CG Integration into Live Action Footage Blender + After Effects Tutorial (Part 1)

kia ora and welcome to this four part tutorial series where i'm going to try and cover my workflow for integrating cg elements into live action footage now this can be kind of a complicated process and i'm not sure if my way is the perfect way but i get some alright results so i want to share my process with you this is our final shop and as you can see i've shot my kitchen floor and i've added in the cg houses now what's important to note is that you'll notice they have a shadow they have reflections in the wood reflections in the bowl and there is a lantern on the house that's casting light on the floor of our real shot so that's what we're going to be covering in this tutorial today so first things first i shot my footage i shot it on my ursa mini pro and you can see i've added in this bowl here that's going to catch our reflections and i've also put my 360 degree camera right in the spot where i want the house so that we can get an hdri out of it i won't go into how to create an hdri but i will link a video that is very good for describing that process so we're going to be using a combination of after effects and blender for this so here in after effects i'm just going to import my footage grab my shot open that up and i'm just going to slide it to where i kind of know i want my shot to start maybe around here and where i want it to finish somewhere here and i'm just going to drag that into my composition like so and i'm going to go to my composition settings set the start frame to 1 and set the length to 150. now because i shot this in log it's a very flat profile which is not great for tracking so i'm just going to throw on a custom lot that i made that i will include in the description so let's go to our effects and presets and type lumetri drag on lumetri color here and under basic correction i can browse for my custom block so the first thing we're going to do here is actually um we're going to export this as an image sequence because blender prefers image sequences and they're kind of just easier to work with so i'm going to go ctrl m in my window here which is going to bring up the render panel i'm going to change this to a png sequence leave it at the same size and choose an output directory and hit render okay let's go on and import our rendered sequence i'm just going to import the same one that i used for the test so just click on that first frame make sure png sequence is selected and hit import now we can right click interpret footage main and set our frame rate to our footage frame rate which is 24. this is an important step don't forget i'm just going to drag that in on top of our footage and delete the footage since we're now just working with this sequence let's go ahead and camera track this so i'm going to right click i'm going to go to track and stabilize and i'm going to track camera now before this gets too far ahead of itself let's go to advanced settings and turn on detailed analysis and that is done and solving the camera now we have a bunch of checkpoints which is perfect so i'm just going to go to the end of the timeline here because i've got a couple of extra points that pop up here what we want to do is we want to set the origin of our scene which is where this camera is so we're going to choose a few points on the ground here see if we can there we go get our origin roughly where our camera is so let's set ground plane and origin that's that's the first step that you want to do alright so we've done that now we can right click and we can create a solid and camera if i scale this up here rotate it on the z axis now we can see that we have a pretty solid track okay let's add one more solid because we uh we have the position that we want our first house to be in we also need the position of this ball so i'm going to select our 3d camera track effect and let's select some points on this ball those seem to be working so let's right click and create a solid and now we have two solids in our scene next step we need to import this into blender i'm going to open up blender here i'm going to delete everything and i am using a plugin called ae to blend it's about ten dollars on the marketplace and if you're doing a lot of tracking you do it fast and easy this is a really good solution so there you go otherwise you can of course track natively in blender so i'm just going to select my camera here toggle down the transform and i'm going to select all of these properties and hit ctrl c drop back into blender and create camera and we can see over here our camera has popped in and it is animating let's hop back into after effects and let's do the same for our solids so let's grab all these transform options except opacity ctrl c and let's create a plane and let's do that one more time with that last one go to transform options everything except opacity ctrl c and create a plane now if we uh hop into our camera view we can see that it is tracking and i'm going to set my scene frame to 150 because that's the length of our image sequence and one other thing i'm going to do is we don't need this empty so i'm going to alt p on this plane clear the parent and keep the transformation and then delete this empty and we actually don't need this plane so i'm just going to delete that and scale up this empty to use for reference later all right now let's jump into our camera and add our background image so that we can see what's going on background images movie clip open hit a to select all of those images open clip there we go let's set the opacity to full now we're not going to be quite trapped yet and there's a few more things we need to do so if we stay in our camera settings here we've got to change our lens so we'll hop over to after effects select our camera go to layer camera settings and we'll see here that it thinks our lens is 38.13 millimeters so let's hop over to blender and input that in this box here 38.13 millimeters there we go and uh the other thing that's worth checking is your sensor size should be the same by default but yeah 36. it says horizontally as well you can set this to horizontal it won't change anything but why not let's give this a save so we are almost checked now but something is still a little bit off so the last thing we need to do is let's select our camera transform go over to these keyframes and pressing g we can make sure that these frames start on frame one so we'll just slide them over by one frame and now we should have a pretty good track okay i'm gonna leave it there for the first part of the uh the series just remember to save your work at this point and um yeah next time we're gonna bring in some models and start working those entire scenes so thank you for watching this far we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jared Jones

Views: 30,902

Keywords: Blender, After effects, CGI, Tutorial, Compositing

Id: 1Kg2pG7YOxY

Length: 8min 55sec (535 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021