Adding ANIMATED 3D CHARACTERS to Videos! - Blender & After Effects Tutorial

foreign [Music] we'll be taking a look at how you can add animated 3D characters to real footage using blender and after effects so let's get started first let's see what we'll need to create a shot start off by choosing the location where you want to place your 3D character I chose this bus stop and to keep it simple this time I put a camera on a tripod I also brought a mirror ball and captured a few photos at different exposures that I'll use to create an hdri of the environment next I found a 3D skeleton model and unloaded it I'll link some websites where you can get free 3D models in the description down below now for the animation I actually used a motion capture suit but if you don't have access to one you can use for example some AI tools like move AI to create a motion capture from video another option is to use miximo which is a free library full of various animations you can simply upload your 3D model align these points and your model will be rigged automatically and it's just a matter of finding the right animation for your character and if you get creative you can get some pretty interesting results next download the animated module and open up blender import a model and create a new camera change the focal length and sensor size according to the lens and Camera you were shooting with then add a video as a background image in the camera now create a new plane and measure the camera with the perspective in our background shot also make sure your character has a realistic scale now let's take a look at the lighting first I'll import my hdri by going into the world tab color and choose environment texture I rotated the hdri to match my scene and under render settings click transparent to hide it from your scene I also played around a bit with the texture of the skeleton the character should also have some bounce light from the ground so in the edit mode I subdivided the ground plane a bunch of times and applied the background video as a texture then hit U project from View now the texture on the plane should be matched with your background however I don't want this plane to be visible in the render so in the object tab I'll enable the shadow catcher option this way we still get the bounced light and shadows but the texture won't be visible additionally I added a sun lamp which gave me this long shadow you need to rotate the sun lamp in the right direction to match the other shadows in our scene you can make the shadow softer by adjusting the angle and now we can render our animation make sure to use the Cycle's render engine enable motion blur and we can reduce the amount of light bounces to speed up the rendering process I render this as a multi-layer exr file with multiple render passes so that I have more options in compositing you can also do just a regular render but I highly suggest you to at least render the character and the shadow separately this way you can better match the Shadow with the background to demonstrate this I'll jump into after effects and import a background shot as well as the 3D render I'll drop them on the timeline and I'll separate the character and Shadow [Music] of course you have to make sure you're working in the right color space then you can simply use effects like curves you and saturation or Elementary color to adjust the colors so that the render can blend into the background nicely the same goes for the shadow if you look at the reference in our shot it needs to be a lot darker and has this bluish or tail tint so adjust it accordingly finally you can throw in your color grade and some kind of zooming animation and we are done I hope you found this useful and if you did please consider subscribing and I'll see you in the next video [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: VFX Studio Koliba

Views: 54,716

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, vfx, visual effects, add animated 3d character to video, 3d characater, skeleton, animation, integrate 3d model, add 3d object to real footage, tutorial, compositing, after effects, cgi, add 3d vfx to any shot, fast and easy, blender vfx, VFX Studio Koliba

Id: 6nVZnBU8WuU

Length: 5min 5sec (305 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023