Blender's New GEOTRACKER Addon is INSANE! | Flaming Axe Tutorial

hey there I'm Alex with level up plus VFX and today I'm going to show you how to make this flaming ax using Keen tools Geo Tracker and Emergen in blender let's jump right into the tutorial shall we installing Geo Tracker is just like installing any other plug-in go to edit preferences go to the add-ons section and click install next we're going to want to open up Geo Tracker you can type in Geo and you'll get the interfacekin tools face Builder and Geo Tracker and go ahead and make sure you install the dependencies will be available down here in the online version you'll get a 30-day free trial during this beta and it is awesome so I highly recommend you take full advantage of it once you've created this Geo Tracker node you'll have two missing options which is your clip and your camera use the eyedropper to select the camera you've added into your scene and set your focal length if you don't know it go ahead and check estimate focal length then if you know the sensor width and height of your camera go ahead and type in those but usually default is just fine finally we need to add in our clip click on the folder icon select your footage and scroll to the bottom and make sure the whole sequence is selected once you've loaded that in if you look through your camera you should see your footage in the background you can see that my ax head is already line lined up with your footage but don't worry if it's not we can do that using the pin mode for faster tracks also make sure you analyze your footing according to the add-on this analyzes your footage and pre-calculates a file to make tracking faster however I still found my tracking was fairly slow but your mileage may vary my footage is in 4k after all once you've finished analyzing go ahead and click Start pin mode and you'll get a wireframe of your ax go ahead and click anywhere on your ax to create a pin and Orient it correctly until you feel like it's set personally I already have it aligned so I'm pretty good but it's always good to set a couple pins just in case for when you need to adjust it later in the future now that we're done we can go down to the bottom here and click track to start if your track starts slipping like it did here for me this is where you really get to take advantage of these pins on the frame where it starts slipping go ahead and grab one of your pins and drag it back into place you can also click anywhere on your mesh to create a new PIN if you need more control once your ex is in a position that you feel is more aligned go ahead and click the refine button which will reinterpret the keyframes that you've set earlier once you've refined your track it should create a more smooth animation throughout your entire thing and you can continue tracking backwards do this until your entire track is complete for the sake of this tutorial I'm just going to keep this tracked area as all I need and I'm going to show you how to export it into embergen scroll down to the scene option and open it up at the bottom you'll see an option that says either camera or geometry make sure geometry is checked and click export this will create a new empty in your scene that follows the track of your object let's go ahead and exit pin mode and then we're just going to duplicate our Cube you can see that the duplicate still has keyframes so I'm going to go ahead and select those and click delete to delete them I'm then going to go into the object properties create one keyframe on this Frame and go to my empty and copy those keyframes once I've copied them I can paste them on my copy geometry and it should still line up with the rest of my footage this is basically baking the animation into keyframes so I can export it as an fbx which is what we're going to do next do file export and choose fbx make sure selected objects only is enabled scroll to the bottom and in the bake animation settings make sure for start and keyframe is unchecked then go ahead and Export your fbx and now it's time to jump into ambergen in Ember gen what I'm going to do is use a preset so I'm going to go over to the presets section and I'm going to choose this fire torch preset given I want this ax to basically look like this I thought this was a perfect preset for my scenario I've always been impressed by how high quality these presets in embergen are I just love them but here's the problem this is a log and we want it actually to be our ax so how do we add it in our node graph right click and choose import then load in your fbx file you'll see that we now have a mover cursor on our screen and we have just this tiny little ax in our scene we want it a little bit bigger than that so let's go ahead and go to the master scale option and set it to 10. this makes the ax a little too big but that's fine we're now just going to move it until it fits inside our boundary box now that we have it in a spot we like we can go ahead and use the geometry node and replace the actual shape primitive here playing through our scene now we can see that the ax is the thing on fire but it keeps on clipping outside of the bounding box so we need to change the size of that in embergen the way you control the bounding Buck size is in the simulation size node for me it was really confusing when First Learning but basically the voxel count is just changing the size of the bounding box think of the Box will count as just the bounds of your bounding box so for X I'm going to go ahead and set this to 250 and for y I'm going to also set it to 250. I'm going to click apply resolution and it's going to change the size of the bounding box I also probably want to bring my ax head just a little bit down so the Fire doesn't clip on the top let's go ahead and play that back it looks like it's still clipping a little bit on the y-axis As I push out the ax so let's go ahead and increase this to 300 and see what happens there we go that looks much better now before we export we need to do one more thing in the simulation node which is the time control the time steps are by default set to 60 hertz but we need them to be set to 24 to match our frame rate be aware that changing the time steps to a smaller value will speed up your animation so you're going to need to change certain settings in your simulation in order to get the fire looking the way you want once you have your simulation looking the way you want go to the back of your node graph right click and add an export VDB node plug that into the volume processing VDB and you should be good to go just make sure you have export temperature set so we can get full control over our shaders add a name and a file directory to your expert and make sure the number of frames is set to match your footage and a start frame is also set to one given in blender our start frame is always one go ahead and Export that now and we'll jump into blender to give it a little bit of a Shader now that we're back in blender we need to go ahead and import our fire press F3 to open up the search option and type in open and you should see open VDB come up as one of the options go ahead and find your VDB files which should be a whole list of files for every frame make sure you select them all and then click import openvdb when you do it you might not see anything but remember we set our scale to 10 so it's actually just 10 times the size of what it should be we'll simply go into the scale option and set this to 0.1 in order to bring it back down to earth we also moved our simulation around a little bit so I'm going to go ahead and reposition it to match our ax once you have it positioned correctly you should see that it aligns with your footage perfectly let's go ahead and create a fire Shader for it and then we'll export it for nuke now I've already created the Shader setup for this but it's very simple and I'll walk you straight through it the very first thing you're going to want to do is create three attribute info nodes one name density one name flames and one named temperature using a math node I'm just multiplying the density by 2 and then pulling that into the density socket I then removed the density attribute and changed the color to be a little bit darker than the default now in order to get this cool fire texture we can see that that's not actually what it looks like if it tries to just come out of embergen it actually will look something like this which is just really low detail so by using a tutorial from iridicium I learned that creating this little sandwich like color ramp here gives you some really cool fire results that look much more realistic I then did a mix color node with the method set to color I'm using that temperature socket to plug into a black body node and that's my B socket for this mix color note I set the factor to 1 and plug that into the emission color I can then control the emission strength to be as bright or as dark as I want I found 6 to be a good value and then I'm all set up for this node but that's a basic fire Shader I'm sure you could spend some more time to make it a little bit better and at the end of the day this also does come down to the resolution of your export from embergen but I'm pretty happy with these results and we'll refine them even further in the comp speaking of the comp let's go ahead and prep this for export and jump into nuke the very first thing I'm going to want to do is go into my render settings and make sure transparent is check marked then in my output settings I'm going to make sure that whatever output format I'm using has set to rgba that means I'll have an alpha channel in my files so it makes it easier to put it over my footage once your settings are all set up go ahead and render out your footage and jump into nuke for the composite alright now that we're in Nuke I'm going to show you my basic workflow for making this flaming ax really pop the very first thing I want to do though is show you what the element would look like if it was just over the footage by default it looks like that not very impressive I know right well don't worry we'll do a couple things to make it look a lot better the very first thing I did was I used a keyer note in order to key the fire for some reason the alpha channel that comes out of your smoke simulation doesn't give the fire an opacity it's by using a keyer node blurring it a little bit and pressing that back over or getting the alpha channel on our fire the next thing I'm going to want to do is add this little bit of heat Distortion here the way I did that was pretty simple I just used a blur node where I blurred my image a little bit grated it up to be a little bit brighter then I used a noise texture with my element as a mask in order to create something that looks like this using an I transform node allows me to distort my footage by a very small scale like 1.03 in order to get this little heat Distortion that wafts up from the Flaming ax I think this looks really cool and really helps sell the effect now what can we do to actually change the look of the fire because right now this doesn't look that impressive well the very first thing I'm going to do is add some glow to it if we look right here adding some glow already really helps the fire look better I'm simply using a basic glow node with the brightness toned down a little bit and the size turns super high and I'm doing a basic merge A over B then to get some really realistic burning highlights and a nicer color I use a glow exponential node feel free to play with your size intensity and fall off until you get something that you like I'm also recoloring the fall off just a little bit and make sure to check mark glow only then I'm plusing that over my footage to get something that looks like this then the Final Touch was just to add a little bit of lens dirt which again just helps integrate this fire into the scene a little bit more now I don't have time today to do a full tutorial on how I did this relighting honestly that could be an entire video in it of itself but if you really want a tutorial on that make sure to leave a comment down below but that's basically it that's how you create a flaming ax in blender using the new Geo Tracker and Ember gen with a little bit of compositing and nuke if you guys like this tutorial go ahead and leave a like I've been Alex from level up plus VFX and I'll see you guys in the next one peace thank you

Channel: LevelUp+ VFX

Views: 10,155

Keywords: blender, tutorial, compositing, nuke, embergen, geotracker, geotracking, vfx

Id: q1Vr8uTnrzA

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 17 2023