Unity HDRP
You may already know all about Daz 3D since you’re here reading this latest installment of our blog, but how familiar are you with Unity 3D? If you thought it was a program just for making indie video games, you’re not wrong… but today, we’re going to show you how you can do even more with Unity, powered by your Daz library.
To help walk you through the ins and outs of Unity and demonstrate what you can whip up fairly quickly, we’ve put together a fun mini-series on our YouTube channel. If you want to create high-quality, professional cinematics, without spending hours and hours dealing with animations and other headaches, you might love sequencing your footage in Unity using a powerful built-in feature called Timeline.
In the meantime, here are a few answers to common questions you might have before you get started. Also, if you want to follow along and use the same assets featured in the tutorial videos, you can find them in our robust marketplace.
Why You Should Learn How To Use the Unity Timeline
Unity’s Timeline feature is built-in, so you won’t have to pay extra. Since you can also get a free solo version of Unity as well, you won’t have to invest anything to make the jump into exploring Unity.
Timeline is perfect for new creators, or even advanced users. It is designed in a straightforward way which allows you to sequence and map out a scene using a variety of tracks. Tracks can queue objects to activate and appear or deactivate, and they can also queue Unity to play sounds, change cameras, and even activate character animations. You don’t need any coding knowledge, nor do you need a very deep understanding of Unity and Game Components, since Timeline will automatically prepare those for you!
With Timeline, you’ll feel like the director of your own movie, which is super fun, too. Your cinematics could be used within actual gameplay if you wanted to make a video game, or, as we will cover in the tutorial series, you can also export footage as your scene plays in real time. That means you get AAA-quality footage without spending hours rendering each frame.
Why You Should Use HDRP
Unity 3D offers a variety of render pipelines to choose from: the standard pipeline, universal pipeline (URP), and the high-definition render pipeline, or HDRP for short. For the sake of this series, we are using HDRP, and that’s because it’s Unity’s most advanced and powerful rendering pipeline by far.
As you follow along the mini-series, you will learn how to set up a scene in HDRP and take advantage of the amazing lighting settings and post-processing effects available for you. This should appeal to Daz users, who are used to working with sliders and manipulating settings. Overall, the process should feel natural to someone who has spent some time with Daz, and the results will be equally impressive.
How You Can Find Animations To Use in Unity
One thing you lose when working in Unity is the robust pose controls that you have access to in Daz. However, where we lose some in pose controls, we also gain a lot in time-saving and rendering. We’ll use Adobe’s Mixamo.com for our animations to get around this. While they aren’t always perfect out of the box for any character, you should be pleased with the results. Not only that, they are completely free to use, and can even be used in commercial projects.
As you get used to Unity, it wouldn’t be too difficult to learn how to tweak Mixamo animations, since Unity uses a straightforward keyframe system for handling animations. If a single bone is behaving strangely, chances are you’ll be able to open up the animation, find the troublesome bone, and adjust those keyframes.
Lights! Camera! Action!
We hope you enjoy this mini-series and it offers you something interesting and exciting that sparks your creativity and leads you to create an amazing cinematic. If you aren’t subscribed to our YouTube channel and would like to stay up-to-date on all things Daz, please make sure to do so!
How to Create a Cinematic Video With Daz Studio and Unity HDRP
Watch the full mini-series:
Thank you for choosing Daz Assets for your renders and creative projects. We hope you continue enjoying your creativity!
