Blender VFX masking tutorial: Fire Power!

hello i'm kenan prophet welcome to another blender branch tutorial in this tutorial you're going to be learning some basic visual effects tips you're going to learn how to create a mask in blender and animate that mask and you're going to learn how to create a basic fire simulation and composite that with real footage to create this firepower visual effect and I have footage that I've taken or you can use your own footage or you can download my footage which is underneath the description of this video so I'm just clearing my scene right now and position my camera sort of in the middle of it i pressed alt R to clear the rotation of the camera and I'm just trying to get a flat sort of somewhere really easy to work with with our footage that's good now what I want to do is go up to this top and change it to motion tracking and open and we're going to open the footage that we have and it is right here footage hand open clip and here it is this is me out of focus because I wanted my hand didn't focus so don't judge my footage even though it is slightly overexposed anyway it's alright it's not a big deal so this is the motion tracking we're not actually going to be doing any motion tracking we were going to use this later for the masking section but for now what we can do is just set scene frames over here on the left side and that sets our timeline to the length of our footage and we also want to prefetch all the frames up go to frame 1 for that and it just caches those in and that makes it easier it's basically I just moved my hand back and forth and we kind of add fire to that very nice so that's good we're done with that for now we'll come back to that later for now let's just change back to default up here at the top I'm going to press in to bring up the sidebar and I'm going to select background image add image change it to just the camera view and movie clip we want to uncheck camera clip and load in that footage it should already be there because we've loaded it in the motion tracking tab I'll press in to give it at that sidebar so now we're able to see our footage what it would look like through the camera and pretty cool now what we want to do is get our fire going it's going to be really simple basically I'm just going to put my cursor sort of where my hand is I'll press shift a add in a sphere and just scale that down and actually I'm going to go to top view and sort of make it a little bit farther away so it's closer to the center that way we can scale this up and that way the scale of the objects just a little bit bigger I'm just going to scale that along the x-axis make it sort of an oval shape so it fits my hand and obviously you have to use your imagination kind of visualize where that oval would be if you know it were behind my hand sitting in my palm and that's pretty good right there so now what we're going to do is we're going to animate this guy and this is what I was talking about if you wanted to motion track my hand and then have it parented to that to an empty or something you could do that good coffee but I'm just going to do everything manually because I found it's a little bit smoother and it works just fine it doesn't take that much time so what I'm going to do is just hit record down here on our keyframing animation and we're going to sort of map out the important parts of where this ovale is so um what the record button does if you don't know it automatically records any movement you do really with anything so it's very easy for animating but if you forget that it's on I can get you in trouble sometimes so I'm going to jump through the frames and basically just move scale and rotate this oval sort of how I picture you know it actually fitting in my hand if I were holding this object so I'm going to jump every 10 20 frame just get the big motions out of the way and we'll go back through and do the small ones again it's a little bit tedious but um you know every visual effect is you just have to kind of do these things all right so here's sort of rotates around maybe like that so our rotates more because we're not doing any camera tracking you have to create manually sort of the 3d rotation of the object and since it is just flame it's really not that much you know you're not going to notice that we didn't camera track our scene and so our camera is not actually moving around in 3d space but you know you can sort of fake the look of that and that's what I liked and I like these simple effects that look really cool and they're really easy to do they don't take too much time well I say that I don't really know how much time this is gonna take okay so I think we're yeah there I closed my hand so what I'll do I'll sort of bring it in like this scale it down and when i clenched my hand I'll just sort of scale it way down maybe spin it a few times that way sure did you like that that's nice so now if we just play this um you can see it sort of follows my hand it's not bad actually I don't even know if there's that much we have to clean up because it is firefighers random so it's pretty good I'll just jump through here and maybe reposition every few frames I think it's pretty good and you can get as specific as you like with this or you can just be as general maybe you just want it to look like your hand is on fire or something in which case you want to have to be very specific at all I'll rotate that you'd be like that it's pretty good that didn't take too much time all right let's get one in here let's play that see what that looks like I'm pretty happy with that we're going to call that good for now alright now what we want to do I'm going to select this our object here I'm going to turn off the cord first of all that's important I'm going to just press W subdivide it and then down here under fractal I'm going to just sort of slide that out just to crinkle our sphere a bit for our oval I just give this some sort of a messy look and we can smooth that out my smooth shading it's not that important but just to sort of change a little bit where those particles shoot out from and speaking of particles we're not ready for the particle system so with that sphere selected let's come over here to the right-hand panel select our particle system and new will name this particle system fire and let's do do about 44,000 might seem like a lot but it'll make us some nice fire and the start and end frames we want it to start at C when I sort of opened my hand right there so maybe frame 58 star frame 58 and the end frame we want it to end sort of that right as I'm closing my hand maybe three 47 in the lifetime we're going to set this to really short - let's just go through here first of all let's make sure these particles are shooting out and they are that's good so let's set the zetas XS we'll set that to 2 so it shoots straight up then the x and y we'll just set these to 0.5 so there's a little bit of randomness going on so speaking of random we'll set that to like 0.4 normal 1.5 and tangent 0.5 we can turn this rotation up a little - that just gets our particles going in more of a random manner which is what you want with fire okay good now the fun part with this object selected I'm going to go down here to object oops object quick effects quick smoke make sure you're in cycles before you do that because we're using cycles we're just going to press s and X sort of scale that along the x-axis and jump to the first frame position is sort of around that so it's sort of in the center with plenty of room up here that's good and now with our domain selected I'm going to hold down shift select this object here and press control P and parent that to the object so now wherever our object moves our domain moves with it that's very useful for just obviously you don't you don't want the domain too big so it takes forever to render and you know you don't you don't waste render time and all that and also you don't want the flame hitting the side of the domain box okay so now with this domain selected let's come over here to the physics panel and we want to do a few things going to check smoke adaptive domain we can change the resolutions up just a bit for now we'll change it later and then instead of selecting flow over here you want to select the actual object um sometimes you have problems if you if you select that it the domain to the flow or doesn't know what you're doing so it's like the object and the flow source currently is that sphere so if we were to watch that smoke would come out of our sphere and we don't want to do that we want to do the particle system so change it from mesh to particle system and there you see the particle system we created fire it's right there now in order to be able to watch this we have to save our file so I'm going to do save as and just save it over recorder this couple different times couple different ways someone to find the absolute best way no actually it was just many failed attempts Hey okay so now that we've saved it underneath smoke cache we have these settings available to us they're not available unless you save them so we want to do is set the start and end of these to the same as our particle system which is start frame 58 and frame 346 so I'm going to go here start 58 346 for the end and so now that enables us to be able to see what's going on with our object and we have smoke coming out but we want it to be fire so with our flow object selected let's change it from smoke to fire now let's check that out see what that looks like there we go some nice fire power and we want to select initial velocity that looks even cooler now a few settings we want to change with this domain selected what we can do is it's like dissolve that way we don't get any of this fire hitting the edges so it's not quite as high if we go down to maybe a value of three we can see what that looks like I just there that it's looking better it's not quite as high it's more of that ball of fire coming out in all directions just pretty cool that's really right about where we want it if you find yours is too high you can adjust some other settings you could select your object go to your particle settings change the life time to lower or maybe the z-axis to lower so it's not the particles aren't shooting up quite as high that's all up to you you could also change the time scale a little bit turn it down that changes the height of your object as well and really the overall speed of it but I like that I like where I like the look of it sort of just kind of a messy fire all over the place so we're off to a good start I'm going to we're off to a good start I'm going to go ahead and save that and if we just do a preview render by pressing shift Z we can see what it looks like which currently is nothing sort of a little bit of smoke in there and the reason being cycles really is awesome adds a material set up already for you but for some reason in the newest versions of cycles or blender they only have a smoke part setup they took away the fire but it's really easy to do smoke so I'm just going to press shift D to duplicate this attribute by the way I'm in I switch to the node editor and we have our domain selected if you come over here to the materials this is the material it's currently just added automatically for us which is very nice so I've duplicated this attribute node and instead of density we want to write flame I know there's a lot of different ways to create fire but this is sort of a really simple way so I'm going to show you how to do that so I'll press shift a and come down here to converter and we want to add in a color ramp node so plug in factor into the factor of that and I'll shift a shader emission and since fire is light we want a pretty good value so emission of five so now if I press shift C you can see we have these colors being emitted as a light and this is what's going to be our fire material so with this color ramp node we want to map out a basic fire material so it's dark on the very edge and maybe a bright red on the very tip of it gonna add in another oh I don't know what you call these things another little node type of thing make it an orange II yellowy color we want that to last for a lot of it and we can add in one more sort of find the more variations you add in they're kind of more realistic it looks sometimes sometimes it's a little tricky that's pretty good pretty cool effect there now we are still seeing our little object here and we don't really want to see that our emission object so I'm going to select that come over here the particle system and uncheck emitter so now if I look through the camera and press shift-z we see just the fire and that's what we want that's pretty cool I'm going to just sort of play with a few more settings I checked it initial velocity but I want to see what it looks like without that I wonder if it's a little bit smoother no okay sorry that was just a curious thought I had it's better make sure initial velocity is checked it'll look better I do want to just sort of right here looks like this guy could be a little bit more over here maybe I'm just going to hit record and change that and then on record hope Final Cut Pro wants my attention all right okay so things are looking good but obviously now it's the fun part the compositing part where we composite our fire with our actual video so I'm going to drag this down give us some more space here and I'm going to do a test render so what I'll do is check transparent underneath vendor and come over here to the layers and we want to select just this top layer we'll change the layer name to fire and I'll put the samplings up to about 24 for now I'll just hit render I know the Sam winds are really low but with blurs and stuff it'll look okay and then for our final render will obviously boost the resolution of our flame frame flame and the samplings okay so there it is doesn't look like much it's rendered on an alpha Channel so now we go to compositing up here on the top and select use nodes and backdrop I'm just going to pull these out I'll press shift a and I'm just going to search for a viewer node and switch that over to that so there we have our fire I'm going to press n to get rid of that sidebar and now if we come down to I don't know where it is I'm going to search for a movie clip and if we just select this job down menu that loads in our footage so now to get this underneath the flame we need an alpha over node so I'm going to search for that alpha over and drop that in I'll drag the image of this to the top of this alpha over node and voila but the scale is way off so that's easy to fix shift a search for a scale node I'm really bad habit of searching for nodes but it's alright so now I'm just going to change that from relative to render size and boom firepower just like that and right away I notice a few things I think there's a little too much red in the tips of that for my liking so it's really easy to fix I'm going to we can fix it from the compositing I'm going to select this right here change this side to the node editor just sort of drag that out so that red is a little bit less I render again show you how this works under render render there's ever anything that makes you want to go out and buy the new Mac Pro it's a rendering in blender okay so now we have blackness because we don't have the composite node plugged in if we just escape it gets Internet that's looking better it's smoother cool um now if you wanted to just leave it like that where it looked like your hand was on fire and you were just holding you know human torch like you could and that would be fine um but if you want to make it look like sort of you're holding a ball of fire that's coming up out of your hand or something like that then you'll need to do a bit of masking and I guess rotoscoping and it's not as terrifying as it sounds it but it is tedious and now since this tutorial is part a masking tutorial that's what I'm going to show you how to do it's not that bad so well what we're going to do is first so I'm going to go back to default escape that render and I'm going to add a bit more resolution to this flame so I'm going to come over here and check high-resolution change the divisions to maybe fifty four and now um this is going to take a while to bake you can play it if you want to but is going to play very slowly frame by frame that's not that bad I guess and you could watch it all the way through what I like to do though I'll just hit pause and bake and that bakes the rest of that so that we are able to watch it it'll it'll be cashed in down here this gray line go all the way to the end and you'll be able to watch a little bit smoother and that's just going to help us with our masking and compositing and everything else but you see that number since we did have high resolution checked it's going pretty slowly that'd be about it's a little bit faster than if you were to actually play it and watch it but it's still pretty slow so what I'll do is not make you listen to me talking to this and I'll just skip to when it's done so see in a bit alright and it is done you can see it is nicely baked in and if we just watch this I'm going to save it first just in case blender gets me great ideas about crashing so there we go our fires a lot higher resolution looks a lot sharper if I just do a good yeah just do a test render here press render okay so there we go there's our fire composited over top of our hand and it looks pretty messy quite chaotic so um you could leave like that if you want your hand to look like it's on fire but but what I'm going to do like I said is sort of cut out my hand with masking and make it look like I'm sort of holding that fire in my hand so let's go back to the motion tracking tab change it from tracking to mask I'll select new mask and we'll just name this hand and the way this works um I just start maybe right here well the fire doesn't come out till frame 58 we'll start frame 58 drag the sub give us our ourselves some more room we don't really need all that anyway alright now this is pretty easy all you do is hold down control and click and then just keep clicking I'm just going to click around this hand here doo-doo-doo and this is definitely the tedious part of visual effects of any kind now I'm sort of taking the inside to the the outside of these fingers are blurry and I'm not I'm trying to just sort of do the inside because well we'll do is we'll blur this mask so um we don't want you know if it's showing something we don't want it to be my shirt or something we want it to be that light color I don't know ten mates it's a party to make any sense at all what I'm talking about is I'm not going around here you know stick and sort it to the inside and we're just clicking along here what I've heard is if your if you were a rotoscoping artist and Hollywood or a visual effects artist I should say you would do this every day for 10 hours a day I probably more fund rotoscope you know Chris Evans or something like that then it would be to burrow scope my hand Hey but yeah people do this same type of thing we have different software and all that and programs I'm sure that make it easier but the gist is there okay so um basically it's anywhere where you don't want there to be fire so I think I noticed in the render there's some fire over here we want that to be on the we want our hand to sort of be in front of that I think we'll see so this doesn't really matter this part down here so I'm just going to cut that around and press option C to connect it there we go we have our hand so now I'll show you what that does we're on frame 58 um and actually before we do that we have record selected I'm going to press record and this is our mask now this is our hand mask and we can animate this mask so we have a keyframe dropped in here at frame 58 but my hand moves over here so we have to move this mask and this is where it really gets annoying and people probably give up and never try to do anything like this ever again but because we're going to be patient with it we'll get through it so now you have to reposition the mask you have to sort of always keep in mind where that fire is and what you know which part of your hands are going to be in front of the fireball which part of your hands are sort of holding the fireball again you can get as specific as you would like or as general for these I'm going to sort of create a box drag them over rotate them to the side and I'm not going to bore you with doing this entire handles either speed it up or just skip ahead for you because important to think is just showing you how to do it you can do it on your own I went a little too far over with that and the nice thing about this being fire we can blur all these edges they won't be perfect and no one's gonna really care because there's all the fire on his hand that's not normal anyway so it's not like they're gonna notice if part of your pinkie appears to have fire coming through that's a rough Monday my hands that on fire rotate that around fit that in place and now for this guy just move it all down rotate it the rest of this doesn't really matter just drag it out okay there you go now if if you examine that keyframe with this you see it's in place at frame 58 and it's short of stutters and goes to frame 86 so now what we're doing is sort of just the journal will jump every few frames put it in place and then go back later I call jump another I don't know 20 or so frames to over here and grab hey to select all of these grab that mask and this is way off here so I have to really get creative now put all of this in place just pressing C to create a selecting circle I'll rotate that around press C again select all of this I had am wasn't really a job offer but you know I have I would know then I get an email for a job that someone somewhere wants me to apply for and so reason I got one last week it was a roto scoping artist which is similar to what we're doing right here and I thought about it it's like hey you know I'm not good at it but I understand I could get could and then I started making this tutorial and I thought hmmm hey someone else can have it because it's not it's not boring especially we got coffee or something or you want to listen to some music it's just really tedious and depending on the situation you might have to be incredibly specific and precise that's why people use green screen so much so they don't have to cut out you know if you're doing a whole scene you don't want to have to cut out people's bodies that's what I meant about the rotating how did I do that yes I selected one of these and grabbed it you can rotate around and that might be easier for you you can rotate and scale this you know you can maybe just do a few vertices and then smooth it out with this thing I like just sort of these points and we're going to blur them all anyway so it doesn't really matter doesn't matter how you masks I'm just going to grab all of these and sort of drag them out and put these ones closer to the thumb okay oh yeah God get rid of that big gap and that one I know fun stuff fun tutorial there we go create a pretty good mask there um so now we can sort of see it follows that gets in place at frame 111 and what we'll do now is go back later and fill in some of these gaps so right there it's way off so let's select everything sort of put it in place and that's when it really gets easier when you're just filling in the gaps um so it's good if you go frame by frame it's gonna really drive you nuts but if you do every 20 frames or so and then go back and sort of fill in the places where it gets off then that's way easier and easier to manage so um what I'm going to do now is I'll show you what that mask has done so I'm going to go back to default and I'll escape this render here and if I just play this we want to have a stop on frame 1 11 frame 111 there we go that's where we did their last keyframe on our mask I'm gonna uncheck record for now and I'll just render this see what it looks like and I'll show you how to get that mask in place and should be pretty cool I really love coffee I I always always have it pretty much whenever I'm working on blender okay there we go there's our vendor so I'm going to press escape and just go to compositing I'm going to make sure I'm going to change this to the timeline down here and yep it's on frame one eleven so that's good so now all we have to do is if I press shift a come down to where is it I don't know where it is output input yeah mask plugin that masks a node if I change select this drop down menu there's our hand mask that we've created I just plug that into the factor you can see now my hand is on fire but we want the opposite of that so if I press shift a and just search for an invert node inverts that mask and boom there we go that's what we want to see you can see the effect our mask at now that fire looks like it's actually coming out of my hand but like I said there's all these jagged edges so I'm just jumping in a blur node change this to fast Gaussian and we'll do maybe four for each of these and we can turn the scale way up or way down I think one is good and there you go now you can you know it's some of those fingers are disappearing but that's what I was saying earlier because it's fire it doesn't really matter no one's really looking to see if some of those fingers are on fire because personally I think it looks sort of cool but that's it that's the effect we have going on there now we want to do um oh so that's masking very easy make sure you have your math node dropped in inverted and then of this blur node so the mess gets blurred and then just plugged into the factor of this alpha over and a pretty easy stuff it looks cool now we're going to actually do some compositing quickly to make our fire a little bit better I'm going to press shift a go down to I don't know where I'm going to search for a glare drop in a glare node and we don't want too much you could do streaks I might do fog glow see what that looks like if I set this threshold to zero and sort of dial back on the mix starting at negative one and just going back then maybe decreasing the threshold that's pretty good let's see what streaks looks like I might like that better I don't know I think I'm worried about the streaks is just how you get sort of these side-to-side things I don't think I want that so I'll just leave it on a fog glow so we have that nice glowing look going on oh that's nice umm what's next now I guess some some basic just overall color correction so we have our flame looking pretty good what I'll do now on press shift a add in a color balance node and I'll make sure it's after the alpha over that way we'll correcting the whole thing and let's just do some basic contrast taking the darks down a bit maybe dragging them to the blue just a touch and normally you want to put the lights up but since my footage was overexposed I take the lights down a bit maybe the mids down to just a tad just so my correct my footage a little bit hmm you can play with it depending on what you have going on obviously you want the fire to be a little bit blown out because fire usually is you also want to be able to tell that it's fire okay I like that I think that's cool I might add in a vignette also so shift a distort lens distortion set that to a value of 1 and then shift a this is a math node so vector converter math change that to less than and a value of 0 I believe you put it in the bottom could be wrong top value of zero there we go and now a blur node so just doors blur I searched for blur change it to fast collagen we'll do a value of 55 for each of these and a size of two just to get it pretty pretty soft on the edges and then just a mix node said to multiply and boom there we go that's probably too much been getting so I'm going to turn down the factor oh there we go head it in the wrong side turn down the factor and there we go and that is cool so now what I think I'll do um before I just go ahead and call it final obviously they're parts I didn't finish with the masking you'll want to go through and complete this mask so you know go through every frame follow it around just like we did pretty easy stuff and other things you can do I'm going to go to default and you can clear your bakes and go to smoke high resolution I'm going to uncheck uncheck that for now also free bake so I can adjust this free all bakes smoke I've resolution change the divisions up and that makes it even cleaner fire and also the divisions of the resolution if you turn that up you get better fire and um I should have adjusted the material before I did anything so now it's going to play very slowly because I haven't baked it but I want to also make just some small adjustments to this fire so I'll let it play a little bit before we get some fire in there and you can see that even just changing the divisions to two makes it look even smoother and better and more realistic I'm just going to go ahead and pause that right there blender might freak out on me okay there we go oops I'm going to drag this up I'll press I'll create a box of render box I'm going to just press shift B drag that over just where the fire is and shift Z that allows us to just render that part I'm going to change this back to the node editor and just map out a little bit better of a flama I wasn't too happy with our flame material here turn this up make that a little brighter maybe change the value down to a 4 for the emission just move out smooth out this orange orange e color here I think that's that's a little better a little bit happier with that what's all about just making those small adjustments um that you want to make I don't know what I'm saying there so what frame did we do our mask on I think it was let's change let's check this I'll check motion-tracking frame 66 it has a pretty good mask I'm going to adjust this a little bit so I'll hit record oops I just want to end on a good final render see what it looks like so I'll move this in place rotate that a bit all right now what we can do just go to default so if we just hit render there and that winders out our fire with higher resolution not necessarily higher samplings you'll want to increase the samplings for your final animation boom there we go that looks cool holding the fire in the hand and I'm happier with the result of that but our effects aren't plugged in so I'm going to escape this render and oops instead of everything going into the viewer we want to add it to the composite - if we change this down here to the uv/image editor and just change it from change to viewer node then your you'd be able to actually save that image image save as that's it for this tutorial there you go that's how to create a simple visual effect of holding some fire in your hand and hopefully I gave you the basic knowledge of you'd be able to go out and create your own fire if you wanna make that fire blue or green or whatever by all means go for it if any of you create something awesome send me an email and show it to me I'd love to see that and you can check out my website for more tutorials and if you like this you could feel free to like and subscribe to YouTube so again thanks for watching and look forward to the next tutorial

Channel: Kenan Proffitt

Views: 238,705

Keywords: Visual Effects (Film Company Role Or Service), Blender (Software), Film (Media Genre), Animated, Fire, Power, Tutorial (Media Genre), Blenderbranch, Blender, Branch, Kenan Proffitt, Blender Branch Tutorial, Masking, Animation

Id: F_2ZNf2VDQw

Length: 45min 14sec (2714 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 31 2015