EASY Realistic VFX Tutorial! Flying Hover Car (Blender and After Effects)

foreign everyone Dominic here again from gimbal Productions and today I'm going to run you through this Back to the Future Part 2 style hovercar effect even though this video is quite extensive I'll make sure I go into enough details so if you're a beginner user a blender or after effects you'll end up with a high quality end result so let's get started during the recording of this video I was using blender 3.3.0 I also use two plugins AE to blend as well as the sketchfab Importer I'll link these in the description before we can begin the effect you'll obviously need your footage as you can see in this clip I'm slowly walking around this scene with the focus on this empty parking spot I'm using very carefully controlled movements trailing where the car will float up into the sky and then take off into the distance I need to make sure I use carefully controlled movements as I'm going to be tracking this camera in After Effects drag and drop your footage into a new composition then right click track and stabilize track camera any effects control panel I won't adjust any of these settings just yet though you may have to tweak these just to suit your footage the tracking process may take some time depending on the resolution of your footage once it's near complete the banner across the screen will say solving camera again click on the track camera setting in the FX panel then you'll see these tracking markers appear across your footage move your mouse cursor over any tracking markers near the area where you want your car to begin right-click then choose set ground plane and origin right click in the same tracking markers again and then choose create solid in camera this step is very important as we're going to be importing this plane in the camera into blender in a moment as you can see as I play back my clip my solid is now tracked to the footage inside blender press the a key then press delete just to remove all the default objects in the scene as I mentioned I'm going to be using the AE to blend plugin we'll first need to copy the keyframe data of the solid and the camera to make this work ctrl-click the solids Anchor Point position scale and orientation keyframe data and then press Ctrl C inside AE to blend press create plane as you can see the plane is now imported into blender we need to do the exact same thing but this time for the camera open up the options and control click on position and orientation press Ctrl C then back in AE to blend press create camera you'll see the timeline filled with keyframe data for the camera though it's recommended to drag all these frames up by one frame clicking the camera icon in the viewport will put you into the perspective of the camera things should look pretty similar to how they did in After Effects though there are a few setting changes we'll have to make to make sure that this effect is perfect in the blender same properties make sure that your document is set to a ratio that matches your footage you may choose to use the same resolution as your footage or instead you can use a ratio that matches your footage instead since I shot this at 4K a 16x9 1080p ratio will work just fine next we need to adjust the focal length for the blender camera to match to one of the after effects camera double-click on the camera layer inside after effects and copy the focal length value inside blender paste this value back inside the camera settings for the blender camera after the adjustment of these two settings if you flip back and forth between After Effects and blender your footage and your blender document should look one to one as I mentioned at the start of this video I'm also using the sketchfab Importer add-on the use of this add-on is definitely not a requirement since you may Source your 3D model from somewhere else or even if you make your own using the add-on you can use the URL of the model web page and import it directly into your blender document there are countless 3D model cars on this website which you can download for free and more importantly you can use it for commercial use as long as you credit the author if your specific car model is not on sketchfab you may have to look elsewhere like CG Trader or turbosquid just a quick note I'm not affiliated with any of these websites staying in touch with the Back to the Future theme I chose a DeLorean DMC 12 as my car for this project before I begin I'm going to choose a background image for my camera this will help me line up my DeLorean in the location where I want it to be to do this select the background images option from the camera panel then choose the same footage that you used in the after effects document you'll then be able to see this footage playing behind your model next adjust the opacity of this background image to a hundred percent next select your car model then position rotate and scale it into the position where you want it to take off from a good shortcut to use is to press shift spacebar to bring up all of these options as I mentioned make sure to use your background image as reference for the scale and size and location of where you want your car to be using the axis orientation buttons I can click on one of these to align my view to a specific angle as you can see here I want my card to be above the ground plane so to do this I'm aligning my car wheels to make sure I'm above that green line that runs across the screen this is looking pretty good so far but I'll make some adjustments later on I'm now going to adjust my viewport settings to the material shading option this will allow me to see all the textures and the details on my specific car model next locate your plane inside the object panel then scale it to fit the location where your car is currently sitting since I'm currently in a parking area I'm going to rotate this to line up with the curb as well as scale it up to a larger size it is very important that you do not move this on the z-axis this is because the plane is acting as the ground in our footage and is tracked as so to put it simply don't move the plane up or down but you can move it in any other direction in the material properties tab add a new material to the plane and change the specular value to zero then using the base color eyedropper tool select an area of Shadow that's casted by a real car right now our scene is not quite looking realistic but that's because we need to orchestrate our lights in our scene to make it so to do this we're going to swap into the Cycles Render engine once you do this make sure you select your GPU as your render device to light this scene I'm going to use an environment texture hdri image to do this swap over into the shading tab in blender if I click on this drop down menu next to the viewport shading options I can see what my final render would look like as you can see there is no hdri element lighting the scene before we begin go to the render properties and enable transparency in the film settings now while still in the shading tab switching to the rendered view now that the background image is viewable we can now make more informed lighting choices using the same drop down menu as before we can test out different hdri environment textures that could work best for our scene if any of the default blender ones don't match your footage you can also download them off the internet in a professional workflow you'd probably be best to capture this hdri image yourself just for now I'm going to stick with blender's default option with lighting come shadows and to make this scene look more realistic I'm going to select the ground plane then choose object properties then go down to the visibility tab enable Shadow catcher as you can see the ground plane appears to have disappeared but we can still see our car shadow the next thing that we'll try to work towards is matching the digital car Shadow to the ones of the real cars in the background I'm quickly going to change my hdri image to sunrise.exr one of the default blender options the reason I did this is because it more closely matched my scene there are still a number of adjustments I need to make though to make this lighting come from the same direction a source project the shadow of the same intensity and direction as the original footage first disable the hdri preview and then swap over into the world setting inside the Shader options make sure that the used nodes toggle is selected then go to add and then search for an environment texture node connect this node to the background node click open on the environment texture node then select the hdri image that you wish to use for this scene as I used before the sunset exr file is going to be found inside the data files inside the blender install directory once loaded the scene will now match what it looked like in our preview from before though we still have the issue of the Shadow Direction not matching the original footage to change this we need to add two more nodes the first one is a texture coordinate node and the second one is a mapping node make sure that you align these nodes in that particular order in the texture coordinate node drag a line from generated into Vector on the mapping node then from the mapping node drag a line from Vector into the vector of the environment texture node this next step might take a bit of time but what you have to do is use the mapping node to rotate the hdri image to match the lighting direction of the original footage if you need to adjust the softness of the Shadows perhaps adjust the scale settings but this is what my result looked like this next step is completely optional but basically what I did was erase the original tires from the low poly model and instead imported a higher poly version of them these new wheel models were also sourced from sketchfab you may need to do something similar if the car tires you own in real life don't match the one on the 3D model if your footage swaps from the real car to the digital one this will be a glaring continuity issue to further make this car model look more realistic I'm going to adjust the windscreen color to match those of the windscreens of the cars in the background this windscreen object has an alpha setting which enables it to be see-through or non-see-through so I'll adjust it to match that of the cars in the background I can also adjust the base color of this window so I'll just fine tune this coloring to make it look like the ones in the background to adjust how reflective the window is you can play around with the metallic settings next I'm going to make the car model the parent of all the tires I just imported select them all and then press Ctrl P then choose object this might take a second but once it's complete if we move our car model the tires will move with it this will help us when we make our car fly later on more importantly I can still independently control all of these tires which will help us create that folding down Tire effect bike from Back to the Future we can now begin to animate the car with automatic keyframes turned on and with the car model selected I'm going to first apply a keyframe for all of these values for the first frame of the footage with all those keyframes applied I'm going to scrub through the footage to find the point in which the car will take her from the ground I'm scrubbing through the footage to see when the camera tilts upwards I'm going to reapply all of those keyframes that I did for the first frame in the video now with those keyframes in place I can now begin to animate the car's flight path using the rotation tool I'm going to make the front end of the car lift up first to make this easier you can swap between Global and local transformation orientations as you can see the back tires now go into the ground so I'll switch back into Global transformation orientation and lift the car upwards on its z-axis and since automatic keyframes are turned on each movement and rotation of the cart is automatically being keyframed on the timeline I'm paying very close attention to these back tires because if they clipped into the ground this would be very unrealistic in the footage scrub back and forth on the timeline just to check what these keyframe positions look like in motion you may readjust these keyframes just by sliding them up or down on the timeline I've now scrubbed further into the timeline when the camera was tilted more upwards to begin thinking about in keyframing where the car is floating in the sky above the parking spot switching back and forth between the move tool and the rotation tool I'm adding slight rotational movements to make the car look like it's floating if the car was stuck moving only on the z-axis and not rotating at all this would be very unrealistic for a floating car that is if it was real adding all of these subtle details goes a long way in selling the effect again scrub through the footage to make sure the car movements look to your liking again adjusting the timing between these keyframes is very easy as all you have to do is slide them up or down on the timeline I also went back and added some more positional keyframes to make sure the rear tires weren't clip into the ground this next portion of the animation process is quite simple though it comes down to personal preference pushing your car into the position where you want it to be flying in the sky on screen right now you can see a Timeless in my process I can't specify what keyframes you should use exactly as your footage May differ from mine as you can see in my process I'm making little small adjustments again to make that car floating look I'm also adjusting the timing between these keyframes by sliding them back and forth on the timeline again I'm playing through the animation to make sure it seems correct and to my liking for when the car model flies off into the distance and in my case it's on the x-axis my camera can no longer see it after a certain point this happens to you you need to make sure you adjust your clip and settings inside the camera this will allow you to see objects further and further into the distance so if you want your car to take off far into the sky this is the one setting that you need to make sure you change after a bit of time I was finally happy with all these locations and rotational keyframes I've made for my animation as mentioned earlier in this video I can still independently control all of these tires to my liking this means I can keyframe that folding wheel effect like from Back to the Future for my first Tire I'm going to go to the first frame in which the car takes off from the ground I'm going to set a keyframe at this point [Music] then as the car lifted off into the sky I'm going to set another keyframe rotating the car wheel to face the ground using local transformation orientations I can use the move tool to position the tire in a way that doesn't clip into the car model again on screen you can see a time-lapse of my process I actually imagine that these tires were acting as stabilizers of sorts keeping the car right side up as it floats into the sky this wasn't seen in the back to the future movies though this is my own effect but feel free to play around with it basically repeat the same process for all the other tires to add the tire lights I added a Taurus mesh into my scene I rotated it and positioned it over the tire rims clicking the wrench icon I added a smoothing modifier making this Taurus mesh quite thin Now using the move tool I position the mesh inside the car tire rims where it can be seen through the gaps I added a new material to my mesh I changed the base color to a pure black but the emission color to a bright blue on the timeline I added a keyframe for the emission strength value it starts at zero then slowly makes its way to 10. I added this into the part of the video where I want the tire lights to turn on after this I made the tire the parent of the Taurus mesh to create the person in the car I used a default character from miximo I also used a sitting animation and I downloaded it as a fbx to create my head I used this website called Avatar SDK which creates a 3D model of your head using only a photo make sure you select head 2.0 and then download the result make a new blender project then import these two separate files you can do this by going to file then import on the top left hand side of your blender window now click on the miximo animation mesh then change over into edit mode I'm going to use the select box to select areas of the model's head then pressing my delete key on my keyboard to erase it now with the head model selected I'll use the move and rotation tool to fit it over the area where the original head was I can use the scale tool just to fill up the neck area just make sure it lines up with the bone that was already there on the miximo model now select the bones then change over into pose mode using control click I'll first click on the neck bone and then onto the head model I'll then press Ctrl p and then set this as bone and if that's all done correctly the new head model will now follow the neck animation once you are happy go file export fbx in the settings change path mode to copy and then click on this little button this will save the textures into the model now all you have to do is import your character into the car scene align it into the car and then set the car as the parent of the 3D model again you can do this by pressing Ctrl p and then setting it to object by doing this the 3D model will now follow all of the car's movements using all the keyframes you've done before now we can render out our animation under the render settings just to save time I'll change my Max samples to 100 but I'll also turn on denoising to get a more realistic image I'll also enable motion blur make a new folder on your computer to set as your export location and then change your color depth settings to 16. now go render render animation depending on the speed of your machine this might take a bit of time so sit back and relax as the render process takes place once all rendered go back into after effects and import the files as a PNG sequence now drag and drop your file into your timeline and resize it if you need to you may notice that your timeline layer looks shorter than the original video this is because after effects is interpreting it at the wrong frame rate right-click the file in the media Tab and then choose interpret then Main change the file frame rate to the match that of your original footage after a bit of color correction you'll then have your final effect and there we go we've now created a Back to the Future Part 2 Style flying car effect now obviously artistic Liberties were taken just to make this my own version this is definitely not the only way to make this effect but this is just the way that I do it and you're free to make it your own as well if you enjoyed this video or even if you learned something new please leave a like And subscribe it really helps us grow out our Channel and also reach a brighter audience if you have any other ideas for Hollywood VFX you'd like to recreate leave it as a comment below and maybe one day we'll make a tutorial for it as well once again my name is Dominic from gimbal Productions and I hope to see you in the next one

Channel: Gimble Productions

Views: 43,139

Keywords: Blender, Cycles, Back to the Future, Delorean, Flying Car, Hover Car, VFX, tutorial, CGI, after effects, hollywood, budget vfx, filmmaking, Gimble Productions, floating, Movies, Render, Easy Blender Tutorial, Projects for beginners, best blender animation, addons, after effects animation, make a car fly, action movies, Zach King, Corridor Crew, Marty McFly, realistic, filmmaking tips, filmmaking basics, DSLR, BMPCC6K Pro, Blackmagic Design, escucho ofertas blender, Beginner

Id: 1MdBk4GuhIo

Length: 19min 40sec (1180 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023