Creating a Blender Scene for Greenscreen - Part 2 #blender #aftereffects #blender3d #blendertutorial

okay so now let's finally get started with uh the cool part so let's connect After Effects one more time with blender and then we can jump right back into after effects and import our camera that we've created and we can use comp Center and then import the layers and it will jump back in After Effects as before uh but now everything should be fine and our camera as you can see is imported into our blender file if we take a look through we can see that our flow that we've created is a little bit too high so maybe we can take this one down for example taking the transform tool so G and then Z something like this and as a next step we will export our green screen footage so we can reimport it in blender so pretty simple go up to composition and then add to render queue and here we will choose a preset with an alpha channel so for example p PNG sequence with alpha or Tiff sequence whatever you like and then we will render this out and wait for after effects to complete shouldn't take too long because uh at this stage uh we only have a few effects on our footage so this take maybe like a minute or two and let's open up our settings for our 3D camera and as you can see in the object properties uh we have this camera symbol down here and in this menu we will find the uh section for the background images maybe we can click this and then we can go to add images and of course we're searching for a movie clip and then we can open up our file and blender will automatically detect this as a PNG sequence and we can hit open uh let's hide our background for a second to see it better we don't see too much because we have to change one little element which is putting our background element into the uh front view so you have two options here back and front in the depth part and we can change the opacity so if we click on front you can see that our pest doctor is now uh really in front of the image and and whatever we will put in the back of our layer uh will be the the background element and uh let me show you the workflow so you understand why we uh just put all of this effort into this small section uh so if I now just import a new Cube for example scale it up a little bit and put it in the very background and then start scrubbing through the timeline you can see what happens uh because now you can hopefully see what the workflow is about because now we have our reference from After Effects and we can build around this camera movement our scene which is pretty cool and this way we really really quickly can uh create complex 3D worlds within our green screen composite and later then put all of these together in After Effects one more time oh and if you can see at the very end there are some pink clips and this is just the end of the clip so uh we have a little bit too much timeline blender so we can change that down here to uh for example 203 and then we can trim our comp like we would do in After Effects before and yeah this is pretty great and now it's really time for our kit bashing part and this is really like the most fun part and the most creative part so let's delete our Cube it was just for presentation purposes and now we can start setting up our blender scene so let's split up our main screen into two parts so we have just one camera screen on the left side and therefore you can hit the T key and the N key to get rid of the side bars and we can zoom in a little bit and just in order to make sure that we only see the camera image we can go down into the camera properties and then on the viewp display and here we will change the pass PUD or pass part out I don't know how this is pronounced and just bring this one up to 100% and this way we only blacken out the uh surroundings of the camera image and really focus on our camera and for me this is pretty helpful when I build up something like that and the cool part is now we have our monitor on the left side and on the right side we can go back into our 3D view pod if you aren't and we can go out of the camera mode and work our way in our 3D scene and we can see what's going on in the camera so this is the way that I'd like to work uh because it feels a little bit more controlled to see what the camera will see as you might have guessed now it's time to really get some assets along the way and position them in our 3D view Port uh so let's adjust our floor real quick always double check that if you scrap through the timeline the camera uh movement is not cutting off some areas of 3D scene that we don't want to see like so I have to really ensure that the scene is looking great all over the camera movement okay okay so let's put our flow something like that and then it's time for our first asset and I'd like to start from the background all the way up to the front so background mid-ground foreground to create depth let's unhide our sky and position this one in the very background uh that we only see the the clouds not the field that is beneath the clouds and like I said before make sure that we really ensure that our background is covering the whole scene from the beginning of the camera movement to the very end uh so scale it up if needed and position it in the very back so that we only see our Sky element and as a next step we can start building our cemetery and for this one I had some 3D scans from I think it was sketch fap and we'll start with this big Cemetery gate in the back and we can position it and bring it in our scene and now we can see it in our camera and we can line up with our floor slightly and adjust it with the different axis and then we can continue with our next element in this case this musy stone wall so once again bring it back into uh zspace and move it along the X and the Y AIS uh double check from all perspectives so that we really line up uh the elements with our floor and if you like and in this case we only have one of these elements uh we can of course duplicate this one and we are doing this by using the shortcut shift d uh so as you can see we need another element on the left side so let's uh take the duplicate version and move it over uh once again bring it into place with the transform tools and of course we can use some other helps like uh modifiers in this case for example the array modifier and this way we can create an array of the same object to create uh very quickly some sort of cemetery walls that surrounds our cemetery and if you have gaps like me you can adjust this with the X Factor in this case and just put them a little bit closer together so this way it feels like one solid Mossy wall and yeah this way we've created the foundation for our cemetery and now we can take our flow element which in this case is the foot path and we can rotate this on the z-axis 90° and bring it into place and ensure that the scale of our object is a little bit closer to the scale of our pest doctor so as you can see maybe it's a little bit big um so maybe we can scale it down a little bit just in touch it's a little bit of a back and forth uh so there is no exact uh method uh just try and you know eyeball a little bit of the scale just that it feels a little bit better integrated into our shot something like that and we can adjust the position of our foot path and once again we can use an array modifier and putting up the count to maybe something like three and adjust our foot path so that it matches with our background gate H maybe we have to adjust our gate a little bit so move the whole composition and the stone walls a little bit to the left and this way it feels a little bit better aligned so as you can see we have to adjust our stone walls so let's do another array modifier raise up the count to two that should be enough and ensure that both walls are connected and yeah this is starting to look pretty good uh maybe we have to adjust our foot path a little bit it feels a little bit floaty so let's bring it down on the z-axis and uh if there's some interaction with the floor because the floor is of course not a flat plane so it's a little bit wobbly uh we can of course uh sculpt our plane so for example if we take our uh flow element uh we can start sculpting different elements to better match with our overall composition we'll go from object mode into sculpt mode and there are a few brushes that we can use for example the grab brush just to bring down the floor slightly under our foot path so uh the shortcut for this is G and then we can just for example use our mouth and just push the vertices a little bit down F to scale our brush or we can use the radius up here and we can just bring this down and touch so that the flow and the foot path are a little bit better connected and that there is not this nasty interaction I mean a little bit interal action can be because you know as long as the cemetery is for example very old maybe a little bit of grass and dirt is coming over this foot path so it's not a clean transition it's a little bit of of a story element too uh so this uh Cemetery could be a very old one and the foot path is a little bit grown over with uh with all kind of vegetation and floor elements so just find the sweet spot for your composition so that it matches up with with the later final Cemetery once again you can uh search for for reference on the internet on Google or on Pinterest to find old sem pictures to get yourself inspiration and a little bit of reference to build up from anyway that should be enough for this one and we can now uh take the draw brush and draw in some unevenness into our floor uh so you can see by holding down the mouse button in this case I can quickly draw some smaller hilts at the side uh because uh of course this would be not a perfect plane and you can do this randomly and just build up some some interesting Terrain uh just to make uh our composition a little bit more interesting okay so next element um maybe what about some dead trees uh we had some dead trees here also from sketch up I guess uh so let's take one of them and bring them back into our composition once again move them into the background because we're still at the background stage and position it slightly behind our musy stone wall so that we don't see the The Roots and maybe we can rotate this a little bit and yeah that seems to be pretty interesting oh maybe a little bit a little bit like so maybe let's uh put it a little bit over to the side so that it don't distracts uh from our pest doctor let's rewatch the camera movement yeah something like that looks okay okay so now let's start with the mid-ground so we can use some some of the Tombstones for example and bring them into position move them along the X and the Y AIS and just try to align them with the floor something like that and of course maybe we can use uh some sort of uh gate uh for our Tombstone and bring this one into position two and it's always a good choice to uh rotate it slightly because uh that not all of the elements are aligned perfectly because uh this is a very old cemetery and of course the nature strikes backs and some of them may sunk into the floor or something okay and at this stage you can see it's it's really up to you so uh just do your own stuff uh start aligning different objects along the way if you like you can go back into sculpt mode and adjust our flow a little bit so that the flow and the different elements in this case tombstones better interact with each other so therefore you can use the draw brush as before or you can use the grab brush to adjust the vertices of the flow a littleit bit it's up to you but the more time you spend on little details like this the better your overall scene will later on look uh so really it's up to you it's a creative work uh just don't redo what I'm doing here uh do your own Cemetery this is just my little version for this tutorial but uh I did this a few times in the workshop and every time it turns out differently so um this is nice and it's just creative it's really just building a little world uh by just pushing some elements around that are already modeled so you don't have to care about that you don't have to texture just place your objects along the way and try to make something interesting okay so now we can uh put in some bigger objects for example the mousum so let's take this one it's a nice scan from sketchfab link is in the description as mentioned and you can download this for free and use this for your own scene and I really like this one because it's a pretty high poly uh and really detailed mous with with nice normal maps in this case and we can place that somewhere around here so we have a nice mid-ground element and we can change of course between the global and the local space so you can better adjust your elements in 3D space so maybe we can rotate this slightly and bring it above our floor something like that maybe move it back a little bit yeah something like that looks good okay and really just think about the scale actually this is a little bit small maybe I will adjust this later on and then let's continue with our foreground element um maybe we can take some scan from quickel Mega scans uh because this is very detailed and I only used the level of detail uh zero elements so that we really have the most detailed version with 4K textures so we can place this element right in front of the camera and this way you can really see that we are about to create depth uh maybe something like this it's not that easy but you get the ideas like the camera is uh is moving from this element to our pest doctor maybe we can rotate this a little bit bring it back into position and we have this H I'm not pretty sure whether this is cool because now we don't see our mousum and I want to see my mousum uh so maybe we can put it up here and bring our mum a little bit in the background and bring it closer to the foot path okay and let's scrub through the camera movement yeah that's better but the problem is that the foreground element should be kind of like a first hint for the viewer what what the location is about and I would like to see a tombstone that is pretty clear to read so maybe this element we can put it a little bit more in the back it still looks nice but it's not our hero asset for the forground so for this one we will take a pretty easy and pretty clear to read Tombstone so I think of across for example like this one so let's try this as our foreground element this is an element that I model completely on my own and it's also having some nice normal maps and 4K textures so it should be a good asset to be in the foreground so let's rotate this slightly and bring it back a little bit so we can it's a little bit too too high so maybe we can bring it down a little bit so we really see the cross yeah something like that so now it's a little bit better to read what the asset is and the viewer gets a good hint what the location is about so it's a cemetery of course yeah that looks better that looks interesting and later on we will do a Focus Shift from the tombstone to our pest doctor so this is a good element to start from so we will animate the camera uh and the depth of field so we have a nice transition between these two elements okay and now let's bring in another element of course another Tombstone and we can place it for example somewhere here and once again rotate this a little bit because there are no aligned elements uh in an organic uh environment so please ensure that you create a little bit of chaos and a little bit more visual interest uh because nothing in life is really perfect um so maybe we need some other element here for the background because this looks a little bit too empty so maybe another tree and we can uh bring this into position maybe somewhere here and of course ensure that we don't see the roots so bring it a little bit better into position and then move it down on the z-axis ah maybe something like that and you can see we only have like 10 to 12 elements and it it really just is it's kind of like enough because if we would take all the elements that are there and try to put them into this small scene it will feel a little bit uh overwhelmed and a little bit too full so maybe only like two or three more elements and then we are good to go so once again just try to create something that looks interesting but uh still realistic so of course the cemetery is populated with a lot of tombstones but every tombstone has its own place and needs its space uh so don't put them too close together because that would make no sense at all so maybe one more element maybe this Tombstone here bring it into position once again make it a little bit more aged a little bit more sunk into the floor and yeah maybe that is already enough for demonstration purposes uh really I encourage you to make your own version and just try to do something that looks much better than my version here and always go through the timeline to see where elements are but what you have to think about uh if we now take a look at our floor element uh there is a modifier and in this modifier there's uh the grass element and if we enable that we can see that we have some grass and population going on so always have in mind that there is this one big element which is the vegetation uh which will make our environment even more crowded and even more Vivid so if you place your objects maybe it's a good idea to turn on and off the grass element uh here and there uh just to see how things look overall and now let me show you how I set up this terrain so you can do this for your own scene okay so let's quickly talk about the terrain that you can see in the tutorial and actually I use this free add-on which is the free AO terrain generator which is a pretty cool and awesome new plugin which in the base version or in the light version is free but give it a go and use the base version for only five bucks which is really a steal and you can create some awesome looking terrains as you can see and when you download this blend file uh you get by default this setup here uh it's just demonstration one uh so if we go into Eevee and just click on that you can see there's some some nice Shader going on and if we take a look at the modifiers in this one you can see there are a few modifiers we can get rid of the subdivision one for Cycles because we're using Eevee and if we enable grass you can see that the generator is trying to populate really nice looking grass which is by the way moving when you uh play it back uh all over the place and this is kind of like a very nice setup and the way that I use it in my Cemetery scene is a little bit different so what I was doing is I was creating a plane and I was scaling this one up a little bit and put it to the side and then I shift click this one and use the shortcut crl L and copy all the modifiers and now our modifi is being translated as you can see something weird is happening because we have to apply rotation and scale and then we should have this result and very importantly you can see this in the original file uh there is a vertex Group which is called detail and this detail is controlling where to populate the grass so we need to create a Vertex group for our plane and we just have to rename it detail uh because in the modifier stack if we open up the grass uh modifier you can see it that there's the naming convention detail so we really have to make sure that our vertex group is called detail as well and then we can actually delete our original file and then I think I was going into addit mode and subdivide this like a few times maybe like four times don't overdo it because this one is pretty heavy especially when the grass is turned on and if we now take a look in Eevee you can see that we have a Terrain and of course if we scale this up and just apply rotation and scale it changes and this is the way that it works and if we now and this is the cool part uh go into our uh grass setting and we can raise up the density maybe to like 50,000 and just play around with the uh scale okay something like that and if you now just don't want the grass to populate everywhere you can do uh something very cool you can go into the weight paint option uh raise up the weight to maybe something like one and start painting out the grass where you don't want the grass to be uh because this is a little bit heavy here maybe we can turn this off for a second and as you can see the weight painting is not that easy because we don't have too much vertices to play with but let's say in this reddish area here we don't want any grass to populate maybe we can just create one more subdivision okay go back into Wayne paid and just make it a little bit nicer thing like that okay and if we now enable our grass once again there is no grass happening here in this reddish area and this is the setup that I use for the cemetery scene so download the free autot terraa uh in the Basel light version or give it a go and uh just span $5 on uh the full version and you have a really nice and solid workflow uh for setting up quickly a Terrain with and I hope you can see that here with moving grass I mean it's a little bit hard to see because the performance of this is a little bit heavy uh when we are in viewport shading but the grass is moving and this is really really nice and the cool part is that just the grass is like planes so it's not that heavy if we go into the statistics you can see it's not a very heavy scene so it still randers pretty fast uh only the viewport uh feedback is not that great but this is the reason why he turns off the grass by default so you can work pretty quickly and then you get uh better feedback okay so let's go back to our scene and work with the grass okay so now let's repeat what we've learned so far uh so we can go into the weight paint mode uh selecting our plane and uh now we can just raise up our weights to one uh so that everything that is red is not covered with grass and we can paint out our foot path so let's try to implement that by just making a nice transition between the vegetation and our foot path so paint out the area so that the foot path is more or less red at some point uh we have to turn on our grass because even though we painted this one red doesn't mean that there will be still a little bit of grass uh so maybe we can turn on our modifier and as you can see there are still some single elements on the put path that I just don't want to have okay so uh let's uh focus a little bit more on the background so you can see there are some smaller grass patches still there so uh really ensure that the area is really painted completely red so that uh there is no grass left I mean some grass can can still be there I mean if you ever see uh an Old Stone path sometimes the grass is coming through the uh in between areas of each Stone but it's hard to implement that with this setup here because it's only 2D images it's easier for us to uh paint this out I think it will look better and you always have to remember that things are moving so that would look a little bit weird so maybe something like this is fine and in the next chapter we will take care of our lighting setup uh so we will work with a lot of haze and fog and that will just get rid of some elements in the background so I think that this looks pretty good and yeah we can continue with our next chapter and that will be lighting

Channel: Thies Grünewald

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Id: dCa7YKMLD2g

Length: 26min 31sec (1591 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024