After Effects To Blender Workflow | Add 3D Objects and Effects to Your Footage (Tutorial)

guys today I'm going to show you how to work between blender and after effects this is a super useful skill to know being able to get 3D effects and objects into your footage tracked into the footage without having to use an external plug-in like element 3D which is a hundred dollars blender is free and you can do a lot more so yeah possibilities are endless so to start off all you're going to need is this after effects to blender script I'm going to leave this link below it'll show you exactly how to install the script into After Effects extremely easy and it'll show you how to get the script into blender as well which is again super easy so once you have followed that guide and installed the script into after effects and blender all you have to do is gather your footage we're going to right click on it and we're going to go to track and stabilize and track camera and we'll let this run through all right so once your track is complete this is what it should look like we have all of our tracking data here and we're just going to hover and find an area where we'd like to place our 3D object so for me it'll be on the ground here I'm just going to find the spot I want right click and then I'm going to click create solid and Camera so this will create this sort of track solid here and if you click play you can see what your track is looking like so if you have decent footage here meaning not a lot of motion blur not too much shakiness going around you should have a good track like this you're running into issues at this stage it's probably because there's too much motion blur the footage isn't crisp enough so yeah make sure you pay attention to that when you're working with your 3D track so this is looking good we have our track solid now we need to bring the track solid and the 3D camera track data into blender and this is super easy again we're going to use that script that we installed so we'll go up to file go down to scripts and once you installed it it should be right here so we want to click export composition data to Json and now you can choose if you want to only do the work area or the whole comp I'll just do the whole comp and then make sure if you've selected this you unchecked export selected layers only we want to export these three out so we'll click export and then once you do that we can fire up blender so in blender let's go ahead and delete all of this starter things here we're going to go up to file and again this is after you follow the guide to add in the script to blender we're going to go to file import and with the script and you should see it right here after effects composition data converted to Json so find where you saved it from After Effects so for me it's right here and let's take a look so this is exactly what we have in After Effects if you just take a look here so you have your footage which is right here this is the 2D footage that you're looking at you have your track solid which is right here and then you have your camera and I'll scale that up so you can see that so you see as this moves along this is the movement of that camera from After Effects so all we need to do is Place whatever 3D thing we want onto the track solid and it's going to be in the exact same place in 3D space as where we put our track solid in After Effects so before we do that if you guys want to see the footage while you're compositing here you can select this you can go over to the Shader editor just by clicking down here Shader editor and drag this up and we'll click new and all you have to do here is drag in your footage so if you see the base color right there you just want to click and drag out and then release and then type in image texture and then you can just click open and find wherever you saved your footage and again this is the same footage I'm using from After Effects open that up you're not going to see anything from here and that's because we're just in the normal viewport shading make sure you switch over to this material view or the rendered View so now we can see our footage but if I click play the footage isn't moving so to make it a video and actually see it moving you can just crank up the amount of frames here and then check on auto refresh and now if I go back to my timeline you can see now the footage is moving alongside with the camera and if you want to be able to see the track solid through the camera so we'll go to camera view so you see you can't really see the track solid like you did in After Effects it's kind of covering it up you can just select here go over to the material properties and then scroll down scroll down and then right here where it says settings you can change the blend mode from opaque to something like alpha hashed or Alpha blend let's go Alpha hashed and then back in the Shader editor you just grab this Alpha value right here and you can just like half that and now you can actually see the track solid through there so that's a nice little setup for compositing and being able and being able to actually see how it's going to look with your footage there so now we'll place in our 3D object or our 3d effect and for this I'm going to use my director 3D plugin it has a ton of different 3D objects and effects and things like that of course you guys can go on the internet and just search for any 3D object you want to put in here you can download a ton of them for free if you do have the plug-in you can just click over here if you want to use one of these preset ones which are pretty cool so say we want something simple like a twinkle or something like that we can put that here click s and scale that up and then you just want to click G and place this over top of the track solid and again this track solid here is exactly what we set up right there so it's going to be in the same place in 3D space so if I went to the camera view went to timeline and I click play you can see how it's going to be tracked with our scene so from here you can just set it up how you want you can animate the object if you want so I can go here animate the rotation just get like a simple spin or something 360 set a keyframe now we just have a simple spinning 3D object like that and then I can change the material if I wanted to use one of these preset materials and again make sure you add lighting so if we go to the lighting view you see everything's dark because there's no light so you can shift a and add in a light or again I'll just use director 3D or these sort of presets preset three-point lighting which is super useful and then I can just go like this yeah link to that will be on my website if you're interested but um here's what we're looking at and if you want you can go to EV turn on Bloom just to get a nice fast render so once you're ready to render this all out you don't want to render out the footage here or the track saw you only want the object so you can either delete these or if you want to keep them you can disable in renders so if we click here disable and render or again just delete it doesn't really matter you want to make sure you're exporting out with transparent background so in your normal render settings go to film check on transparent and then we can set up where we want to export this so I'll go over to the output properties over here under output just set up the folder that you want so I'll make a new folder called render and then click accept make sure RGB plus a so that you can render out with that external with that transparent background and then you just click render animation so now this is going to render out with the 3D camera that we set up and then once it's ready all we have to do is drag it back into blender and it should line up properly alright so once you have rendered that out let's hop back into after effects and to bring that 3D asset into our normal footage you just want to go over to your project bin so right click and we want to go to import multiple files and then find wherever you save that so for me it was in this render folder just select the first frame click import and then click done so here's what that's looking like and we can go back to the composition that we are in and we can just drag this in but here it is just drag it in like that you're going to see it's not aligning with the footage here so first we'll fit it to comp and the reason why this isn't lined up in the perfect duration and not synced up it's because the frame rate is mismatched so if we look at this original footage here it will reveal it in the project scroll this out you can see right here this is 25 frames per second but this clip just right here is 30 frames per second that's because after effects automatically Imports every image sequence as 30 frames per second so to fix that just right click go over to interpret footage Main and then change this to whatever the frame rate of your footage is so again for me it's 25 now you'll see this is lining up properly this bit I just ended the render faster because it was cutting off the screen but now you can see it's perfectly tracked with our camera and we can just hide this track solid and yeah there you go extremely easy a lot better than element 3D in my opinion because you have everything the blender has to offer and I mean this is just a simple 3D object you can go in there and fully add in full 3D effects characters whatever you want for example and say instead of a 3D object I want to do like some sort of spinning titles for my song my music video whatever so I can again I'm using director 3D you can look up any tutorial you want for this these preset modifiers here and then I can even go in and add different effects like drawn butterfly or whatever and again you just look up different tutorials for blender you'll find a bunch of these but for this one I can literally just click and it's going to put in some butterflies which is pretty cool bump this up so that the butterflies will wander a bit and then once I like what I have here I can just hide these in the render and again the exact same process so yeah I have fun with it I think that being able to add 3D into your workflow adds so many new things you can do with your editing in my opinion at this point I think it's an essential skill for really just taking things to the next level and adding whatever it is that your mind wants into the video frame let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see if you guys aren't subscribed to this channel yet hit that subscribe button we're doing a lot more shorter easy guides and other than that as always thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and I'll see you guys [Music] thank you

Channel: Max Novak 2

Views: 49,374

Keywords: blender, workflow, after effects, how to, tutorial, max novak, add 3d to footage

Id: V-D9u5dI4yA

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023