Trying to combine the best of both worlds - Unreal Engine live inside After Effects
I've been doing VFX for a while now. I started in film and commercials, but these days I'm mostly working in games with Unreal Engine.
Every now and then I get video projects that don't need high-end renders, but do need to be turned around quickly.
That got me thinking, and eventually building, a plugin for myself that streams Unreal straight into After Effects. Instead of constantly rendering image sequences, I just use Unreal as a live external renderer. The viewport appears as a layer in AE, cameras and nulls stay in sync, and any changes I make in Unreal update instantly.
Originally, that was all I needed. But a few people working in virtual production saw it and asked if it could stay live instead of only updating when AE refreshed the effect. That led me to add a realtime mode that continuously updates the feed.
As a result, you can feed a live camera into Unreal, composite it with the 3D scene for previz, and stream the final result into After Effects in real time.
It's at the point where it mostly works, and before I call it finished I wanted to see if anyone else would actually find this useful, or if I'm just solving my own problem.
Here's a video of an early prototype (a bit outdated, but it shows the core idea), along with a site that explains the workflow in more detail.