Apple Motion 5: "CAMERA PROJECTION" TUTORIAL PART THREE

hi this is simon from tokyo productions and welcome back to part three of this camera projection tutorial now if you've been following along you'll know that it's not camera projection as such but you'll also probably have discovered that it can be every bit as effective so in part one we looked at creating this alleyway scene in part two we looked at this more advanced technique for dealing with more complicated shots and in this third part we're going to be looking at constructing a 3d object from a flat 2d still and as a bonus feature we'll be looking at adding some volumetric lighting to this alleyway scene so let's get started on this I've got a new project here it's 1920 1080 framerate doesn't matter nor does the size so let me come over to my file browser and I'm going to give you a link to this image file that I've created for you so let's bring that in it's called dumpster and you can see that's pretty sexy as images go so this is a flat 2d image of a dumpster let's just add a camera and see what happens if we try to fly around it so if we rotate on Y we can see that really doesn't work at all so how do we turn this into 3d we're essentially going to be using a variant of the techniques we've already looked at and this is extremely useful if you want to populate your scene with 3d objects to give it a bit of extra realism so the first thing we want to do as we did in our corridor scene in part 2 of this tutorial is to set up some 3d geometry that we can use as a guide for constructing our 3d dumpster so I'm going to urge you to customize your keyboard so you can easily switch views using the keyboard rather than having to use this menu so to do that come over to motion commands customize what I've done is I've used control and option so I click on both of those and let's type 3d view so we can see I've mapped everything so far but I haven't mapped 3d view back so let me just show you how to do that I'm going to map that onto the K key because I've already used B for the bottom so let's just drag that onto the K key and know that that's mapped so what I've done is I've maps F a front B for bottom K for back l for left and so on so advise you should do that it just saves time and makes this help process a lot more fluid okay so let's save that and let's close it so let's go back to creating our 3d geometry we're going to come to object new group let's move that to the top the time being I'm going to select the rectangle tool and I'm going to come to a window show hard so I can set it up we want a width of 1 and make sure that outline is on fill is off and just select a color that's sufficiently different from your foreground image so now I'm going to draw a shape that matches the left hand side of my dumpster doesn't that be too accurate at this point that's pretty good so this will be the side so let's call it side I'm just going to select the Anchor Point tool and with our overlays turned on let's zoom right in and let's just set that anchor point on the right hand edge of that box I've just created and then what we can do is we can right click duplicate we can call this front let's come to properties let's come to the wire rotation and set that to 180 degrees and that's flip that over so we've now got something little we can use for the front let's switch to the transform tool now let's drag that out to something like the width of what we imagine are the front of our dumpster would actually be now imagine you were doing this in a real world scenario you had an objects that you were shooting that you then wanted to recreate in 3d I would strongly recommend that you took along your tape measure and you got yourself dirty and measured the various dimensions of your dumpster so that you can use those relative sizes to set up your 3d mesh absolutely precisely here obviously I'm guessing about the depth to some degree and to a much larger degree I'm guessing about the width of the front not too important in this case but just something to bear in mind okay so then I'm going to come back to my side here and I'm going to switch to edit points first want to zoom in and I just want to adjust this top corner here so I'm going to select that I'll down the shift key and drag it up just so it's defining the left-hand side all the way up to the top there and let's just check that we're good at the bottom yes that's good and then what we want to do is we want to flip it so it's genuinely in 3d space so let's come to the Y rotation and go for minus 90 now let's duplicate it to make the other side so right-click duplicate and let's call this side far and let's come to the properties and let's scroll in the exposition field till we're over there on the side okay and then we just need to construct our back face so let's select the front right click duplicate let's call this back so to learn this up we need to switch to our top view I think so let's hit ctrl alt T which is what I've mapped it to or you could use the menu here but I shall be using these shortcuts and I shan't be describing them just to save a bit of time so switching to the top view gives us that and we just need to move this plane back in Zed till it matches up with those corners there let's switch to our front view control alt F and then I want to select my egg point tool drag that down to the bottom corner here so I can scale it correctly and come to my Y scale and just drag that up till it's matching the back corners there and now if we switch to our camera view let's turn off the reference image and we rotate our camera through Y you can see we've got our 3d guide okay make sure to cancel out that camera rotation and let's turn our image back on again so we need to duplicate it three times to get our side our front and our top so let's right-click duplicate right click duplicate right click duplicate and let's lock the bottom layer just so we can keep that as a reference but we'll turn that off for now so so let's name these various elements front side top and let's turn off everything except the side so what's useful here is to make sure that our anchor point is on this edge here and I've set up the artwork so that it in fact is but if it's not then just adjust the anchor point so it matches up with our 3d guide okay first of all let's name this guide group and just hide it for the time being and what I want to do is I want to mask out that side so what I'm going to do is select it to come to the Bezier mask tool let's click down here let's click up here let's click here I just want to keep in that little bit of a hinge up there and just so we're masking out that area there okay so this is our side and we want to make it match up to the geometry so let's turn the geometry back on again first of all we need to set this group here to 3d so let's right click make 3d group and let's call this tops and then we want to rotate this side so it's sitting on the left-hand side of the geometry so select the side come to its Y rotation and enter a value of minus 90 and that's disappeared but not if we switch to our left view we don't need to make too many adjustments we just need to adjust this bottom left-hand corner so first of all I want to adjust the crop so select the crop tool and I'm going to crop it in to the edges of our image it'll help with the final adjustments so then I'll switch to the distort tool and I just need to make a very small adjustment as you can see just to pull down this bottom left hand corner so I'll just bring that down like so and we could possibly just adjust that top left that should do so we can switch back to the main camera view if we rotate the camera you can see how well that's now sitting on the side of our geometry okay let's do the same thing with the front so let's hide the side let's turn on the front first of all we need to select the Bezier mask tool and we need to cut out the front will come them here there we go we've got our front cut out let's switch back to the crop tool and again let's just crop it in so it's just the bit of the image that we require so now let's switch to our front view and let's select the distort tool and let's grab this right hand edge and drag it along like so and then I just want to square off the bottom edge like so okay so now we can switch back to our camera view turn on our side just have a quick check of how that's looking okay it's zero out the camera again let's do the same thing with our top turn off the other two sides let's again select the Bezier mask tool and just want to very tidally cut out the top area I'm going to have to sacrifice those hinges at the top we could use them but it would make this a little bit too complicated and I don't want to overburden you with details so just going to use that to cut out a very tiny shape for the top so then I want to select that top layer and the crop tool and again let's just crop it in like so and finally select the Anchor Point tool and I want to adjust that so it's sitting just there on the center of the front edge so at the moment this image it is front on to us when we're looking from the front and that's not how it ought to be orientated at all so I'm going to switch to the left-hand view and you'll realize obviously at this point that we need to rotate it so it's lying along the top of the dumpster so we can just rotate the x-value like that and then we can also bring it down on why I happen to know that the right X value here is minus seventy four point four so I won't waste time fiddling around I'll just type that in okay so now we can switch to the top view and carry out our lineup process so we could do all of this with the distort tool as we've done before but I'm going to make life a little bit simpler by using the X shear just to square us up just and get us started I'm going to move it across on X so that our anchor point is centered up and I might also just use the Y shear as well just to square us up a little bit more with the front and at this point I can switch to my distort tool you can drag up this top edge and we can square it up this might take a little bit of fiddling so I'll speed this part up so there we go we're lined up pretty well and we can switch back to our camera view and we can turn on our other two faces let's take our camera and just rotate ourselves around in Y a little bit just going to do one little thing just to soften off these edges and that's to take all of these masks come and click them to select them all going to come to the mask properties here and I'm going to set a feather value of four and that's just going to help to blend those in a little bit more probably won't see it but it I promise you it does actually help and now let's add a light just to see how it's all looking new light and if I move that around you can see we very much got a convincing 3d object that was worth that little bit of effort to build now let me turn the light off and explain that although this is looking pretty good there are certain limitations to it if we were simply moving the camera in X Y or Z this object is pretty much good to go as is however you'll notice that if we animate the Y value something very funky is happening with our left hand side it appears to sort of get sucked into the edge of the object and the reason for that is obviously we haven't built any 3d geometry for this left-hand side we've just left that original image as is and it's not looking correct for that wire rotation well to fix that we're going to have to do quite a bit more work but I think it's going to be work that's well worth while then just turn the guide back on again and I want to add an extra bit of guide for this crossbar here so I'm going to switch to my left hand view and I'm going to come to my side and I'm going to duplicate that and I'm just going to come to edit points and I'm going to bring those down just define this sidebar here bearing rather this section here isn't actually part of the object is just due to the perspective on the image so we're really just going to select this area here that we want to identify as our bar so now let's switch to the camera view I want to duplicate this and I want to move it a little bit out on X like that so it's defining the outside edge of the bar if I turn the dumpster off and we just rotate the camera a little bit you can see how that guide geometry is working so let's turn the dumpster back on again let's turn the guide off for the time being I'm going to come to my left hand view and what I want to do is I want to eliminate this extraneous artwork here because this doesn't really exist in real life this this section here so I'm going to select the side I'm going to select the rectangle mask tool I'm going to draw a rectangle mask there come to the mask controls set the mask blend mode to subtract so that subtract that from the main object and let's just feather it by that 4 pixels or maybe even 6 pixels and maybe just move it out a bit so we've got a nice tidy edge there so now what I want to do is hide the areas of this background image that comprised this bar and these fins so I can rebuild it so I'm going to take that side layer and duplicate it and I'm going to remove the image mask from it and I'm also going to come to its properties and undo that 4 corner transform and I'm going to come to the crop tool and the overlays and let's just crop down like this till we get that objects more or less isolated and let's come to the Bezier mask tool and let's just draw out the center area of that bar just want an area of flat color without any obvious shading in it so let's take this and let's now transform it drag it upwards drag it downwards move it across just adjust it so it's covering our background quite substantially and then we could come to the Bezier mask and feather it like that but it's going to feather my left and right as well as my up and down and I don't want that so I'm going to come to the library filters blur Gaussian blur and I'll add that to the Bezier mask I'll come to the inspector I'll zero out the horizontal and I'm just going to increase the vertical just so it blends that shape better into the background so obviously you're better off doing this kind of work in a dedicated image processing program like Photoshop but this will do for the purposes of this tutorial okay I'm just going to call this layer fill so we know what we have here and we turn it off momentarily and I want to do two things I want to cut out this fin and I want to cut out the bar so let's start with the fin I think so take this layer and let's duplicate it so right click duplicate let's kill the existing masks again and let's call this fin let's take our busy a mask tool and let's draw around the fin do want to include quite a bit of the outside rather than going to tighten it so this I think is going to work quite well so I just want to come over to the Anchor Point tool and you see that anchor point is way over there and I don't want that I wanted to be on the edge just here and then I want to select the fin come to properties and I want to rotate it and I want to basically cancel out that wire rotation that we originally put in if I not come to my camera view and we turn our fill back on again and I move that fin above it and if we rotate the camera you can see that's actually working quite nicely right we need three of these in total so let's turn off the filter so we can see how it's all working select the fin right click duplicate and come to properties and let's just adjust the z-transform so that moves that across to the center there let's duplicate it again again let's come to the z-transform and we want to position this one quite at the back and we can turn our fill layer back on again just as check how that's working and where's our camera there we go so those fins are working quite nicely now and we just need to add in the bar again so let's turn off the fill again let's come to our left view and again we want to duplicate our side element so right click duplicate let's bring it to the top of the dumpster group let's delete its masks again because we just want to isolate the bar so let's select it let's come to the Bezier mask tool and let's isolate that front face of the bar like this then let's turn back on our 3d guide just to help us line that up and so we can move it out a bit let's actually turn off the background side because it's not helping us at this point what I think I'd like to do is crop it down so we're not having to worry about all that extra area there so let's enable the crop tool crop it up from the bottom drop it down the top and zoom in again the bottom left needs to come down just a fraction the top right needs to come up just a fraction and now let's switch to the front view and what we need to do is we need to align that to the edges of our fins zoom in a bit and adjust the exposition just like that so here we are back in our camera view and if we now do that telltale rotation on Y to reveal the side you'll see that we've sorted that problem out however if I turn my light back on again and we come to the light properties and enable shadows you'll see one issue which is that we're seeing through the bar at the top there although it's not something we can see from the camera view the light is telling us that we can see through the bar so we just need to make an object that obscures the light so let's turn the light back on off again just for one second I'm going to take that final side that I've made and I'm going to duplicate it going to come to its transform and I'm going to rotate it through 90 degrees on X and then I'm going to come to my top view and I just want to move it out on X till we hit the edge of our guide there and I also look at one look at the front view and we just want to check the height of that let's bring it down to there so it's just at the top of the fins and switch back to our camera view and turn our light back on again you'll see that sorted that problem out and now we've got completely realistic shadows there we can really do anything we want with this model so it's been a really long process I know but I think that's really worthwhile I think to be able to get a nice-looking 3d object like that that you can play around with it's it's worth a bit of extra effort to get there so now that we've finished our build I wanted to point out something that you've probably worked out for yourself already and that's that if you were photographing this dumpster yourself for use with this technique the best thing you could do is to photograph it from each angle so you'd come round to the left-hand side and you'd shoot as near as possible something that looked like that and you'd come around to the front and so forth and the advantage of that is that not only is it much easier to fit the separate elements to your geometry you'll also get better resolution in the end because you're not distorting the picture quite so much and you've got much more information unequally well if you've only got one angle we don't know what the far side of the dumpster looks like and we don't know what the back looks like but if we taken the trouble to shoot them we could add them in very easily so just think about doing that when I've done camera projection in the real world not using this technique but using the classic camera projection technique that's exactly what I've done I've shot every single face of the object and it makes a lot life so much easier so there's a couple of extra things I wanted to do just before we import this back into our original sin one which is to duplicate the side here and put it at the back there just in case we see through the lid for any reason so I'm going to duplicate that side right click duplicate come to the properties I'll switch to the front view for this and then I'm just going to move this over on X so it's sitting at our right-hand edge okay so that's one thing we want to do and the other of which is to creates some occlusion for the base of the dumpster and also for the back where it meets the wall so I'm going to select the rectangle tool and then I'm going to switch to the top view and I'm just going to check my HUD and I've got a wacky fill color and that's deliberate so that I can see exactly what I'm doing so I'm going to draw out a rectangle that exactly matches my top view like so and then I'm going to switch back to my camera view just need to bring that down on Y till we start to see it at the base there just somewhere like that and I want to feather it out just a little bit songa to feather that by 15 pixels maybe 25 in fact just enough so we see a little bit of fit at the base and when this is black it'll look like that contact shadow or occlusion that you'd get in reality and we need to do the same thing for the back so I'm going to duplicate this layer right click duplicate come to its properties let's close down the HUD I'm going to zero out that X rotation and then I'm going to come to my front view I'm going to move it up on Y till we just clears the floor and then looking at my overlays I'm going to scale it up vertically so we're just at the back they're just peeking out over the back and then I want to come to edit points and I just want to add some points here just where the handles are so holding down the Alt key click there another one there another one there another one there take these two points holding on the shift key I'm going to move them out again so it just clears that handle there switch back to the camera view just need to switch to the left hand view we need to move that obviously to the back there on Z just to clear that hinge area there and switch back to my camera view this will work much better when we see it in situ so don't worry about the color just at this point okay and the final thing I want to do is I want to adjust the anchor point for the overall dumpster group so let's slightly Anchor Point tool and make sure our overlays are on and I want to make sure it sits down at this bottom front corner here so I'm going to bring it down to there so just if we need to scale it for any reason we will scale it up from the floor and it's much easier to handle that way okay I think we're done and we're ready to switch over to our other scene so let's copy this dumpster group right click copy let's switch to our original scene and let's come to the top here and select paste and that'll bring our dumpster into our scene let's come back to our first frame come to the dumpster properties now I want to move the dumpster down behind the effects group so I'm going to select object send backward and that'll position it behind all this nice smoke and fog and I want to position the dumpster at minus 540 on why because I happen to know that I've set my original floor at 540 pixels I also want to rotate it through 90 degrees on Y and I'll send it back on Z minus 1750 and then I just want to move it over on X and I'll know when I've gone too far because my background occlusion will disappear so there you go that's about right and then I want to select these two rectangles which are forming mining occlusion layers and come to their fill color and let's set that down to black so now that's sitting in my scene fairly nicely right we've gone to all this trouble to build our 3d dumpster and our lighting is not really doing it justice so I want to come to my lighting group I want to select all the lights apart from the distant one and I want to move them in on Zed so I'm going to scroll on Zed till that foreground light just hits the front of the dumpster there that makes for a better effect ethic so the color of the dumpster doesn't really match the rest of the scene and I'm going to do something I don't normally do and let's use one of my plugins that is available commercially under the Hawaiki brand and it's called Hawaiki automatch and I'm going to add it to the dumpster group I'm going to come to the inspector I'm going to select the reference color as being this dark tower at the back here and the destination I'm going to select my lid of my dumpster there and then I'm going to hit enable and I'll dial that down just a little bit and then I'll open up the fine-tune section and I'll come down to the mid-range and I'll darken it down and that's just helping to put it into the scene much better saves me a lot of extra effort and what that's done and you can probably just about see it here on this affecting the foreground is it's changed the order of operations of these various layers so what I need to do is I need to take this layer here which is my smooth smoke and I need to move it down behind the dumpster because it thinks it's in front at the moment so I'm going to move it in there and that'll put it behind the dumpster and then when we come forward we get that nice reveal of it behind and that looks quite nice now there is one other thing that's important to remember and that's the shadow properties of the lights so I'm going to select those bottom two lights the ones that are nearest the dumpster and I'm going to turn on their shadows and you'll see the difference is that those fins don't get artificially illuminated as though the light is coming through the geometry so that's much more effective look but for this final part of this tutorial I want to adjust the lights because I want to show you something a little bit different from camera projection and that's to look at volumetric lighting coming through one of these windows so let me move back a little bit and I want the lights to come through this window over here on the right and throw a beam across the alleyway on to the dumpster so I'm going to select the light that's nearest to us and temporarily I'm going to move it to minus 1100 to get us in the ballpark and I'm going to turn off the light that comes next just give us a little bit more drama and this first light I'm going to adjust the fall-off and I think I'll come down to 10 and you can see that's now illuminating the dumpster we're seeing a little bit more of that edge detail which is so we will spend so much time working on right and this light is looking like it's probably coming from somewhere around here so the first thing I'm going to do is turn off everything except for my right-hand wall so we're left with that and that's including the lights it's just a simplify things a little bit then I'm going to come to this right-hand wall I'm going to open it up I'm going to select the layer inside and I'm going to click on this little rectangle here with the dot in the middle and I've no idea what it's called but it's a very handy way of isolating that layer without any of its transforms so that gives us this and I'm going to zoom in onto this window that I want to work with and I'm going to select the Bezier mask tool and I just want to draw a mask for the inside of that window it'll be hard to see something like this there we go and then what I'm going to do is I want to make sure to come out of this mode here by clicking on that button again and then I want to duplicate this right hand group so right click duplicate and this top layer I'm going to call right wall and the back one I'm going to call right window and then I'm going to come to the Bezier mask for the right wall and I'm going to hit the invert mask switch and we're back to square one I'll come to the right window group come to its properties and I'm going to set it exposition to 980 just moves it away a little bit I've now opened up a little bit of a gap there and what I'm going to do is just adjust the Z position a bit so that comes back into position there we go next I want to make a new group above the right wall group so I'll select the right wall group come to object new group then I want to switch to my left hand view like so and I'm going to zoom into this window again I can see that a bit better I'm going to select the rectangle tool I'm going to come to window show HUD I want a white fill and no outline and then I was going to draw a rectangle up here and for some reason that doesn't draw it quite in place little bug there I think I'm just going to move it into the middle of that and I'm going to scale it up a bit just in this area of this top windowpane here and then I'm going to select the Edit points tool turn on make sure the overlays are turned on and just make a little bit of an adjustment to that so it's sitting within that area of that top pane don't need to worry too much about my right-hand edge I wanted to overlap with this pipe because I'm going to move it backwards eventually and then I want to hold down the Alt key and just drag that down so I can take care of this next pane down and just make another adjustment so they edit points there do the same thing again held on the Alt key drag it down make another copy just fine-tune those points drag it down make another copy and fine-tune the points like so and when you're more or less happy with that we'll switch back out to the camera view can't see anything but that's because we need to select this group and we need to move it over on x2 back to where that window actually is in the X space so 980 pixels we'll move it back into position now if we select those rectangles and we change the opacity down to about 35 and we turn on lights back on again you can see how that's working to look like an illuminated window but that's only half the battle so let's call this window light and let's duplicate that group right click duplicate and let's call this window Rays and then I'm going to take those layers and I'm going to return the opacity to 100% I want to select the group I want to come to the library filters blur and I want to look for zoom blur and I want to add it to that window Ray's group I'm just going to turn off the lights while we set this up and I'm going to zoom out just a little bit I'm going to make sure my overlays are turned on I'm going to grab the zoom blur widget or whatever it's called and I'm going to move it over to roughly here just where that pipe is and I'm going to come to the inspector and I'm going to increase the amount and as you see as I do so that stretches out these rays and I can fine-tune how they fall just by moving that zoom blur widget like so now if we look through the animation you'll see that that changes depending on the position of the camera and that's not quite right so what we'll need to do is we'll need to keyframe the position of this zoom blur Center so let's set a keyframe there at 1 second which is where it will turn itself on and then let's come to a point at which it's starting to disappear and we need to move it out to where that would have been if we could still see it so it's somewhere like that I think and now that stays more or less in the right position probably not that critical and that looks pretty good to me so now I'm going to turn everything back on again and see how we're looking so we've got a problem here in that the Rays look like they're being chopped off so we can fix that by selecting that window Rays group coming to object and selecting bring to front and that solves the problem of those rays disappearing and finally I just want to tweak the position of that light so it's having the best effect first of all I'm going to just turn off render shadows because that slangs down just a little bit I'm going to come to the lights group I'm going to find that light there it is turn on the overlays so we can see where it is we need to move it down on Y and move it over on X and that's looking really quite good I think so we just need to turn render shadows back on again and go for a final render so here we go this is what it all looks like and I'm pretty pleased with that this has been another mammoth tutorial but I hope it's given you some ideas about how to use your own stills to create 3d objects in motion I think with a little bit of imagination you can really create some amazing scenes and if you're an After Effects user this technique will work just as well in After Effects and will probably be a lot easier and more adaptable than the standard camera projection method so anyway thanks very much indeed for watching and I hope to see you again on the next one

Channel: Simon Ubsdell

Views: 29,130

Keywords: Motion (Software), Tutorial (Media Genre), CAMERA PROJECTION, volumetric, lighting, 3d, volume light, 3D object, modelling

Id: vrCwsxGXBQs

Length: 40min 13sec (2413 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2015