Clone yourself with Blender (VFX Tutorial)

hey everybody and welcome to my next blender tutorial in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to duplicate yourself in blender so blender has a new feature where you can actually duplicate yourself yeah it's crazy but it uses like some photogrammetry features and stuff it's kind of hard to explain but i'll show you in the tutorial but i'm out here because i wanted to introduce you to my duplicate which he's somewhere out here i don't know oh there he is oh hey everyone so i see you've already met my duplicate so in another tutorial i'm you're the duplicate i i'm the real one no no no no i'm the real rhine king you're the no it's the other way around no no it's not like that i hated to do that but i had to so okay let's just i'm just gonna go show you how to do this in blender i can't really recommend this it can be dangerous but yeah let's let's go oh that wasn't nice just wait till i get even with him hey everyone this is ryan king and welcome to this blender tutorial where i'm going to show you how to clone yourself in blender and more specifically i'm also going to show you how to interact with your clone so in this shot i actually punched my clone uh yeah so this is a pretty fun thing to make if you're a regular viewer of my channel then you've probably seen that i already have a tutorial similar to this it's how to duplicate yourself in blender and in that tutorial i show you how to duplicate yourself multiple times so this tutorial is going to be similar to that but i wanted to show a few different things because uh in that tutorial i don't show you how to interact with yourself like for instance punching yourself so so this tutorial is going to be a little bit different i know i just recently made a tutorial on how to duplicate yourself but i wanted to have another tutorial that's a little bit different just to show you how to clone yourself once it's basically a split screen effect where you have one side be one video and then another side be another video but i do show you how to interact like here in the video i show you how to interact with yourself so just like that so i'm going to show you how to do that in this tutorial so here i am in my file browser and i've just made a folder called final tutorial files where i have all the files so i'm just going to put all the files in this folder for the tutorial so here is the raw footage that i filmed on my camera and so i'm just kind of making sure that i'm not going to overlap myself so i kind of like used uh this plank on the shed that's behind me to make sure i don't overlap so i'm kind of using that as a border now there's a few important things that you need to do when you're filming the first thing is to mount your camera on a tripod that's super important there are ways to duplicate yourself without using a tripod um but you have to do like a bunch of motion tracking and it is a lot harder and it's a totally different topic so i'm not going to be showing you guys how to do that in this tutorial in this tutorial you need to have your camera on a tripod another thing that i would highly suggest you do is change the exposure on your camera to manual because um just a cloud going by or like a door opening or closing or a window or even just you moving around um that can change the exposure because like if i'm closer to the camera you know my black shirt might make the exposure like go up a bit to kind of get more light so the exposure can change a lot with the camera and if the exposure changes then when you're blending the two different videos together it can actually mess up the shot because the color gets changed and something else that can help a lot is if you have someone else help you film your footage whoever's filming they can look at the camera and try to make sure that your fist if you're punching yourself or whatever you're doing is going to match up right and also they can make sure that you're not overlapping with yourself the wood planks of the shed i tried to make sure i wasn't overlapping this line right here until my clone was out of the shot and then i'm fine with overlapping it but if my clone gets too close to me then you know it can get messed up so that's something that can really help out if you have someone help you they can make sure you're not overlapping yourself and just make sure that you're positioned right while you're filming because i didn't have anyone help me out and so i had to like go back and play the video and make sure that it was right and you know like i would punch too high and then it didn't look like i was punching myself and i had to film it multiple times so you can see here i just first filmed myself i just kind of was practicing and so i just saw myself i ducked and then i punched myself and while i was filming this i was counting in my head so in my head i counted two seconds so what i did is i started to count two seconds and i ducked and then the two seconds was ending right when i punched so i counted one and i ducked and then i counted two right when i punched and that way i can make the timing more accurate when i go and fill my other self over here i started in my head to count one right when i was swinging over myself so right here so right here i started to count one and then i swung and then right at the two second mark i just got punched so that way uh it's gonna be a lot more accurate and you're gonna have more success also having someone help you film can be really helpful because they could like maybe have a stopwatch and and then you can match up the footage correctly okay so here i am in blender 2.9 which is the current stable version as i record this uh let's just go over here and i'm gonna go into blender's video editor now i have this video editing tab up right here if you don't have this tab you can click on plus and then go to video editing and click on video editing now if you don't know how to do video editing in blender i have made an entire tutorial series which i'll have a card up on the screen and it'll also be in the video description if you want to watch my tutorial on video editing so i'm just going to drag in my footage right here and then i'll press the spacebar to play and i'm actually going to with the both the video and audio selected i'm going to press ctrl g and that will group together uh the audio and video into one strip so now i know the audio and video aren't going to get messed up they're going to be perfectly aligned and i can just go and edit this strip so now i'm just going to go and find the correct one that i like because i did film myself multiple times you can see i'm kind of practicing there i'm trying to like uh make sure i punch the right height because a lot of the times i would punch too high and then it looked like i wasn't punching myself i'm pretty sure this is the good one yeah okay this is the good one so i'm just going to cut it right there with k and then i will go over and find the starting of it and i start acting right here so i'll click on this just select it and then press k to cut it and then this i don't need any of this so i'll press x to delete it or press the delete key and now i'm going to go to the clone and just find the one that i like let's see it wasn't that one that's it so this is the one that i like so i'm just going to go as far as i can and then i did it a few times just to try to get it right so i'll just move over to like here and then i'll press k to cut this and then x to delete it let's save this file so i'm going to go over here go file and save as and i'll just save this in the same folder as video video if i can spell it right edit video edit blend and save as image right there okay let's keep on editing this so and here's the starting right where i come into the shot so i'm going to find the spot where i'm out of the shot and then press uh k to cut this and then x to delete this so now i have two video strips i have the first one which is my real self and then i have my clone which is right here and i'm actually going to move this up so i'm going to select this and press g to move it above the other one so they're overlapping each other okay and then i'll select both of these so i'll shift and click on this one press g and move it over to the start of the timeline and just make sure that this is at the very starting so frame one and now i can just play through this and now i'm going to actually match them up to make sure that they're working properly now i know that they are going to work properly because i've done this tutorial a few times but if you're filming your footage and you want to make sure it's actually going to work right or look good before you start masking you can use this method just to make sure it's going to work right so what i'm going to do is this top footage right here i'm going to change the opacity down to like 0.5 so that it's less it's more like see-through you can kind of see through it and then the blend value change this to alpha over and now you can actually see through the video and so now you can actually see both of me i'm kind of faded out that's because it's fading in between both of the videos but you can actually tell if it's going to work or not so what i'm going to do to make sure this is actually going to work properly is i'm going to move along until myself which punches my clone is right when he's contacting like right when he's contacting the face so this bottom one this is my real self and the top video strip that's my clone so now that i've moved this blue line to where i actually contact my clones face then i will select this top one press g and move it along the timeline until i find the spot in the video where i get punched i'm just going to move along you can see it's almost there and i get punched right about there so i'll zoom in a bit and kind of make it more precise and there we go so now i've synced this up properly and you can see it does look like i'm being punched or i'm punching myself so that's how i can tell i can just sync that up and then this is how i want it to be synced up in the actual video and there we go if i just scroll between this you can see it looks pretty good now you can see uh this stopped early if i drag this out you can see i start to come in a second time because i'm re-filming myself um just a few times so what i'm going to do to fix this is just k and cut this just to delete it and then i'll move over and now that i've figured out that the timing is right i don't need to have this fading so this opacity i'll just turn it back up to one and now what i'm going to do is press f12 to render out just an image of what i'm seeing and so that way it's just going to be an image of the plain background and now i want to save this image so i'll press alt s to save this image and i'll just save this as a photo photo.png okay and i'll save that in the folder where i have my other files now what i'll do is press escape to escape out of this and i'll go to my file browser and drag in that photo that still photo where there's nothing okay and i'll move this down here and then i'll click on this handle here press g and pull it out so now when i go out of the image when my clone gets punched out of the image it's going to go and get punched out of the image you can see there's my shadow right over here and it's kind of going away and then it will just turn into an image okay so that's the top one and then the bottom one is my real self so now i want to set the end frame so i'll move over here and i'm going to move one frame it's going to look like one frame before the end frame and i'll press ctrl end and ctrl end is a shortcut key for setting the end frame you could also just find the end frame you could see what frame it is you can see i'm on frame 478 and then make the end frame for 78 right down there now what i want to do is i want to render out each one of these layers into separate image sequences that i can mask them together and also just to remember how long this is i'm going to click on this handle press g and move it over so that it's the same length and then i'll move over to the starting one click on this handle to select it so this little white area right here press g and move it over and that way it's the same length so we don't have to worry about that getting messed up and i've already synced it up with the punch so i know it's going to be the correct timing so what i'll do is i'll go down here and i'm going to save an output for this image sequence so i'll click on this file right here and i'm going to locate to the folder where i have all my files now i'm going to click this plus folder here to make a new folder and i'm going to call this one and then i'll do that again so i'll click on the plus to make a new folder and call this one two so now we have two different folders and the first one i'm gonna put in one so i'll just go inside this press accept with no name right here and then on the uh and then on the file format i am just going to make it a jpeg so that the file size is going to be smaller you could definitely use a png and i'll just make this jpeg quality 100 and now i can uh save this again by going file save and then i can press ctrl f12 to render out the animation it's going to render out if i go over here to my file browser it's going to render these out as an image sequence so you can see it's rendering here has all the images and there we go so it finished so now let's press escape and now we want to render the bottom one so to do this i'm going to click on this and press h to hide it and then click on this and press h to hide it so now you can see through them you can't see the top one you can only see the bottom one now what i'm going to do is click on this file icon again and i'll go back up and i'll go to the second folder that we made and i'll go inside this folder and then click on accept so now we're going to render out this image sequence to the second folder and we already have the file format set as jpeg so i'll go ctrl f12 or you can go render and render animation and then if i go over here i'll go back out to the second folder and you can see now it's all rendering out into an image sequence okay so it finished now so now we can go and start doing our masking so i'll just save this again by going file save and then i'll just go file new and just open up a new general let's go over here to the compositing tab because we're mainly going to be using the compositing tab i'm going to click on use nodes to use the compositing nodes i'll press n to close this panel right here because we don't need it and then also this timeline here i'm going to click and drag to make it smaller because it's a little too big i don't really want it to be that big and then we're not going to be rendering anything in the 3d side of blender so i'm just going to click on this and press x to delete it or use the delete key and now we need to add in the image sequences that we made so i'll press shift a and i'll click on the search and i'm going to search for image so i'll add the image here just drop it right here and then i'll press shift d to duplicate it so that we have two of them and then uh before we forget let's save this project so i'm gonna go file save as and then locate to the folder where you have all your files and i'm gonna call this masking and then click on save as so now i need to open up the two image sequences that we rendered out so i'll click on open right here and then i'm going to go to the first one and then press a to select all the images and click on open image now you can see it as it adds it in as an image sequence so right here it says the amount of frames that's good because that's the correct amount of frames and then the start frame is one because we want it to start at frame one also because the frames are 487 we want the end frame right here to be 487 so just make that 487 and now that's going to be the correct video length now another thing that you need to make sure is that the frame rate and video resolution are the same so real quick i've hopped back into the video editing blender file and you can see the dimensions or the resolution is 1920x1080 that's what my camera films in and then also the frame rate when i threw in the footage it set it to 59.94 frames per second because that's what my camera filmed so you need to make sure that this is the same as your video and then if i just close this i need to make sure that um when i'm doing the masking this is also the same so this uh the resolution is 1920 by 1080 and if i go down here to the frame rate i need to set this to 59.94 frames per second now we need to add in the other image sequence so i'll click on open right here and i'm going to go into the second folder i'll press a to select all the images and then click on open image right here and then just make sure that it's using the correct amount of frames and make sure the start frame is at one because we want it to start at frame one now i'm going to be using a blender add-on that's built into blender it's called the node wrangler if you don't have it enabled you can go to edit and go to preferences and then on the add-ons right here you can click on the search and start typing in nodewrangler and here you can see nodewrangler just enable it and then you can close this preferences so to use the nodewrangler i can hold down control and shift and then click on a node and that way i can see what the node is and if you can't see the backdrop here it might be because you need to click on the backdrop and then the backdrop is too big right now so to make it smaller i can press v to zoom out or alt v to zoom in and you can see it adds this viewer so that we can actually see what we're viewing so now i want to mix these two videos together because i need my clone and my real self so what i'll do is press shift a and i'll click on search and i'll search for the alpha over node and just drop the alpha over node right here and then we're going to connect the viewer and the compositing to the alpha over so the compositing is actually what's going to render out and the viewer node is what we're going to be seeing in the preview so this alpha over node can mix two videos together so you can see we've added in the top image to this one and then the bottom image i'm going to drag it in right here and now this factor value this is how much it's blending between the two images so if i just move over and if i change this factor down you can see now it's blending between these two images and it looks like i'm kind of fading out and that's because the background is the same because we used a tripod so the background didn't move so it just looks like i'm fading in and out but we don't want these to be fading by an equal amount so what we're going to do is we're going to use a mask and the mask is going to be used to tell the alpha over node this part is going to be one video and then this part is going to be another video so i'll press shift a and i'll search for the mask node just click on mask drop it in here and then this mask i'm going to connect it up to the factor and that way instead of using a just a one value we're going to tell it where each video is going to be shown so now we actually have to make the mask because if i click right here we don't have any masks made so to make a mask i'm going to scroll over and then on this plus we're going to hit plus to add a new workspace and i'm going to go to vfx and then i'm going to click on masking now there's a bunch of things here which i'm not going to use this timeline here i'm not going to use this so to remove some of these windows i can move my mouse up here until you have that little crosshair and i can click drag out and then drag back in and then let go and that way it'll close that and then also um the compositing nodes i don't really want them right here because i have the compositing tab right up here so i'll just click with my crosshair drag up and then let go to close that and then these two side panels i'm just going to click and drag just to make it really small and then also right here it's hard to see because it's the same gray color but i can just click and then drag down just to make it really small now we need a reference to know where we're going to have to mask this so we can actually open up that image sequence so let's just hit open and then locate to where your masks are and i'm going to open up the second one and then press a to select all of them and open that clip so now i just need to mask around myself so what i'll do is i'll just go to the starting frame and i'll turn on this auto keying and that way whenever we move the mask it's going to animate it and then i'll click on new and we can just leave this as mask and now to add the mask you can hold down control and click and just move around the entire character just go all the way around and then go back to the starting and blender is automatically going to fill this so you don't need to worry about that now let's just move along the timeline and basically just make sure that i'm in the mask the entire time so i'm actually going to scale this up because i want it to be a little bit bigger it can be pretty big right here the main thing is to make sure that my duplicate or my clone doesn't go through this mask because then it'll still start to fade away so i can press a to select and deselect and then s to scale the mask and then g to grab the mask and r to rotate the mask and then if i want to just select a certain bit i can press b to box select and just grab a certain bit of the mask and then move it around i can also just click on each individual point and move it around manually also if you're seeing these little tail handle kind of things i don't really like these you can definitely use them if you want but i don't like them most of the time so to get rid of them you can press a to select the entire mask and then you can press v and then click on vector and that will remove those handles so to see where we've added keyframes you can see right down here where these little yellow lines are that's where we've added mask keyframes so now let's just go through and animate this mask so i don't want the mask to be too close so you can see right here my hand starts to get really close to the mask so i'll b to box select this area and pull it out a little bit to give myself some more room and now where i duck i need to make this way smaller so i'll just press g and move it down and why i have to do this is because the clone is trying to punch me so their fist is going to swing right here so i need to move this down and then when i come back up i can move it back up now something that i want to make you aware of is that there is a shadow behind me and that can look weird if the masking is going through the shadow you can kind of notice it so let's go back to compositing and just see how this is working so far so if i click right here and add in the mask that we made and then i need to move over a frame just to have it update you can see here is the mask but there's this shadow right here and this can be a problem i'll show you how i figured out how to make it look as not noticeable as possible so what i'll do is press shift a and i'll search for a blur node and i'm going to add the blur node right in here and if i control shift and click on the blur you can see there is the actual mask that we've made and i can actually blur out the edges of the mask and that way the shadow isn't going to be as noticeable because there's a fade in between it so if i control shift and click back on the alpha over now you can see that fade is a lot harder to notice but because this blur value is so big it's starting to make the duplicate disappear a little bit so i'll go back into masking and just give it a little bit more room so i'll move back over here to the keyframe you can see right down there there's that little yellow area that's where i added the last keyframe and then i'll box like this and just move it over so that my clone has more room but this shadow is gonna be here for a while especially when i'm punching myself i know that there's a shadow right here and it can look a little bit weird if your mask is just randomly moving around in this empty space so what i'm going to do is from here where i come up until i'm done punching is i'm going to make this mask go along this line right here and that way it'll be a little bit harder to notice the mask so now as i come up i'm going to move this up and i'm going to align this right with the board of the shed behind me now i'll keep on moving and i'm not going to animate any of these right here except i might need to move this down a little bit so i'll just box select the other area move it up and then keep on going and you can see it gets really small right here and if i go back to compositing and i just move one frame over just to have it update you can see it's starting to fade out because of that blur value it's just barely starting to fade out a little bit so what we need to do here is we need to actually animate this blur value and we're going to have to do this later on because when i mask out my hand i'm going to have to mask it out very precisely so that it looks like i'm actually punching myself and so if we have this blur value up it's going to blur out my hand because the mask is too close so what i'll do is move back over here and just move this maybe make this a little bit bigger like over 100 and then i will press i to add a keyframe on both of these values so now i'm actually animating the blur and then i'll move over to where i was talking about right here where it just starts to make my arm fade out and i'll change this to very small i can change it to maybe like six or something and then i'll press i and i just to make sure it adds keyframes to the blur value so now let's go back into masking and now we need to add some keyframes so i'll move this out and remember i'm not going to move these right here because there is a shadow right here that you can see and when we blur that it can look kind of weird and this right here this is where i really need to be precise because eventually i'm going to actually punch myself and my fit is going to be overlapping with my clone so i just need to hold down control and i can actually click to add some new points here so i can just add new ones in and it'll just animate those and right now i don't need to be super precise because if i hit f12 to render you can see i'm not quite overlapping my clone yet so i'll press escape but pretty soon we're going to need to get really precise because my hand is going to overlap so if i press f12 again you can see there's still a little bit of space so i can keep going but it's gonna be it's gonna get pretty close uh really soon and this is the frame you can see that's close enough i'm gonna have to really start to be super precise now so i can just add more points um don't add a ton of points but you can add more i'm holding down control and then clicking to add those new points this is the most tedious and hard thing about the tutorial but luckily uh we only have a small little area where i overlap myself so it's not going to be too hard now if i press f12 there we go now because that blur value we do have a tiny little bit of blur and i actually think that helps because it can make the edge not so sharp it's just a small little area but that blur is still there so to fix this i can just select the entire hand just press s to scale it down a little bit and now if i press f12 you can see it's really not visible okay and you can see my fist is already almost gone it's almost through uh the duplicate so i just need to do like one or two more frames i can just rotate this and just manually put all the points where they need to be we're almost done with the hardest part okay now if i press f12 to render that you can see now we're done with that bit so now this i can just i don't need to be super precise now i can just give it some extra room and then i don't need to animate anything right here that's all good but you can see eventually i'm gonna go through the mask right here so i actually need to give this more room now so i can just pull this out and i can actually make this a lot flatter so i can press s and x and just make it a lot flatter maybe just bring this up just to kind of make it flat so i'm just going to make this mask a lot more straightened out and then i can select all these press s x and then just scale them down so they're a lot more flatter now you can see if i uh render that with f12 you can start to see the shadow and because this mask starts to move away you can see right here it starts to move away you're probably going to notice that it really depends on your footage but for my footage you're going to actually notice that the shadow is kind of moving so one way i'm going to try to make this less visible is now that i'm done with the punch i can actually make the blur value a lot bigger so if i go back to the compositor this blur value it's way down at six um but once i'm past the punch i can press i and i to add more keyframes and then after this i can just blow up that blur and just make it a lot bigger so i'll just change this back to like 100 and press i and i just to make sure it's added those keyframes and actually i can probably make it even bigger than 100 i'm going to make it like 150. okay there we go i'll ctrl shift and click back on the alpha over and that's pretty much it let me just go back to the masking tab and i just need to make sure that i'm not going to move through the mask so i can just move this out but now that my duplicate is gone we have a lot more room to work with so i'll just make this really big give it plenty of space and there that's it and now the masking is done so i'll go back to compositing i'm just gonna go file and save again and then also i'm going to turn off the auto keying because we don't need to use this anymore all right so let's render this out into images and then we'll throw it back into the video editing blender file that we made and render it out to a finished video so right over here i'm going to click on the output it'll locate to the area where i have all of my files and i'll click on this plus again and call it like final render final images so make a new folder go inside that and click accept and then right down here i'm just going to use jpeg again because jpeg is a smaller file size you could definitely use a png if you wanted and then we can just go file save this again and then go ctrl f12 and just render this out all right and the render just finished so i'll go file and save this again and then if i go over here to my file browser you can see i'm going to open back up that video editing uh blender file that we made i'll escape out of this and then i'll go to frame 1 and then i'll press shift a and add image sequence and then i'm going to go to the final images press a to select everything and click on add image strip and now if we play this yay there it is it actually looks really good that looks pretty cool something that i do want to do is do a little bit of color correction because uh as i said earlier i did set my exposure to manual and so i actually set it a little bit too low so the whole thing looks a little bit dark so to add some color correction i'm going to go over here to the modifiers with this image strip selected and i'll click on add modifier and add this curve right here so the curves and then the c is how bright you want it to be so i can just make it a bit brighter just to make it look a little bit nicer and then maybe add just a little bit of contrast by pulling another one down and then it's a little bit too red so i want to pull this down a little bit just to make it a bit less red and i'll go to the b for blue and drag this up just to make it a slightly more blue and then i also want to hear the sounds of both videos so i'll just press alt h to unhide this one but you're not going to be able to see the video because this one's on top you're only going to be able to hear it now there's one last thing which is really important uh to make this really feel real and that is to add a sound effect so i'm going to head over to freesound.org this is a super awesome site i've actually contributed to this website i have added a few of my own sound effects um so this is just a super awesome website where you can find really great sound effects so on the search right here i'm going to type in punch and search for that so we can get a nice punch sound effect now you definitely need to check the licenses because some of these you can't use for commercial use some you can and some of them you have to give credit to the artist and some of them you don't have to what i like to do is i like to click on the creative commons 0 and this is going to add a tag and that way only sound effects that are creative common zero license come up you can definitely use other sound effects but i just like to use creative common zero so that i know i can do whatever i want with the sound effect so i actually like this first sound effect that comes up let me just play this okay so i'm going to actually use this sound effect i think it's pretty good so thanks to this person for making the sound effects it's super awesome i don't know how to pronounce this but thanks a lot for making this sound it's really great and you can see here it says creative commons zero this work is licensed under the creative commons zero license so i'm just gonna hit download and then i'll just save this file and the link will be in the video description if you wanna download the same sound effect that i'm using so i'm going to jump back over to blender now and i'm going to go over to my downloads folder and i'm going to grab the sound effect and just drop it in right here and now i'm just going to move frame by frame right to where i punch myself and make sure the sound effect is synced up properly so i'll just move it over and then listen to that and then just cut this and then delete that and now if i play this let me just make sure it's synced up so now let's render out the final image so i'm going to click right here on the file format and i'm going to make it ffmpeg video i like to use mpeg-4 as the container i like to use h.264 as the video codec and then i just like to leave it as medium quality and good and then on the audio codec i like to use aac you could also use mp3 when i'm uploading a video to youtube i use mp3 as the audio codec because i found that the aac audio codec doesn't work well with youtube because youtube can't finish processing the video for some reason it just doesn't like it and it can't finish processing so when i'm uploading to youtube i use mp3 and now let's set an output here so i'll just click on this file icon i'll just save it as final render and i'll save it in the folder where i've saved all my other files and then i'll hit accept i'll save this again by going file save and then i can go to render and render the animation and here you can see here's the final thing i really like how this one turned out it looked pretty good um the shadow it's kind of hard to see you can notice it if you really look closely down here you can see the shadow kind of move a little bit but really people aren't going to be looking down here they're going to be looking at the action so it's pretty hard to see and i think it turned out pretty well so thanks for watching this tutorial i hope it was fun and i hope it was helpful and i'll see you in a future tutorial

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 7,130

Keywords: Clone Effect, Blender Tutorial, Blender VFX, Ryan King, Ryan King Art, clone, duplicate, split screen, vfx, visual effects, cloning effect, video editing, visual, effects, Blender, 3d, learning, tutorial, clone yourself, cloning blender

Id: EYwoKiehdRc

Length: 33min 36sec (2016 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020