Cheap Tricks | Creating A Zombie Horde Battle Scene - Game of Thrones VFX Part 3

hello again everyone Hoshi here it's great to see you and may I say you're looking great today you want to mess around with some visual effect techniques well let's get right to last time we horst around with this guy and today in part three of our Game of Thrones series we're gonna play with some humans whole spectrum of them humans in peril in battle undead exploding and Beyond dead okay it's a weak theme but we've got a lot of super helpful information in here as usual we're covering a whole lot in this video and if you're in a hurry you can always quickly browse through the video using our lovely table of contents below but you should really watch everything because we've got a present for you sometimes the most complicated part of shops like these isn't the VFX he was getting an amazing stunt performer costumes props fans lights and a green screen studio and honestly none of that's very easy so a special thanks goes out to Ronan Traynor martes vitek and all of our talented by performers from the UK's independent drama and to Mookie international for producing all of this beautiful content and I can only cover so much today and you know since we've got all this amazing footage lying around many stunt people fought and died to bring you this green screen footage they didn't die they're actually super in control of their bodies really talented this high quality footage all of it is available now thanks to the amazing digital pigeon but no not this thing this this is digital pigeon an amazing sight for sharing large files including large media that needs to be previewed fast they're graciously hosting these 17 gigabytes of individual clips here the footage was shot in slow motion and each green-screen piece is cropped down for efficiency these experts repeated some of the fight moves at multiple angles and it just looks like they had a bloody amazing time from the link below you can quickly preview all the files we have available since these are large files just download what you need by clicking right here also 17 gigabytes isn't really meant to be zipped so check out these glorious files and also check out digital pigeon comm when you need to send large files fast now every green screen shot may present a random challenge of its own but if you're rockin Prime at key r6 this high-quality footage is usually as simple as hitting Auto define key cleaning the background restoring the foreground and then combining your character with stock footage photos whatever we want to see you make something cool or funny with this stuff so tag us wherever you post this so we can share your work you know and feel like proud parents they should jumpstart your creativity and be a great way for you to start practicing and putting together your own scenes today up top I'll show you a few examples of working with this footage and then later on we'll play with downloading and bringing some digital characters to life I'm gonna move along a little quicker to make sure that we get to cover all of these exciting bits let's do it let's start with this guy who's having a stressful day at the office ladies and gentlemen meet James Unsworth who we lovingly called the dude of beards we filmed the dude in front of a green-screen holding up a shield and doing his very best to not die how many is Prime at here to key out the green-screen utilizing the spill killer to try to fight off all of this Green reflecting in all the silver parts of his costume I'll admit it was a little tricky to get the balance just right but once I did it was time to combine him with this background I downloaded from pics here I apply a color composite matcher to my night and changed his target midpoint to one of these kind of gold or sepia tones from the background with my colorblindness anytime I can use a color matching filter the more confident I feel in my composition going forward next it's not needed to look more like he was making contact with the ground and for that I'm gonna use VFX shadow as you've seen me use before VFX shadow allows me to establish a guide ground plane and then set a direction for my cast shadow and do my best to match these shadows that are kind of in the background of this photo the background image is super sharp throughout so to simulate a little bit more depth of field I'll apply a universe spot blur I set the spot position to the far end of this hallway switch it from an ellipse to a rectangle adjust the width and height the more this is cranked up the more it looks a little bit like a tilt shift effect but that's not what I want so I'm going to turn it down to a pretty subtle amount if you don't have spot ler you could always create a compound blur map and then apply it to this layer to liven up my comp I'm bringing in some burning debris from action V effects I'll scatter them around the comp in a few places that I think will look good because you know dirt and sand super flammable this might seem obvious but you should always make sure the scale and speed of your fire matches the scale and speed of where you're compositing it to if your fire scaled up but moving too fast it looks wrong and if you shrink it down it'll appear slower and equally wrong my original piece of footage is in slow motion and luckily almost all the action VFX elements are shot at 60 frames per second this means I can right-click and interpret the footage of any of these to conform to a 24 frame per second rate effectively putting them in slow motion you can see the frame rate of this footage is changed up here at the top of the project window in fact since I know I want all of the stock footage to play slower I can right click on that piece of footage then go to interpret footage and say remember interpretation or Control Alt C and then I could select the rest of my stock elements all at once and press ctrl alt V to paste that 24 frame per second interpretation across the board and command of course if you're on a Mac alright let's shoot this guy with some flaming arrows I Photoshop this allows you look an arrow which I'll import and make its own composition combining it with one of the torch assets from action VFX makes it like 20 times cooler then with two keyframes in the slight arc these arrows can fly dangerously through frame creating dread but maybe some of these other enemy archers are slightly better than this and they hit this dude right in the shield how do we do that we create a null called shield then we click on the original footage layer and track motion if you did things in this order the motion target should automatically be the shield layer and now all you need is a couple of high contrast points to track the position and rotation I'm gonna ignore scale because I don't think it'll help in this case then it's simply a matter of parenting a few arrow layers to the shield null masking them a bit and dragging them behind our dude of beards video layer you could slap on some different color Corrections so these arrows don't look identical if you want or you could just accept the exceptional craftsmanship of these enemy combatants next let's add a dynamic element to this shield I'll drag in my pre comp of that flaming arrow and parent it to the shield layer right here then I'll add a few keyframes to have that arrow slide into place as if sticking in the shield in this case the shield is moving so little and the arrow comes in so fast it isn't obvious of the arrow as a child of that shield but if you did this in a wider shot I would suggest splitting the clip so one part of the arrow is not parented the shield until it makes contact speaking of contact let's throw a fireball in right as the arrow hits the shield I'm not gonna parent this one to anything I'm just gonna let that fire breathe and kind of flame out right where it is I will parent a bit of this ground fire asset to the shield handle animate a little subtract mask to time its appearance with that arrow strike then in the far foreground I'll throw in some sideways embers and in the background will add some burn marks around these to ground fire areas these are just stock images but if you ever need to create something like this on your own just use some fractal noise and some radial blur I'll pre comp these 3d layers along with the background so they'll work and super calm which you've seen me use in part 1 & 2 of this series just like before I'll select all my layers and select the super cop effect and all my layers are reunited in the magical graphical workspace that is super comp applying some flame presets the fiery elements automatically adds some nice raps and heat distortion and tweaking around with some of the integration presets can help our night sit right in between all these flaming arrows let's add an adjustment layer with some Mojo on top and some universe heat wave to make it even hotter in here and what I love about working with super comp is that I could throw in a new fire asset or something and get it integrating almost immediately also those of you with functioning guys out there probably notice there's some green spilling into our dude possibly the whole time so to tidy that up I'll add color ista and pull down the saturation of the green highlights and look at that guys pretty cool at this point I think it's obvious that if you've got a little bit of well produced green screen footage and a background to match you can use their traditional compositing skills or I unique to a like Super Comp to put together unique things that no one's ever seen before you could even get all stylized with these assets and probably do something while that I haven't even thought of yet now let's move on to chapter 2 now one thing that was pretty cool in the old G ot series was the way those White Walkers really had an aversion to certain materials you know they just shattered out of existence when hit now we've covered disintegrations before and that's a handy template you can go download right now if you'd like but here I want to create an almost entirely digital shot mimicking this one from the show so I'll start with a clip of this guy swinging a sword I'll time stretch him to 40% so he's playing closer to real time lastly I qiyam out with practically no trouble I place him in a comp along with a frame from that original clip I'm mimicking so I can start tinkering with the colors for the most part it's a combination of adjusting individual color curves and using color matching filters that source that original reference image as I add in each new element throughout this video I'll be tinkering with the color Corrections along the way I may not always stop in detail to talk about it otherwise we'll be here all day next I need a background so I hit up pix here where I find this image of an oldish looking castle with some snow on it in Photoshop I paste some generic wintry landscape over this waterfront part and use a super feathered brush to speckle the background with some fog I saved the flattened image and bring it back into After Effects where I can paste in a color matching filter and then do the old make it a 3d card adjust the anchor point some optimal folding point duplicate the layer and then fold it on itself also if I make the actor a 3d card now I can move my camera around and bring the whole thing to life a little more to simulate some camera shake I add a wiggle expression to the position and the X rotation of the camera and that sound means it's time for a wiggly pro tip for you hi I'm Hoshi and most of us know wiggle expressions like this but when I use them I add a seed random expression just before to lock in that wiggle motion you've probably noticed that when you add or move layers in a comp with Wiggles expressions those Wiggles are recalculated no big deal really but if you define the random scene ahead of time then you can change your comp and your Wiggles will stay the same hey wake up lucky we're talking about expressions this is especially helpful with things like camera shakes because sometimes After Effects cashes layers with effects that rely on the camera if not it's got a rear end of them each time you add a layer and that wastes time so remember see random pick some arbitrary but unique value in parentheses and thank you for tuning in for this red giant pro tip you might like to subscribe to our Channel and you love it alright this camera move is good but the backgrounds too bright so while darken it and add an adjustment layer with Magic Bullet Mojo which I'll constantly be tinkering with a bit and can we just agree that if one of my layers spontaneously changes a bit later it's because I tweaked the color correction cool cool cool I'm gonna add some shadow to my solider using VFX shadow with a simple softness so he looks a little bit more integrated I'll bring in a foreground and a background fog layer from action of the effects for both I'll add the set matte effect so they have an alpha now then a fill effect so they match my background fog exactly and I can use the alpha curves to force them to be a little bit more opaque we're on our way now and all our pain could be solved with three keyframes but I'm pretty sure I promised you more so to bring this shot even more life we got to add some death in the form of a completely CGI character don't be afraid and we've actually kind of covered this before on cheap Trick's you start at Nixon mohkum where you can download free animations of characters they even have several undead looking characters if you want one of these let's say I don't I can go to sketchfab search for downloadable zombies and then probably find something great so long as it's a human morph of type I can download and unpack the files if it's an FBX or obj and upload it right back to mix ammo place some rigging guides and then watch the miracle of cloud computing finding the right animation for your piece can be somewhat of an art I'm going to search for this massive online database to try to find something appropriate for the zombie attack and I'll settle on this one called hmm well I download that file and now I need to turn this nice little animated FBX into an obj sequence so it can render in element 3d now I could do this in cinema 4d or in blender and you know in fact let's just throw them both up here import your animated FBX in either if you're in cinema group everything together if you're in blender delete this cube in cinema you can use Riptide pro or steady baek's X rec to export a model sequence in blender you say export obj and then in the options over here on the side check the animation box then you let them do their thing filling up folders with delicious 3d models and that's it we can go back to After Effects now and add a solid will apply element and then inside there we'll make sure to select import sequence and then click on the first frame of our exported zombie collection you'll know you've properly imported a sequence because it'll show the frame count right here now all we got to do is figure out which of these textures is the body so we can relink those textures that came from sketchfab click out of there and then an element under Group one will create a group null let's quickly pop him behind the foreground fog layer and then we'll use that group null to place rotate and scale our zombie I mean our white white Walker in place now element has a handful of lighting options including the power to Costas but I'm lazy and I don't really want to deal with actual lights so instead I'll go to render settings lighting and use the single light preset and rotate it around until it looks like some faint top lighting after all this is all really diffuse I also go to physical environment and I'll select my castle background to override the default you can add some motion blur using a variety of methods I'm using real smart today but if I were really smart I would have remembered to add a ground plane layer in element and set its material to matte shadow ok how we doing nice but let's make this zombie swipe a little bit more imminent he doesn't really go into full swing mode until about frame 16 so we'll go back to the particle look baked animation and add a frame offset of 16 frames great now they're attacking each other at the same time but I don't need this follow through actions so I'll add a keyframe to the playback speed right here where I wanted to stop and then add a zero percent speed keyframe one frame later my keys playing freeze tag or something and now begins our process of just overloading this one layer with a ton of effects now remember that effect called shatter we use it to Thanos me a while back and we're basically gonna do that same thing here as a one-off I'll add the plug-in which by default shows this wireframe of sorts I'll change the shape to the glass pattern with a bunch of repetitions I'll move the position of the force one over here somewhere and then add some keyframes to the radius for the shatter so it's zero at the beginning and then spreads out to cover the whole walker once he's struck leaving this all in wireframe mode helps me kind of preview what's gonna happen a little faster if I tweak some of the physics settings I can get a shatter shape that I like and it's a simulation so you got to play around with it when you're ready switch your view mode to rendered and I'm actually going to drag this shatter effect up before my real smart motion blur because I'm you know in fact a mini pro tip when possible arrange effects in the effects window in a thoughtful order by which I mean the most computationally optimal order element has to exist then it needs to shatter before I add motion blur but there's no reason my color correction needs to be before the motion blur because then it's wasting time rendering phantom frames just to get a result it's like asking someone to peel an apple after they slice it yeah I mean it and it may not be a lot of time saved but with anything like a fake motion blur or time echoes considerate all right let's see how this shattering zombie looks kind of like trash but that's okay shatters an old plugin and sometimes when you get a team of old guys together the magic happens so let's keyframe some roughen edges to go from practically no erosion all the way to this blotchy or shape as it explodes well keyframe some brightness and contrast to kind of snow if I him a bit and we'll copy over some of those color matching filters from our soldier layer and then no kidding we'll add some bevel alpha to this mix to make the chunks look a little bit more like volumetric snow with all of this stuff motioned lured we're about one or two pieces of stock footage away from completing the shatter effect I'm going to use this powder hit from action essentials which is literally in like every action movie kid and then one of the free blood mist elements from action VFX I've got a whole collection of them all I do is bring it in invert unmold and tint it for this comp now I designed the physics in my shattering lair to look like highwind so I'll add an additional foreground cloud element with a speed cranked up and a few key frames to kind of carry out those powder bursts and now I've got a nice high wind kind of effect I'm noticing that it looks a little strange that he freezes all at once meaning my snow tinting is kind of happening all at once so to fix that I'm gonna use a really bloated solution which is duplicating my whole zomboid layer then on the bottom copy I'll disable that brightness and contrast effect and then go to shatter and tell it to just render the layer which means the parts that haven't been broken away then I'll go to the top Zomboid layer to its shadow effect and tell it to render just the pieces that have broken away the result should be the light snow breaking away over the darker legs let's see how we're doing and not too shabby but he does look lonely and two's company but zombies Eric crowd alright imagine you want a horde of zombies sounds intimidating but it doesn't have to be what we just did with Walker numero uno is relatively close to what we would do to create a whole horde of zombies using element you repeat some of those steps finding models on sketchfab you're really in the market for more of a game quality character since each frame is gonna have to be saved as a separate file you don't want a ginormous file and also mix ammo won't like that either but throw your model into mix mo oh that's for something else throw your model into mix ammo and then browse through the mini zombie animations and walks they have then check this in place box then save those FBX files export some obj sequences the more characters you do this to the more variety you'll have in your final and variety is good unless you're lazy like me then fog and small is good I'm gonna demonstrate this all in a clean comp just so you can see it better well throw an attempt background and then a solid with element and then an element we'll import each zombie sequence we'll scale them about the same and then drag them each into their own group they've each got kind of their own color and gate which will be helpful I'll also add a group 4 which is just a big ground plane with the matte shadow setting on its material I'll exit element and go to each group and under group utilities I'll create a group null I'll rename this top one floor and I'll parent the other ones to it that way the floor is kind of something I can rotate and scale around later if I want control of this whole setup and if we did everything right we've got the walking dead on our hands I'm gonna go ahead and add some ambient occlusion to everything sampling one of these darker background colors and if I rotate this ground plane a little you can see we're getting some nice contact ao2 in fact if I were to dive into element and click on my plane I'd enable it as a mirror surface go to the material check mat reflection and turn up the reflectivity I'd add some normal bump mapping to it so the reflection would be a little bit warbly and cool to reflective though so let's turn down the glossiness and reflectivity of that material a bit yeah and using the Z gizmos I can animate all these groups to move forward together over time now obviously I need to play around with how fast each group moves based on its baked animation otherwise I've got like a slippery little situation going on here so yeah this is all closer now I'm not super concerned with this contact being rock solid because it's about to get a whole lot more crowded in here now at its core element is kind of a 3d particle replicator to some degree meaning that if I go up here to group one I'll see that one of the very first options is the particle replicator I'll set the shape to be a plane and then turn up the particle count giving me this cute little synchronised group of zombies let's scale the X and z shape up and so they're spread out a little bit more and then under the particle look baked animation I can change the loop mode to random loop offsetting their timing across the board and giving me these great zombies moving out of step with each other lastly I'll go to the replicator effects and up the X scatter and now I can repeat that same process with each of these three groups now the great part is that each of these groups is still being dragged slowly forward by its own group null allowing the fast zombies to move faster than the slow ones but with very little input needed to make this happen I can rotate my camera around enable the fog slap some motion blur on and then get something like this or this or this now these guys aren't super high quality but they work well as a horde moving together in the background of a comp and depending on your model is in the amount of time you spend setting them up you really could get some pretty decent results and I haven't even talked about adding lights or playing with the output settings which can all allow you to render them even better keep in mind you could use this process to pretty easily create background crowds that are cheering or at a concert or a marathon maybe a fleet of soldiers heading into battle I'm gonna drop this particular crowd into the background of our original shot and then pepper in a few of our awesome green screen soldiers just so there's some real humans in there and since our very own Marta was willing to die courageously for this cause I will add some blood splatter and make sure that her death wasn't in vain I mean if a zombie ever you know runs past you menacingly look out instant death but it's all good it's all good I've added some snow in the foreground and the mid-ground because why not and I'm pretty darn satisfied with this one-hit kill mode but what if something were more than dead what if you wanted to give birth to something that was just horrid well you'd go download Diego Luhan Garcia's skeleton model and pop it into cinema 4d he's pretty high quality so I'll add a polygon reduction group and throw in any pieces of the anatomy that I don't think we'll need that much definition like his legs then I'll bend his arms out a little bit so Mixon MO might like him more I'll open his jaw and then use the mesh brush to make him look a little more sinister hey export this obj and import him to mix him oh and luckily he maps his hands didn't really work out which is something I've run into before but I'm gonna file that under not crucial for this piece and there are so many fun jason and the argonauts you could do with an animated skeleton but I'm thinking about one particular moment in Game of Thrones so I think that a creepy crawl works obviously I saved the animated FBX and then export an obj sequence of it and go over to After Effects where I bring in this footage I shot with my phone had my daughter's preschool there was a bit of pavement showing in the background here so I took a steel frame of the original image created a pre comp and used CC power pin to unstretched a square patch and then I used kingpin tracker to paste this patch to the ground plane using the offset tools none of this needed 3d tracking to accomplish which is why kingpin is so great for little paint outs and patches like this well we're also going to use element n particular for this little shadow creature so I do have to run a 3d camera track anyway I'll establish a ground plane and create a camera and then an element 3d I'll import two things my skeleton crawl obj sequence and this kind of bumpy ground plane geometry I'll apply a dark shiny texture to that skeleton and then on this ground plane thing I'll make a material that has matte shadows doesn't create its own shadows and receives ray-traced ambient occlusion I find things like this are really helpful for 3d integration because it's something that he can cast shadows or Hamby an occlusion onto that isn't a perfectly flat plane and all this really helps make the contact points feel more organic okay I did this next stuff a bit out of order get over it the skeleton and the game of thrones shot is kind of warbly like he's boiling a bit and an element under particle look deformed I'm an enable the 3d distortion noise if your model has enough geometry you could use this tool to get some really cool results I'm gonna use it pretty subtly an element I'll grab an environment map that I made in my front yard it seems to work pretty well for reflecting in these shiny bones I'll add in a light try to match those of my original footage I'll make sure shadows are enabled and then I'll play with the light settings for diffuse shadows and elements own shadow settings to give me the look that I want now to save time going forward I'm going to pre render my skeleton as a PNG sequence so I have it for compositing purposes I'll also do a depth pass by going to elements output settings and selecting z-depth I can adjust the start and end points to give me a nice helpful map then I'll render that out too and now it's time to smoke this shadow demon up now I know what you're thinking trapcode particular can use obj sequences to generate particles but that sounds hard and I'm tired so I'm gonna see if I can generate some smoke with a graphics layer itself now I have a crazy idea so stick with me here I'm going to import my rendered skeleton layer create two copies I'll rename one 2d and the other I'll make a 3d card and attach it to my camera when a 3d objects attached to your camera it appears not to move though it's actually traveling through space along with your camera if you zero out the orientation it'll appear to face camera and if the XY position are set to zero it'll be centered and frame just pushed back some amount in 3d space from your camera now I'm gonna switch to a custom side view and enable a guide ground plane layer this is basically where the original element skeleton was crawling but now you can see this 3d card moving right through that same space along with the camera now switching back to my main camera view the last thing I need to do is scale the image so it's basically the exact same size as my comp window I could use an expression for this but I'm on a roll now why would I do this one very particular reason actually I try so hard not to make puns with the word particular it's impossible code particular can use a layer to emit particles from a 3d layer using its colors and alpha just like we did in the infinity war tutorial I set the layer emitter to be this 3d skeleton and let me show you what we get almost right off the bat cool right now the reason this is so cool to me is that these particles are being generated in roughly the same space as where that 3d layer was being rendered to so it'll linger in the right world space even as the camera continues to move you can kind of see this from the perspective view now watch what happens if these particles were cloudlets that grew in size over time and faded out in opacity I'll make their lifespan a little shorter and turn the shadow lets on so the whole thing will look a little smoky er also let's add a turbulence field under the air physics setting and see how we're doing now particle results will always look different for you on your end so finessing the settings within your own setup will always lead to the best result for you now it's time for that depth map we've already rendered I'll place duplicates of my particular layer in front and behind the skeleton I'll tweak the settings so they're not exactly the same but then on this top layer I'll add a set matte effect I'll select my skeleton depth map as the layer with effects and masks checked and source the luminance now soloing this you can see that the depth map makes it look like parts of the skeleton are lost in the fog and others aren't because I selected effects and masks here it means that I can go to my skeleton depth layer and add a curves adjustment and as I adjust the curves it'll affect the depth map allowing me to find a custom amount of obscuration that I wanted to have let's try dressing it up a little bit more just for ease I'm gonna duplicate my particular layer again I'll still use the layer emitter but this time I'll emit fewer particles but I'll turn on the ox system to continuously emit particles that are the same color with the turbulence field still intact the result is basically little particles that shoot off in squiggly patterns emitting a little trail of smoke behind them now these little particle trails are pretty cool but they look even cooler if I add a CC vector blur to them even if the default settings the result is kind of this cool ink bleed kind of looking effect I think it's kind of wild kind of stringy kind of gross I'll mess with my particular settings in a million more boring ways until I find the right balance with smoke that I like as a very last touch I'll also bring in this side smoke element from action VFX and then I'll port all the important layers into super comp where I can balance and blend them together making a special use of the blur behind tool will crank down the curves and practically day for night this thing and man there are some cool looks you can get if you wanted to colorize this smoke or something now what they did in the show but I think it looks cooler but anyway you get it the whole point is to show you that attacking a fully CG character doesn't have to be a big deal even when it's got some cool character effects and things associated with it this came together relatively quickly and I mean imagine if you weren't you know rushing to make a tutorial out of it and spend some real time it would look fantastic just like you today my friend remember you can go download that awesome footage hosted by Digital pigeon comm and make something awesome with it and then share it with us a red giant news or with me at action movie kid and after all I'm your action movie dad do it wouldn't hurt for you to you know and tweet me once in a while

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 56,258

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, trapcode, magic bullet, universe, particular, mir, video, training, blogger, mograph, plugin, postproduction, post production, game of thrones, cheap tricks, action movie kid, game of thrones vfx, battle, battle scene, primatte, chroma key, green screen, free green screen, free green screen footage, free footage, warriors, halloween, halloween video, halloween tutorial

Id: mBPy0YqJJTw

Length: 34min 49sec (2089 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019