Beginner CGI in Blender - Free Tutorial!

all right I got you you're sick of making donuts and you're ready to start creating some cinematic VFX shots using blender well then boot up your PC take a c and click on whatever the heck this logo is supposed to be and let's get started all right so once we have our footage recorded the first step of the VFX process is always motion tracking this basically involves creating a digital camera in our scene that has the same motion of our real-life camera doing this will allow whatever we add to the 3D scene to move and change perspective as if it was recorded by a real camera and so just floating around on top of the footage to do this blender tracks and gathers information about how specific points move in our Shaw and in relation to one another then to some crazy math magic to spit out a digital camera based on that data thus for the best results our footage should be smooth and have plenty of distinguishable details so the blender can easily grab this information and if you really want to be smart and plan ahead you could also grab some information like sensor size and Camera focal length and feed that into blender to improve the digital reconstruction of our real world camera alright you've got all that no well let's open the blender and do it anyways so the first thing you want to do is switch the editor type to movie clip editor then click open to open up your shot then you'll want to click set scene frames and prefet so that our shot runs smoothly in blender now now we can actually start tracking 2D points in our shot so blender Could reconstruct a digital camera if you go to the tracking tab you'll actually see that blender has a few different trackers to choose from but the one you're going to want to use in most cases is affine since it will get their location and rotation data in addition to any changes in perspective in SKU and with that selected we can now add our trackers now you could just use the add button to place tracker's manually but personally I like to avoid getting carpal tunnel so instead just click detect features which causes blender to automatically place trackers into the scene wherever it finds distinguishable features now all you need to do is Click track forward and Bam data usually you want about eight tracks going all the way through your shot but if some of the tracks don't last that long you can go to the last frame of your shot clip to Tech features and track backwards instead of forwards to get more data also it's important to make sure that you have enough trackers in the place where you want to put your object which in my case is the ground so if to take features isn't giving you enough trackers in that location this might be a good time to use those beautiful eyes of years to find Details yourself and manually Place trackers there once you've got to run eight tracks going all the way through your shot you go down to the camera Tab and put in as much info as you can about your camera such as focal length or sensor size or you could just go and select refined focal length to have blender do that for you automatically then you can pop over to the solve Tab and click a to select all your tracks then click solve to solve the camera motion now if you did everything right you should see a number pop up on the right hand corner of your screen this is the solvera which to spray you from all the math basically tells you how accurate the 3D camera is to the real world camera now for the best saw bladder recommends the number below 0.3 but anything between 1 and 3 can also be usable if your solve isn't below that already you go over to the cleanup tab to refine your tracking data first off you can click filter tracks which will cause blender to select any trackers which seem to be misbehaving once that's done you could delete those misbehaving tracks and click resolve to see if you get a better error you could also once again do this manually by scrubbing through the shot selecting any malicious tracks and banishing them to the shadow realm using the delete button another trick that I like to do is to open another window by clicking and dragging on the corner and then switching the view to graph now I know this looks scary and it's probably giving you horrifying flashbacks to middle school algebra class but this actually allows us to see clearly how we need to clean up our salt you see each of these lines represents X and Y data for one of our tracks in the scene now all of these lines should roughly follow the same pattern on the graph because they are all graphical representations of the same camera movement meaning that the ones that seem to break this pattern are inaccurate tracks thus this view makes it easy to detect and delete any bad tracks with the added benefit of making you look super smart whenever someone catches a glimpse of your monitor anyway after doing a bit of cleanup you should hopefully have a good solve error which means we can move on to part two all right so assuming you made it through the horrible nightmare that is camera tracking we should have a digital camera that matches the motion of our real camera right well yes but actually no because if we look at our 3D scene we can see that the camera isn't actually moving this is because we actually have to apply our solve data to our 3D camera to do that all you have to do is go to the scene setup Tab and click set as background and set up tracking scene this accomplishes a few things it applies our camera solve to the camera in the 3D scene it creates a ground plane for our 3D world that will catch the shadows of whatever object we place on top of it and it sets our footage as a semi-transparent background plate within the camera view itself you can see this in effect if you click zero on the numpad to access the camera view and also make sure that you are switched to cycles and have transparency checked under your render settings also to See Your Shadow Catcher In Action you're going to want to go to the outliner move the ground plane that's in the background collection to the foreground collection and there you go but don't Rolex just yet because if we script through the timeline you can see that our floor plane and Cube aren't really moving with the footage you see blender's kind of stupid and doesn't actually know where the floor plane is supposed to be in our scene where the center of our scene should be or even how big things are supposed to be in our scene to fix this you're going to need to go back to the movie clip editor and select a track that you want to be the center of your scene and then go over to the orientation Tab and click set origin so that the origin of our 3D scene will match up with that selected track then you're going to want to select three tracks that are on the floor of your scene and click floor in the orientation tab which should then Orient the ground plane in our 3D scene to match that of our footage lastly to set your scene skill you're going to want to find two tracks that you kind of know the distance between for example I think that these two tracks are about one meter apart then you're going to want to input whatever that distance is into the distance parameter and click set scale and look at that now your scenes should be lined up and ready to go all right with that out of the way now we're ready to move on to the fun stuff and import whatever model we want into our 3D scene now if you want to model something yourself that's cool but personally I prefer to just go to productioncrate.com and download one of their high quality assets but once you got your model you can now import it by going to file and import and selecting whatever 3D file type you intend to import then just position the model wherever you feel like you want it to be using the translation and rotation tool now this is pretty sweet and all but if you switch over to the material view you may notice that your model leader has no material or just a basic one with an image texture depending on how you imported your model that's we're going to have to switch over to the Shader editor and adjust the models materials to get a more realistic result luckily production creates assets make it really easy for us all you need to do is create some new image texture notes for the roughness normal and metallic textures these textures will essentially control how metallic rough or bumpy certain parts of the model are then simply click on the file icon to import your desired texture into each node and unplug each node into the corresponding slot in the principled bsdf Shader roughness to roughness metallic to metallic Etc and if you have a bump or normal map you're going to need to place an intermediate bump or normal map node in between your texture and the corresponding slot and mess with the strength parameters a bit to get it to work also be sure to switch all of these nodes except for the image texture node to non-color data that way it doesn't screw with our material foreign so if we pop over to the render preview we can see that our model's materials are looking better but the model doesn't quite feel like it fits on the scene yet this is because of the next important step which is lighting you see right now the model is just being lit by a gray World color and a pathetic little Point light that blender adds by default however suing you didn't film your shot in a gray walled insane asylum the sliding probably isn't the same lighting as seen in your clip to make the lighting match the best thing we could do is use a 360 hdri or high dynamic range image this allows blender to realistically lighter scene from every angle since it's pulling its lighting information from a real image that can occupy a 360 degree space also the fact that as a high dynamic range means we can manually adjust the strength of the light emitted from the image to fit our scene now the best way to get an HDR is to use a 360 degree camera to capture it on set so that the lighting matches perfectly however if you didn't do that don't Rage Quit just yet the next best thing we could do is go to productioncrate.com and use one of their HDR eyes that best matches the lighting found in our scene for example since my shot was filmed on a partly cloudy day in mid-afternoon I could go to productioncrate.com and find an hdri that best fits my footage anyway once you have your hdri you can go to the world settings and click on color then click on environment texture now if everything just turned purple don't worry you didn't break anything yep that's just blender's way of telling you that you have no texture imported so simply go to open image import the hdri and boom realistic lighting however you may notice that your shadows are facing the wrong direction if that's the case simply go to the Shader editor switch it from object to world then click on use nodes which allows us to use nodes to edit the environment in this case we want to add a mapping and texture coordinate node then connect the object slot of the coordinate node to the vector slot of the mapping node and the vector slot of the mapping node to the vector slot of the hdri now we can use these sliders here to rotate the hdri so that the Shadows line up also feel free to adjust the strength of the hdri and add additional lights if needed to match the lighting of the C even better [Music] all right the last step of the VFX process is compositing which means burning our 3D render and our footage together into a final composition but before we start compositing we need to get a quick render of our shot first off you're going to want to go to the view layer properties and enable Shadow catch or pass so that blender renders out an image with some Shadow catcher information then we can go to the render Tab and check a few things before we start rendering for example if your shot has motion blur you're going to want to check that in the render settings to make sure that the blur of the 3D element in the background shot map then we can go over to the render drop down and edit the samples to fit our liking more samples equals a crispr shot but it will also take a lot longer for a shot like mine with a simple 3D object and transparent background around 250 samples works just fine furthermore blender has a denoiser that's enabled automatically so if you really don't want to wait that long for your render to be done or you just have a crusty workstation you can just lower the sample Cal and let blender stenoids or do the rest of the work also before we get a render out make sure you go to the top right corner and delete the background layer that blender will try to render out by D default since in this case we're not going to need it with that said we can click render image and listen to the beautiful sound of our computers fans breaking the sound bear and done now you can see blender has already done a little bit of compositing for us by default however it did a crappy job especially considering we don't have a shadow so let's clean it up a bit by going to the compositing tab and clicking use nodes then clicking fit in the background tab so we can see the full composite if we look at the nodes set up here we can see that blender by default has used a series of alpha over nodes to Overlay the 3D render on top of the background plate this node works by taking what's ever in the bottom image slot in this case our render and overlaying it on top of whatever is in the top image slot which in this case is our footage blender by default has created two of these but we're not going to need both of them so we can just delete one of them and also another one of these render layer nodes and then replug the alpha over node into the composite in viewer nodes now with things simplified a bit we can add that shadow first off I'm going to plug the shadow catcher pass of the rendered layer node into the viewer node so I can actually see what I'm doing essentially we want to tell blender to make everything that's white transparent everything that's black opaque and everything that's in between semi transparent to do this add an alpha over node with the shadow catcher plugged into the factor then we can turn the background color to Black and we are left with exactly what we started with great however what this allows us to do is select the black shadow and bring up its Alpha transparency although it might not look like it blender is now treating everything that is fully black to be transparent and everything that's fully white to be opaque however we want the opposite of that so all we need to do is take a blenders in a reverse card also known as the invert node and plug it in after the alpha overnode and select Alpha so that we get our transparency sweet now we have our semi-transparent shadow isolated but it's also white this is because in addition to transparency the invert node has also flipped the colors so simply change the shadow color to white and now we get something that's usable to buzzle this Shadow into our footage you're going to want to grab yet another Alpha overnode plug the shadow into the foreground slot and in the background slot we can put the combined render and background footage and then plug all of that into the composite and viewer node now with all of that set up we could pretty much do whatever we want in our composite to match our 3D render to our footage since this note setup gives us the ability to individually manipulate our shadow model and footage what I ended up doing is using a brightness and contrast node to bring down the contrast of the model a bit and to raise up the brightness of the Shadow then I used some blur nodes to blur both the model and the render then lastly I used some color balance and color correction nodes to add an overall orange and teal grade to the final composition and now with all that done just go over to the output tab select where you want your render to be output and its file type click on that glorious render animation button wait a couple Millennia and enjoy your finished shot [Music] foreign

Channel: ProductionCrate

Views: 23,016

Keywords: productioncrate, footagecrate, rendercrate, soundscrate, graphics crate, motion graphics, mo-graph artists, vfx, vfx artist, visual effects, visual effects artist, free vfx, free music, royalty free, royalty free vfx, royalty free music, 3D, 3D modeling, free 3d models, free after effects script, film, filmmaking, independent filmmaking, 3d objects real footage, 3d tutorial blender, camera tracking, blender camera tracking, 3d camera tracking blender, blender tracking tutorial

Id: bwPKjf0bfG4

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 25 2023