Introduction
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Another really cool thing to do inside of Aximmetry is the Get Transformation feature. And what that allows you to do. It allows you to take any object or objects that you've built in Unreal and move them inside of Aximmetry without going back and forth. Without re-cooking your footage. You can even take these objects and animate them inside of Aximmetry. And it's super simple to setup. So let me show you how to set up the Get Transformation inside of Unreal to where you can move your objects inside of Aximmetry. And like I said, it's super super simple.
Sample Scene
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So here is a sample scene that I downloaded off the Unreal Engine Marketplace. This FJ Cruiser or something I put together in Blender. I'm a big fan of the FJ cruisers. This is a box truck that I downloaded off the Unreal Engine marketplace as well. Now let's say for example that we want to be able to position or animate this box truck inside of Aximmetry and to sort of match it up to where our talent will be inside of Aximmetry. So like I said this is ridiculously easy how you set this up.
Setting Up Get Transformation in Unreal Engine
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So the first thing you do is is sort of highlight the object that you want to move inside of Aximmetry. Make sure it's highlighted here. We're gonna go to our Level Blueprint and we're gonna find Event Tick. So we're gonna add an Event Tick here and then the next thing that we're gonna do is we are going to take this box truck and throw it inside of our Blueprint. Once we have the box truck inside of our Blueprint what we're going to do is we're going to add a SetWorldTransform so SetWorldTransformation there it is. So world transform we're going to take our Event Tick put it all right there. And now what we're going to do is we're going to add our GetAximmetryTransformation. So we just add this to the new transform. I'm going to call this ‘Box Truck’ for now so we can see this up in Aximmetry. And that is it. So we're gonna Compile. We're gonna hit Save. And obviously, this tutorial is taking into consideration that you know how to add your Aximmetry camera. You know how to set up your project for export for Aximmetry. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to Cook our content. And like I said the great thing about doing it this way is if we need to move this truck and our scene, you know instead of jumping back and forth and re-cooking the content every time, you know how big your scene is you'll be able to just move this object in Aximmetry without going back and forth. It's pretty sweet. Okay, we're done Cooking so now we're going to hit Save.
Setting Up Get Transformation in Aximmetry
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And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna open up Aximmetry. It's so much fun just diving into Aximmetry, playing around with all these tools. It's like anything is possible. Okay so I've already got a project where started I got our VirtualCam up here. And so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our ‘Beach Project’ that we just cooked and we're gonna add it to this Compound. And if you look right down there. What do we have! We've got our BOX TRUCK pin. So exciting! Okay, so we're gonna take our CameraTransform pin. Put it there. Our Field of View, connect that. We're going to add our Cam Focus Distance pin. And we're gonna take our Out, put it into Rendered. Take our Preview and take it right here. And if you look, I'll go fullscreen. There is our box truck. It just happens to be in the middle of our FJ Cruiser right now. But don't worry about that we're gonna fix that here in a second. So we're good to go! Looks like we've got our objects separated. So the first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to add a Scene Node. So we're gonna type in ‘scene’ and there's Scene Node. We're going to move this down here. And you'll look right here we've got something called World Transform. So we're going to take the transformation of that, put it right into our BOX TRUCK. Okay, now once we do that, we can go over here, to our Preview, and select Preview 1. And if you look down here, at the bottom, we can move this stuff. Look at that! Without re-cooking. Shadows/highlights. I mean look at that! Here, I'll go fullscreen. Is that cool or what? Okay, so the Scene Node is really good if you just want to position things. Right? Position, or you know, scale or you know do whatever.
Moving the Unreal Object in Aximmetry
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But let's say, for example, that, you know, in the intro video that you saw, I had this truck actually moving. It was actually animated. And so how do you do that? Well, we're gonna get rid of the Scene Node here. And so I’m going to delete that. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add a Sequence Node. The Sequence Node allows you to do it, allows you to animate properties which is pretty... pretty cool! So it basically sort of works the same way as positioning and everything. So let's go ahead and turn this down here. And you'll look I've got a World Transformation again. And I'm gonna take that into the BOX TRUCK. And if you look down here I can still, sort of move things. Which is great. I'll go fullscreen. You see, I'm moving this in real-time. Okay, I'm gonna go back to the desktop here. And so now we want to, you know we want to animate this. So we've got a Sequence Node set up so what we have to do now is add a Sequencer to the Sequence Node. So I'm going to go here. Here is our Sequencer. I'm going to take our Tracks and I'm gonna take that into the Sequence Position. And as soon as I do that and double-click, you'll see, here is our Sequencer.
Sequencer Timeline
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If you're familiar with, you know, any kind of nonlinear editor, you know. Here's your timeline. If you look down here, here is our X,Y,Z inputs, that we can add keyframes to. Which is really exciting. And the keyframes are such a joy and so simple to add. So let me start off by what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go back to our setup here. And so now I've clicked our Sequence node and you'll see I've got the little highlights here, where I can sort of move things around. And you can either move it around here on-screen, or you could go over here to Transformation and move them here. Okay, so for now I'm just going to make this right. Just right in front of the FJ. And I'm gonna move it sort of out of the picture here. Okay, then we'll go back to my Sequencer, and I'm gonna turn on the little record icon here. So now it's going to record keyframes once we hit the little take icon here. So click that and look, we've had keyframes. So really quickly, if I just wanted to show you I'll go fifteen frames in and I'll move this, this way. I'll add another keyframe. Look at that when I move this, I’ll go full screen, you'll see that it's animating. Ain't that sweet? Okay, so we go back to the desktop here. For now, I'm going to delete these keyframes. And so what I'm gonna do is I want to sort of know basically where I want this truck, this box truck to start. We want it to sort of come into frame around three seconds so I'm gonna scroll down the timeline here to three seconds. If you look, here's the three second mark. And I'm going to hit keyframe. So there's our keyframe. I'll go ahead and go back to our beginning and just delete these. Okay so our first keyframe really is gonna be at three seconds. We want it to be out of frame in around four, so I go here to four seconds and I'm gonna move this out of frame. Okay, and I'm gonna add a keyframe. So now. you'll see. And what I'm gonna do, what's really cool is you can use your spacebar to play your timeline. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go fullscreen and now I'm gonna hit the spacebar. It's gonna sit for three seconds and then swoosh. it rolls by. And that's sweet.
Adding Footage to Scene
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Okay so we've got that going so I'm gonna go back to the desktop here and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna add some footage. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and add my B1 Data, and my B1 Texture. And I'm gonna go to my desktop here, and here's some footage we shot in our studio. And I'm gonna throw this out to the In.If you look down here I'm gonna go fullscreen. Here's our guy, walking across the parking lot. He's reacting to nothing now. You'll see where he walks out of the cropping area. Here let's see right now that's looping, right?
Synchronizing the Scene with Footage
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So what we would like to do is we would like to start all these events at once. Okay, we've got our BOX TRUCK now, that we've got our GetTransformation on. That we can move freely inside of Aximmetry without going back and forth. Now isn't that cool? It's fun and then we've got this footage of this person walking across a parking lot, reacting to this truck going past him. So we basically got our timing fixed down we just want to start these all at the same time. So let me show you how to do that. So I'm gonna go to our clip here and the first thing I'm gonna do is I am going to turn off the Looping. So I'll turn off the Looping here. And then I'm gonna go to our Restart trigger and I'm gonna assign that to our keyboard. so I'm gonna assign that for now. Just assigned to ‘s’ on the keyboard. So now whenever I hit ‘s’ you'll see, the footage restarts at the top. Here, I go full screen. So I'm gonna hit ‘s’ and ‘s’ again and it's restarting. Okay so now we want to do the exact same thing to our Sequencer. So if you look here, here's our Sequencer, and if I scrub through here there's our box truck moving by. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna go to our FLOW and our Sequencer. And if you look here, and I click here, you'll see there's a Restart here. So I'm gonna right click on that. I'm going to assign the keyboard. And I'm going to hit ‘s’. Now we're going to get a warning saying, hey this ‘s’ has you know, this key has been assigned to another trigger. Are you cool with that? Are you cool with, you know this one key assigning multiple triggers? Yes, we're just going to Ignore. So now, when I hit ‘s’ you'll see, our clip is starting and our truck just went through. Okay, I'm gonna go full screen here. I'm gonna hit ‘s’ again. And you know, once you get things sort of timed out the way you want it, you can then, you know add camera movement, camera moves, all sorts of things. But I'm telling you. You know anything that you can imagine right now, you can pretty much do in Aximmetry. And it's really exciting times to be able to use all these tools.
Having Fun With the Tools
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And I hope this tutorial will help you build some awesome stuff in the future. You know, I mean the possibilities are endless. And imagine taking that object, the FJ for example. I'm putting it to this tracker. You know, I just quickly did a quick thing. You know here's sort of... here's the scene. And you know I'm moving the tracker, the puck tracker around. Anyway, it's pretty crazy the things that you can do with Aximmetry. And once again, like I said, I hope this tutorial will help you create some really, really amazing content down the road. And the possibilities are just endless.
