Blender 2.8 VFX Tutorial | Green Screen

hey everyone is Steve here and welcome to a new beginner visual effects tutorial where we'll be learning how to do green screen effects using blender 2.8 so did a video about four or five years ago now on how to do visual effects in blender but things have changed quite a bit methods have gotten easier and different so I decided that it's time for a new video on how to degree in screen and just how easy it is and free it can be to create amazing green screen effects at home with nothing but a camera on a green screen [Music] I'd like to start off by thanking this video sponsored story blocks formerly known as video blocks story blocks offers a massive online collection of royalty free stock footage if you're working on a short film or maybe a documentary or video project and you'd like to take the quality to the next level add a few shots from story blocks and make your project look a hundred times more professional I was really blown away by the quality of the shots they offer at an amazing price plus you can get a completely free week of story blocks when you sign up with the link in the description which is great because we'll actually be using a shot from story blocks in today's tutorial and with that free week you can download the footage we'll be using in this tutorial and get to try out the website so before we get into the editing aspect of it I'd like to cover a few tips on how to film really great green screen footage that will be really easy to composite later in blender and obviously we'll also need a green screen I just purchased mine off of Amazon I'll leave the link in the description where you can get one yourself it's essentially just a large green sheet that could be draped anywhere or hung anywhere and work as a green screen for me I worked well to just hang it on my shelving you did here I just draped it over it and I made for a nice green screen backdrop another tip is to set it up in an environment where you might be able to kind of control the lighting a bit this actually leads me into my next tip which is you want to set some lights up just on the green screen itself and not on your subject to remove the shadows and soften shadows on the green screen as these are most often the most difficult things to chroma key out later on if you can it's also great to have some backlighting on your subject this adds a little bit of edge lighting around your subject and helps you separate your subject from the green screen even more obviously this will depend a little bit on the footage you are using and this leads me into my last tip which is know what footage you're going to be using now as I mentioned earlier we're gonna be using a shot from story blocks they offer a ton of footage to choose from and I'm gonna be going for an artistic shot of a large city landscape the shot I'm gonna be doing today is actually inspired by a Coldplay music video it's probably one of the coolest music videos I've ever seen it's just jam-packed of creative cool visual effects shots and I was kind of inspired by the shot in that music video when they have their singer Chris Martin over a large landscape just kind of sitting there singing a song so that's kind of what inspired this shot we're gonna be filming someone in front of a green screen and then the end of the video I'll show you how to add that into a large city landscape so over on story blocks we're just going to choose the footage that we are looking for in this video like I said I'm looking for a large landscape to put myself in so I'm just going to search for city landscape although there is tons of different options you could use on story blocks for a green screen shot this doesn't one I decided to go with I thought that someone would also be cool but I just didn't end up using it you could use this one if you would like the one I ended up using is if you just scroll down here a bit so here's a shot that I used in my video and we'll be using in this tutorial but there are many shots on this website that would work amazing for this as you might have seen just scrolling through them and if you're going for a different kind of shot there's all kinds of options available on story blocks if you want to go through something more abstract you can go through backgrounds and if you feel me something like a music video or something some of these would be a really awesome to throw in the background of a green screen shot or something really cool all kinds of options so take a look around and you probably find something that will work well for you so JB shot picked out that you can be using in your scene you'll want to kind of match the lighting of the Sun on your subject so you kind of have to fake it with some lights but if you have the shadows on the characters face the same as it is in the environment it'll look a whole lot better so you kind of want to look at the shadows in your scene and then set up the lighting around a green screen to match that as close as possible so once you've picked out what your background shot is gonna be you're gonna want to make sure you match some of those settings on your camera while you film your green screen so for example make sure you're shooting at the same frame rate this is 24 fps and make sure you also copy the focal length sometimes you can't tell us information but you can kind of estimate if it's a wide shot or a telephoto shot to kind of shoot your subject with the right focal length as that will blend in a lot better and then the last tip is to get your subject is far away from the green-screen as possible well obviously still being within the green-screen as the more depth of field you can add to your scene the more blurry the green-screen can be and the easier that green screen is just going to cut out really easy so once you have a green screen footage shot you'll be able to just download it onto the computer and get started if you're not shooting your own footage I will be including the shot I shot up myself for this video in the description so you can check that out and download it and we'll get started in black so ever I'm wondered 2.8 now I'm using the Alpha too but by the time this video is coming out there already might be the beta which is coming out in just a few days from now and you can download that as well it's getting very stable now and you shouldn't have too many issues using blender 2.8 now that's why I'm going forward with it so the first thing I'm going to do over in blender now is open up that green screen footage so when we go over to the top here and click movie clip editor once you're in the movie clip editor you just click open right on top here and you can open that footage just open that green screen clip that you shot or download it alright here I have it up right now I'm just gonna hit end to close off our properties tab there as I don't need it so here's a shot with me right in the green screen and it looks pretty good except for the fact that we have us to have a lot of junk around the outside of a frame that we need to mask out so this is done really easy just by switching from tracking up on top here to masking then you just go add and add a circle mask you click that and it'll be added down in the lower corner here if you just hit G and your keyboard though you can drag it over to your subject and then we're just gonna grab some of these handles and pull them out to the corners of the mesh so I'm going to scroll in here a little bit with my scroll wheel grab that bottom handle pull it to the bottom of the subject here grab the side one here make sure you grab the middle of the handle and pull that one out to the corner here right there and then again these two handles as well just making sure you grab the center of the handle and it's just a very basic mask but it's all we need in a shot like this to cut out all the unnecessary footage and just keep the subject in the frame so I'm just grabbing these handles fitting it around my subject a little tighter the tighter you can get it the better but you'll want to scrub through your footage here in a second and make sure that your subject never goes out of this mask otherwise it would look obviously not good so with that setup let me give myself a little more room right here I'm gonna scrub through the footage on our bottom timeline here and let me get that a little bigger and as long as the subject never goes outside of the green-screen eye so you can see right here my head goes out a bit so I'm just gonna have to grab that handle and make sure it's large enough to contain my head and then the handle the guitar here it goes out a little bit as well so make that a bit bigger and it's the subject stays within that box now we'll be good so we can just leave that as it is now and we just switched over to the compositing tab here so click compositing you want to click use nodes and we already have backdrop enabled we can hit and it close off our properties tab again and we can make our timeline a bit smaller now and we're not going to be using this render layer so I'm just gonna hit X and delete that I'm gonna go shift a and add in that movie clip so input movie clip and if you click the little box right here it'll already be opened in blender so you can just select it there and you'll have your movie clip and if you go ctrl shift and left click on that render layer you'll get a viewer layer now you can see I'm in the background I'm very large and what you can do is use alt V to make that bigger or V to make it smaller I'm just going to use a V to make myself a bit smaller and now let's go ahead and add that mask to the shot here so for that all I'm gonna do is go shift a and we're gonna go down to mat and the key to this get it key there's a pun the key to this is going to be using the keying node so go ahead and drop the King node in to your compositor here and what we're gonna do is we're gonna run that mask into the king node so you have to add another input and that is gonna be the mask so you go ahead shift a add input mask you drop that in right there you click the little drop down there and you can grab that mask that we created a moment ago and just drop that into the garbage matte and if I right click let me first connect my footage now to that King's node I'm just gonna grab that and drop it into the image now if I take a look at this by ctrl shift clicking the King node you can see that I'm cut out and it's not right so what I want to do is I want to add an invert node so color invert and just drop that into your mask and you can see it's working the right way now the one issue you might notice is that the mask is too small and that is because the resolution within blender needs to be set to the same resolution as the footage we used so jumping over to our settings here what we want to do is we go to our output we want to make sure that there is a resolution here is set to 4k as that's what I've shot my footage in and it's important to shoot your footage at the highest quality possible-- on your camera because it will give you more details to work with in compositing so I'm just gonna change the resolution here to be 4k which is 3840 by 2160 so type that in and then your mask should automatically scale to the right size if you have a set to see in size here so just check the scene size again to update it and you can see that the mask is working now we have to set up the chroma key color so this is the first setting that you should change on your keying node and it's going to be the color of your green screen right now it's set to white so it's cutting me out you want to be set to the green screen and you want it to be set to the darkest area of the green screen I found that gives you the best results someone grabbed a little eyedropper there and I'm going to drop it into a shadowy area of the green screen something under my leg here would work so you choose that and right off the bat you see you get pretty good results actually I'm getting cut out a little bit but it really cropped out most of that green screen so now what you're gonna do is use the clip black and the clip white settings to kind of tweak the amount the green screen is cutting out so if I add some more black you can see it gets even more cutting out on me so wanna take some of the white down so the more I pull this down the more you can see I start to get my shoulder back which is looking pretty good so I'm gonna take that way down and I'm gonna take the black down eating a bit more almost down to nothing and then I'm gonna go control shift and change it to the matte setting because I found it's easier to see how good your chroma key is working when you change it to the matte setting here on in keying screen as you get the black and white which makes it really obvious if you're cutting into your master now with that setup I'm just gonna zoom in here a little bit with alt V you can see that even with the clip black set all the way to zero I'm getting a little bit of choppiness in my my clothing here still so that means that the color of the green screen needs to be tweaked a little bit so now you can go in here and kind of fine-tune the colour pulling it back and forth to see which colors crop out the green screen but not my shirt as much honestly you don't want to wear green in front of the green - if I didn't mention that earlier punching it again and you just want to kind of pull this around until you get an area that looks like it's cutting out the most background and least shirt and then you have to bring the colors up a little bit if it's gonna still be cropping out your shirt you have to take the colors up just a little bit look it's about right and you can see there's a little bit here but we're gonna fix that with some of the other settings now so with that setup we can now adjust our black again a little bit and cut out eating more of that nasty green screen and then pull the white around as well to kind of feather that a bit now we're gonna go ahead and start changing the other options now the dispel factor imbalance that is more for the color that's not going to cut out the green screen at all but the screen balance itself will and you don't want to take the screen balance down to a lower value down to about a point to I found looks pretty good so pull it down to about a point - and that's gonna give you better results on your Chrome there and then we're gonna work on the edge kernel so the edge kernel is kind of a fine tuning and you can kind of just play around with this setting a little bit changing the edge kernel size and then the edge kernel radius a bit I'm you can see that doing this kinda cleans up the green screen a bit we have a little bit of issue on the floor here that's gonna be our most troublesome spot as it's the shadows down there to kind of find what doesn't cut out the inside but cuts out the outside so about a value of 0.3 for the edge kernel or radius here for maybe this little bit bigger tolerance and then the edge kernel radius can be somewhere around 3 to 6 I found that a 4 looks pretty well so I'll leave it at that okay so the last thing now is to work in those edges of it so I'm gonna do that by eroding the sides of the mesh a little bit I'm gonna take this down a few clicks and that's gonna basically cut our weight right all of the edges on your mesh so I'm gonna go about on negative 3 maybe a negative 4 and so that's kind of cutting into my skin a little bit too so what I'm gonna do to counter that then is I'm gonna feather the edge a little bit by cranking this up a few notches and that just gives us a nicer edge that's slightly feathered but not too feathered and then you can give it a little bit pre blur in the top pr2 that sometimes can give you better results play around with it you know sometimes I found a little bit of that helps to kind of remove areas in the mesh there you can see if it's at zero we have a few dots in the mesh but if you put it up a few times there's nothing in our mask and then a little bit of post blur as well just for those edges so if we take a look at that now you can also try a different feather fall off this will give you different results obviously and it might be a nicer edge if you need a few a shot so if we take a look at it now you can see that the chromo is working pretty good but I have a little bit of shadow issues still going on underneath my legs here so you could now play around with the colors again just a little bit more seeing that we change those other settings how much you can cut away at that and you can see that I can actually go a little bit higher now on my darkness and that helps to cut away at those shadows a bit if I jump back to my mat you can see that looks better there's just a few dots in the mesh here and adding a little bit more pre blur will fix that so this is looking pretty good I'm not gonna worry about anything else in this shot at this point you can see that there's a little bit on the underside still of my meat here I'm gonna go up to about a pre before I found looks good and then right about there with the fall-off so that looks pretty good right there you can see there's one little area here that you could remove if you needed to with a separate mask but I don't really have to in this shot because the bottom is actually hidden by the buildings that they'll be overlaid on so no need in going through that work if you don't need to now I just kind of want to scrub through your shot and see how it looks from all the different angles so they're scrubbing through here now just to kind of check to see how the green-screen looks and it actually looks pretty good in most of these different areas again like I said go to the map because you can see easier if your mesh is being cut out in the wrong spot but this is looking it's looking pretty good I pre wear five if you need to when you see some spots might be necessary but I like the looks of this so that looks pretty good I'm gonna leave it as it is like I mentioned you could add a second mask to cut out some of the green screen underneath the leg here if you needed to because I was gonna be visible in my shot it shouldn't be visible at all anyways so I'm gonna leave it as it is and so what I'm gonna do now is if you were going to just take this shot and put a still background behind it not a moving background you can go ahead and do that right now by adding in an alpha over I'm just going to show you real quick shift a color alpha over drop that right into your viewer node there you know plug your green screen footage into the bottom socket here of that alpha over node and then you could plug whatever you want into this top input to put your footage over that so for example I'm gonna go ahead and drop in a just the movie clip that we'll be using later on so I'm going to go ahead and go input movie clip we can just grab that shot that's already loaded in there whoops that's gonna actually be the wrong shot go ahead and open the footage down that you downloaded from story blocks so I'm just going to go ahead and locate that real quick right there this is also 4k and I'm just gonna take that now and I'm gonna drop it in to the top socket to show you guys how you could overlay your footage right here now of course we'd have to choose convert pre multiply and you have it good to go so you can see that's how you would do it if you're working with still footage and you'd do some color tweaking and stuff now I'll be doing a little bit of that later on but because I'm gonna be incorporating this into a moving shot there's another step involved and that's going to be first saving out our alpha footage here so we can open it back up in the blender and animate the location of it to follow our background footage so you're just going to take the footage and plug it into your viewer node and into your composite node real quick here and then you can go ahead and you know choose an export format you don't want to make sure that you're exporting an RGB a format that includes the alpha Channel as you can see right here and a PNG file will work fine just go ahead and choose an output I'm gonna quick make a new folder here for our images I'm just going to call them alpha images go ahead and select that folder and hit accept so you put all your images into this folder and make sure your FPS is set to the correct FPS - actually 23.9 8 so it's not quite 24 FPS so we haven't set that to that and you're good to go so all you have to do now is go up into the top and render here render animation and as long as your timeline is set up as the right amounts that fits all the footage you'll be using I'm not using any more than 250 frames this is more than enough actually so once your timeline is set to the number of frames you want rendered out all you have to do is go render and then render animation and you'll start rendering all these frames out into that folder alright now that all of our alpha shots are rendered down I'm going to show you guys how we can blend these in to that live footage we've been using seamlessly well as seamlessly as possible I mean I am gonna be a giant me over a small city so it might not look completely realistic but it's very creative and it looks cool you can't deny that so with that said and done let's go ahead and close off that image there we're just gonna switch to our layer tab here and then jump out of the movie clip editor over to our 3d viewport so in our 3d viewport we're gonna grab that camera we're gonna hit zero and then we're gonna hit 1 on our number pad so we're in the front view and I'm gonna go alt control 0 so we snap the camera to the viewport and with that done I'm going to go into our camera settings here now let me pull this up a little bit and pull it out with the camera selected you're gonna go down to your object data here and we're gonna choose background images here we're gonna add an image I'm gonna choose movie clip and we're just going to open up that background scene that we opened up a moment ago so what I opened up just uncheck camera clip there and just see it in your background so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna grab my camera and hit Z I'm a number-pad to pull it up along the z axis I just want to pull it up so that the grid floor that you can kind of see there is in line with the city floor no this doesn't need to be perfect there are add-ons for doing this I know but this doesn't need to be perfect in this scenario we're just kind of getting it for ourselves to kind of be lined up so I'm just gonna double tap R then and kind of line up that floor like grid floor you can see here with the floor of the city you can see if I grab this along the X&Y now it looks like it's about in line with that too close enough so with that setup and done I can delete that cube and what I'm going to do is I'm in able an add-on right now so I'm gonna go edit user preferences let's pull this down here and we want to use the images as planes at so just start typing out planes and this add-on already works with blender 2.8 so just check that box there and you're good to kill and with that add-on enabled before we do anything else I'm gonna go first up into our workspace here up into our camera settings and I'm gonna change right here the render engine from Eevee over to cycles because we're using cycles for this video tutorial as Eevee currently doesn't work with image sequences so with that done all we need to do is go file import images as planes now you're gonna locate that folder you saved all those alpha images out into unit hit a to select them all and then you gonna check animated image sequence over in the import options here this is important otherwise they'll be opened individually and not as an image sequence so go ahead and choose animated image sequence and then choose the material setting to be shadeless as we don't want this to be getting any shadows from anything it wants to be just how it was we shot it and we you can see here we have the video imported onto a plane here if I was to scale this up a bit and then grab it along the X or Y axes here by hitting G&Y I could pull it out to there and if I change my shading up here to be rendered you would see that we have my self rendered in the scene here and then to make the background city visible again in the viewport here we're just gonna go back to our render settings here drop down to film and then choose transparency and that will allow the background to be visible again so now you can take your image sequence here and you're gonna go ahead and position it where it looks best in the city so I'm going to scale it up a bit and then grab it along the x axis or first of all scrabbling was that access to its kind of we're kind of sitting on that red plane and I actually found rotating the shot a little bit it made it look kind of nice instead of rotating this plane though what you can do is you can split your window here just grab it up in the corner pull it over I'm going to change this to be the UV image editor now I'm going to change it from view to UV image editor I want to tab in edit mode so we have it selected here and then we have to put our clip in here too so I'm gonna grab our PNG right there and if I go back to rendered over here as well got to scroll over here and choose that rendering now I want to tab into edit mode and I rotate this you can see we're rotating myself on the plane without actually rotating the plane we're just rotating the UV map so go ahead and rotate this about 15 or negative seven degrees looks about right just so the feet and butt kind of line up in a straight line something like that looks pretty good I think about a Oh a negative six or so from the original and with that setup now we could just tab out of edit mode close that office we don't need to change the UVs anymore and then grab our clip to be positioned exactly where we want it in this city so I'm gonna grab it along the y-axis to kind of push myself back a bit further I thought it looked cool to kind of put this building here in front of me so I'm gonna scale myself up now grab along the y-axis a bit more and then grab it along the x-axis as well positioning myself over on the background here and what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna add a mask to cut out the bottom half of my body that would be buried behind the buildings and also give the scene something to cast some shadows on so to do that I'm just gonna go ahead and shift a and in a plane we're gonna go ahead and scale this up quite large and then we can just grab it and move along the y axis to pull it out closer to the object there is I'm gonna go into the object settings here so along the side here you know look for your object and then you're gonna drop down to the cycle settings here and I want this to be visible in the camera but I don't want it to give out anything but these shadows so choose shadow catcher and this will basically mask out the parts of my body here but also receive shadows from the scene so to put this in to works I'm just gonna grab the lamp you see here I'm going to go into our lamp settings which is right here let me see the lamp settings yes right here and I'm going to choose use nodes I'm gonna change it to a son now I'm gonna take the Sun I'm gonna drop the amount down to about thirty I found was a nice strength right and if I double tap R and rotate it so it's facing the camera more if I kind of pan out here you can see the rotation now in the camera view you can see we get the shadow being cast across the ground which is perfect for our needs as we want myself to be shadowed now the plane might be a little high as it's cutting off some my arm here so grab along these that access and just pull it down so it's cramping out the the parts of the body that you want to but not everything somewhere around there looks pretty good and then we can kind of adjust the shadow intensity if I go ahead and rotate this rotate this a little bit more you want to rotate this Sun to kind of match the shadows on your scene and this is going to be to cast shadows along the city here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna zoom in on my building here and it might help if you make this a hundred percent opacity now just going into the background images and giving the alpha a hundred percent you can see that we have shadows along our buildings and that is definitely coming from the right side over to the left side as the sunlight hits this side of the building and cast a shadow along here so I'm gonna match that with our Sun lamp here and our object here to kind of have the same shadow cast as that one does just play around with it until it looks about right and I found that looked about right and then you can go to your world settings here choose use nodes make the color a dark blue or so and then you're going to take the strength down and this is going to adjust basically how intense those sun rays really are so that's looking pretty to you since we have this shadow being cast from our object now you can see there's a little bit of an issue here if I go to solid view our floor is still not large enough to reach our plane here so go ahead and just scale it up a bit now when we switch the rendered view will have even more shadows being cast by the object now of course it also needs to be moved down a bit now just like before as it was a little bit too large now the one other thing I did is I duplicated this Sun one more time I'm gonna go shift e duplicate this Sun pull it behind and then give just a close bit of contact shadows to make it look like it's touching the ground right there not a long shadow but of contact shadow essentially so rotating the Sun to be mostly coming straight down now just to kind of give that contact shadow right where my body would be touching the city something like that and then this strength of this Sun and we go to Sun setting spirit doesn't have to be as strong you can tune this down quite a bit somewhere around four is about right and then you can see in the camera view we just have those darker contact shadows and then the long overall shadow this still might need to be rotated along the set a little bit just so it's kind of matching the shadows in the scene a little bit more something like that and we're getting there we're almost done so now to add the masks to come and make a look at those buildings in front of me as I'm sitting on this large city what we're going to do is going to add a few cubes to our playing so I'm going to grab that plane and then tab into edit modes we're adding it to the same object and I'm just going to zoom in here to one of the buildings if you hit Z and go to wireframe you can see the buildings through the plane nice and easy and I'm gonna place my cursor right around that building there and go shift a and add in a cube we're gonna go ahead and rotate this cube along these that axis by hitting R and Z to line it up to kind of match the rotation of that building and then just scale it down a bit so just about the size of the building maybe just slightly smaller right over the building there and then we're just going to grab that top face by switching to face select mode it is up here I believe right here face selected to grab that top face and then hit G and Z to pull it up to be the full size of that building there now if I travel to edit mode and I hit Z to go back to rendered view you can see that that building is now sitting in front of me which is a lot more realistic now if I move to the side here you can see that the building is inside of me a little bit so you don't want to make sure that you grab that and pull it away along the y axis a little bit so it is in front of me you might have to tweak the positioning and you also want to make sure that all these objects are added in at the same time line so you can see I'm sitting at frame two to three right now you might just be sitting at frame one I don't know why I'm you think sitting there but just stay at that frame while you add all your other objects so they're all on the same frame before we animate the camera so now I just have to grab that building and put it back over the other building here as I moved it to little bits and that looks to be about right right there and we're just going to do this a few times now with the smaller building so you don't have to be nearly as picky it's going to work out just fine even if it's not copying a building just exactly you just want a bunch of little cubes along here to kind of break up the shadows and break up this straight line that we have going on so I'm gonna go ahead and tap into edit mode duplicate this one more time with shift D and move it over to this building and we'll just go ahead and add a few more of those buildings along the bottom here [Music] [Music] so though we have it there just went ahead and added a handful of more small little cubes along the butt base here where I'm contacting the buildings to add some more shadows and kind of mask myself out using some objects it's pretty easy just a handful of object and you can add more if you want more detail or less if you don't care that much about it so with that done what we do now is gonna match the camera movement now there's two methods of doing this one is camera tracking which is the best method but takes a bit more work in time and isn't as easy and the other method is just key framing it yourself which can give you quick easy results but sometimes they won't look that good depending on the shot you're using because I'm using a shot from story blocks that is basically panning it was probably filmed with a drone so it's a nice smooth shot it's pretty easy to go ahead and just match that movement with some key frames right within blender and that's what I'm gonna do here so I'm gonna click this button here which is for automatically and straighting keyframes every time I move an object so go ahead and check it just remember to uncheck this object when you're done with it already this setting I should say so I'm gonna grab my camera and then just left click right on frame 2 to 3 where I set up my buildings so now that I did that I'm gonna jump to the end here and because I know that these buildings are supposed to be lined up over this object here I can see how much the camera has moved and how much you need to move it to match it so because the camera is basically moving along the x-axis here I'm just gonna go ahead and grab it along the x-axis and then hold shift to do some more detailed movements and just move it until that building is fitting over that that mask objects that we added right there and if I do that that I know I pretty much almost exactly copied the camera moment camera motion between these two keyframes now I'm gonna do the same thing every 50 frames or so and do the same thing just grabbing along the x-axis and moving it until that building fits in there nicely okay so now that I went ahead and added all the keyframes for the x-axis along this mask here you could say I'm gonna go ahead and jump back to frame 2 to 3 or added my buildings and I'm a few keyframes along these Zed exits because the camera does up and down a little bit so I'm gonna look at the bottom of the mask here and see what information is within this mask so you can see some of the details here and the distance they are from the object and then I'm just going to make sure that all the keyframes are about the same if I jump to the next keyframe here you can see that it's pretty close but maybe the camera needs to move along these that access a little bit to match that submission to grab along you said and then click same thing with this keyframe you can see this one has a lot more building in the bottom here so I'm gonna grab along these that access until it about matches the other one and we're reaching about the top of the building there and right there it looks about right same thing with all these now this is not a perfect method of doing it but it's a quick and dirty method to get decent results okay so now the last step before we get into the final color grading compositing is to add a few clouds in front of me this really helps with the scale and blending into the scene behind me so to do this I'm just going to use an image with some alpha masks clouds so I'm going to use the same method of importing an image as a plane by going file import images as planes as long as that add-on is still enabled you'll be good to go and then I'm just going to grab that image right here again I'll include a link in description for this do you guys want to download it yourself so to go ahead I'm going to use the same settings and click this isn't an image sequence so you can uncheck that otherwise go ahead and import the image right there I'm going to scale it up a bit you can see I'm inserting some keyframes because I didn't turn off my automatic keyframe insertion I can just hover not here it hit X delete that key frame and I'm just gonna position these clouds over the lower half of my body so it's kind of blending me in with that environment dude it's a and the only thing I have to do is to make those a little less intense and that's what I'm gonna do right now by splitting the window here and this new window here I'm gonna open up the shader editor I'm gonna hit end to close off that again all we need to do to change the amount of this is to change the amount of the Alpha here and I'm gonna do that just by dropping in a color ramp node right there the more we crank the black up the less clouds we're gonna have and the less intense the white value is here the dimmer they'll be so I'm going to take this white value and make it less intense and you can see we get some shallow clouds hovering over me there and that looks pretty good so I took that value down quite a bit to a dark gray and you can see we just have some faint clouds now in front of me something like that should work about a point zero six so the last thing I'm going to do is make sure that we have the passes we need enabled in our rendering settings here so you can go ahead and check shadow and immune occlusion as these are two things that will be helpful to have any or render passes and that should be it so with that done you can go ahead and check denoising so it renders nice and clean we can go ahead and put our winner back to a solid view and hit f12 and render well the last thing you first do is go back to your compositing nodes and add that render layer back and we're not using these nodes anymore so I'm just gonna go ahead and go shift aim and an input a render layer I'm going to connect this now to our composite node and to our viewer node and with that setup all we have to do is hit f12 and render alright and I'm back after that untimely crash so yep remember to save files let me be an example for you okay so what we do first is drop in that alpha over node that we did previously so just go color alpha over and drop that right into your node here this is in your the bottom socket and then our video footage is chemical on the top socket so go ahead and you can open up that video footage again just add in an input movie clip and then click right here and grab that footage that we already have loaded in again with that all we have to do is plug it into the top socket and you can see we have our footage overlaying our render now we can go ahead and the first thing I want to do is add a little bit of mist to myself here as that's gonna help blend it in with the mist in the background here and really give it like that sense of scale to make me seem like I'm really big compared to the city so to do that it's gonna be just a simple mix node so shifty and in a color mix drop it right in here between the alpha over and your render layer and all we're gonna do is we'll change the color here to be kind of the color on the the city here of that in the background here so if I go control shift and click on our our video footage here we can just choose this color then as sort of the mist you see in the background here so let's go ahead and shoot something like that and then we'll just make it a little bit darker and a little bit more pinky something like that looks about right and then all you have to do is let's go to our footage here and take the amount way down I found like a point zero five looked pretty good man they you have some mist over the background there maybe darken it just a little bit make it a little bit more purple a little darker and that's already giving yourself a sense of scale maybe the point zero six yeah it's helping a little bit right there one thing to mention is that I am working in 1080p now so just if you want to switch to 1080p see if it footage down to 1080p and open it back up I have it just right here if i zoom in here I have a movie clip with a scale node just set to the render size which is 1080p now to scale my footage down to 1080p so for a few more things now to kind of make this match our footage first I'm gonna change the colors a little bit so I'm gonna go shift a adding a color balance and drop that right in there and okay we'll make sure our project saved this time not making that mistake again and I'm gonna change this to power slope so by taking the slope up a bit we kind of lighten the the highlights of bits and then by taking the power also up a little bit we kind of darken actually the the shadows a bit so you're gonna kind of want to play around with this until you can match the shady areas if i zoom in here a bit of your buildings with the shady areas of your object if you alt click on your scene you can actually see the values right there they're red blue and green values of an object compared to the red blue and green objects of another one this if you want to get technical can actually help to get the exact right colors to match those numbers up going back and forth some people might just prefer to do it by eye and you can do it however you like I'm just gonna kind of find a color that looks like it blends in pretty well here with both the highlights and the shadows and then I'm just going to give my scene a little bit of color changes to kind of match the color grading of this scene do this on the first take the slope down into the slightly purpley slash reddish hue here by dragging that down a little bit and then I'm gonna take my power here and I'm gonna go again to the green which is actually inverse the power sliders are kind of inversed it's just the way the color works in blender so you're gonna want to take it towards the green and it's gonna give you a little bit of a purpley hue so taking that up there a bit to kind of help match the the color that we're going for and I think that actually looks pretty good as far as the colors go it's starting to blend in pretty well so the next thing that's gonna really make this blend it a lot better though is we're gonna add some of the clouds in our background shots over the top of the subject here and to do that I'm going to take my output from my movie clip and run it through a color RGB curves so to shift a color RGB curves plug it into the image right there and then ctrl shift click on that and I'm going to take it and make it very dark this gives us sort of a a mask between the clouds here and the background so by doing this and then making it as taking the clouds up a bit and making the blacks as dark as possible by pulling this slider over a bit something nice and dark will allow us to add the highlights of this over the top of your subject so I'm going to that right now with a color mix we don't drop it in right there change it to add if I go add right there and then put this in the bottom socket control shift click that you can see that we have some clouds sort of added over at the top of your subject now we want to take the factor obviously down quite a bit on this and the other thing is certain areas you don't want added over but I'm kind of getting added over as you can see here I found the easiest way to fix that and this scene is to just use a mask so it's just as easy as going to shift a distort and adding in a matte actually I'm sorry in a box mask drop it in right there change these signs to be the whole size of your frame by increasing that scale up a bit this value right here and same thing with this family we're just gonna make it nice and tall and then we're just gonna move it down along the y-axis with this box here to cover up the areas that we don't want the clouds over now if I control shift click on this we can see we have a white and black mask I want to invert that real quick because I want it to be black that we're putting over the factor let's go ahead and invert it so we have the black on bottom we're gonna blur it a little bit so go shift a filter blur drop it in there fat goes in and make it a nice blurry amounts something like 30 should work fine so go ahead make about 30 30 and maybe even more just crank it up along the y-axis mainly is where we want to blurred something like that around 100 and then all we have to do is take this value and drop it in to the factor right there on our add node now if we go to that you can see that we need to move it a little bit but we're not getting the bottom half of clouds coming over and so that's working pretty well now we go ahead and just move our mask up a bit until we get the clouds just the way we want them over the top so that's looking looking pretty good and you can see that it's kind of fading my head into the cloud here and it's looking pretty well if you want to adjust the factor now all you have to do is drop in a math so we're gonna go down to math don't worry it's not as scary as real math can be we're just going to drop in a converter math node drop it in right there change it to multiply and if we take the value down here it'll take the amount of clouds down so about 0.3 is a nice touch and you can get some nice looking clouds overlaying your your subject here now a few more things to really kind of make this blend it a little bit more first off I thought it was saturated a little too much so you can see what our color grade is doing here actually it's affecting the whole thing to fix that we have to go ahead and do what we did before we take the Alpha to be the factor there perfect but you can see that if you want to turn this down just a little bit you could take this factor down a bit but you can see that the saturation is a little strong so I'm just going to go ahead and drop in a color hue saturation value node and with this node we can just crank saturation down about 0.9 you can get a bit of a more D saturated look going on there and I think that looks pretty good you can also make the black evening a little black hair if you feel like it's looking a little bit too soft and that's looking pretty good and you can see that a shadow is also applied over the the scene there as well and things are looking not too bad the last thing to kind of add some extra effect to your scene is to add some glow we can add filter glare drop that right in there I'm going to change this from streaks to a fog glow and then just start cranking the threshold down until you see it's applied to your scene in the right amount whatever looks good to you something around a point three or point two works pretty well and that kind of just add some clothes to the scene that also helps kind of blend the subject into the background now this is close to being finished just one step left and this is the ambient occlusion now this took a little bit of tweaking because we don't have a real 3d object we're just using a plane here but I found it did add some realism so I'm gonna show you guys how to do that to finish off the end of the video here so the ambient occlusion is gonna be a way that we can kind of add some shadows underneath my body to kind of match it looking like I'm sitting on this city so to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a color ramp so shift a converter color ramp I'm going to take the AO output of our render layer and drop it into the color ramp here and as you can see we have this image and I'm going to take the black value here and crank it up a bit so we get even more of that black mist that we want for our ambient occlusion crank it up a bit and then I'm gonna take the whites down as well because I want this to really be only black in the areas here and not everywhere else on the scene and then once I get the value pretty close somewhere around here I'm going to take the intensity down a little bit so I'm gonna make it just a little bit of a softer great something like that what we have to do is we have to make it so it's only on the object here and not on the background because we don't want to affect the background and the way we can do that is by adding a color ramp shift a converter color ramp and using the Alpha into the color ramp drop it right there all we have to do is go color invert now so we invert this if I show you guys what we're looking at we have alpha being right there and then if we invert it this obviously gonna be the inverse of this and I'm just going to screen it then over the top so screening it is going to take the white values then and make the black values here white essentially so I'm gonna put this in the top socket this one on the bottom so it's screening over it and change the mix type to screen with that said and done you can just click on your note here and you can see that we have the white in the background and this is the only black here the reason I added this color ramp is so we can tweak the edges here a bit if I bring the blacks up a bit you can see that we fix those edges that were kind of looking bad there so go ahead and do that a bit and then you have the black values but you're looking for now what we're gonna do with these black values is we're gonna multiply them over our scene here to add that extra bit of ambient occlusion you could say so to do that it's just a color mix drop it in there change it to multiply and I'm gonna drop this in the bottom socket if you go ahead and look at that now you can see that the black on me is definitely helping to kind of blend the shadows and stuff of the lower body into the scene here and it looks quite a bit better I thought so you can take the factor down a little bit if you think it's looking too strong or not I'm just down a little bit I thought look good and there you have it so that looks pretty fancy if i zoom out a little bit here you can see you have your object sitting there in the clouds playing music so that's gonna do it guys that is the final results from this tutorial hope you learned some cool green-screen techniques you can go ahead and render this out as an animation if you wanted to I have videos on the channel for how to render animations if you don't know how but that's going to do it again like to give a big thanks to storey blocks for sponsoring this video it's an amazing website it has some great resources for filmmakers like you and I so if you're interested in some royalty free stock footage definitely check out story blocks link in description but that's wonder if for me let me know if you like the video with the comment and a like and I'll see you guys in my next video bye [Music] you

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 178,726

Keywords: Blender, Beta, VFX, 2.8, CGI, Green, Screen, greenscreen, Realistic, How to, learn, music, video, city, landscape, free, easy, beginner

Id: 5ZpGpfQjzJA

Length: 48min 46sec (2926 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 30 2018