Easy Camera Mapping VFX with After Effects | Tutorial

oh hey Internet so recently I uploaded a breakdown video using all the visual effects in my short film The Omen chronicles and I've been reading all the comments online and out of all the effects that people seemed most interested in learning how to do it wasn't the smoke or the sparks and all the flashy stuff like that it was actually how I painted people out of the scene fortunately this is an effect that you can do 100% in After Effects with zero third-party plugins or software so I decided to go ahead and make this tutorial on how to do that and if you're interested and following along you can actually go ahead and download the original footage I use to make this exact effect and tutorial so the download link for that is in the description for you to follow along if you want so without further ado let's get into it okay so as you can see we have a very blank typical After Effects project file here and I've already imported the footage so I'm going to drop this into a new composition and I'm going to shave off the first and last couple seconds because you know always fumbling around hitting the record button everything gets all shaky so I'm just going to trim it to here this is the work area and if you right-click on that you can trim comp to the work area so now I'm going to drop the warp stabiliser effect on it and right away I'm just going to go to detail analysis and enhanced reduction and let's set this down to like five and so what I did was I shot this whole thing on my Canon t3i very standard you know run-of-the-mill footage nothing too fantastic I mean I didn't shoot this on a red or anything and I shot it on a tripod while holding the tripod using it as like a sort of counterweight stabilizer sort of thing if you don't want to have any sort of twisting back and forth that type of shaking is the worst because it gives you the most rolling shutter artifacts and what I mean by that is you know that weird jello II effect that you see with a really shaky footage and that's just really hard to correct for it is doable but it's just way easier and way faster to just not have it at all so as you can see this actually looks pretty steady um yeah not too bad I'm actually going to jump it up to ten percent though see normally I never go above 20% I mean if there's a lot of motion and I just really want to stable all go upwards of like 30 to 40 but I typically never go beyond that even if you have a really shaky footage just like one or two percent is great so now that we have it stabilized it looks great I'm going to pre compose this so by going up to layer and then pre-compose and move all attributes that's always important because you want to be able to bring the effects that are applied to that into that layer cool so now that we have that included I'm going to go ahead and track the camera and it's just going to analyze in the background this you could do detailed analysis if you need to so once this gets tracked out we're going to basically create a solid that is going to go on this wall and another solid that's going to go on the ground here and we're going to use that as the basis of our projection map and so once we get this solved I'll create the solids and a camera select that get all these tracker marks check that out pretty cool and you might also notice you'll get like these roaming ones here you can select them and delete them if you want but honestly this is a good enough track that it's not really that big of a deal so let's go to the end here about right here so select some of these points around where she was standing and sweet actually it looks pretty solid so I'm going to go ahead and right click create solid and camera interesting it looks a little off we want this line to kind of match up with this vertical line here so first things first I'm going to make the layer a white layer so if I go to solid settings and make this white keep dragging everything into my recording window should we get cool and now I'm going to apply the grid effect and this will just kind of let us see how it matches up into the scene so it tracks great now we just got to get the orientation right so first let's go ahead and move this little orientation thing down to the bottom here by doing that we're going to hit a to bring up the Anchor Point and this is basically just you know the center point of where all your scale and rotation and stuff is based off of so we want to set our Y position here to zero and or you know 1080 opposite of that let's go ahead and set it to zero and we'll flip it around because I find it much easier to keep track down the road so if you hit W or the rotation key here you can make sure you get the red here oh not that one that's the Z there we go so you can flip it as much as you like but if you hold down the shift button while doing that it'll actually pop into 45 degree increments so let's make it all the way vertical here let go and let's just kind of get it lined up drag it down to the bottom here that actually lines up pretty well so let's drag this out and you'll see our first hiccup here it doesn't line up we want this line to you know measure up with that so we hit W again we can rotate it into place maybe Matt that's good enough that's actually not too bad so now we can label this wall and I'm going to duplicate this layer by hitting ctrl D or you can go up to edit and then duplicate but that one's a pretty common a shortcut to use so let's rename this one the top one sidewalk because why not and we're going to rotate this exactly 90 degrees and the easiest way to do that is just to have your rotation tool out and rotate it remember hold down shift 45 degree increments and bam exactly 90 degrees we're already mostly way there hey check it out sweet all right so now we can go ahead and delete these grid effects they are no longer any use to us delete that and you'll notice that we have just you know this white blob on our screen you also might notice we have the seam going on here to get rid of that just select one of your layers and just kind of nudge it down you never want to just like grab the layer itself and move it that is just a recipe for disaster because some of your position settings will be different alright so our next thing we want to do is we want to let's go ahead and turn those off you want to create our projection plate which is essentially a just a film slide in a projector from you know the old days so here's a good clean slate right here dang it and we're going to duplicate our footage in freeze frame it in that specific spot so go to time freeze frame and yeah it doesn't work that's okay just delete it not a big deal also before you move your playhead click out and then hit the star button above your 9 key on the number pad that'll leave a marker on your whole comp so you know exactly when it actually stopped because you might you know close out of that and you won't know where it is so remember holding down shift pops to that alright so here we want to do a couple things first let's click our camera here and hit P to bring up our position and here all our position keyframes from our camera track and we're going to create a light so go to layer new light and all these settings don't really matter as long as it's casting shadows and hit OK so now we want to copy the position of our camera at this very moment to our light and you can do that in number of ways one you can just copy the position and paste it here but then you have this weird issue with all your keyframes I have a much better solution what we're going to do is we're going to parent it to the camera but not just parent you're going to hold down the shift key and then parent it so I'm holding down the shift key letting go and now I'm going to undo that by just selecting none and what that did was it moved it into position it moved it to the same position and then I basically undid it so now we have this so for our footage we want to make this a 3d layer as well so let's go ahead and make 3d and hit our position key and let's copy the position from our light to our footage BAM so now we still don't really see anything it's like what happened to it oh it's this massive black object here ok cool so go to your position here and then we're going to see the top view so where it says active camera go down to top and if we activate these again you'll see this is our top view of our composition here you can see the little camera flying back and forth as I go through the camera move so we're going to do is we're going to select our footage here and we're going to move it forward from the light just a little bit exact same principle as a projector literally and if you hit s on the keyboard to bring up your scale you can bring it down till it's just just big enough to see and any scale numbers between like you know 1 & 8 is perfectly normal that's okay so now we've done that let's go back to our active camera and you'll see we have a little floating slide just hanging out you know that's good nah but it's not what we want yet so we have our slide here I'm going to kind of just rotate it so it's flat and I'm going to scale it down again holding shift makes it so that it scales evenly and just kind of roughly get it into place it doesn't have to be perfect because what we're going to do next will solve this issue it's actually my favorite part because it's interesting and it held me back the longest time so I figured it out so corner pin that's what we're using drop that onto the footage and now we can actually go through and let's set our resolution to full just move each corner till is actually in their respective corners and don't worry it'll it'll all line up once all four corners are actually in place it might not seem totally like it right now but that's right and even if you're off by a couple pixels is really not that big of a deal BAM sweet so with without corner pin and now should line up perfectly for the most part you know so now we want to edit our 3d layer settings and to do that I use the shortcut AAA so you just hit a on the keyboard twice really fast with your selected footage and for this we want to cache shadows only and that will make the layer disappear from the actual view see if we set it back to off it just is the normal frame again and if we've set it to on we get the results but we still have the frame so if we set it to only the frame actually goes away and the next thing we want to do is set our light transmission to a hundred percent and that's what actually turns it into the you know the actual film slide sort of thing we can project the light from our little light here through our frame and on to these white solids that take it but we got to change those settings as well so let's minimize that select our two solids here and hit AAA to bring up their settings and the only thing we need to do here is set accept lights to off BAM look at that and just like that we have a projection map and obviously we have all this extra white stuff and what we're going to do is we're just going to select everything and minimize it first we're going to mask out basically the area around her and so if we set our two solids here to 50% opacity I hit T on the keyboard to bring up opacity by the way just kind of go where she jumps and about right there cool so we could actually extend this nope didn't want to do that select your solid stretch it outwards sideways a little bit more if you want and if you hit G or the pen tool will bring up the pen tool and we're just going to mask around here cool we're going to do the same thing with the sidewalk and here I kind of want to get all of the shadow as well so I'm actually going to extend this so we can cover the shadow there we go and again with the pen tool so cut around cool and that's it so if we select both of our layers here and hit F we can bring up the feather let's set them both to about 100 and we hit T again let's bring their opacity back up to a hundred percent cool and there you have it projection map she is no longer in the scene oh but she starts to appear there and just walks right out so that's the gist of projection mapping itself as an effect so let's go ahead and do a couple more things we're going to precompose everything except for the camera we're going we're going to pre-compose that too but we're going to duplicate it first because we don't want to get rid of it so select your footage camera while sidewalk and your lights and go up to layer and pre-compose we're going to call this our projection map sweet so now if you check it out just like that it's actually not too bad lines up pretty well I in my experience it rarely lines up very well so now we're going to you know animate her back into the scene and we can do that one of two ways one we can just literally fade out as she jumps so if we set this to off we can set our path city to animate from 100% to 0% and we can set both of them and hit f9 on the keyboard to easy ease those things and turn it back on so now as she jumps she kind of fades in let's brand preview this sweet so as you can see it's all there and then she pops out of nowhere you can't do this with traditional 2d tracking I mean you can kind of get away with 2d tracking the wall and the ground separately but you still get parallax between you know the edge of the street and the wall here not so much parallax with the wall itself but you'll still get a little bit of lining up issues that you'll hat you would have to correct with you know something like the corner pin tool and that's really just a pain so this is a much more efficient much more interesting way of you know painting someone out because it's in motion okay so one extra thing I'm going to do for this tutorial is show you how to do a difference mat so let's go ahead and duplicate both these layers ctrl D move them up to the top let's turn off the animation of the passing on this top one and we'll just precompose both those top layers as clean and plate footage cool so now if we duplicate our footage itself and move this up here we can call this a girl raw footage ba so we're going to hit f4 on the keyboard to bring up our transfer modes and we're going to select this top one and set that to a difference transfer mode and as you can see any pixels that are different has some math thrown it I don't actually know specifically what happens to the pixels but any pixels that are the same to the layer underneath are just canceled out they turn black so that allows us to create a luma matte so if we pre compose both these layers again actually let's delete the camera tracker because that's just unnecessary see if we need to tell them no okay and it's like both of them ctrl shift C to pre compose and we're going to call this difference matte and now we're going to select color Rama or Colorama whatever you want to call it and I know right away it looks like you're looking at like a thermal image or something like that not that big of a deal if you go down to output cycle and then presets you can go down to ramp gray and I will just make it a black and white image and if you hit right here in the wheel and select white you can actually create this new pin and drag it all the way around and just kind of boost the color settings or the luminosity settings I should say but now we're starting to get some of this noise here and we don't want that either so if we hit again and select black kind of just eliminate that a little bit and I know this is rough I wouldn't honestly I wouldn't accept this for my own projects this is not nearly up to par for the quality I'd be interested in getting but if you're just you know doing something rough and quick or perhaps throwing a bunch of smoke on top of it actually isn't too bad so go to fast blur let's kind of get rid of some of those harsh edges that's good enough maybe this boost it a little bit levels band like that just like that we have a luma matte and all this ground stuff we're not going to want either but that's okay so if we duplicate our footage one more time and bring it up here let's call this a roll footage again and go to the track mat and set to luma matte if we solo this you'll see that she's actually so loaded from the scene it's a quick and dirty way to rotoscope someone when you don't really want to actually rotor scope so let's pre compose both those layers again ctrl shift C I know we're doing a lot of pre composing but that's okay and we'll call this girl so now we can actually like move around and stuff if we actually move this so that it fades out a little later see me right right there and so now if we hit P to bring up our position we can animate this so for right here just as she's starting to land let's set a keyframe and then move back a few frames maybe at the peak of her jump like about right here and we're just going to move her up and we're going to turn on motion blur here in a moment and I would select your second keyframe and hit easy ease so that should kind of like lose in but obviously we don't want any of this stuff right here so here we will actually use a mask so let's mask this out and then on the keyboard maybe have to hit it three times I don't know we're going to set it to subtract maybe feather at 15 just in case you get a hard edge and we're also animate the path for this thing let's set it to none for the time being so we kind of know where it's going to be so right when she lands if we hit U on the keyboard to bring up all of our key frames right here we're going to set a keyframe on the mask opacity right there move that up one frame and then hit zero so now we can go back to subtract we don't have that nasty little I mean I guess we do have a little bit of it on oh dang okay so we got to add one more mask select our footage and add that last mask and it's important right here that you put this above the subtraction mask because you have to add and then subtract so now when the opacity of the mask disappears she does not as well cool so now you kind of get like this dropping out of the sky effect which i think is fairly convincing considering it's so crude if you hit f4 we can turn on our motion blur for both the layer and the comp and that got rid of that little thing we saw so let's Ram preview this alright so here is our final effect and you'll notice that there's a bit of a a thing here and that's because of the thing we didn't take care of around the shadow forefoot and that's just kind of popping with the motion blur that's very easy to fix so I won't do that here there's a couple more things we can do to make this really solid and the last thing is we can hit ctrl alt Y to create an adjustment layer or you can just go layer new adjustment layer and we're going to type in pixel motion blur and what that will do is it will literally analyze each and every frame and the vectors of each pixel and add motion blur on top of that update my samples so if you turn this off to see the difference it makes this is usually really good if you have a high shutter speed at which I shot this whole video at because I knew I was going to stabilize it so I didn't want to have any of that motion blur artifacting baked into the shot which looks really weird when the camera gets stable what I prefer which is real smart motion blur which is a lot faster in my opinion I've had yeah it's honestly it's worth the money I've had this thing for a couple years now it's great but if you don't have it not a big deal because pixel motion blur does the same thing it's just like four times slower just keep that in mind it's the kind of thing you throw on like just before you render out your final shot and oh yeah one quick thing I forgot to mention if your texture for whatever reason looks kind of blurry and you just can't quite seem to blend it in because it is too blurry what the issue is is that your shadow map size isn't large enough and to fix that go up to composite in composition settings and you'll bring up you know your typical composition setting this dialog box here but if you go to advanced and then go to options you can set this to whatever you want by default is that comp size and when you're working with just 1080p footage usually comp size is plenty but for instance on omen Chronicles I was working with 5k read files and so I had to bump that up to like 4,000 to get it to look clean so if you have that issue try that it might help if not I guess sorry I tried well I hope you learned a thing or two with this whole tutorial I was pretty excited about this because there aren't that many tutorials online talking about projection mapping in a real use sort of scenario it allows you to paint someone out with the moving camera I'm sure all of you guys can see the appeal on that and so yeah I will see you guys later and action

Channel: SirWrender

Views: 452,248

Keywords: wrenthereaper, wren, wren weichman, camera map, projection map, mapping, camera mapping, projection mapping, vfx, tutorial, epictorial, after effects, nuke, 3ds max, Cinema 4D, maya, Blender, boujou, tracker, camera tracker, warp stabilizer, visual effects, how to, Adobe After Effects (Software), Autodesk 3ds Max (Award-Winning Work), Animation, Animated, shoot your friends, corridor digital

Id: 8J1iwmjnpWo

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 19 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Guffeluf]

High quality, very comprehensible, also a lot of nice tips and keyshorts. Thanks!

[u/Merendino]

That was nice. Thanks for posting. Straight to the point, little extra flair. Overall fantastic.

[u/r1c3ball]

Always wondered how studios did this effect, constructing skylines seemingly out of nothing. Thanks for the link! :D

[u/jumpsplat120]

Is there another tutorial teaching the same thing? Every time I try to follow this tutorial I get hung up and every time I search for a similar tutorial all I get is versions where the camera doesn't move.

[u/smearballs]

Nice! Could have used that trick a few times in the last month. Great to know!