15 Immediately Useful Camera Tricks in Blender 2.8

hey it's kept from blender been sheriff 15 camera tricks or things to know that will help you make better looking shots I've been asked many times by my subscribers to do this video so here goes this will be an overview video not too in-depth but it can give you ideas and help you break out to the next level or at least help you know what to research more of number one resolution settings yeah it's boring in all but here's a quick rundown of knowing your resolutions the main ones to know at the time of this video are 8k 4k 2k HD 1080p and HD 720p here's a link with lots of other resolutions because the world definitely isn't simple anymore the link will be in the description number two focal length knowing this can help you spice up boring shots and get more cool let's start with the difference between wide-angle and telephoto wide-angle is like what you see on GoPro cameras on your iPhone it's a wide shot like this shot of Los Angeles skyline taken from Mulholland or Griffith Park or something telephoto is more of a long shot that can be taken from far away like if you want to shoot a tiger but you don't want to get too much love this is a shot of downtown LA from a similar vantage point and it fills the frame with the buildings and it has the side effect of compressing the foreground in the background see Barnsdall and Kaiser are about five miles from downtown but it doesn't seem like it in this picture does it blender gives us the ability to go from extreme wide-angle to extreme telephoto for free in this scene I have a camera zeroed out in the middle facing down the y-axis I have Suzanne and some boxes and a mountain range if I look through the camera right now I can see that it's the standard setting of 50 millimeters some photographers call this the nifty 50 because it's good for portraits I call it the default watch what happens if I bring this focal length down to say 11 the scene gets really really wide now what happens if I bring it up to like 300 I can see up her nose and the mountains are right behind her we know they're not but horizontal compression is a funny thing learning to use different focal lengths for your shots is a good way to break out of the my renders look like everyone else's renders paradigm play around and look at photographs for reference you can learn a lot by doing so number 3 clipping planes when you load in some huge models like kid bashing stuff most of the time you can't see them if you adjust your clipping planes that can help while this is no panacea and can sometimes cause more trouble than it's worth I generally scale objects down to real-world settings to fit the grid and then set clips start to between 0.1 one and N two about a hundred thousand does this always work no you're robbing Peter to pay Paul but this is a decent starting point and most of the time works pretty well for me at least give it a try number four rack focus this is a really cool effect you see in movies and TV a whole lot it's when you see the camera focusing on one thing while something else is blurry and then it changes the blurry thing comes into focus while the sharp thing blurs here's a quick way to do it so you have a camera and a Suzanne and another Suzanne if you edit an empty and move it forward a bit you can go to camera settings check depth of field and under the focus on object choose the empty you created a minute ago now you have a control if you go to f-stop and lower the value then move your empty forward and back you can simulate the shifting focus based on low depth of field if you play with different f-stop numbers you get different results the lower the f-stop the shallower your depth of field is which gives you more blur conversely a higher f-stop gives you a deeper depth of field where more of your scene is always in focus it's the aperture size this tutorial doesn't address breathing as that technique is cool but it would add way too much in the weeds to this video number five dolly zoom freakout effect otherwise known as the Hitchcock effect this was a more common technique back when I was in my 80s it's the Hitchcock effect and I've seen a few people teach this in various software over the years you basically change your camera focal length while simultaneously moving your camera in and out in this scene I have a bunch of Suzanne's on a camera at 0 0 0 the trick here is to set a relatively wide angle like 35 millimetres in this case then keyframe the camera at 1 I move it back then keyframe it again it's a 96 or however fast you want the effect to happen now set keyframes for the focal length at frame 1 set the focal length to 35 millimetres then at frame 96 set it to say 150 millimetres which is well into the telephoto range now just adjust your subject to look about the same in the frame and let the magic of the movies happen right before your very eyes see how it warps based on focal length freaky horror movie crap right play with this one and freak out some Instagram people number 6 framing the shot composition is as much an art as it is a science and here's where you're taking your camera out and practicing photography off of the computer is good for you if you don't have the patience for that here's a quick way to make more interesting compositions it's called the rule of thirds many cameras including the 5d Mark 3 that I use frequently has this feature on there it's a grid that breaks up the viewfinder and allows you to align your shots based on thirds which makes for more interesting compositions blender has this - it's under camera properties viewport display composition guides there are many here but thirds is immediately useful and so is the golden ratio if you turn on thirds you'll see the grid appear let us line up our shots better this is a shot I did of a Borg interior video that I made a while back notice that I have the camera dead center on the central hive boring watch when I move it to a line with one of the left vertical lines interesting it instantly adds some more visual interest I'd say use these guides to frame up your shots any good photography book will help you there it matters number eight lock camera to view this one is overlooked but so useful many of you who've been using blender for a while know this but it's worth having us in the video this allows you to hold the camera and frame your shot by default if you look through the camera by hitting 0 on the keyboard you'll look through the camera but the second you try to move it snaps out here's the fix go to this little arrow up here or hit n on the keyboard then under the View tab you'll see the lock camera to view checkbox if you turn this on and hit zero to go back into the camera view when you move around it's like you're holding the camera if you click off of this all you need to do is select the box and you're back holding the camera if you don't want this effect on turn off lock camera to view and it goes away simple right helpful I don't know you tell me number 9 active camera if you have more than one camera in your scene it's difficult to switch back and forth here's how to do it I'm in a scene with two cameras the one with the black triangle is the active one if you hit 0 you'll go into that camera if you want to look through the other one simply select the green camera icon in the outliner this will allow you to switch back and forth if i zoom out you can see the black triangle switching you can also select the other camera and hit control 0 but this is way easier try it number 10 camera rig on a path if you want to make a cool animation like this one or this one you can do it pretty easily first zero out your camera by hitting alt G in alt R then rotate it up on the X by 90 degrees now adding a busy a circle and scale it up then add in an empty and parent your camera to the empty on the empty add a follow path constraint choose the Bezier circle now choose animate path your camera now moves around if you want it to look ahead duplicate the empty then in the constraint properties change the offset to a negative number that pushes it forward a bit now to make the camera look at that empty select the camera and add a track to constrain the target will be the second empty make up Y and then set to two negative Z now hit play and watch an amazement I have a whole video on this in the link above where I do quite a bit more number eleven camera rig tool this is a cool add-on that allows you to use some useful camera rigs I have one issue with these that I'll address in the next section of this video but these simulate real-world camera rigs make sure to enable the camera rig add-on and edit preferences now if you go to add camera you have dolly camera rig and crane camera rig add in a dolly camera rig if you select dolly rig in the outliner you can now go and select the arrow target curve pieces move them around and animate them this gives you some nice dolly type movements that will instantly make your camera which look a bit better if you add in a crane rig you can use this similarly it simulates a crane jib and does a pretty nice job for free my only concern with this one is that jibs give you the ability to keep the camera level without needing a target you can probably turn that off in this rig but I'll show you how to create a simple one on your own in the next section number 12 simple camera jib rig this is by no means of be-all end-all rig it's quick and dirty and I've been using this type of thing for a long time and other software for some cool establishing shots and other things take your camera hit alt R and alt G to zero it out then rotate it 90 degrees on the x-axis now add in an empty and duplicated move the duplicate empty back a bit now parent the camera to the first empty and then parent the first empty to the second empty the one in the back now if you rotate the back empty it rotates the whole thing the camera needs to stay level though so let's make that happen select the front empty go to the X rotation channel right click and choose add driver simply choose the back empty and in expression type VAR x negative 1 this basically just makes the front empty rotate exactly opposite the back empty lastly under type choose X rotation and watch as you rotate the back control empty the camera stays level you can always still rotate the camera separately from this rig and even constrain it to a target with the track 2 like we did in the camera path section of this video but this will work look I created some more Susanne's and when I rotate up I get a nice establishing shot of a Suzanne army pretty shread number 13 handheld camera look this can go way too far and giving you the Blair Witch effect but it's useful for the CSI type handheld camera effect when you want it simply set two keyframes on your camera one at the beginning and one at the end now change your timeline to graph editor and open up that little hidden icon on the right side and choose modifiers I've been doing this for years another software but I credit Ian Hubert for bringing out this hidden window in a really funny way like I'm sure you guys have all seen that one but I digress in here you want to expand your channels on the left side for your camera and choose one of the channels go back to the right side and choose add modifier noise this adds noise to the animation curve it heads way too much though so use the scale and strength parameters to really smooth it out a little bit goes a long way once you have done that for each channel you want to have it on hit play and you get a decent handheld look really quickly number 14 triangle of exposure this is more for photography but understanding this will help broaden your understanding of everything you do in creating animations on the camera and look end there is a ton of information available on it but it's all about how much light hits the sensor to create an image an understanding this may help you tremendously it deals with ISO aperture and shutter speed balancing each can have a dramatic effect on your images it's a deep subject and deserves its own video or series of videos but I wanted to mention it here because it helps and blender understanding this will help with motion blur in regard to shutter speed depth of field in regard to aperture and maybe something like gamma in regard to ISO which is sensor sensitivity number 15 control motion blur depth-of-field in post this is the one you guys should probably have been waiting for so those of you who stuck around to the end good this is a huge time-saver and I almost didn't want to include this to teach to some of the useless trolls out there but the good people outnumber the idiots 99 to 1 on my channel so here we go I'm putting out a whole lot more of this stuff on my patreon this month as well go to camera view and set a few keyframes for your animation set the render disciples here Eevee works too but right now it's just a little bit just used cycles choose where to render to and make sure you choose multi-layer EXR with RGB I selected it's better this way your files will be much larger but you'll have more to play with before you render go under view layer properties and make sure Z is checked and then check vector as well you can add in D noise and data but that's not really relevant right now when it's done go to compositing hit use nodes and add in a viewer connect the image to it and selected this shows your renders now that's the render layer not what we want what we want to do is open the image sequence that we rendered out to do that add in an image sequence node then choose the image sequence you rendered out now select the render node and hit em to muted connect the combined out of the image sequence node to the in of the viewer ahead and select the viewer and now we see the animation frames that we rendered out here's where we can add in nodes to address motion blur in depth of field this gives us the ability to control these things interactively and when we get the added benefit of faster render times it's really awesome add in a vector blur node and drop it on top of the node that connects the combined out of the image sequence node to the input of the viewer it's that line going across the whole thing then connect vector to speed and wow you get motion blur you can also control this now a bit next let's add in some depth of field add in a defocused node and drop it over the line to connect it then connect depth to Z and enable use Z buffer we don't have our aperture controls on a node that we can tweak to our hearts content to get fun we can also add a color balance node here and change the color of the cube to this is really powerful stuff there's so many possibilities when you are ready to render make sure the out is connected to the composite node as well choose mp4 or render your movies files it doesn't matter and render away so there you go 15 camera tricks and things to know that will help you I've recently added a whole video explaining how I made this animation from scratch in three hours as a challenge on Daniel crafts channel it's up on my patreon as I love giving out tons of content but there's some stuff I reserved for people who really want to learn and be here there's also a newsletter and an e-book in the links below if you're interested so with that thanks and stay healthy bye

Channel: Kev Binge

Views: 135,574

Keywords: blender camera animation, blender camera movement tutorial, blender depth of field 2.8, camera rig blender 2.8, hitchcock effect

Id: cFjgypPX9nE

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020