Create & Generate 3D VOXEL Style Characters + Composite in IRL Footage ! | Adobe Ae , Blender

welcome back everybody today we are tackling the final boss of the pixel to real life series that we've been doing on the channel recently if you guys are unfamiliar originally we dropped this great animated pixel visualizers video using photoshop in after effects to recreate these really awesome animated music videos that you see here next we followed that up with a create animated 3d pixel visualizer where we talked using blender which is a free 3d software i talked all about how you can make these easy characters customize them to your liking today we're going to be taking those concepts but sort of building on them um let's just talk about this video here if you haven't seen this this is actually all the way back from 2018 he is a director for psycho films and i've been a huge fan of their work for years now always mixing together some always having some really creative ideas it's kind of mixing like video game style really executed in a great way where you can see they have these 3d pixel props these 3d pixel characters they convert real life characters into 3d pixel voxelized characters if a lot of that sounds like nonsense to you let me just show you so here for example is a character or a kid here the kid from the beginning turned into this 3d lego brick looking thing and tracked back into our scene that's one more advanced example that we're going to lead into by the end but there's a lot more easy things that you can pull and take away from that we're going to teach you down the road in this you're going to see how it goes from this normal 2d pixel animation and i can't wait to show you guys how to do some of this stuff so check this out so what they're doing here is they're creating these 3d voxelized characters and this is actually extremely easy i'm going to show you all these free softwares for how you can create your own characters i'm going to show you plugins for how you can do this at the snap of a finger and even if you guys aren't into 3d again these are free tools just follow the tutorial and you can apply amazing concepts like this into your own videos we're also going to show you how to track into real-life footage obviously this is just a scene of them in front of the lights they match the lighting in 3d and we're able to create something like this let's give you one more little example here um if you pay close attention you can see this tent is actually voxel you have this guy pushing a cart this is vauxhall it's a little hard to see with the motion blur but these are all 3d voxel characters and cars tracked into the scene really cool and that's the power of 3d you can match the lighting so it looks photorealistic it looks like it's meant to be in the scene so this is the power of what you can do applying motion graphics simulation things that exist within 3d software to your 3d effect and blending it with real life now we're not going to go too in-depth because this in of itself would probably take another 30-40 minutes explanation but i'm going to show you all the ways where you can start applying physics i'm going to show you all the ways where you can composite in these characters so let's go ahead and get right into it to start you guys are going to need three things number one is going to be blender which is free and if you have any other 3d software that you prefer you can use that so go ahead and download blender if you don't have that next thing is magicka voxel and i think you guys are really going to love this another free software you can use this magicka voxel software for creating your own voxel characters if you don't know what voxel is it's pretty much like 3d pixelization kind of like minecraft style but not exactly minecraft style if that makes sense so we're going to show you two different methods we're going to show you how to generate using plugins or using free things within 3d and alternatively we're going to show you how to create from scratch so let's start with method number one which is creating your characters from scratch you want to download the latest version for windows or mac once you've installed you should have a folder like this just open up the folder open up the application in that folder and magickavoxel is going to fire up now if you guys would like you don't have to use magickavoxel you can use the timestamps below to skip to where we just generate that's going to save you a lot of time i just wanted to mention this because it gives you a lot of room for customization all right guys so when it comes to creating your own character within a magic of voxel i'm not going to hold your hand too much through the process of this there's so much we need to cover and it really does depend on the scope of what you're trying to create i'm creating something extremely basic so i went in with very minimal knowledge and the great thing about magic of voxel it's extremely easy to use again if you are trying to create a more complex character my best advice is to click on the tutorials i linked in the description there's some that have like two minute quick start just showing the controls and stuff for magic of voxel again it's very simple there's just attach for adding your voxels erase for erasing them and paint and then you can select faces you can select individual voxels etc again if you are wanting to create a character i recommend you just watch one of those two minute tutorials if you do enjoy this process there is some cool passive income ways to make money from it if you guys are into crypto or nfts there's something called the sandbox which is a 3d play to earn metaverse where you can literally create these 3d voxel characters and sell them as nfts they're always looking for content packs a big part of all of the content and assets in the sandbox is through the community if that sounds like something that may interest you and again a way to make some passive income if you do enjoy the process i'm gonna leave some info on that down below i literally just created a box for the head extruded the bottom of the box for the neck and extruded some arms and some legs it's extremely easy stuff guys so i decided to make the 3d character look like me a cool thing about magic of voxel you can just click import and bring in any image to use as a reference you can even extrude those images if that's what you're into and you want to just take an image and work from that whatever essentially i just put a picture of me behind so i could get a little reference and i painted on some eyes a beard also note that i'm putting my character in a t-pose here meaning my arms are outstretched i'm doing that very specifically because if you have your character in a t-pose we can use a free website called mixamo to apply a bunch of different animations onto this 3d character so keep that in mind that's very important if you do want to animate your character so once you're done in the bottom right that little export panel you can export that out as an obj or ply usually people just export out as obj and we're also going to export it out as a dot vox so you'll see the vox option in the exports there's actually a free blender add-on that allows you to import these vox files and when you import this way it's not going to be one connected character it's going to actually import your character into blender all as cubes so this way you can apply simulations you can crumble it you can apply physics if you guys want to look into that again check out the description where it's linked so let's go fire a blender import in our character apply all the animations etc once you have blender open you want to go up to edit preferences go over to the add-ons tab all you need to do is search up that folder that you downloaded for the vox importer click on the i o scene vox file make sure that you're clicking onto the testing tab and then search for the magic voxel importer if you're not on the testing tab you won't be able to see this so check that on you might have to restart blender but i don't think i had to once you've checked it on if you go to file import you should now have the magicalvoxel.fox file format available to import so now let's go ahead and just test bringing in our dot vox file if you guys want to experiment with some other props in the original magic of voxel folder that you downloaded they have a bunch of test projects in the dot vox folder so if you want to kind of mess around with those again you can view those in magic of voxel or you can just bring them straight in with that vox importer so i'm going to switch back and actually import in my custom character and just quickly show you how i can add some easy simulations onto here what i did was just select the very first cube you want to go down to the physics tab you want to just click rigid body so once you've done that you want to just click a to select all so that all of those other cubes are selected then you want to click f3 or whatever your shortcut is to bring up the blender search bar and you want to click copy rigid body from active that'll apply the physics to all of the different cubes and this may take a couple of minutes depending on the amount of cubes for your character so don't be afraid if it freezes up for a little bit if we click shift plus a in object mode and we add in a plane and just put that plane underneath our character we can make this plane a collider object by just selecting the plane going to our physics tab and just adding a rigid body and changing the type to passive so now your plane should act as a collider so whenever you press play all of your bricks will fall and they'll bounce off of your plane so simple as that and again showing the power of 3d easily creating a voxel character and using some of what 3d has to offer to make it interactive so that's the basics guys for creating from scratch so now we have one last thing that we are going to talk about that is applying animations easily to those custom characters once we show you how to do that we're going to move into generating voxels from any mesh all right guys so to apply 3d animations to your custom created character all you need to do is go to mixmo.com now we're not just going to upload the straight obj file into here we're actually going to do one step before that so whenever you originally exported out your obj from magic of voxel it should have created three different files the first is the obj the second is this mtl file which is pretty much just a file with a set of instructions for the obj and the third is this little texture map weird colorful png what you guys want to do is actually right click and create a new folder and name that whatever i just named mine character in that new folder drag in those three files that i just mentioned so the obj file the mtl file and the png once you've done that you want to compress that folder into a zip file so i use winrar so all i have to do is right click and click send to compressed zip folder so now that we have that zip folder we can just drag and drop that street into miximo so this way when it uploads it'll have the textures and the mapping will be all correct so here's what that looks like within mixmo so now what we're gonna do is use the autorigger within mixamo just follow what it wants you to do here just apply the chin the wrists the elbows uh if you're having a hard time with your character you can go back into magicka voxel and just erase a little bit of a line as a reference for where your knees are for where your wrists are so here's what mine looks like again the hands are a little bit bendy but this is pretty good results for such a basic lego looking character and of course if you want to do the rigging yourself animating yourself you can always just set up a simple rig within blender so all you need to do at this point is search through this library of animations once you find something you like you click download and you can download an fbx file of your 3d character animated so that's how you can apply animations to your custom voxelized character very easy and you can do this in a very minimal amount of time alright guys so that concludes the custom creating from scratch portion of the tutorial now we're going to talk about generating voxels from scratch and this in my opinion is what they personally used in this j-rock music video just based on the style check out how easy it is to do the generation method i'm going to show you how to do it in blender with no plugins and then i'll mention some plugins later so i'm just going to import in a normal fbx 3d model that i got from turbosquid uh this is soap from mw2 i need to apply the texture which were also included in the download so in the bottom left i'm just going to make sure i'm in the shader editor and i'm going to select each of the individual parts and just click the little open folder here and find the corresponding image texture for that part so here's a little time lapse and be doing that quick side note here because this model is broken into different parts i'm gonna have to do it i'm gonna have to redo the steps for each part if you guys model is just one object with a completely baked texture for everything you'll only have to do this one time so step number one select your object we're gonna start with the upper here we want to duplicate it so click control c control v i'm going to rename this to upper voxel select that upper voxel object and you want to go and add a modifier we're going to add a remesh modifier and then all you need to do at this point is switch over to blocks and then go ahead and change around the octree depth change around the scale and the threshold so that this looks the way you want it to to make that easier hide the visibility of the original object that you duplicated so i'm just going to hide the upper you can see what that looks like very lego brick-esque now i want to go and transfer the texture data onto my voxelized image so i'm going to add another modifier and this is going to be a data transfer modifier now to make sure the data transfer works we need to first apply the remesh now for our data transfer we can select a source and our source is going to be the original object that we duplicated so the one with the hidden visibility the upper next all you have to do is go down to face corner data and check that on you want to go to the uvs tab and then under face data check that on and change the mapping to nearest face interpolated next all you have to do is click generate data layers and you're going to see your texture applied onto our voxel remesh super easy if your 3d model is broken up like mine just go ahead and redo those steps for the other parts or if your object again has one baked texture so it's just one object one texture you only have to do this once i'm gonna time lapse me repeating those steps again if you guys are stuck just rewind and again always keep in mind here sometimes you'll have to play with the scale in the threshold because sometimes things will be disappearing so just tweak those settings if there are any parts that are missing everything should turn out beautifully and at this point you can also go back and use the miximo part of this tutorial to export this model out apply any animations to it but really it is that easy this awesome voxel look out of any 3d model now i do want to do some honorable mentions if you're trying to do this in cinema 4d there is an old plugin called voxygen it's about 88 it's pretty cool if you just click the oxygen plug-in and make something a child of that plug-in you can use any of these parameters to apply this voxel look very quick and very easy i'll leave a link to that down below if you want to do a free method within cinema 4d i'm also going to link a tutorial below talking about using volume builder and then projecting the texture similar to what i just showed you in blender so c4d method will be down below either way you guys now know how to create your own voxel characters from scratch you now know how to generate your own voxel characters from any 3d model that exists on the internet or that you create now let me show you how to composite your voxel characters into real life footage alright guys so to track your voxelized characters into real world footage you first need your footage i went to pexels.com to get some royalty free stock footage and then downloaded this snowing christmas street shot i fired up after effects and i'm going to go ahead and just drag my footage into the project bin on the left and then i'm going to drag the footage onto this new composition button right here so here's what this is looking like and it's a little bit too long we don't really need that long of an animation so i'm going to end this around 8 seconds by just dragging this bar right clicking and clicking trim comp to work area now i can actually do all of my tracking within after effects and this is optional if you guys want you can do your tracking in blender c4d whatever so i'm going to right click on my footage go to track and stabilize and click track camera then i'll let after effects do the rest and get some tracking data from the shot if you want a good clean track make sure there's not a lot of motion blur all right so my camera has gone through and solved if i scroll through here you can see all of this tracking data that we've now gotten from the scene if you're not seeing that just click in the effect controls up here to see that for this to pop up and this is a pretty clean track so hopefully we should get some good results now i want to go and find the place where i would like to place my voxley's character into my scene so for me i think somewhere on the sidewalk is fine so i'm going to place this bullseye in the area where i'd like to track my 3d character i'm going to right click and i'm going to click create solid and camera so if we do a little test change to third resolution so it's a bit more smooth whenever we press play you should see your track solid perfectly tracked within your scene and now all we need to do is bring this into a 3d software and use this little track solid as a reference for where we need to place our 3d object this turned out really good so what i'm going to do is go up to file export and click export to max on cinema 4d exporter now i'm going to do this within cinema 4d just because that's my 3d software of choice the workflow is exactly the same with blender all you need to do is download a free script that allows you to export instead of to cinema 4d export the cameras to blender i'm going to leave a full tutorial down below if you guys would like to do this within blender but either way export it to c4d or use the script down below to export to blender go ahead and open up your 3d software depending on where you exported your tracking data so i just have to go to file open and open up the project file that i exported from after effects again if you're doing the blender way follow that tutorial to open it up within blender once you have the tracking scene open it is exactly the same you're going to have a camera which if i click off this little camera control in c4d here's what this camera looks like and you can see how the camera is going to be moving in 3d space because it's mimicking the camera motion from the original footage this little solid here is what we created in after effects as our reference for where we want to put our character so all we need to do is bring in a 3d character and just plop it right here on that plane same exact thing in blender just import in your character and just position them right here so let's bring in santa i'm going to go to file merge objects and i'm going to import in my santa dot fbx so what i could have done is textured it all in blender and then brought into c4d uh once i've applied that voxel generation method that i showed you earlier or if you guys paid for the c4d plugin you could just click plugins once you've installed it you just click see if i place them as a child individually i can just duplicate these and it'll still have the textures applied and check it out here's what it looks like uploaded to mix mode we can just add the textures whenever we come back um and bring this in all right so i downloaded an animation from mix mode just this waving right here and and to prep our character all you have to do is just select the texture tags on the original t-pose drop it onto there now we have our animated voxel santa but either way let's go ahead and take this animated santa just ctrl c pop back into our original we can delete all the setup here and we'll control v to paste in our animated guy so we have our character we have our track scene just take your character and put it on your track solid because again that's the spot that we specified where we want to have where we want our character to be and then if you pop into camera view here's what it'll look like in camera view if you just click file save you can actually pop back into after effects just drop this project file in as a layer you'll be able to see a rough sketch of what this will look like when it's composited back in what here's a little mock-up of what it will look like you can't see the textures because it's an octane texture so it's just going to show up black right now but in terms of the scaling and everything i think that looks pretty good i can make it a little bit bigger if i wanted to also what i can do is replicate the lighting here so it looks a little bit more in place i wanted to go super in depth with it [Music] [Music] all right guys so again i just set everything up to make it match the lighting a little bit more now i'm going to go ahead and render this out and just composite it back in don't be scared that i'm showing in c40 again it's literally just putting your voxley's character onto the plane and then at that point do what you want with it you can put your lighting in blender as well you can add shadow catchers you can do whatever in blender you can do everything in blender here that i'm showing you i'm gonna go ahead and export alright guys so once your animation has finished rendering in after effects you just right click in your project bin and go to import multiple files and navigate to the folder that you set up previously so here's mine santa waving animation here's all the frames that i exported select the first one import as footage and click import then i'm going to click ok and then done now for some reason with after effects it always imports it at a default of 30 frames per second which you can see at the frame right here so if i was to go into this composition of my normal footage and just drop this in you see how this doesn't match up and when we press play it's not properly tracked all you need to do to fix that is just look at the frame rate of your original footage 23.976 just right click on your tiff sequence go to interpret footage main and set it to 23.976 or whatever frame rate you originally rendered it out as depending on your normal footage so like that and remember we only did eight seconds so that should be fine and check it out i even added i even pre-composed everything and just added a little camera with some motion blur so that we can zoom in and see our little voxel santa a bit better really cool the track looks awesome you have those nice natural shadows in there so it goes to show how easy it is to replicate that music video and bring those oxidized 3d pixel characters into your real world footage match the lighting and i really loved how this one turned out last thing i do want to mention here is the exiting is this last scene where you can see all this different simulation mograph style things happening with the cubes and it composite and transfers this real world person over the steps for this would be very similar where we composite it into real life footage the only difference being if you want this fancy animation so that it looks like it's transforming over you guys need to look into mograph and i'll show you some quick examples and of course link a bunch of tutorials below if you're working in c40 or geometry nodes within blender which are essentially the same exact as mograph and c4d being able to transfer and create these simulations so again i'll link all those down below i'm going to show you a little beginner version of this and uh c4d this is just using the plane effector so some basic motion graphics stuff within c4d and if you want to look into this for blender again i mentioned geometry geometry nodes all you have to do is go up to mograph and just click on poly effects this will allow you to change around these different objects so what i'm going to do is select my voxel character that i have here just the standard object i'm going to hold shift and select the poly effects and i'm going to click alt g just to null them together and i'll name this character transform or something like that i'm going to go ahead and click on the poly effect and we're going to go to the effectors tab to mograph effectors you see here an easy one is just to add in a plane effector and you see automatically how it's kind of changing and chopping things up but what you want to do is go to polyeffects put the make sure the plane effector's in there and then you just need to change the falloff for your plane effector so right now if you click on the plane effector go to falloff it's set to shape infinite so if you want to have a specific shape that you're moving around and animating you can change around here so maybe just make a sphere and then we can change the size of the sphere and then you'll see whenever we move the sphere over top of our object it's going to be transforming it in this weird motion graphics way if you want to change the look of the transformation go ahead and select the plane effector and go to parameters and what you can do is change you'll see you can change around position if i put up my x it's transforming in the x-axis z-axis if i really wanted to you can change by scale let's put it to uniform scale and negative one now you have this sort of like box looking thing of course you guys can play around with how that looks it's as easy as adding a little bit of keyframes you could go to coordinates transform this or just click this little set a keyframe button but you move certain amount of frames and you can animate this across and make sure you reset the keyframe so just like that we created a little animation of our mograph effector our plane effector just doing some cool little tricks upon our custom character so that'll open the door to some cool things that you can do with this again it really depends on the look it really depends on what you're trying to do so just utilize the information out there i'll say one more time mograph for c4d just search mograph tutorials i already gave you a nice little one with the plane effector or or if you're going to blender out search up geometry nodes and it's pretty much again the same exact thing as blender motion graphics so hope you guys did enjoy this tutorial we're probably going to step away from the 2d pixels the 3d pixels for a little bit talk about some other new things dive into some after effects transitions and things like that but i think that using these 3d tools to amplify your videos and really bring ideas to life is the future of where the space is heading where this tech is heading where the culture is heading as these 3d tools get into the hands of the average person you're going to see a lot more amazing things coming out of indie developers individuals it's not going to be so locked into studio things and you know with blender and things like that you already have tools at your disposal that are 100 free that you can start experimenting with if you just start working it into your workflow so hope you enjoy slap like on the video if you did as always thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you in the next [Music] oh

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 11,916

Keywords: create, tutorial, adobe, after effects, pixel, pixel art, visualizer, music video, redd, drake, betrayal, after, effects, the, animation, light, vj, loop, premiere, max novak, editing, element, 3d, best, top 10, preset, pack, plugin, free, glitch, vhs, overlay, transition, car, c4d, cole bennett, justin odisho, the weekend, how to make a 3d music video, ae, glow, music visualizer, cinecom, corridor, magica, voxel, jay rock, jack begert, es tales, blender, sandbox, metaverse, nft, passive, income, 3d to real life, trippie

Id: vWTDNeQqzvg

Length: 26min 10sec (1570 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021