Cheap Tricks | Creating A Zombified Horse - Game of Thrones VFX Part 2

[Music] hello friends its Hoshi your action movie dad here with another episode of cheap tricks I'd love to welcome you to part 2 of our four-part Game of Thrones series where we're taking inspiration from the once popular television show really I'm using the show as an excuse to explore a bunch of effects for the fantasy genre today specifically we're covering this undead horse I never know what'll be most useful to you so these videos are a bit overly thorough if you ever need please feel free to browse through them with the table of contents below this undead horse was enabled by two amazing new plugins that come as part of red giants VFX sweet kingpin trekker and spot clone tracker now kingpin will allow me to track and place these rotten flesh images right onto the horse's neck and face and spot clone tracker will help me erase all of these tracking points afterward now I don't mean to beat a dead horse here but some of these plugins made this so much easier and faster than without so yeah I'm gonna strongly recommend you check out all of the VFX suite if you don't like saving time cool but I really do and I'm gonna plug a cool plugin whenever I come across one whoever makes it let's go over how cool these two are kingpin tracker is a planar tracker that works entirely within After Effects and it's lightning fast it's faster than the native tracker and faster than like hopping out of the car to use mocha and then running back but here's what this plugin does very simply you take footage of something that you want to track or replace you add in a layer that you want to fill that space apply kingpin tracker and adjust the corners to where they should be select layer to track and then hit track now right here in the effects control window the magic is happening your video layer is being planar tracked faster than AE can preview it and when the tracks complete you can see that an incredibly faithful planar track has been performed and applied to your layer there are rendering options for sharpness and motion blur just below and check this out your original shape can have any kind of alpha you want and there are some incredible plane our transform tools available right here like scaling and offsetting and even rotating your layer so just this one track comes with a variety of opportunities now obviously Square signs and screens are the obvious choice for a plugin like this but while testing out this plugin I have the most fun tracking non-traditional shapes and seeing the results for example what if your producer thought that this guy's fade was too fresh because there are three acceptable haircuts or you know not fresh enough possibilities like this really opened up once you start to play with a plug-in if you haven't you can watch Stu's video on getting started with kingpin tracker where he talks about a simple and effective set extension much like they've used in Game of Thrones you could even take this exact technique and go a step farther creating something like this there's no camera tracking going on at all it's just me pasting different signage to different planes within this original footage in an upcoming episode I'll even show you how I use kingpin tracker to change this outfit into this one so that's kingpin spot clone tracker is very much what it sounds like a plug-in designed to let you track spots in your comp and then clone stamp them away the setup is super clear you've got a spot control and a clone from control that are linked to each other they can track together like this or separately again using that lightning-fast built-in tracker and a little similar to photoshop sealing brush the default setting in spot clone is a repair mode meaning it's not just cloning pixels one-to-one it's actually repairing the footage by using your clone from regions general texture but your source points colors for example you don't always have to match the exact brightness of skin or cloth or whatever for spot clone to guess what you're trying to do in the age of tracking markers spot clone is a miraculous time-saver tracking and cloning in one simple step and it's even pretty great even if your background is kind of complicated I'm gonna pull out a lot of these stops when we go to paint out these so let's get started let's import our horse footage now I don't want to gloss over us just obtaining this footage magically when you're brainstorming crazy things that you could film for your YouTube video and someone offers to dress in a costume on a horse in front of a green screen you say yes yes please Thank You silver lady now a few people may have seen us tease this footage online and thought that the footage was unworkable from a keying standpoint and to them I say did you forget I have crime at tier which can do all this also you know feel free to to dress in your own costume and film yourself on a horse in front of your own green screen wall you know whatever works so yeah we got this key working pretty well I'm gonna switch to alpha view which will help me clean up any missing bits I can check the core matte setting here to fill in some of those slight holes and turn on the spill killer afterward to get rid of the bleed also because the cameras moving I'm gonna run a point tracker on the background and apply it to a null that I call background now I can bring in any environment or stock footage I want and just remember to parent them to that background null for now I'll use this woodsy background I may change my mind later but for now this will do now I'm just like in our last video I'm leaving the footage elements pretty uncorrect it for now so I can do that work with super comp later now you'll notice this horse is covered in markers for the very obvious reason of wanting to make this horse look deader than he is now I'm gonna do this by pasting on some zombie horse bits i cobbled together in Photoshop it's mostly a dingy or skeleton mixed with some other pictures of dead animal bits so just ignore my internet search history it's for work anyway they're cobbled together right on top of one of the still frames from the video with the intention of my horse looking like this you could obviously push the gruesome level if you wanted to but since my kids could walk in at any moment I'm gonna start here now there are two sections that I'm going to be compositing in to paste these layers to my original video layer I'm going to use kingpin tracker now for this there's a slightly different process I'll use but it's really nifty I go to the last frame and I slide my layer into place then I apply kingpin tracker but I hide the effect temporarily I'll switch to show from pins and then define a good representative rectangle within my layer then I'll show the to and from pins and I'll just this yellow rectangle to line up with a blue rectangle now I can select the horse walk in layer as my layer to track backwards in this case and as this track runs you can ignore the comp window and see the magic happening down here in a preview window this is the real speed of the track is like long enough for me to consider an old town road joke here about how I'm gonna take my horse too and then you know just give up because because this track is done so I'll switch the effect on and can't nobody tell me this isn't pretty awesome the layers tacked right in place and even does a nice little gross stretch here where the horse moves his mouth a bit now to more thoroughly understand what the effect is doing I'll explain in a teeny bit more detail now I hid the effect up top so I wouldn't have to watch my layer a distractingly squishing around if I did this with the effect turned on kingpin tracker takes the area from this blue rectangle and planner projects it to this to yellow rectangle now you can see the blue rectangle doesn't encompass all the pixels but that's fine those pixels won't be cropped unless you want them to be rather we're defining a more square region that matches a squarish region from the footage that we're gonna track shown in yellow by default I can even show both girl rectangles at once and if we've already lined up our layer with a background and then these two rectangles the tracking just happens right here now to gush we're just a second I love this functionality to do something similar in after-effects without kingpin you'd have to maybe track four points through your comp and then apply that to corner pin data for your layer or maybe trying to apply that to some puppet pin data if you wanted to try that way but to be frank you need a lot of expressions and linking complicated even more if your layer sizes differ and forget about transforming and translating the shape afterward you're kind of stuck with what you've got and you could always jump outside to mocha but again you're stuck with this data that's kind of inconvenient to transform but with kingpin everything is right within After Effects now let's move on to the neck I'm going to repeat the process from before placing the layer applying kingpin and adjusting these to and from pins to kind of line up now naturally I don't want to marry this layer to where these four tracking markers kind of are but this chain is kind of dangling around and may throw off our tracker so before I run the track I'll check varying illumination which is helpful for tracking planes even as their exposure changes perhaps it's higher tolerance will overlook this chain so I'll run it and I see that it wasn't successful there's this distinct pop do you want to lose that chain well actually before I try painting out the chain and running the tracker again let's try broadening the shape of our pins suit yourself alright hiding the effect for a moment again I'm gonna stretch out the to and from pins to include basically this whole neck all the way down to this additional marker in place I'll adjust the to and from pins to be in the same spot here and it'll run my tracker again and just as fast as before it runs and looking down at the preview window it seems to be working and here we are it looks great though I wouldn't mind if it were a little bit bigger which I can do really quickly by opening up the transform properties and scaling it excellent I love the size we've got this little bit kind of sticking out over here and to get rid of that I'll add a subtract mask to my layer the whole time keeping in mind that the masking is happening before the transform is happening so the relationship looks a little weird no matter once it's masked this looks awesome and this track is really great but what do I do about these tracking markers that are still visible there's a lot of them and they're quite big that's a problem so I'm gonna turn off my other effects and just focus on these markers for a second now anyone I know who's worked or the VFX tracking markers knows that they're kind of essential but also painting them out is like the worst so like wouldn't it be cool if we just built a plug-in called spot clone tracker that allowed you to define the spot you wanted to clone out and a source spot and you could click a track button and it would fly through your comp in seconds and then and then BAM we've we've erased the spot now you know if I like I could duplicate this effect and move the clone from and to spots and then run the tracker again on the second instance and look at that I repeat this process in all the straightforward spots and then I'll turn my attention to these two spots that have this chain interference now I'll run the tracker and predictably it has some trouble when an object moves in front of the track point so in this case I'll just scrub to where the issue is delete the poorly tracked keyframes and do some manual adjustment to get us through the end now this movements pretty smooth and it doesn't take too much fussing and here we are the spots been cloned over so if we zoom in here this chain is still causing another issue now watch the clone stamp right here it's brightening and reflecting the color of the chain as the chain passes through now why is this well remember that Spock clone is healing the cloned region it's using its powers to try to grab color information from around the area you're cloning now this is helpful in most situations as a straight forward clone stamp may create some kind of color disparity and visible spots this is simple enough to adjust though under the spot options here I can switch from repair to a straight clone mode or I could manually adjust how much of the matching color happens in this spot right here allowing me to pick something somewhere in between now I'll do the same exact process for this other spot that has the chain kind of in the way and now with our rotting flesh layer on you can see how we systematically removed one tracking point out for the other next let's track this spot right in the middle of his face pretty straightforward track here the only thing I'm going to do it's different is I'm going to adjust the match spot color a bit because that orange of his markers kind of bleeding through next I'll move on to this spot right here that's sort of on this bridle and the interesting thing about this is that it's right on an object that's pretty distinct so I'll take some care to choose the clone from spots what's sort of cloning a bit of the actual bridle from just slightly above onto here and once that looks alright I'll go ahead and run the track now that that tracks done I can go to my last frame and I can see that that clone from spot seems a little bit misaligned and the bridle doesn't look like a straight line anymore and there are two ways that I could address something like this one is going down to the clone from section and I can manually adjust the X&Y offsets adding keyframes for them to drift properly over time and below those offsets there's even a rotate value so I could rotate the clone spot to make sure that this trap is a little bit more aligned again but I want to show you one other feature so I'm going to delete those keyframes are created and then back up in my clone from section I can choose to set the clone from point explicitly allowing me to use the tracker for the clone from as well so I go ahead and track forward and it looks like it automatically stops after a few frames saying that there's not enough detail in that area so I have a little hack for that which is down here I can uncheck match spot size which will give me a much larger region to track from I'll run the tracker again which will give me a proper center point and then when the track is done I can recheck match spot size now as I play through you'll see that that from point is also tracking itself to try to keep itself more in alignment when I get right to the end everything is pretty good but the rotation still seems a little bit off so I will add a manual clone from rotate keyframe here all right I imagine you all get it spot clone let me start with this and start removing spots one by one until I was here obviously the chain got painted away in a few spots but I can do a pretty simple fix for that taking a duplicate of my original footage extracting the darkhorse values chroma keying out the orange markers and doing a little bit of matte choking on the chain I'll also create a loose garbage mask around it preserves it well enough for this spot I consider this a very successful tracking marker removal but in the interest of your education there's another potential method for removing them that might be worth a shot for those of you keeping up with that perfects newer features you may have heard of content aware fill content-aware fill lets you take a video layer punch a hole in it and then press this button to fill that hole with pixels and sometimes fills really cool now back in horse country watch what happens if I key out some of the holes where those orange markers were let's see what Phil thinks of this go Phil all right it takes just under 16 minutes to run on my machine and here's the result and to be fair it's not bad like some of the spots on the neck were handled pretty well there's some obvious glitching in these Cheyney parts and the horse nose had some issues for sure being right on the edge here but I can see what it was going for I've also got to point out something that everyone should be aware of these generated fill layers are EXR files they're generated each time you run the fill and for these four seconds alone our files take up about three gigabytes now I'm sure it's because they're trying to do everything in a lossless format so you don't lose anything when you go to final but it's a good thing to be thoughtful about when you use content aware fill now just to be thorough let's try this technique one more time this time I'll feed content-aware fill a reference frame I'll scrub to this last frame and create a quick reference frame Photoshop automatically opens up and I can kind of manually paint out all of the markers with a little bit more care on the bridle I'll use one of my favorite tricks which is the smear brush at a hundred percent strength it lets me kind of paint with the existing pixels when I'm done I'll save that file and jump back to AE wreck and tell Phil to do his thing and 12 minutes later the result is not better really in fact I don't see much of a difference between when I didn't have a reference frame and this run so perhaps I need to create more reference frames but at this point considering all of this computing time we're like half an hour into finding an alternate route and I'll tell you I think this version we created with spot clone in about 15 minutes of real work is just objectively better so it just goes to show you something that we've known since the Stone Age Phil I still love you too you're actually pretty amazing at what you do so I'll be seeing you around alright let's get back to it we've got our horse looking mostly dead it's a big difference between mostly dead and all that please open his mouth you know he's right and I've got a wacky idea I want to see if I can punch some holes in my horse's neck using the ingredients I've already got so I'll duplicate my neck layer so I have two of them I'll name them cleverly neck and neck hole I'll drag the neck hole layer down here above the horse footage and turn it into an alpha inverted mat and now you can see that that kingpin tract layer is punching a hole right through this horse's neck neck now it looks weird right now because both of the neck layers are right on top of each other but if I dive into the transform pins on my neck hole layer I can offset that layer that's causing the hole in my horse's neck until the result I'm getting is this nice gaping hole in the bottom of the horse's neck next stop it I can add the roughing edges effect and drag it up here above kingpin and kind of play with the settings in that to kind of tighten up the alpha for this or try some things that make it look a little bit more like hanging flesh now that I've got this additive neck wound in this visible hole in the neck it would be cool to kind of put something like little dangly muscles or something behind this horse so I poke around online and for some reason I'm really drawn to this etching of this horse and its neck and and stuff it looks kind of gross so I'm gonna play with that in Photoshop let's crop it down to just this next section the area we're kind of using for our kingpin tracker level I'll keep out the white I'll tint this whole thing kinda reddish and then I'll use the smudge tool set to like 30% and is kind of run it over everything to smooth out these layers so they look less like edgings and more like gross stuff play with some color correction a little bit and maybe like recolor eyes little bits and pieces of those muscles until it looks just kind of gross then I'll jump back into After Effects where this process is actually pretty simple I'm gonna take my visible neck layer duplicate it and make a pre comp out of that leaving all the attributes in the comp I'll rename it neck muscle and drag it down below the horse now if I dive into that pre comp I can bring in those neck muscle fibers and kind of align them where the previous neck hole was supposed to be add a mask to kind of feather off the edges and then turn off my old neck layer jumping back to my horse comp I can see just a hint of those tissues visible under the whole so I'll go to kingpin trackers transform pin settings and offset this layer to be rendering a little bit over here somewhere that looks like it's properly grossly in place now that I can see these tendons I can kind of adjust my hole and my wound and everything to sort of work in concert to create this kind of plausible but gross looking neck like the muscles are still intact so it could arguably walk around like a zombie but but I think it's definitely better than mostly dead now I'm gonna repeat the same process with a face I'm gonna duplicate my face layer and then because I'm already using an alpha inverted mat down here almost change this layer mode to silhouette alpha and just like before it's punching out a hole right behind the original layer but I can use the transform settings and kingpin to kind of offset this hole I'll stretch it and kind of play with the settings seeing where this hole looks the coolest and right now I'm really just trying to recycle I could create genuine new layers for transparency of this horseface but we're already on a side quest and I got to get us back so let's see I think around here is pretty awesome it seems plausible still but just super sad for this force so I'm sorry about this horse I'm sorry you're really Compton to this poorly colored thing with a lady holding an invisible stitch all the stick she's supposed to be holding a weapon so let's go ahead and get a null that tracks the position and rotation of that stick let's draw a really crappy ice sculpture thingy I had some fractal noise for texture rough on the edges a bit well parented to this sort position no and it looks awful in the best way let's make it doubly awful by duplicating this layer throwing on a bevel alpha with a really wide edge thickness and and then let's see how many of our sins we can cover up using stock footage from action to be effects we've got this really cool displaced fog image which I'll throw behind her I'll set its matte to its luminance channel time stretch it to kind of work with her walking in you know add like three or four other fog levels doing the same kind of thing just trying to time them out about right and then once I've got everything in the mix and almost everything parented to that original background null so it kind of tracks with the camera we're ready to try to make it look better using super cop all right so just like in last episode I'm gonna select all the layers that I want to be part of this composition and then go to effects RGB FX super comp now we went over super comp a bunch in the last episode but I want to show off one additional feature I'm gonna turn off my top ice sword level for a second and click on this second one here I'm going to switch the layer type to displacement which is the third available layer style as I play through it's plain to see that Super Comp is treating this layer like a sheet of frosted glass the texture informed by the fractal noise on the original layer reflecting whatever is behind it let me solo it so you can get a better view with something like this displacing the background I can now turn on my additive sword level and play with the color correction settings until I get just some of the highlights of the sword reading on top of my displacement layer together these two combined to create a kind of glassy icy look for this sphere so kind of cool right now let me turn all of my layers back on and then start playing with some of layer presets available in Super Comp for this horse layer I'm gonna use the foggy integration preset again which I'll sort of hide her into the fog a little bit I can customize the settings then I'll move down to my background layer where I can apply some color correction and kind of darken it out a little bit and then one by one I'll jump to each of these layers adding different integration effects different color correction settings until I start liking the way that all of these are blending together it still looks a little bit bright so I'm going to add an adjustment layer to the top and apply Magic Bullet Looks here I can shop around and see what other fantasy looking stylizations might work for this shot and tone them up and down as I need I'm going to play with the color settings exposure and things on that adjustment layer a bunch until I like the way everything is mixing together a nice reminder that with super comp I can still go down and mask and change any of these base layers that I want just for the heck of it I'm also going to go to action be Effects and download one of their snow elements and kind of throw that in here in front and behind the horse a few different instances of it adding some volume fog and a few key frames on the brightness and contrast for the adjustment layer give this a little bit of a coming out of the fog look and I'm gonna go ahead and call this the final for this shot sure it's it a little bit of copy but we learned some really good lessons along the way look forward to you guys joining me in the next few weeks to explore some more creepier get er awesome stuff so stay tuned and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our exciting VFX adventures oh that was horrible every think of something else

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 67,710

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, trapcode, magic bullet, mograph, plugin, postproduction, post production, game of thrones, got season 8, danaerys, targaryen, white walker, undead, spooky, horse halloween, cheap tricks, game of thrones vfx, horse costume, equestrian, night king, daenerys, how to remove tracking markers, tracking marker, footage tracking, halloween, halloween tutorial, halloween video

Id: tjndq6joskc

Length: 26min 52sec (1612 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 22 2019