Highlights From Unreal Fest 2022

Spoiler Alert! Unreal Fest 2022 (New Orleans, October 17 – 20, 2022) was everything I had hoped for 🙂

There was a lot going on every minute of the conference. More than once I was caught between two presentations I was desperate to attend. Even knowing that Epic will be making all the presentations available in the coming weeks didn’t blunt my FOMO.

Most everything presented was in Unreal Engine 5.1 Preview 1 or Preview 2. And in one of the Hands-On Labs, I was able to use 5.1 Preview.

While there was a lot of content for gaming and virtual production, my focus was on any animation and cinematography related topics that were available. And there were plenty. Here’s a couple of highlights.

The Art of Virtual Camera in Animation
This talk was given by a couple of different studios that are using the Unreal Engine Virtual Camera to shoot their animation sequences. Instead of animating cameras in the scene, they are using a virtual camera and Take Recorder to record their shots. According to the presenters, the result is a much faster workflow and more organic camera movement. Using vcam is at the top of my list of things to experiment with. As a result, I will be purchasing an iPad in the not too distant future.

One of the speakers was Enrico Targetti. He is a cinematographer for the Netflix animated series Super Giant Robot Brothers. The show is now on my Watchlist.

Animating in Unreal Engine 5.1
This was a great talk showcasing the new Constraints tool that will be part of Animation Mode in the 5.1 release. You will be able to constrain one object to another along specific properties like transform or rotation among others. I know I could use this right now for a camera setup I have in one of my animated shorts. It would be a lot faster to simply constrain the camera to an actor using the transform only. From what I understand, 5.1 will be released fairly soon so I won’t have to wait too long. No, I don’t want to get the 5.1 build from GithHub. I’m too production focused right now and don’t have a moment to spare to descend the rabbit hole.

A great tip that came from the co-presenter, Fredrik Nilsson, was a reference to BungeeMan available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. This rig is setup to showcase squash n stretch. If you want to learn how to employ this type of effect in your Unreal Engine animation, this looks to be a good place to start. I downloaded the project but will have to wait a bit to play around with it (see the previous comment about being production focused right now).

I will keep the highlights at two for this post but may highlight more in the coming days. Honestly, UnrealFest 2022 was packed with great content! I can’t wait to watch all the presentations I missed. I’m going to have to block out a week to go back through everything.