How much of this shot do you think we actually filmed for real? The answer is it was just me and everything else was added later. It's Steve from Unexplored Films here and today we're going to be
creating a 3D set extension - a virtual environment
to add to a moving shot. Today's video is sponsored by our friends a ProductionCrate, a fantastic
all-in-one assets hub for your filmmaking, so stick around to see how they massively
helped us with this video. Now, a great way to add production value is to extend the sets or the locations that you have available to
you using other elements, and we've touched on this
in our previous videos on how to create digital matte paintings and also our video on
how to do set extensions for miniatures, so be sure
to check those out too. But today we're going to
be taking those techniques a step further by trying to create what looks like a 3D environment for a moving character to explore. And all we use to make this
was Adobe After Effects and ProductionCrate. So as usual, we're trying
to do a lot with a little and prove that you don't
always need a big budget to get some really
creative filmmaking effects and if you're enjoying
these DIY Hollywood effects and tutorials please consider subscribing and you'll get to see lots and lots more. So as we wanted to test this
concept with a moving shot we first needed the shot of
our character walking forwards always keeping the same
distance away from the camera. Now we could have filmed this outside but we wanted to film this
in front of a green screen. So how would we make it look
like the character was walking? The answer was to simply
set up a treadmill in front of the green screen. We faced it forwards because this was pretty
much the only angle where you wouldn't see
the front of the treadmill because the high part was at the front. Next, we could set this going
on the slowest speed possible and I could pretty much
stay in the same place while looking like I was walking forwards. The challenge then was
pretty much just to imagine that I was walking through
a strange environment that I hadn't experienced before, instead of just walking
on the spot in a room. But the good thing
about this technique was that it meant that our
lighting could stay consistent, the distance from the
camera could stay consistent and we didn't have to have
someone following me around with a green screen outside. So it was a nice quick shoot this time. And once we had to
take, we were happy with we could begin the editing. So now we need to find some elements to create our virtual scenery with, and these can be difficult to find and time-consuming to cut out. So rather than trying to
build these elements ourselves we headed over to our
sponsor ProductionCrate where they have an amazing
library of elements that you can use to create
your own virtual environments and digital set extensions for your films. You'll have seeing their effects used in some of our previous videos and they are such a useful
production resource for us with our DIY Hollywood effects videos. They have a huge library of
pre-keyed visual effects assets as well as sound effects and music and it's all under one
affordable subscription. And they also provide lots
of free options as well. If you just want to create
a basic account with them. And if you sign up using
our link below this video they will know we sent you and it helps us out a little bit too. So we had a look through
the various categories in ProductionCrate to try
and find some elements that we thought would make a
good background for this test. In the end, we decided to create a kind of desolate-looking landscape with some destroyed buildings and rubble and we also found some
good mountain scenery and sky for the background and some smaller details
like overgrown cables, hanging wires, chain link fences and barbed wire. They have all kinds of
different categories though so you could easily create
almost anything you wanted. We downloaded the high-res
versions of all these clips which you can get with the pro access and then you can make
a start arranging these into a nice composition,
either in After Effects or in Photoshop. We actually did ours in
Photoshop because we were doing a bit more cloning and duplicating and moving things around and we just decided to do it there first. But wherever you do this, you can still be using
that filmmaker's brain to try and find a really nice composition just as if you were filming this for real. So when we were done we basically ended up
with something like this. We had our sky at the
back and then our hills, then our ground and then
some chimneys in these walls and the rubble and then close to the front we had some hanging wires and then at the front we had
this kind of brick doorway which I thought it would be fun for our character to
actually step through. So now we can bring our
layers into After Effects and begin to animate them. Now previously we haven't
done much with 3D layers in these videos, it tends
to just be the X-axis and the Y-axis, which is moving
up and down and side to side but if we enable the 3D setting we now get access to the third dimension which to Americans and most
people is called the 'Zee' axis But us Brits would
probably say 'Zed' axis. And in this latest
version of After Effects Adobe has added some new
camera navigation tools for 3D layers. But before we look at those we can right click and
create a New Camera. And this virtual camera is
what's going to allow us to move through the 3D scenery you can actually change
all this information like the focal length, but
we actually left it at 50 because that was pretty similar to what we'd filmed the effect at and that camera just gets
created as a separate layer and it just can sit on top
of all the other layers. So next we want to see
this scene in 3D space so that we can try and separate
out some of these layers and to do this, we can click
on this Orbit Around tool. Now we can see the scene in 3D space and as you can see, all the
layers are sticking together. So what we can do now is that we can begin to
shift some of these layers backwards and forwards
using the Z access control. And we can actually use
these little colored arrows on this thing that's called a gizmo to push and pull the layers
in the different directions that we want them in. You can also do this with the key frames, but if you're more visual, you might just prefer
to organize the things just by pulling the arrows around. As the sky is going to be furthest away, we can start by shifting
that all the way to the back and this is of course
going to make the layers that are further back now seem smaller. So we can compensate for
that by making them bigger, using the scale control. Now we can shift these other
elements further back as well like the chimneys and the
fence and the broken walls and as we move this around
in 3D space you can see that this is basically beginning
to look like scenery on the stage of a theater. Which is of course pretty much what we're going to use it for. You could even try rotating
some elements 90 degrees like the ground, which we tried here although you might not see much of it and this could just be
more of an experiment. If you find the orbit
tool a bit disorientating. If you click on the tab that says one view you can choose one of the other options such as two views horizontal,
or two views vertical. This will show what your
camera is seeing on one side and another point of
view at the same scene on the other side. This here is showing what
the same scene looks like from the right and each
of the vertical lines represents a different layer and as I move them around and backward you can see the same thing is happening from what our camera is seeing. So this is another way to not get confused when working in this 3D space. So now we can open up our camera layer and set a key frame for the
position at the beginning and the end of the shot. We left the end key frame where it was and moved the beginning
key frame forwards. So now we've basically
created what looks like a simple dolly move backwards
through our digital scenery. Also we're working with some
very high resolution stills from ProductionCrate for this so these pixelated details
won't look like that when we do the final render. So now we were ready to drop in our character filmed on the treadmill and we removed the
background using Keylight and if you want to learn how
to do that in more detail check out our video on how
to add yourself to movies and with a little bit
of adjusting the speed of the camera move, we already
have something that looks like a pretty good much for the speed the figure is meant to be walking at. We're also trying to time the
moment the character walks through this brick archway with the moment where I look
up and around at the ceiling as if I really am walking under something. So when you do your filming it might be an idea to
already have some idea of what scenery is going to
belong where in the frame and that way you can
pretend to look at it. So now we need to get all these layers looking a bit more consistent, like they belong in the same frame because they're all different
brightnesses and contrasts. So we can drop our Lumetri color effect onto any of the layers that need it and start doing some minor tweaks. And we mostly lowered
the exposure on these to darken them down a bit and we also reduced the contrast. Now it's around this point
that you're probably thinking there's something wrong with the sky and the reason is of course the sky doesn't have to get smaller. It can just stay the
same size the whole time. So we can actually switch
off the 3D layer for the sky and the mountains, because
they're far enough away that they don't need to
get bigger and smaller. But to add a little bit more movement we can just simply keyframe
the sky from left to right just so that it looks
like the clouds are moving above the mountains as
the camera move happens. So this is starting to look good but all the elements still
look a little bit static, like they could be still images
because of course they are. So we can go back to ProductionCrate and try and find some finishing touches. Now they've got a cool
animals section in here and in it we found a flock
of birds flying around so we thought that could
be something moving that distracts your
eyes from the fact that lots of these things aren't moving. There's also some things we
can add to the foreground such as maybe using some of
these dust or smoke elements to add a little bit of haze and atmosphere into the whole shot, and
again just make all the layers including the character that I'm playing look like they're all belonging
in the same environment. And remember if you're adding video layers conform the frame rate to
the same one as your sequence to get the smoothest motion. Finally if we want to stylize this further we can drop an adjustment
layer on top of everything and again and the Lumetri color to that and do any further color
correcting to this layer which will affect all the layers under it. Then if we want to, we can
pre compose all these layers into a new composition and
use the wiggle expression tool just to add a little bit of camera wobble to the entire shot. Finally we did our sound design and once again ProductionCrate
had everything we needed to make it sound like this character was really in the environment (birds chirp) (footsteps patter) So that was how we took the
footage of our character on the treadmill, just in
front of a green screen and built an entirely
new virtual environment using a 3D digital set extension. So guys, if you enjoyed that,
subscribe to the channel and you will see lots
more effects and tutorials I've been Steve for Unexplored Films and I'll see you next time.
