How to render animation in unreal engine

Hello everyone, today I will show how to render animation in unreal engine, I will use unreal engine 5, I tried to make the tutorial suitable for beginners.

Create a project

For animation, I create an empty project, games > blank , you can also specify the path where the project and the project name will be stored, and click create (Also, you can check the starter content if you don’t have models yet and you just want to try to make animation, then you will immediately add several models to the project) :

unreal engine setup

Those who are used to working in ue4 can click dock in layout , then the dock will be fixed and will not be hidden:

You also need to open a tab with place actors so that you can place objects, effects, etc. on the stage (you can not open them from the top menus and pull them out, but personally it’s not convenient for me to do this), it’s done like this:

Scene setup

Next, we need to create a new world, this is done simply, right-click on the content browser > level , name it whatever you want and poke 2 times on the icon that appears:

Now we can see the excellent darkness, how beautiful it is:

Let’s create a terrain:

Scroll down and click create :

Management in unreal engine as in games wasd and buttons e – up , q – down

Switching back to select mode:

Next we need to light up the perfect darkness, go to the lights tab and drag a direction light onto the scene:

Next, go to the visual effects tab and drag the sky atmosphere to create the sky:

In the same tab, we take and drag volumetric cloud to create clouds:

Let’s make a little fog in the distance, in the same tab drag the ExponentialHeightFog onto the stage:

you can click here to change the color of the fog, I’ll leave it as it is:

Next, I just created a cube, so that later I can animate the camera approaching it:

Animation creation

First you need to drag the camera to the stage:

To change object selection modes (move, rotate, resize), press the space bar:

When placing an object, you can change the coordinate system from global to local and vice versa:

Next, we need to create a new sequence:

Choose where to save it and you can also change the name of the sequence and click save :

This tab should open:

If not opened, then add it manually:

To select the camera view mode, you need to click here:

I’m only going to change its transform , so I keyframe only the transform :

You should see a dot like this:

I go to the last frame, set the camera as it should and do the same, put a key frame:

You can also change the interpolation mode by right-clicking on the key frame (circle):

You can also change the number of frames by dragging the red bar:

Animation render

Now we need to connect 1 plugin to the project, for this we go here:

We drive “render” into the search and look for this plugin:

Press yes :

Then restart now , unreal should restart:

Next, open this window:

In the window that appears, press + Render and select our sequence:

Click here to customize the animation:

you can hit delete to remove the option and + Settings to add the option (I usually render in png so I removed the jpg and added png) :

Next, I added anti-aliasing with the following options:

Next, I change the sequence output directory:

Next, save the render settings preset:

Save and click Accept :

Next Render (Local) to render the scene:

Next, the render will start:

Collecting video

Next, we see a bunch of images in the folder that was pointed to the render output:

Next, you need to combine it into a video, you can do it in any video editor, I will use blender. When the blender is open, you need to open the video editing tab: