Create Looping VFX Animation with Blender!

welcome back to blender daily in today's tutorial i want to show you the whole process of creating this seamlessly looping visual effects animation i hope you'll enjoy and learn something new let's get started here's just a quick disclaimer before we start with this tutorial i'm going to use after effects and photoshop in this video but don't worry you can also follow along if you don't have access to these programs i will only use very basic tools in them so any video or image editing software should do the job you can see a list with a few free alternative softwares on the screen and if you really want to you could also do everything directly within blender and use the node based compositor but now let's get started with the tutorial okay so right here i have the footage that i prepared for this tutorial and you can download this with the link in the video description if you want to follow along with me this is basically just me walking into the frame from the left side and standing here for a few seconds until i grab the pan and leave on the right side a few seconds later i come back in and just pretend to hit myself on the head after that i leave the frame again and that's everything we have in this clip now before we can start with the actual 3d work in blender we need to further prepare this footage so for this i open up a new composition in after effects and loaded in our footage then right away let's drop through the timeline until i walk into the frame we want to cut this right before so shorten the clip and bring this to the beginning then continue to scrub forward until i start to grab the pan which is right here and make a cut with the shortcut ctrl shift d then scroll forward and we're gonna cut away everything until i start to walk back in so let's remove this stuff then continue i hit myself walk out of frame and as soon as i'm out of frame we can cut again now let's rename those layers so the top one is going to be the hit and the bottom one is just me standing there now we need to change the order of them so the hit is going to be on the bottom and me standing is the clip that's going to be on top then bring this to the beginning and now if we want to see both of those layers at the same time we can just take the top clip and bring down the opacity a bit so you can see me walking in from both sides at the same time then right here we have to hit so let's look at this frame by frame the pan comes and right here i'm getting hit now we want to cut this top layer just at the moment where i get it so this one is going to be the last frame of this top sequence so let's shorten it and now i'm going to disappear right when i get hit and this is the moment we're going to replace myself with particles later on in blender now obviously we can't use this low opacity so i'm just going to bring it back up to 100 percent and instead we're gonna draw a mask in order to combine the two layers then go to the last frame before i disappear make sure that you have the top clip selected and choose the pen tool to draw a mask i also like to have the roto bezier option enabled we don't have to mask out everything just the right side of my body is enough once you have this go over here and close the mask so now we can see both layers at the same time let's also make the mask a bit softer so go into the mask options and increase the mask feather to something around 3 pixels now we can go back frame by frame and see how this is working now you can see that i start to move right here and the mask is clipping in me so let's go back to the last frame where we need the mask which is right here then add a keyframe for the mask expansion go back a few frames and increase this to let's say 15 pixels so this is going to make the mask bigger and it won't be an issue that i am moving around then let's go further back frame by frame and we can see that we still need the mask pretty close because i get close to the mask with the pan right here however we are already getting issues up here on my head so in order to fix this let's just keyframe the mask pass so right here before we get this issue add a keyframe for the mask paths then go back one frame and adjust those points in order to avoid any intersection so this is keyframed right here and we have this issue with the head fixed so let's continue to go back frame by frame again right here the pan is getting close but as soon as i move away we can increase this mask expansion even more so let's add a keyframe right here then go back a few frames and here we can see again clipping happening so let's bring up the mask expansion to let's say 50 pixels and just always check that we don't get any issues on the copy of myself then go further back frame by frame right here we have clipping again so we can increase the mask expansion to let's say 80. no issues at all so continue to get back frame by frame and i think now we are safe so let's grab through the rest of the sequence and i think that's basically it for the masking we have to do so let's uh go through everything and also set the end frame of our sequence so we only export this part let's close all those settings and take a look at it to see if it is all working properly i am happy with this result so let's export this go up to file and under export choose add to render queue and we can leave all those settings right here however i want to change the format to jpg and just click ok you don't have to worry about any compression because we're going to use this just as a backdrop in blender and for the final render we're going to come back into after effects so we don't lose any quality then also don't forget to set an output folder and down here make sure that you have save in subfolder enabled because after effects is going to export every frame as a jpeg and we want to make sure that we have all of those jpegs in the same folder so let's also change the name of this subfolder to image sequence click save and click on this render button to export and if we now go to this image sequence folder you can see that it exported each frame as a jpeg file for the next step i went through our image sequence and looked for the very last frame before i disappear in my case this is frame 123 i then loaded this image into photoshop and i'm now going to cut myself out so that we can use it later on as an image texture for this i'm gonna use the really handy quick selection tool in photoshop left click to add to the selection and hold down alt in order to remove parts from the selection it doesn't have to be perfect as it will be visible for only a few frames in the final shot then invert the selection with the shortcut ctrl shift i and press delete to remove the background now let's export the first version of this as a png file i also want to create a second version and for this i'm first going to add a new layer put it below our current layer make sure that you have the new layer selected and choose the clone stamp tool switch the sample to all layers and start painting around your object hold down alt to add a new sample point and then just drag with the left mouse button in order to paint just draw a border around it so we can fix some issues later on in the texturing again this doesn't have to be perfect as it will only be visible for just a few frames and once this is all done export another version of it before we can start to recreate the scene in blender we first need to extract the camera perspective in the 3d space and for this we are gonna use a really handy tool called f-spy that you can download for free from fspy.io so just scroll down here and download your version for mac windows or linux and also get the official f-spy importer add-on so we can import the camera later on into blender i already have f-spy installed so i'm just going to open it up and drag and drop the first frame of our image sequence in here now you can see that we get those red and green lines the red one stands for the x-axis and the green one is for the y-axis now in order to extract the camera position we just have to align those with parallel lines in our image so i'm just going to take this red one that represents the x-axis and align it with the top of the roof the second red line has to be parallel so i'm gonna align it with the stairs and what i'm doing right here is i just hold down shift to open up this magnifying glass which allows me to make precise adjustments in order to extract the camera position we just have to match two axes so instead of the y-axis i want to use the set axis so i switch this over here and then just align those blue lines with the windows on the house and now f-spy correctly calculated the position of our camera as you can see on the orientation of this gizmo we can see it even better if we enable an xy grid floor that perfectly aligns with our scene this point right here is going to be the origin point later on in blender so let's just place it on top of those stairs and once you're happy with the alignment just go to file save as i'm just gonna call it camera and save it right there okay now it is finally time to start working with blender and first of all let's just delete everything from the default scene and instead bring in the camera that we created with f-spy for this if you haven't done so already open the preferences and in the add-ons tab install the f-spy importer add-on so just click on install select the zip file that we just downloaded and choose install add-on then also don't forget to tick this checkbox next to the add-on in order to make sure that it is enabled once this is done you should be able to go to file import and find this f-spy option then just select our camera.f-spy file and choose import project file now you can see that i created this camera and already set the first frame of our sequence as the background image and this camera has exactly the same perspective that i used when i recorded this footage so now we can start to recreate those stairs in 3d for this press shift a and bring in a new plane and the first thing we realize is that the scale of our plane doesn't match with our image at all so if we open up this side panel you can see that this plane has a dimension of 2 by 2 meters which isn't realistic in this image so in order to fix this select the camera and change the pivot point to 3d cursor and when i now press s to scale you can see that this brings the camera closer or further away from our plane if we take a look at it from the camera view we can scale this up until the 2 by 2 meter plane roughly matches the scale of our scene so let's switch the pivot point back to median point and start aligning this plane with our stairs for this i like to use x-ray view and maybe it is easier for you to see what i do if i open up a second window disable the x-ray in here maybe make it a bit smaller then tab into edit mode i prefer to use the edge selection then first select this edge back here g y to align this with this line right here then select the other edge g y bring it to this corner maybe also bring this bit over here g x so that this perfectly aligns with the stairs then e set to extrude this downwards e y and over here you can see that i'm creating those stairs then again e set to bring this downward always align it with the corners of the stairs e y e set e y e set and e y one more time and that's how easy it is to recreate those stairs from within the camera view so next let's bring in another plane press shift a and rotate this 90 degrees on the y-axis let's bring it over here t x and maybe also bring it down we're going to use this as a collision object on the side of the stairs so bring it over here to align it with this little wall maybe also go to edit mode and with ex give it a bit of thickness we can close the second window so that's basically everything we have to recreate in this scene next let's actually load in our footage into the background of the camera because currently we just have a still image so for this select the camera and if you are not able to select the camera from within the camera view just select it in the outliner go to the camera properties and bring down this clip start value to maybe 0.01 and now we should be able to select the camera from the 3d viewport as well then in the background image change this from a single image to a movie clip choose open locate our image sequence and press a to select all the frames open clip and now we can scroll through the timeline and take a look at our animation now in my case this is 253 frames long so i'm just gonna adjust the end frame and i also like to bring up the opacity and then let's also fix the frame rate so in the output properties change the frame rate to 25 fps as this is the frame rate that i recorded this footage at for the next step in our process we are going to bring in a 3d character for this go to the last frame before i disappear and in the downloads of this tutorial you should find the character t post.blend file we can just take this and drag and drop it into our current project choose append and under collection which is right here we can just select the character collection which is going to import a character mesh and a character armature our goal is now to align this mesh with myself on this last frame before i disappear so for this let's first enable x-ray view and hold down shift and right click between my feet in order to place the 3d cursor right here on those steps then with the armature selected press shift s and choose selection to cursor to bring this down here and this is already aligning pretty well so maybe scale it a bit down to match the height and we can continue to edit this and align it in pose mode so switch to pose mode and now you should be able to rotate and scale all those bones in order to align it as good as possible with this character i think i'm going to speed this process up a bit the goal is just to align this character as good as possible with me on the last frame before i disappear it doesn't have to be perfect as this is just the base for our particle system and the character itself won't be visible at all once the character is roughly aligned we can jump back into object mode select the mesh itself and make a few more adjustments in edit mode if you go into edit mode you can see that the armature modifier isn't working anymore so just go to the modifier properties and also enable it for edit mode then i want to enable proportional editing disable the x-ray view and just fix this part around my pullover where the mesh isn't aligning properly now my character looks really horrible but again this doesn't matter at all as it is going to be just a base for our particle system and the only thing that matters to us is that the outline of the character roughly matches to the image let's take a quick pause right here to talk about polygonic the creators of my favorite blender add-ons one of their plugins is called traffic and is a huge asset library with cars other vehicles and street elements the cars are all rigged to make it really easy for you to create exciting animations with them the cars even have good looking interiors and very practical light controls another awesome thing about this add-on is that it gets constantly updated and new assets and features will be added in the future this is a must-have if you need good looking cars for your renders or animations you can find the link to it in the video description but now let's continue on with the tutorial let's continue to add in the particles so first let's hide the armature and make sure that you have the character mesh selected then go to the particle options click on this plus to add a new system and i actually want all the particles to spawn exactly on the frame before i get hit which is 124 in my case so i'm going to change the start to 124 and the end to 124 as well so now all the particles appear exactly on this frame and we don't need to see this mesh anymore so on the viewport display disable show emitter and also do the same for the render now currently we only have those white spheres that are just placeholders and aren't actually going to render so to replace them with an actual mesh press shift a and bring in an ico sphere let's move this to the side right click to shade it smooth and then in the particle options on the render change this from halo to object make sure to select icosphere and now we get meshes as particles maybe let's also increase the size of them a bit to 2.07 maybe also give it some randomness let's say 0.4 now currently those particles are just falling through the ground which we don't want to happen so let's select the those stairs go to the physics properties and enable collision then do the same for this wall and when we now play the particle simulation you can see that they are bouncing off the stairs and also those walls actually i think i want to make those stairs a bit wider so i'm going to select all the edges on this side gx to move them a bit over and now the stairs are just a bit wider i think i want to also make those steps a bit smoother so in the modifiers i'm just going to bring in bevel modifier bring down this amount and increase this to let's say three segments shade it smooth and make sure that you put the bevel on top of the collision modifier so that the particles will actually bounce off those smooth edges another issue that we have is that those particles disappear after around 50 frames so to avoid this go to the particle settings again and just increase this lifetime to let's say 400 so they won't disappear until the simulation is over what we also need to fix is that those particles are clipping through the ground of the stairs which wouldn't look very realistic so an easy way to fix this is just go to the physics and under deflection enable size deflect when we re-simulate this the particles aren't clipping through the ground anymore another really important setting that we shouldn't forget to enable is the rotation so in here go to rotation check this and enable dynamic rotation otherwise the particles will always have the same orientation which will look very fake once we add the shading to them so just make sure that you have dynamic rotation enabled next let's make the pan actually interact with the particles so as you can see currently the pan is just going through the particles which takes away a lot of the realism so to fix this just press shift a to bring in a new plane scale this down quite a bit and use g set to move this upwards go to the last frame before i get hit 123 in my case bring this plane up and press i to add in a location keyframe we can also quickly go into edit mode and press e to give it some thickness and now just go frame by frame and animate this plane so g set move it down i to add another location keyframe go to the next frame g set i another keyframe and so on g set i location [Music] g set i location and this is going to make the simulation look a lot more realistic once we have the interaction of the pan in the particles can cheese set i location g set i and location [Music] g set i and location now we're almost done let's bring this up even more i location and then on the next frame let's just move it to the side i location so now let's go back to solid view we have this plane that is going down with the pan and in order to make it interact with the particles we just need to go to the physics tab enable collision can play the simulation and you can see that this is now interacting and i don't want to actually see the plane so let's just just change this in the viewport display options to bounce so we only see the outline and now this already looks way more realistic that we have the pan affect the particles now another thing that i found that makes the particle system look a lot more realistic is to make them move down a bit faster in the beginning and then only slow down later on and an easy way to do this is to just animate the gravity so select the particles go to the particle properties and under field weights on the first frame of the particle system bring the gravity up to let's say 4 then press i to add in a keyframe let's forward about 10 frames bring it back down to 1 i for another keyframe and when we now play this you can see that the particles fall down really fast in the beginning and then behave with normal gravity later on an issue that we have now is that a lot of the particles are falling down on the back side of the stairs which we don't want to happen i want all of them to roll down the stairs and then fall down on this side so very easy to fix just bring in a wind force field bring it over here g set to move it up and r x to rotate it down those stairs then just re-simulate and now almost all of them are going in this direction we have one more that is moving over here so maybe we can just play with the seat which is giving us another random iteration let's play this again and in this case i have all of them going in this direction which is perfect i think the wind is still a bit too strong so i'm just going to bring down the strength to let's say 0.75 let's simulate again and also take a look at it from the camera view and see if i'm happy with the simulation so here i get hit the particles appear they move down and then it starts all over again now i want to make sure that all the particles are disappeared out of the camera frame once the animation is over which is actually the case so i'm pretty happy with this result you could continue to play around with all those parameters of the force fields and particles to get different results however i'm pretty happy with this result so i'm just gonna go to cache and click on bake in order to save all the movements of the particles to memory in order to create a cool material for those particles i want to project the texture cutout that we created in the beginning of this tutorial onto all those spheres now unfortunately this doesn't work with particles because we need to make a uv projection and all of those particles are basically just instances of this icosphere that we have over here and so they all share the same uv map which is an issue when we want to make projections so we need to find a way to make all those fierce real objects you might think that we can just go to the modifier options and click on convert to make all the spheres real objects this would basically work however with this we will also lose the animation data which doesn't really help in this case so the solution i came up with is to export this particle system as an alembic file and then import it back into blender which will make all the spheres individual objects that we can uv unwrap and still keeps the animation data of the particles so in order to do this make sure that you have our character mesh object with the particle selected and nothing else is selected make sure that your particle system is baked which we did before then go to file export and choose alembic i'm just going to call this particles then i want to change the frame start to frame 124 which is the start frame of our particle system and just leave the end on 253 which is the end of our timeline then make sure that we only export the selected objects and disable renderable objects and also be sure that particle system is enabled so that it will actually export our particles once this is all set up just click on export alembic and it will take a few seconds in order to export our particle system now before we import this again let's make a few adjustments in our scene so first of all i want to create a new collection and just call this backup and then just take this character collection and bring it in here and disable the backup collection so we don't see our character anymore as we're not going to use it anymore i don't want to delete it since we might want to go back and make a few adjustments on it so i just keep it in this disabled backup collections where it won't bother us then let's also select the wind object and this collision object and press m to also put them into the backup collection as we're not going to use them anymore then let's also create a new collection and just call this olympic and just make sure to have this collection selected when we import our alembic file so just go to import alembic select the one we just exported and choose import now this also changed the length of our timeline so just bring the frame start back to one and you can see that we now have all those individual objects in here and they are animated exactly as the particles were it also brought back this original character mesh that we don't need anymore so let's just press x to delete it it is now a bit slower than the particle system that we have before but i think it is still okay then let's make a few adjustments in our viewport so first in the overlay settings i want to disable all those annoying relationship lines and in the shading menu i like to change the color to random so we can distinguish a bit better between the individual particles now in order to create a uv projection go to a frame before the particle starts to move and also make sure that you are within the camera view then let's select all the particles so just select one of them use the shortcut shift g to select grouped and choose siblings to select all the other spheres then i'm just going to open up a new window change this to the uv editor and here i'm just going to import our texture cutout that we created in the beginning of the tutorial now to project all the uv maps tab into edit mode with all the particles selected press a to select everything and here you can see this is our current uv map and to project this just press u and choose project from view in here which will project all the uv coordinates onto the texture cut out that we created all right so let's now turn this into an actual material so first of all i'm gonna switch to the shader preview and also open up a shader editor let's bring this over here select just one of the spheres create a new material for it let's just call this sphere and i'm gonna make it red so we can see which objects have this material applied then again select all the spheres with the shortcut shift g and choose siblings and then ctrl l to link the materials so now all the spheres have this material of course we don't want to keep this red color so let's press shift a and under texture bring in a new image texture then let's load the texture cutout in here and just connect this into the color and you can see that this is projecting perfectly we currently have all those black borders but we're going to deal with them in just a second but first i want to add the material for the stairs and the wall object over here so for them we also want to project an image onto them so let's just create a new material called this stairs and also press shift a to bring in an image texture and we're not going to use the texture cutout instead we're going to take the first frame of our image sequence open it up and when i plug the color into the color you can see that this isn't working because we haven't properly you we unwrapped those stairs yet but if we now tap into edit mode just select everything and with you make a view projection you can see that this still isn't working this is because our stairs don't have enough geometry so let's just fix this in edit mode press ctrl r to add a few loop cuts so that those individual faces become approximately squares then again a to select everything and subdivide this let's say two times then go back into camera view u and project from view and now with this amount of geometry it works perfectly i don't like to have this repetition around the camera view so i'm just going to change this from repeat to clip and plug the alpha into the alpha now to actually make this transparent go to the image settings and under the viewport display options change the blend mode from opaque to alpha clip so now everything out of outside of the camera view is transparent then we can also copy this material to the wall over here so select the wall shift click on the stairs and again use ctrl l to link the materials and copy this material now again this isn't working because we haven't unwrapped this object yet so also tab into edit mode a to select everything and right click to add a few subdivisions say five times maybe even more let's say seven times back into the camera mode u project from view and now we also have a material on this one so now that we have those two shaders let's go back to the spheres and deal with those black borders so first of all we can also take the alpha and plug it into the alpha then to make it work go to the material settings and change the blend mode to alpha hashed so now we get this perfect outline however this becomes an issue as soon as the particles start to move because some of them are now just cut open and this is exactly why we created two image textures in the beginning of this tutorial so now we can load this second one in press shift a a new image texture and this time open up the cutout with the border that we created if we were to use just this one without the alpha you can see that we get this border which looks pretty bad in this case before the particles start to move however as soon as they are not in place anymore we want to use this texture so the particles won't get cut in half so the optimal solution is to make a transition between those two textures for this let's go back to the frame where all the particles are in place and we're only going to use the colors of the image texture with the border and the alpha of the texture cut out then we can bring in a mix rgb note and when we change color 2 to a completely white color we can use this factor to adjust the alpha mask on the borders and we can now make use of this to animate the transition so just go to the frame where the particles first start to move and add a keyframe with the factor zero so just hover over the factor and press i to insert the keyframe then let's forward three frames bring the factor to one and with i add another keyframe and now we have this very cool transition so that we have a clean border at first and as soon as the particles start to move they become proper spheres it is working perfectly in shading preview however if we switch to render preview with cycles you can see that we get these black borders again and by the way if you haven't done this already change the render engine to cycles because some of the features that we're going to use won't work with ev luckily those black borders are an easy fix just go down to light path and increase the number of light bounces for the transparency so let's try 20 and it is already better however still not enough so let's bring this up even more to about 40 and now we have really clean borders all right so now it is finally time to start preparing for rendering so first of all let's switch to render preview with cycles and let's bring back the background image so in the render properties just go down to film and enable the background transparency currently we don't have any light in our scene so that's why i went to polyhaven.com which is a really great website where you can get high quality environment textures for free i then looked for overcast skies in order to find the environment texture with a similar light condition to what i had when i recorded my footage i then decided to use this canon hdri i set the resolution to 1k and downloaded it back in blender then go to the world tab and next to color click on this yellow button choose environment texture and import the hdr file that we just downloaded now we finally have lighting in our scene and i think it is not strong enough yet so i'm just gonna bring up the strength to two in order to make it a bit brighter now this looks great however in the final render i don't actually want to see those stairs and the wall that we have on the side instead i just want the shadows that are casted onto those objects but not the objects with the textures themselves and in blender there is a really easy option to do this just select the stairs go to the object properties and under visibility enable shadow catcher do this for the stairs and then also for the walls on the side so now we can see the objects themselves in the final render but we still get the shadows that are casted onto them from the particles so before we can make our first test render let's set up a few more things in the render properties so first of all in the sampling options i think i'm going to bring down the samples to 64 which might be enough then i also enable adaptive sampling to speed things up a bit and also don't forget to enable motion blur which is going to make our result a lot more realistic i'm just going to bring down the shutter to 0.25 so that it is not too extreme and under performance i also like to bring up the tile size to 256 since i am rendering with a gpu if you are rendering on a cpu i recommend you to bring the tile size down a bit for optimal performance for the render i also want to have the particles and the shadows on a separate layer so for this we can make use of the view layer option in blender let's just name the current view layer to particles and then click on this button to create a new one and just call this shadow now in this shadow layer let's just disable the backup collection as we don't need it and let's create a new collection with our two shadowcatcher objects so click on this button to create a new collection rename this to shadowcatcher and bring in our two objects let's also rename those so this one is the stairs and the other one is the wall then as i said in this shadow layer we only want to see the shadows themselves and not the particles so for this just go to this alembic collection and in this options enable the indirect only button and then enable this for the alembic collection so all the particles in this alembic collection will only indirectly affect the stairs and cast shadows onto them but the particles themselves won't be visible so that's it for the shadow layer now let's set up our particles layer and here we basically do the same thing but for the shadow catcher also enable indirect only so we only get the particles and the shadows aren't visible for the final compositing it is a huge advantage to have the particles and the shadows on separate view layers now for this particles layer i also want to go to the view layer properties and enable denoising data so we get optimal denoising later on in the compositing and there is one last thing that i want to set up for this i'm going to select the camera and in the camera options enable depth of field then hover over the distance and press e to get this eyedropper and select my face as the focus point make sure that you use this distance option and don't use the eyedropper of the focus object because this will follow the object and we don't want our focus point to move now with this depth of field enabled the particles will become a bit blurry once they get close to the camera which adds just a little bit of extra realism so now with all of that setup let's switch to the rendering tab and press f12 to create a test render first it renders all the particles and then also the shadow layer once it is done we can switch between the two layers up here by switching between the shadow and the particles if we were to render just like this it would only export our particles but not the shadows so to fix this we need to set up a few things in the compositor so let me just close this timeline and enable use nodes so you can see that we currently have only the particles render layer in here so let's just duplicate this and switch the bottom one to the shadow layer and whatever goes into the composite output is what gets rendered so currently it will only render the particle layer unfortunately it is not possible to input two render layers into the composite output at the same time so instead we're gonna bring in a file output node and from the shadow layer we're actually going to use the alpha layer because we can use the denoiser on this so press shift a and under filter bring in a denoise node and just bring this between this connection if we were to use the image output that he knows node wouldn't work but with the alpha node we can use it just like this and to make the compositing a bit easier later on i'm also going to invert this output then let's set up the file output node so select it press n to open up the side panel and under node we can go to properties and first of all set an output folder for the shadow layer so i'm just going to create a new folder for the renders call this render and in the render folder also create a new folder for the shadows open this up also give it a file name which is going to be shadowcatcher and accept then for the file format we can leave this on png but we can change the color to rgb as we're not going to use the alpha channel and leave everything else on the default so the shadow layer is now ready and we can focus on our particle layer for this we also want to use the denoise node so let's duplicate it and since we enabled the denoising passes for this layer we can this time use the noise image denoising normal and denoising albedo outputs this will give us an even better result for this composite node we need to set the output settings in the output properties of our scene so down here we also want to use png but this time with rgb a and also a color depth of 16 bit so we get a bit more information for the compositing then let's also set an output folder so i go back to our render folder and in here create a new one for the particles open this up also give it a file name which is going to be particles as well accept and now this layer is also ready so that's it for the compositing let's just quickly go back to the layout tab and let's just set up the length of our timeline so go to the frame where the particles start to move and then go back five frames more we want to have a few extra frames so we can make a nice transition later on in the compositing now i'm on frame 121 which is going to be the first frame of my timeline with this setup as well we are now ready to render i think i'm going to increase the number of samples to 128 in order to get a really noise-free result if your computer is not powerful enough you can also go down to 64 or even 32 samples in order to get faster results with everything ready go up to render and choose render animation to initiate the render it took me about one hour to render out all the frames but now it is finally finished and if we go into this render folder you can see we have the image sequence for the particle layer and then also a separate folder for the shadow layers so for the final composition i just open up the after effects composition that we created in the very beginning of this tutorial so let's now load in the image sequences that we rendered into this project so in the project section just right click choose import and file then go to your image sequence i want to import the particles first select the first frame make sure png sequence is checked and then click on import now the issue that we have with importing image sequences is that after effects doesn't know which frame rate to use in this case it just used a default 30 fps however our original footage is 25 fps so we need to fix this and for this just right click on the image sequence and under interpret footage go to main and here change the assumed frame rate to 25 click ok and this is already fixed then let's do the same thing with the shadow layer just go to render shadows again select the first frame choose png sequence and import then again interpret footage main and change this to 25 fps as well then let's just bring in the particles layer first bringing it on top of our composition and now by default it starts on the first frame which is not what we want so i'm just gonna align the end with the end of our composition and here we you can see we have this little overlap of the two layers which is because we added those five extra frames before we rendered so we can make a nice transition then let's also bring in the shadow layer and also align it with our particle layer currently this adds just this black and white background but to make the shadows actually work right click on the shadow layer and under blending mode change this to multiply so now the shadow is working however you can see that it makes the whole image just a bit darker to fix this in the effect search for the levels drag and drop this onto our shadow layer and then just play with this input white value until it only adds the shadows but doesn't darken the overall image now let's adjust the transition from the original footage to the particles so i'm just going to zoom in a bit and i want this transition to start let's say three frames before i disappear then on the last frame before the particles start to move i'm just gonna keyframe the opacity of both layers to 100 percent then go back two frames change the opacity to zero and now we have those particles fade in a bit just before i disappear currently the particles don't have enough saturation so we can clearly see the difference between the original layer and the unsaturated particles so to fix this just search for the hue saturation effect drag and drop it onto the particles layer and then just slightly increase the master saturation to let's say something around 15 so now this transition is a lot smoother and that's already everything we have to do in the compositor so i think we are ready to render for this go up to composition and choose add to media encoder queue this will open up the adobe media encoder that we're going to use to render the composition right here make sure that you have this set to h.264 so it will export an mp4 file then set your output folder and also give it a file name so i'm just gonna call this loop then save and press this play button in order to start rendering now we are finally done with our looping animation and i'm really happy with the result i hope you could follow along with me and if you have any further questions feel free to ask them in the comments and i will do my best to help you out that's it for this video thank you very much for watching if you want to learn more about creating visual effects with blender you should check out the vfx courses i published on gumroad and blender market i put the link to them in the video description i am nick from blender daily see you in the next one

Channel: Nik Kottmann

Views: 15,627

Keywords: Create Looping VFX Animation with Blender!, blender visual effects, blender vfx, blender vfx tutorial, blender after effects, blender photoshop, blender visual effects tutorial, blender loop, vfx loop, blender particles, particles animation, blender particles vfx, blender instagram loop, visual effects loop, loop animation, blender vfx animation, blender cgi, cgi loop, nikkottmann, nikkottmann tiktok, nikkottmann tutorial, nik kottmann, nikkottmann visual effects, tiktok, 3d

Id: f4qCXknQ6IE

Length: 57min 7sec (3427 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021