Design a 3D Set Extension Tutorial! + FREE model pack!

hey what's up Andrew Kramer here for Video Copilot dotnet and welcome back to another very exciting tutorial today we're gonna be taking a look at building this digital rooftop set based on our recent Video Copilot show that looks something like this amazing now be sure to check out the rest of that show lots of cool behind-the-scenes action on how we put together the entire sequence right now we're going to build this virtual rooftop set inside of After Effects using element 3d and the most amazing model pack ever made I don't know how we do it now even if you don't need a rooftop scene we're actually going to be covering a bunch of tips and techniques involved in building virtual sets using digital props we're going to be setting up a global illumination style lighting with shadows ambient occlusion and we're gonna even make the ground kind of look like it's wet so lots of cool tips and tricks we've got a lot to do so unlike the guys outside that are supposed to be working on my roof let's go ahead and get started all right we'll come over here and create a new composition call this roof scene make it 1080p looks good we'll hit okay then let's create a new solid call this e 3d roof and hit OK then we'll come over here the effects presets will type in element drag that out onto our solid now if you don't know element 3d is a plugin for After Effects that we make that adds a lot of cool 3d capabilities we use it a lot for motion graphics and things like that but there's a lot of really cool things you could do in the visual effects space and that's what we're gonna be talking about today all right let's click on the scene set up and let's take a look at this rooftop tool kit so I've got it installed you can download it from the web site Video Copilot dotnet and once you install it you will see the rooftop tool kit which looks like this so we can just click on an object here and there it is an amazing-looking vent of some sort now I'm going to change the environment map so we'll come over here to the presets environment and we'll go to the basic 2k and just use this outdoor looking scene which is just nice because it kind of has a building in it and rooftops make sense okay so you could hit N and kind of see the environment that we're reflecting so and I'm also going to turn off draft textures perfect let's take a look at a couple these models so we've got this vent here looks really nice 2k textures move that out of the way we'll load see here we've got the barrel I'm also going to turn the light down actually so what I like to do is only work in a PBR a physically based environment so what I'll do actually is just turn up the brightness and the gamma just a little bit so on this barrel you can see that it's a little bit metallic so one cool thing that you can do is if you come over here to the object you can click on the material and we can even change the color so we could just tint it a little bit and the cool thing about the physically-based shader is that the metal doesn't change so the metal still looks kind of like worn metal but we're only changing the color of the paint so this is a really cool way to add variation and if you really want to get into it you can click on the glossiness map and actually play around with the brightness and the contrast so if you brighten it up it'll actually make the barrel more shiny and more glossy basically so you can play around with the levels here and you know just create some really cool results and of course once you start compositing your scene you're going to want to add variation that way so for example we could hold alt drag this barrel maybe rotate it and here's the tools for the rotate scale and move and maybe here we could change the color now if I change the color of the barrel it'll change both of them but if I right click and choose duplicate and replace it makes a copy and we could say just rename this to say green and we could change the color to green and you know and maybe this barrel went through some stuff so we could go to the glossiness channel and make it a little bit rougher so just cool ways to add variation to these models also cleaning house right-click remove unused good idea let's take a look so we've got some air ducts look at this thing very cool very rusty rustic rusty okay we've got some pipes these are really cool so another cool thing that we tried to do was make the models really versatile so for example you can you know you can go here turn off the support hit D or just turn the switch off here and just have the pipes by themselves and also if you go to the mesh view which is this button right here you can actually see all of the pieces so what you can do is if you control click on a mesh you can hit D or turn off the switch here and disable it so you can actually go through and create variations you can even say click a few of these pieces here disable them you can also disable multiple so if you were to say hold ctrl and shift get rid of multiple now if I want to solo these I can actually hold down alt and see I have all of them selected here I can hold alt down and click on one and it will solo all the ones that are selected so just think about what you could do in terms of building blocks as you break these components up and you know turn them into your own sort of creation now we've also got a beacon light which is pretty cool and there's a barrel set so we've already put a few barrels that green barrel man just seen some stuff man and this is a really cool element you can also turn on the ambient occlusion inside of the UI just to kind of give it a little bit of shading so check this out so that looks really cool just holding down shift and dragging the background looks like we've got an old-looking antenna with some lights on it we've got a door and one cool thing about this is if you do go to the mesh view we can see the door here now I see that the door is rotating around the center and I want it to rotate from the side here so what I can do is go to the move tool and then click on this lock anchor and then I can move the anchor point over you can say go to front view so maybe a back view and I can move the anchor over just like that then uncheck that go back to the perspective view and now if I take the rotation tool the door opens up nicely and I can show you some cool ways to animate that as well so anyway this is just a brief overview of the roof top pack and of course this great air conditioning unit that will keep you nice and frosty so let's build our roof top what we're going to do is create a plane so we'll come over here create a plane and let's make this five by five now we're going to be using this really cool rooftop texture that has some really nice detail in it so what I'll do is I'll switch back to material view click on the new material and this is just a basic material that's completely reset and what I'll do is I'll take my textures and drag them right into the slot so drag the roof texture into the diffuse and we'll take the roof texture normal and put that into the normal slot now you can see it's got a bunch of kind of bumpiness to it so we'll turn the normal down to maybe five and we just want to be really really subtle and I'm also going to add some detail because I've actually created this as a tiled texture so what I'm going to do is click on the object come over here to the UV mapping and it's already set to UV so we'll set the repeat up - so as I increase it you see that it just adds more tiling so let's set that to say two point five and two point five that's nice and now it's pretty glossy right this is not looking right so one thing I could do is I could turn the glossiness down and as I do that it becomes a little bit more matte or a little bit more diffused but I don't want it to just be all diffuse I wanted to have some detail so what I can do is I can actually use the diffused texture and put it into the glossiness map slot so if I hold down alt drag that on to the glossiness map and then go inside of it and then turn the brightness up a bit check this out you see right here really transforming the way that the surface looks so we can see here now that we have areas that are really diffused and then we have areas that are a little bit more glossy almost like it's a wet surface so we can basically play around with the bias by playing around with the level control and you have things like saturation and contrast that can help really refine it and you can also even invert the map which will give you you know a different look altogether but I think I think something like this is actually really nice alright so let's go ahead and start adding some of our digital props now just to clean up what let's go ahead and remove any of the unused materials and we'll even rename this material and just to be clear I'm only pretending to be organized for the sake of this tutorial okay so we'll come over here to some of these roof props we have this air duct let's just bring this out here and let's set this up as our orientation so we're looking this direction and using wer we can move these things around we can come over here scale them up a bit and let's hold alt and drag this will rotate this and scale it up so I want the camera to sort of be almost like this move this closer here like that mm-hmm and let's add some of these pipes so put these pipes out here by the way I'm holding down shift for it to lock to an angle and maybe we'll just turn it that way scale it up a bit and maybe we'll throw a few of these ducks out here maybe one here we'll put one over here and make it larger I'm just trying to fill up the scene a bit we'll take one of these large AC units place one here another cool thing you could do it you know you can just maybe stick it through the ground like you know almost just as a way to add detail it's almost as if you're just throwing random props around just to make the shot look cool who would do that now I'm not joking but I recently just figured out this feature an element is that if you're sort of behind the gizmo and you know you can move it up and you can move it side to side but you can't quite get to that other gizmo and you have to move the camera to get to it well check this out you can actually just put your mouse behind it as if there's an imaginary line in the corner and access that gizmo now we should probably make that a little bit more obvious so that people who make the software can figure it out all right so this looks pretty good for now and of course we can refine this as we set up the shot so we'll come over here hit OK go and save the project and let's go ahead and create a camera so hit okay now I want to rotate the scene a bit so I can move the camera but actually I'm just going to rotate the scene so let's just rotate this so that it looks similar to how we had it inside of element we'll go ahead and move the camera in here a little bit closer now one of the questions I get a lot is how do I set things up to be more realistic inside of elements so right now I'm going to show you one of the go-to solutions that I use for setting up an outdoor style lighting so it starts with a parallel light so we're going to create a new light set this to parallel with a little bit of orange a little bit of warmth go ahead okay maybe a hundred and fifty and cast shadows so hit OK now just move this light we're going to move it over here to the right let's go to the top view and hold down control I'm going to move the light over to the side here so here's our camera we're looking this way our light is coming from the right so realistic lighting starts with lights and render settings so let's come down here to the render settings and we'll come over here to the shadows and we're going to enable the shadows and so right away we're already getting somewhere with our shadows now what we can do is increase the shadow map resolution now if you have a good graphics card you can also switch this to ray-traced now because the scene is not too complex and these models are really well optimized ray-tracing can actually be pretty fast when you're not doing diffused or soft shadows so in this case we're doing a really hard sort of Sun like shadow so this actually helps make it more realistic and keeps our render times under control now the other thing is ambient occlusion so what we could do is enable ambient occlusion and we're going to change it from screen space to ray-traced now this is not going to be as fast to render as screen space ambient occlusion but it looks a a lot better now what I like to do is turn the blur down to about 0.2 you really want to have sharp and crisp ambient occlusion so we can come down here to the output and look at the ambient occlusion and you can see what that's doing and it kind of has a nice almost like a global illumination look to it like a skylight and this is just a nice look to this rooftop scene so we'll go ahead switch this back let's take a look at a couple of the rate rate settings so here we have the max distance and if we turn this down you can basically see it can create really really tight and B inclusion or really really wide ambient inclusion so depending on your scene you maybe wanted to be soft and maybe you just want it to be contact shadows so in this case we're going to do something kind of in between maybe 35 that looks pretty good alright so we have our shadows and we have our ambient occlusion how can we get this to look more realistic so if we come up here to the lighting even if I disable the comp lights element 3d gets a lot of its material lighting from the physical environment so if I turn the brightness up or the gamma or even if I rotate the environment it changes the look of the materials now if I show the environment in the background you can actually see how it affects the materials and this is all before I have even turned on any lights so the clue here is that we want to make sure that our environment is lighting up our scene in a realistic way so we'll go and turn the comp lights back on and maybe we'll pull this light down a little bit so we have some longer shadows and maybe try to make this look like a little bit more overcast we'll turn up the gamma here and turn up the exposure a little bit all right so I think we've got a pretty good start on our rooftop setup so let's go and put the camera into position and let's go and start adding our background elements so we'll come over here the project I've got a couple of things already pre-made we've got some background buildings that we can scale down we've got some intermediate buildings put those right underneath the element 3d layer and scale them down and having your back plate actually helps a lot to start figuring out the perspective and the balance of the shot so you know when you have perspective lines like this you want to try to match those so you know figuring out all the angles and things like that so we also probably want to try to match the sort of overall density and brightness of the scene so here now we're just playing with those three settings the exposure gamma and then of course rotating the environment to try to match the feel of the scene here all right so we've got a great start here but we don't want everything to be a lifeless digital creation we want to have a little bit of humanity and that's where Sam Loya comes in doing his best uncanny valley impression amazing all right so we've got Sam here we're gonna drop this into our project come over here to key light we're gonna get rid of that green let's see here he lied drop that on there take the color I'm going to pick the color close to the edge and turn up the screen game will solo this here and we're gonna switch this to the intermediate result so we can look at how this is affecting it a bit and we'll go to the clip black bring that down that'll kind of add some of that detail back in after we turn up the game here so pretty good and we'll just add a quick screen blur maybe 1.5 now we're probably going to take a look at some more advanced King tricks but in this particular shot it's pretty small we'll just shrink it and not worry about doing something too complex now in all seriousness I know I give Sam a hard time about as acting but I gotta say in this most recent project I think the guy with the leaf blower really stole the show I mean just look at the concentration you know it's not one of those guys in that leaf blowing Union makes so much money alright so let's just do a quick garbage matte I hate to do this but well we have to cut Sam out here and that looks good so unsolo him now let's go and fix some of the green here we'll come over here to spill suppressor advanced spill suppressor drop that over here and we'll set it to ultra looks really good and let's do a basic color correction to match some of this blue so add a curves adjustment and we'll go and set this to the red channel and just turn this down just a little bit here so pretty good maybe just add a touch of blue hide the masks alright so we'll go and make Sam a 3d layer and we'll hit a a turn off except lights probably should be set that way by default I'm going to make a feature request now we'll go ahead and scale this down just a little bit now the Anchor Point is right here in the center what I want to do is move Sam up so his feet are right here so what we can do is hold down alt and you can actually move the layer and keep the position and Anchor Point in place so I don't think this worked in older versions of After Effects so really cool feature and now I can scale this and Sam will appear to be intersecting with an errand in union which is perfect so what we'll do is uh we'll move Sam forward right to the ledge there scale them up a bit or down I don't know all right now Sam is a 3d layer but let's make our background layers 3d as well so we'll turn on the 3d layer switch hit a a turn except lights to off and we'll take the move tool and let's just push these layers in z space I'm holding down shift that's good and we'll push the background even further away so that there's some digital space there we go so now we can just scale the layer up take the background and scale it up and that way there'll be a little bit of a parallax a little bit of dimension in the Far background all right so let's go and add our digital camera movement what I'm going to do is create a null object we'll make it 3d and I'm going to parent our camera to it then hit P select the position keyframe and we're going to move the Z position forward so just making a simple little push it like that now I like to use a null because this way I can move the camera and I'll still have the basic movement now another cool detail is adding some smoke elements so I've got some smoke elements from action essentials to well drag these out make it a 3d layer you know what's next hit AAA except lights to off and we'll tint this and we'll hit s scale it down a bit and we'll do that same trick with the Pan behind tool grab that hold alt and that way the bottom of the smoke it's a little easier to align to the surface now I'm also going to create a mask around my smoke here just to feather the edges a bit so hit F increase that a bit and I'll just you know put some smoke here scale it down a little bit hit control D maybe we'll put some smoke over here that air conditioning seems a bit smoky off set the time a bit no one will ever know and we'll say duplicate it again and let's put this over the ledge so we'll put this up behind the element layer and move it down just a bit as if I don't know somebody's windows opened up and they're making something smoky maybe some more foreground smoke I think that was good to mix in some live action elements even if it's really really faded like even if it's just barely noticeable you know one thing I was going to talk about was giving the surface a little bit more of a wet sort of watered-down look so what we could do is jump inside here and let me show you how you can actually create a reflection plane so if we select our plane model and go to the glossiness and maybe you just turn the glossiness up just a little bit and here we can see it's somewhat reflecting the environment but we're not really reflecting the objects yet so for example right here we can see it's not really reflecting so what I'll do is just right click the plane and choose reflect mode mirror surface and so what that does as you can see there is it creates a bit of a mirrored reflection now I could turn up the you know turn the map down a bit maybe even turn up the reflection the actual reflection just to make it a little bit more apparent but I think this is cool where you can just kind of create pockets of water essentially that are more reflective but doesn't look like it's completely wet so I think something like that is pretty cool all right so let's sit ok let's take a look so that looks nice you can see now we're reflecting that a bit and again we can tweak the environment and move that around and of course we could duplicate Sam and make him reflect a little bit as well but frankly I'm just going to probably cut him from the scene altogether and let's just do that now in fact you know we should add let's see here let's go to the star pack and let's just add this guy I'll scale him down a little bit see now we're talking maybe what we could do is uh let's reset the position and let's drag it out of the group folder and put it on Group two so when they're on separate groups it just makes it a little easier to animate so huge bb-8 here now is on group two right so what we can do is scale him down here and he's already rigged up so we could create a null object okay what is this tutorial about I don't even know anymore but say I can move them around a bit that's cool and if I go to the auxilary channel you can actually play around with the rotation and I think on just the different so there's his head there so if you play with the different auxilary channels one two and three you can actually animate his rig I don't know how Disney would feel about bb-8 you know standing over the ledge of a building Disney he'll probably send me a letter about like robot suicide and you know all that kind of stuff so anyway now speaking of the auxilary channel I got a little off track here if we go back to the air conditioning here and we select that the AC unit we could click on the mesh view and I think if we hold ctrl and click we can actually select the fan right and then I can rotate through this and what we can do is take that sub object now in order to animate it in after-effects what we could do is click on the auxilary animation set it to channel 1 now remember we're on Group 1 auxilary channel 1 so then we hit ok we'll close group 2 open group 1 go to the auxilary Chan all for one and now you're ready I can rotate this fan so that's great so you can just animate it here you got the fan works the same for other things maybe helicopters or cars or other things that you need to animate simple things moving and you just want to be able to control all of the key frames it works pretty well and by the way you can download the star pack over at Video Copilot so some really cool models and there in fact got a vapor ATAR in here I mean that looks just like a rooftop element to me just stick that in there maybe uh I don't know maybe just make it a little darker I honestly don't think anyone would know all right so this is definitely one cool way to use digital props in your films and you know as you're thinking about different things that you may want to use keep this in mind let's imagine you had a real rooftop scene like this that you filmed and maybe you wanted to add some additional objects so what you could do is set up the scene the same way that we just set it up and instead of using our ground that we created what you can do is click on the material and go down to the advanced settings and turn on matte shadow and what that does is it actually makes the ground transparent so now you can basically place digital props into your scene now in this particular scene there's not really any hard shadows it's very ambient lit so I turned off the shadow lighting but if you do need shadows just check out the matte shadow control and you can play around with the darkness of the shadow so in this case we're just going to disable comp lights and that looks pretty good so you can imagine here now I've added in some nice digital props sometimes just having some cool things in the foreground like some cool crates or some cool objects just helps fill out the scene a little bit finally I'll leave you with this tip and that is the ability to use digital props to cover up bad acting alright guys thanks so much for watching I'm Andrew Kramer be sure to check out element 3d a lot of cool things you can do for motion graphics and definitely some great things you can do in the visual effects Department and in the meantime I'm going to do some some color correction on this I forgot alright once again thanks so much for watching follow us on Twitter Instagram subscribe on YouTube all that good stuff we appreciate it and we will see you next time

Channel: Video Copilot

Views: 561,733

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Id: e4hdDcYumec

Length: 34min 20sec (2060 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 18 2016