3D Truck Composite in Element 3D

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here and welcome to another very exciting tutorial today we're going to take a look at compositing 3d objects into live-action footage so here's our original footage we've got this nice parking garage and now we've got an armored truck and one of the things that makes this look so realistic is that it's not parked perfectly see it's off-center and that just you know those imperfections they just they go a long way you know what is this guy thinking he must be thinking which means it's real makes you think um no it doesn't um but we're gonna take a look at this example we're gonna take a look at how this technique can be used for all sorts of things like titles of course you know just any kind of 3d object you know you don't want to park in that spot obviously and you know as well as doing some fake shadows so element can do some sort of soft shadows with the ambient occlusion but we're going to take a look at adding some hard shadows that just make objects look a little bit more realistic and does can be a lot of fun we're also going to be taking a look at the camera tracking tool built into cs6 as well as the camera tracker plugin from the foundry so we're going to take a look at those two options and let's jump right in here's we're going to do we're going to 3d camera track this so we're going to choose window tracker and this is only in cs6 but if you're using a previous version there's other tracking tools out there you know like buzu and some of these other ones I recommend the After Effects plugin camera tracker from the foundry it's got a lot of great capabilities but we're in cs6 so we'll just use the track camera feature so we click that and it's going to start analyzing in the background so it's going to process everything you can see some information here alright so the 3d camera tracker has finished processing it's got all these little dots everywhere and what we need to do is create a camera from all of this data so what we can do is if you put your mouse into the scene you see it triangulates a flat position so let's say we want our truck to be here I want to use these three points to triangulate that position on the ground so in other words just click on the ground right click and choose create null and camera or we could even do create solid and camera so now we have this solid if we hit s we could scale it up and you can see that represents the ground we could even do something like grid put the grid effect on there and you can see that that is looking pretty good now in this case we have a flat surface but let's say we wanted to connect a 3d object or a text or something to other positions well what you want to do is click on the effect name and then just click on the different points right click and choose create null and a null object will be created in that position so here it is right there you know we could go through and just add some additional data that we may want to use so for example I could shut this grid off and let's say we want to add a point to this position so we'll choose create null we'll come over here maybe here create null and and maybe this one here will right-click and choose create null so I'm just trying to create some information so if we click away we still have all of these nulls in our scene so they're in 3d space and the great thing is now we know the actual position of this null object because if we hit P it's whatever the position of this is so we could do things like place objects exactly in that position because we know exactly where that is all right so this is the basic idea but if I were to create a new null object and make it 3d and then if I move my camera around you can see that null object is floating in the air and now we're way past it and it's no longer helpful to us because it's too close to where the camera is so what I would like to do is adjust my scene coordinates so that the null object or the center of my After Effects scene is in a little bit more of a useful location like around where we want to work so I'm going to go ahead and show you how to take all of the data of our scene and make it a little bit more manageable so here's what we're going to do let's delete that null I'm going to create another null object we're going to make it 3d and f4 to toggle the switch make it 3d and then take all of the null objects and the camera hold down shift select them all and then parent them to the null object and then we're gonna come over here to the active camera and change it to the top view then if we turn on our title action safe we can see there's this little plus sign that is the center of our scene of our world and if i zoom out here a bit we can see the null objects that we created earlier and instead of them being really close to the center of our scene they're way off in the distance so what I want to do is bring them in a little bit closer so here's how we'll do that we'll take our null object hit s and then scale it down and so you can see that the camera is moving in and so are the null objects so check that out we're kind of moving everything in equal distance to that center point so we'll bring it in nice and close maybe five or ten percent five percent looks pretty good depending on where your points are and such and then I'm going to take the null and move the position so that the points in my scene are around this center point and remember this is the top view but let's also look at the front view and make sure these points line up as well so here's another tricky part so let's go back to the active camera we can see that these points are all perfectly where they need to be so everything lines up nicely we haven't changed any of the relative values but what I do want to do is take this null object this null object and this null object and make sure my ground plane is perfectly flat in other words when we add stuff into our scene we want to make sure that it lines up perfectly flat so if you have three points that are on the same flat plane what we can do is go to the front view and we can see those three points and we can also see that they don't line up so if we were to turn on the title safe even hit ctrl R we can bring up the ruler and just align it right with this plus sign remember that's from the title safe and that's showing us sort of the middle of our scene and what I want to do is move these points up so we're going to move them up by moving this null object and we're going to line them up so we've got two of them to line up but the third one not quite so what we want to do is hit R and we just want to rotate the scene so if we rotate hold down ctrl C that's not good we rotate it down and check this out they're almost lining up perfectly so then we can go and move this back up maybe just it a bit more move this back up and we just need to you know tweak the settings here so you can you know you can rotate this a little bit and play around with the different coordinates until you get it just right so now it's going to be pretty close and I just need to rotate it on the Z a little bit so now that's pretty good now you may not be able to get it perfect every time but the closer it is to this flat plane the better and easier it's going to be to put things into your scene that are three-dimensional so let's go ahead jump out of the active camera and take our null object and let's just delete that hide the title safe and get rid of that ruler and now let's go ahead and add some stuff into our scene all right so the 3d tracker that comes with After Effects cs6 works pretty good now if you're running into some trouble where you're not able to get a good solid track or things are kind of bouncing around you might want to check out the camera tracker tool from the foundry which is a separate plugin but works very similarly so I can kind of show you that really quick called camera tracker and it's just got some other great options so it's got a mat source so what you can do is you can block out people or things that are moving in your scene that may mess up your tracking data you can also input some camera information like the focal length and things to get a more accurate track so if you're finding you're having a little bit of trouble you're not getting the results that you need check that I get some really good results with that so let's go and move on to adding some 3d objects into our scene now we're going to be using element 3d from Video Copilot this is great side I recommend it and we're going to do effect Video Copilot element and what we're going to do is jump into the scene and we could go and we could add any 3d object I'm just going to go into my models and I've got an object called a truck and we'll go and load that now this particular model is like 2 million vertices 600,000 polygons so it's pretty large object but it looks pretty nice now remember when you open up objects in element from a 3d program they actually come in white so they'll come in looking just like this and all you have to do is take your textures your UV textures and go to the different channels and just turn them on and off until you find the one you're looking for and then just drop the textures right into the slots and basically just rebuild them and it takes a couple of minutes but once you're done you can save it as a model preset and then you don't have to do it again so in this case I've already got it all set up now there's a couple of things that I want to do first first it's on Group 1 so that's important want to make sure that our truck is on group 1 the other thing is we want to try to match the environment reflection and for the scene of the parking garage so if we go into the environment we can actually check out some of these different options so there's one called a garage and that one works pretty good now there's also one called studio warm that has some nice warm tones which kind of match our scene inside of the After Effects side so what I may want to do is go to the environment and maybe lower the saturation just a little bit and hit OK and then if I right click and drag we can see how the reflection effects our object so looks pretty nice you can also hold down alt and left click and drag and orbit around your model so you can really kind of get a good sense for how things look and you can tell this is a pretty high quality model if we turn off draft textures and these are you know really large you can see we've got some really great detail and the specular map looks very realistic so very cool way of bringing in some good solid looking models now this is really important I want this object to be on the ground surface so I want the anchor point to be the bottom of the truck so if we click on the object we can come over here to the transform and the anchor point is set to the bottom so I've already added that into my object before I saved it but you just want to make sure it's set to the bottom so that your object will lie flat on the surface so we'll hit OK and we've got our truck here now here's something cool before we do anything our object is kind of rotated awkwardly so what if we went into the particle look brought the size down and then created another new null object and check this out we're going to make it 3d and just like before we're going to take all the track points hold down shift and the camera and parent it to that null and then we're going to rotate the null and now what we've done is we've made it so that all of the objects that come into our scene align perfectly you know perpendicular to where everything is I can even take this and move it so even though the null doesn't move we're actually moving the camera and everything around our world space we can even scale it up and change the scale of our scene so we're only changing this null but it changes everything around it so that looks pretty good we'll go ahead delete that null and just start working so we can come into Group one where our truck is and we can rotate it around maybe we'll rotate it and we can go to the particle replicator and move it so we can maybe move it back a little bit now be careful you don't want to change the XY position because that's going to make it go down below our floor plane and in order for it to look like it's sitting on the surface we need to make sure that those two points connect so watch this we make it high it'll kind of look like it's floating in the air so we don't want that or maybe we do it can be awesome a flying armored truck that'd be a difficult heist to pull off no doubt but I'm sure Mark Wahlberg and his gang could do it and there are many coops so this is good but we also want to create some shadows that are on our ground surface so element doesn't currently cache shadows from lights but it does have ambient occlusion that creates some really nice soft shading that we can integrate in our shot so instead of trying to explain this let me just jump in and show you what we have is our truck it's on Group one well I'm going to come over here to the model browse I'm going to go to the primitives and we're gonna come down here to the plane click on it and just drag down it's invisible underneath to make it faster alright so we've got this flat plane what we can do is put it on to group two and take it off group one and then hit ok so now we have a flat surface in our scene we can go into group two particle look turn up the size so that it covers our whole entire surface we even move it around by adjusting the replicator position so now that that is in place we can come down to the render settings and we have ambien inclusion so if we turn that on we add some nice shading into our scene so turn up bar resolution so we have a little bit of shading underneath our wheels we can even turn up the radius and even the samples so that it's a little bit smoother and we can turn up the intensity and it looks pretty good however it's on this blue surface so how can we get rid of that well we go into the scene setup we've got an option specifically for this case if we click on the material scroll down to the Advanced Options and turn on matte shadow so now it's invisible it warns you hey it's invisible so if you can't see it it's because it's invisible right so we'll hit OK and so now it disappeared and we still have some nice shading now we have to be careful you want to turn this up too much you want to just use it to create a little bit of contact for your objects and you know it's not going to be the perfect solution but it looks pretty good and it can really make your objects look more realistic but we still want to create a more substantial shadow underneath the tires but before we do that let me show you something interesting about the matte shadow object so it's invisible but if we move our objects down it can actually be used to obscure things so you can use that matte shadow to hide things to block things and you know for example if I made an object that was a box that aligned perfectly with this pillar I can actually use it to obscure things in 3d space so some fun opportunities to use that and you know it's a really handy tool so let's go and move on to creating the shadow we're going to be using a technique similar to the particle shadows tutorial so I recommend you check this out for a few more advanced tips I'm just going to show you the basics right now so one thing we could do is we could just create a black solid hit okay and make it a 3d layer rotate it so that it's flat put it underneath and we could use the pen tool and we could probably create a decent-looking shadow we could hit F feather it out a bit and maybe even you know add some more detail for the wheels and stuff and this would actually work pretty well so even if I took off the ambient occlusion you know maybe expand that mask a little bit this could actually work pretty well you know with a little bit of work we could you know make it more detailed we could lower the opacity and keep the ambient occlusion on but if we want to create a more accurate shadow or we have a more complex scene here's what we need to do for that so we have our element layer set up so it'll type element so what we do is animate everything and then take our layer and duplicate it so edit duplicate and then we're going to pre compose it so we're going to choose a layer pre compose and move all the attributes so we'll call this element shadow and hit OK then we're going to double click on the comp and then go into element so we need to clear out our scene so we're going to get rid of that ground plane and instead of using all of the materials we're going to create a new material from the material area and we're just going to drop this on to our object and it's going to replace all the materials with this one material and we're going to change it to just being white and then go down to the illumination and then turn the intensity up to 100 so we just created a flat white material and I'll hit OK so now what I'm going to do is create a new camera and we want to be kind of a long lens so like 200 millimeter hit okay and they're going to take the camera orbit tool and we want to orbit so that we're right above the bottom of our object so wherever the object comes closest to our surface then we're going to take the camera hit our and let's rotate this so that it fills up the space we could hit a a pulldown shift zoom this in a bit you know we can even just use the camera tool and you know move things in cool you want to make sure there's a little bit of space around the outside and then what we're going to do is come down here to the render settings will shut off the ambient occlusion now we're to go to the fog and turn it on turn up the opacity 100% and set the range to negative 100 so we're kind of creating a reverse fog so then we're going to turn the distance up and you can hold down shift until it disappears and then when it disappears try to find the position where it's right about where the wheels get wiped out so then what I'm going to do is create a white solid and put it at the bottom here so what we've done is we've created a snapshot of the areas that are touching the ground so in this case the wheels are darker because they're actually touching the ground and then we have the you know the undercarriage and other parts that are kind of gray so that's the basic idea of what we need to create a nice looking shadow so we can do something like this we could duplicate the element layer and f4 set it to multiply and then we could maybe even make this a little bit blurry so we could add a fast blur and turn up the blurriness and even extend the distance a bit so that it creates a softer shadow so we turn that up we might even take the bottom layer and blur it out a little bit as well so we could just add a fast blur and so this is the basic idea of creating the shadow so then if we go back into our comp we can turn our layer into a 3d layer take the rotate tool and rotate put it underneath the element layer and then let's go to the top view really quick and then we can see our truck here and we can rotate it a little bit easier so we'll rotate this around line it up hit s scale it down scale it down a little bit more here so there we go you can just hit escape or just go back to active camera and then set the transfer mode of the shadow to multiply and then we can take a curves adjustment and just you know adjust the brightness of the shadow or you know change how intense it looks so we can bring it up a bit and maybe even blur it out some more so that it's nice and soft and we can even lower the opacity so this is where you can really just dial it in perfectly and there we go we've got some nice shadow so let's go and take a look at setting the lighting up for this truck because hey we want this to look good right so here's what we're gonna do let's create a new light so I want to create an ambient light that is similar to the room color so we'll set it to about 30 and change it to an ambient and hit OK so that's going to start giving us the color we need in our scene now our shadow layer is now being affected so what I want to do is hit AAA and shut accept lights to off and another thing to keep things moving fast inside of this world not that element is affected by this but just two D layers like planes can actually be slowed down if you're using the raytrace renderer so if you're only doing simple things like 2 e layers and using element then you probably want to have this set to classic 3d so that you're not wasting resources rendering you know ray traced planes or something like that so FYI alright so we've added our ambient light so that's going to just start getting things to look right now I want to create a light that's coming from this back area for example so somewhat of a bright white light so we'll create a parallel light that's white and then what we want to do is move the position of the light so hit P I just like to hold down shift and move lights until they're in the position that I like them so we can see now that it's kind of coming from overhead here and that's looking good we just want to shift it there we go and then we'll hit T bring up the intensity now the other thing that's important is the reflection map so if we go into element we can actually come down to the render settings and adjust the environment all by itself so we go into the rotate environment we can rotate it until we get like a nice highlight and what that's going to do just make your scene more realistic because then you're gonna sail way though that looks like it's reflecting even if it's not a real raytrace reflecting you want it to kind of give you some of those cues that make you feel like you're really seeing you know reflectivity or whatever so that's a nice touch there all right so another thing here is we've got some of these lights that are creating some orange lights so let's create a couple of point lights and we'll use this kind of warm color here and turn up the intensity around 100 and we'll find the position of that light one thing we could do is we could take one of these nulls hit P copy the position and then paste it into the lights position so now the lights right there and then we can move it up and it's a lot easier to find that you know where we want it so now we can see the highlights on the hood can you know hit T brighten this up a bit you know we could create another light up here you know we just want to make things look like they're integrated so that's pretty good for the lighting and we might even turn up the ambient light just a touch but now we want to do a little color correction so we'll take our object our element scene object and we'll choose effect color correction curves and let's try to match our plate so I'm going to add a little bit of red so that's good and then I want to go to the blue channel and bring the blue down just a bit so we won't we don't want to overdo it but we're just trying to get it to look a little bit more real now the blue on this is just really really strong so let's just add some specific color correction like a hue and saturation will even put this before the curves and go to the blue channel and bring that down and then bring the lightness down too so it looks like it's integrating cool so then let's go back to the curves and maybe tweak the settings a bit more so that looks pretty good right there and we could spend some more time you know tweaking lights and and you know we could even go into element go to the output multipass and we could turn up the specular we could turn up the reflectivity amount and you know we can make those kinds of adjustments to make the scene look you know really nice alright so this is how you can do some really impressive stuff right inside of After Effects using element 3d and you notice that we set up our scene data really nicely so that when we were moving the shadow around and we were placing objects it was very easy you wouldn't have to deal with you know moving things around to get them to align perfectly to some crazy world space so spend a little time in the beginning to make sure your tracking data is you know solid and just makes everything a lot easier later on now just a quick reminder this week we're coming out with a new update for element that's going to include some really cool new features one of them is some improved sampling and anti-aliasing right now we have multi sampling and this is hardware based anti-aliasing this looks pretty good but some cards are only limited to 16 or 8 and in some cases like if you have a really high detail model like this particular truck you need even more control so we've added a new feature called super sampling which adds even greater control / smoothing out edges and getting rid of flicker or things like that in this really thin edge right here we can see that it breaks up just a little bit so if we look at some of these edges you can see it's just a little bit choppy and what we can do is turn on super sampling - say - and now we have a much smoother edge so let's snapshot this and go back to zero and if we look right here we can see that things get a lot better with the 2x super sampling so if we turn that on and the great thing is it doesn't slow stuff down that much we can still scrub through our scene and the render time is just a little bit more but what's nice is you can just turn it off while you work get your scene set up get it all lit make everything look nice and just like a 3d program you can just turn the quality up when you're ready to render the final shot so that is the new feature of element that's going to be coming in an update soon now if you want to take it to the next level here's some other cool ideas so in this particular shot we can see we freeze the frame we sort of have the wheel fly off and I'm actually using some clips from action essentials to composited with the truck so if we take a look at how that's set up I can show you the basic idea so so see some debris bits and if we jump inside the scene setup can take a look at how that's set up so we have this floor fracture object and this object is part of the starter models it's basically a flat plane that's pre fractured so if we look at the wireframe you can see it's broken up into chunks and that's on group four and then we've also separated out the back tires onto group three and the way I've done that is I've just separated the materials that represent those tires and then on the truck example or on the main truck we actually have that tire missing so when they're on group 2 and the wheels on group 3 those two pieces will essentially come together as one and then we can go to group three and animate the position individually to sort of fly off so for example I could take you know the position of it move it around and you know time the animation so that it goes flying off in whatever direction that we want now the other thing is that we've got some lights here to simulate the fire and so we have a light there we have a light coming from underneath and just one more bright one and what's nice about this is we can see some nice reflectivity now as far as compositing the elements we're using action essentials too so I've used the car bomb and basically you just take it and position it into 3d space so we've made it a 3d layer and we've also made it so that the except lights option is off and that way it's not affected by all the lights in our scene and just you know we put a few in 3d space you know we can move these around so this little parallax and then we've got little bits of fire there and then some dust that's somewhat you know gets frozen as it comes out I've just done a simple time remap for a little more information about creating an explosion I would say check out the blast wave tutorial and some cool tips for compositing explosions and stuff so that one's got some good tips and even the depth charge you know we talked about you know some stock footage so and we've just got some you know our color correction and some glows so that the explosion you know looks nice with everything else so but the cool thing is it's a you know it's 3d so you get that nice parallax and by the way for the chunks the debris bits all I did was on Group four we put the you know the brick piece and what I've done is I've enabled multi objects so when you turn on the multi object it turns all those pieces into small chunks and then you can do like scatter those pieces around so you know nothing too fancy but just a quick animation from them being off and really small to sort of just blowing out and stopping so you know just experiment with that alright so hopefully that helps you get started with your own time freeze explosion come and hopefully this tutorial is giving you some new ideas to use the plugin and I can't wait to see what everyone creates with it my name is Andrew Kramer thank you for watching and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 275,788

Keywords: video copilot, element 3d, after effects plug-in, 3d

Id: b3WePfIQj8A

Length: 33min 42sec (2022 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 31 2012