William Faucher, a creator of educational content on YouTube, Mentor at CGSpectrum, has published a new tutorial, dedicated to Natural Camera Shake in UE.
In this tutorial, William will guide you through the process of using a simple blueprint built into Unreal Engine. You will see how you can procedurally add a “noise” to the existing camera animation. It is an additive process, meaning it will be added on top of whatever camera movements you may already have keyframed.
As 3D/CG Artists, we’re constantly aspiring to mimic reality and create the most realistic images possible. We have a tendency to focus on the latest tools, plugins, features, and get overly technical and over-engineer a lot of things. When really, we should never ignore the fundamentals of how a camera works. A lot of this gets ignored or simply not thought about because it’s not a sexy or exciting topic. Camera talk is for nerds. When mimicking reality, we need to think about every aspect of filmmaking, right down to the actual movements of the camera, and that’s where camera shake comes in, - William Faucher says.
Camera shake is one of the important and fun techniques that can add dynamism, realism, or excitement to your cinematics.
Below there are two examples provided by William, the first one is the original shot without a shake, the second one is with a simple camera shake. Even a simple shake adds new vibes to the work, and with it, the audience experiences new feelings, the shot itself tells a completely new story.
This added realism is a great way if you're working on Photorealistic Games. Also, if you're creating a Shooter, then usually it's crucial to implement the feeling of trembling hand or gun's recoil. This technique is also aimed to advance your cinematics and level up the realistic part of them.
When shooting a movie or a short film on set, it’s not everyone who has access to rails and dollies or gimbals for smooth camera movements. Many times footage is shot handheld, and that’s how we get the “shaky cam” look that is so popular in action movies. It gives a sense of instability to the viewer.
This is something I seek to replicate in 3D, and in this case, the camera shake gives us the added benefit of giving our shots a much more organic and natural feeling. Smooth camera movements are great, but it’s pretty much all we see when it comes to 3D footage these days, - William Faucher.
You may check out more of William's tutorials here.