#vp tips

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.

Welcome to my Little CharLI and VP spotlight tutorial I will be going over a few things I have learned since starting Virtual Photography in the hopes I can help out people unfamiliar with CharLI and want to learn how to light there model, make characters look at each other and how to use AMM to help get that perfect shot.

I'm not an expert but I have improved alot since I starting using these simple tips I will share with you.

Here is what CharLi looks like when you open it, it may seem a little overwhelming at first but once you get used to what does what, its prety simple to use

I'm going to be sharing how I use spotlights in this tutorial so don't worry about the other lights for now.

first of all I usually only use a single, or a set of 4 or 8 spotlights in my shots, you can use more of course.

this is what the spotlights look like, they are in two parts, the main spotlight mesh, this is the physical spotlight that emits the light, and the pink triangle (Pin) this gives you an indication of there height for reference, this is useful when you are getting your lights in position as you can physically see them to get them in the right spot.

Here you have your radius, this is how close the spotlights are to your model,

your rotation this does as it says and rotates your lights around your model,

your intensity is how bright your lights are. each as two sliders, the top is subtle the bottom will be more extreme.

For example with radius if I use the top slider it moves the lights further away but only a little, if I use the bottom slider it will move them even further away. be careful as you can push them so far away light no longer hits your model or they disappear through walls. so its a little trail and error.

Here you have colour, position and angle

colour - is self explanatory, you can use the red, green and blue sliders to change the colour of your lights, it can be a bit of trail and error to get the colour you want

Position - you can adjust your lights position in the X, Y and Z axis i.e to the left, right or up or down.

Angles - tilt you lights to the left, right or up or down

Ok now we know the basics of what does what.

There is more stuff you can adjust but I'm still learning so we will only be covering what I use and know which is the basics

When you first spawn in spot lights, they will likely be to close to your model and the light will be a little too bright, so once you spawn them in we can make a few quick adjustment to there radius and light intensity to make that lighting a little less harsh.

See how much better this looks already? a good tip I follow is to lower your exposure in Photomode down, then bring up lights with CharLi so you have a better control of the light on your model.

multiple spotlights spawn in a ring around your model, if you want to use different colour lights ect, I usually converge my lights so they are closer together then rotate them to one side of the model.

Once I have my coloured lights in position I duplicate them, this duplicates all settings from light intensity, radius, colour ect, then I use the rotate function to bring the duplicate lights to the other side of the model and adjust my colours.

here I have made the left lights pink and the right lights a pale blue. looks kind of cool right?

I noticed when having lights on either side, the middle of her face was not lit so I added a single spotlight in front to give her face some light. I also zoomed in using the FOV slider in Photomode. you can zoom with the scroll wheel but this can result in some distortion like making her head look bigger than her body at some angles. using the FOV slider gives you much better quality and far less distortion.

Once you are happy with your lights positions you may find the lights are in the way when trying to get your shot as at some angles the lights will be in the shot blocking your model. to solve this you can hide the mesh and pin we talked about earlier with these icons here. this will hide the lights while still lighting your model. giving you more freedom to get that perfect angle.

you know when you click look at camera in Photomode the body twists with the head, spoiling some poses and causing clipping ect. well with AMM you can make it so only the eyes look or only the head does.

using AMM if you head to tools, then either target your replacer or V then toggle if you want just the head to tilt to look at camera or just the eyes.

Here I have toggled just eyes so now Raven will track me with just her eyes rather than rotating her torso and head as well. if you want to swap to just the head, open AMM select just the head. then close AMM you will need to then toggle the look at camera of and on for it to change.

Another thing to bare in mind is when and if you decide to change the rotation or position of your model in Photomode. your lights will follow V so sometimes this can change your lighting. you may need to adjust rotation ect to get them back where you want them so bare that in mind if you adjust your models position after you have your lights in place.

simply use the tabs at the top to select each light and make any adjustments you need to get your lights back where you want them. un toggle hide mesh or pin if you hid them to make it easier to see where they are when making adjustments then you can re hide them when your done.

Lets say you have a replacer spawned and you want your characters to look at eachother. this can be done using the look at camera feature with a little help from AMM

open AMM and go to tools, now depending on who you want to look at who will decide who to target. in this example I will show both. first I will target Raven (V) and select head only for look at camera. then close AMM. I will rotate the camera to the other side of my replacers head then select V and look at camera. then open AMM and target V. then open Target tools and you should have an option to freeze target.

once you freeze the target close AMM and you will see her head will stay in position and is now looking at Goro

Bare in mind once you freeze a target this way you can not unfreeze despite that being a button, If u change pose while frozen it can get pretty cursed pretty quick. its a pain in the ass. some poses you can swap to without it getting to cursed but again its trail and error. if you need to change pose ect you will have to exit Photomode and re-enter it to unfreeze it can be prety time consuming. if there is away around this I'm unaware of it currently feel free to share if you know.

Here I repeated the look at camera trick with Goro so now my models are looking at each other yay

another thing to bare in mind with CharLi is the lights focus on V so you will notice here Goro is not as well lit as Raven. Spawning more lights and adjusting there position with X, Y and Z will come in handy here. it can take some experimenting though.

Here I have added additional lights and positioned them on Goro so he now has light to.

Here we have taken a photo after doing all our adjustments to lights, there position and making our models look at each other. sometimes there will be an error where it will go darker then you want when you hit space to take your shot. I think its called auto exposure error or something basicaly its the game being poopy its annoying but sometimes unavoidable so you may need to keep adjusting your lights and taking shots until the game behaves.

One final thing I like to do when tweaking my shots in photoshop. I usually adjust exposure. offset and contrast to make the pic really pop

Here I have adjusted the offset up a little and tweaked the contrast up a little. it really softens blacks and the light and makes the pic look better in my opinion.

And there you have it. all the tips and tricks I have learned while doing Virtual Photography. I hope this helps peeps out that want to get into VP.

If you have any questions regarding anything I have said my Asks are always open. I'm happy to talk you through stuff if you need some help. I'm also willing to do screen share discord calls to help you follow along or show you in real time how to do stuff if your interested in something like that drop me a DM.

🚫 Do Not Re-Upload/Edit My Shots/Art Without My Permission🚫

I need help for motorcycle pics! When he's on it I cannot take good pics bc what are his eyes doing??? Also he's constantly moving and AMM won't let me freeze him.

But how can I put a motorcycle upright when nobody sits on it? It doesn't work for me? They always have the parked position which is tilted.

I also have not found poses that work well. I want him sitting on it, one leg down or both.

I would also like to do some action shots but as a first step I'd be happy to just have him look hot on a bike ok 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

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!

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!