Greenscreen Compositing in Blender and After Effects - Part 1 #blender #aftereffects #blender3d

hey everybody and welcome back in 2024 it's been a while since I've uploaded some new content here on YouTube and the reason for that is that I had to create some workshops for different topics within my job as some of you might know I'm working at the University here in Germany and I thought it would be a cool idea to share some of this content that I've created on YouTube so that people all over the world can uh follow along with these let's say beginner friendly workshops and I try my best to to explain it in depth and we will start with the green screen compositing so as you can see I dressed myself up like a p doctor from medieval times and put him into some sort of cemetery scenery and actually the assets and the footage that we're about to use and create is free for you so I will just provide a link to my Dropbox page so you can download the assets and the footage and follow along with the tutorial it's much to cover so without further Ado let's get started okay inside of After Effects let's first import our files uh therefore we can go into the project window here and we can just make a little bit more space rightclick import files and then we will take the clip that ends with 702 this one and we can click on import oh and by the way you can of course drag and drop your footage directly into After Effects so we can use our second clip the 7004 and just put it here okay uh as a Next Step because I I'd like to work a little bit more organized we will create some folders uh we can do this once again by right clicking and choose new folder and we will call this material and let's put all our materials into this folder and we can create a second folder which we will call comp uh I used the comp with a K because it's the German word for composite and as a next step we will have to to pre-cut our footage uh so let's double click this one so we can see it in the preview window and as you can see uh I was doing some work before because I shoot this completely on myself so I had to check the focus and I had to check the costume and all that kind of stuff so this is just me just dangling around before really the shot really starts so you can see it here if you just scrap through the footage somewhere here where I start to to move along uh we can get uh everything else that is happening before we can just make a cut we don't need that uh so we can use this inpoint area you can find it down here and we can click that and now after effects is deleting all the stuff that is happening before okay and we can do the same thing for the end of the clip so let's scrub through and see somewhere here is the lightning strike and then after this I just yeah start adjusting my costume again and we can set an inpoint before and this this way we've pre- cuted our footage and if we now take our file and create a new comp we can do this by uh just drag and drop our footage down here to the symbol and as you can see now after effects just make the cut and we just have the clip that we needed for our composition and we can now close our footage window up here we don't need that anymore go back to composition window and now as you can see when we scrub through uh we have our clip maybe we can even cut this a little bit more uh so as you can see there was like the the rough cut and now we'll do the the fine cutting inside of the composition uh so we can do this in two different ways we can use our Mouse and just uh slide our footage this way we can make a cut but this is not like that easy when we have to make a cut in the middle of a clip like for example here and for this one we will use the shortcut control shift d or we can use the uh edit a function up here and we can do the exact same thing so uh cutting the layer okay so let's do this at the very beginning so we can get this one off the way so control shift d and just delete this piece up here and now we can use a shortcut to arrange or to trim our our work area we can of course use our Mouse once again to just put this blue Gizmo into place or we can use the shortcut which which in this case is the b key and we can do the exact same thing on the end of our clip so as you can see somewhere around here is our pest doctor and maybe we can end up somewhere here and we can click the end key and then right click up here in this corner and uh just trim down the work area so now that we've done that uh let's rename our composition because at the moment the composition is called as our file which is coming Direct directly out of the camera uh so we go up up to composition and then composition settings and here we have our resolution and our composition name so let's call this uh front green screen for example and you can see like the uh full HD resolution that I was shooting this on and the frame rate which in this case is 24 frames and let's change the uh beginning of our time code to zero so that our composition is also starting at frame zero and that makes it a little bit easier and a little bit better to read okay so now let's start cutting out our green screen uh for this one we will use uh the shortcut G uh which is the pen Tool uh you might have know this tool from other softwares like Photoshop um okay so we need to get rid of this blue curtain and the white wall up here so let's press the shortcut G or we can click that up here and now let's really cut out our element just think of it as a digital uh scissor uh so you can really just make a few clicks uh one down here in the bottom somewhere here then up here in the corner and then maybe someone here uh we will make our fourth point a little bit more here because as you can see the right corner uh is a little bit Overexposed and we don't want this green screen to be seen uh from Key light so let's cut that out and if we now connect the last and the first dot you can see that our starts to change to a circle and if we click that our mask is completed and closed and as you can see now and because we are having a tripod shot instead of a moving shot from a gimbal or Dolly this is pretty easy to mask out otherwise we would have to animate The Mask to make this one work and if we now check our transparency you can see everything that we've cut out is completely gone and already transparent so we just need to take care of our green and for this one we will use an effect uh which is pretty prominent in After Effects which is called key light so let's type in key light and as you can see if I expand this a little bit after effects will give you not only the effect key light down here but it will give you a combination of different effects which may lead to better results uh so it's the key light it's the key cleaner and it's the advanced uh spill suppressor I guess it is called so let's drag and drop this on to our footage and now you can see that after effect switches to the effect panel so from Project to effects and now we can Define our green color which we need to uh separate from uh the transparent background okay so let's take our cursor or pipet or whatever this is called and now let's search for an area of the green screen that is a little bit darker and of course not the shadow area uh so my body is catching a shadow on the green screen which is not the best green color to pick uh so maybe let's take this one here and just give it a go and as you can see for a first click After Effects is doing a pretty good job uh trying to key out the the green parts of our footage and uh we can check this in our view display if we change this through screen mat and uh the rule of thumb is everything that is green should be black I mean pitch black and everything or every person in front of the green screen should be white so here you can see our problems um so we have some white areas down here and even our pest doctor is not completely white so we can change that with a few settings so uh just click on this green mat icon here and the drop down menu will appear and we can change the black and the white colors so uh let's raise our blacks a little bit and you will see that our blacks will start to be a little bit more black somewhere here maybe a little bit more and yeah maybe we go up to like 30% and then we can bring down our white area so let's uh bring this down so that our pest doctor is becoming more and more white maybe like 70% and this already starts to look pretty good um we will not take care of this down here I mean maybe we can raise this up a little bit more maybe to like 54 or something uh don't push too far as you can see because then our effect will be completely broken uh so you can see that now everything is start to look a little bit weird so go back to screen mat and bring down the clip uh black area to about 54% and if we now double check our final result you can see that the key light in is doing a pretty good job as mentioned before we are not getting complete good results because of the folds and the wrinkles in the green screen but uh that should shouldn't be that much of a problem so let's double check with uh solid and put it into the background so we can really see that there is no artifacts or other you know elements that are maybe not correctly keyed out but this is looking promising and even when the green screen uh is being hit by the Light it seems to work so this is good uh so we just have to take care of our uh nasty atches let's go up into the full resolution so we can see it a little bit better and once again click on our footage so you can see this ugly edge here and we will use the key cleaner effect to get rid of this ugly Edge and for this one we will raise up the alpha contrast so really bring this up to yeah let's say 100% and now we just bring down the strange a little bit maybe to like one two or maybe even 0% and that seems to get rid of this nasty Edge and now we get a really nice clean key and if we scrap through the footage you can see that everything stays consistent okay and now that we've keyed out this part uh you can see we have some some green spill in this area and this is where the next effect comes into place the advanced spill suppressor uh so if we click on that you can see that our green immediately gets away and if we put this one to ultra it gets even better so before and after so this takes care of all the spilling that is happening uh through the reflection of the green screen so especially if you're working in a big green screen area uh the light of the green screen is hitting the person in front of the green screen and this effect really takes care of this pretty good now we got a pretty solid and clean green screen template to work with so let's take care of our camera movement as the next step okay and we can do that over the layer element so we can click on layer and then new new and we will search for our 3D camera this one okay and as you can see now we got a new window appearing with different settings but just don't get confused by this we will just take care of preset in this case a 35 mm preset so you can change that and you have your own custom elements but we will take this 35 mm preset and then we can hit okay and after effects will tell us that we just don't have any 3D object yet but we will change that of course and we have to just convert our footage into a 3D layer and we're doing that by clicking uh this little button down here so you can see it here we have different options motion blow and whatsoever if you don't see this you can hit the F4 key or if you're a Mac User you can use uh the toggles down here and now let's just click on the 3D layer and you will see that there is a little Cube and now our 2D footage which was having only two axis the A and the y- axis is now having a third axis which is the z-axis and now we can position stuff in 3D space we will just do a simple camera movement so maybe our camera is you know rolling behind the tombstone or something like that and then is dollying on our pest doctor so uh the idea here is to create two simple key frames uh so let's animate the position start our pest doctor somewhere here at the very right maybe a little bit closer and then let's go through the clip and at the very end of our clip about 8 seconds later our pest doctor will be at the center of our frame so let's move them back somewhere here is good maybe a little bit back and let's see what we've created so far so our camera is moving from one side to another you can press the space bar to just get a preview from After Effects sometimes you have to load but uh that shouldn't take too much time because we now have only like a few effects on our layer and that looks okay and as you can see we have a linear animation because uh we didn't change our key frames so hit the F9 key to uh smooth out the keys and this way we got an ease in and ease out effect or you can right click on each key frame and click on the key frame interpolation and you can change that one too busy okay and now if we go through our clip this looks pretty smooth like we would shot this one on the dolly but of course this is a digital transition but still looks a little bit more interesting than the static version that we've created in the green screen okay cool that works what's the next step so now we are more or less ready to move over to blender because we did our job in After Effects and as the next step we have to create a 3D environment where our pest doctor is moving through so let's jump into blender okay so now that we've done that uh let's quickly talk about how to translate our camera data from after effects to blender and uh on the internet there are a lot of solutions but only a few of them really works and are pretty solid so one of them that you will find when you search for the transition between blender and after effects is this page here and this is some awesome guy that just write down a script so you can use camera data especially or let's say exclusively for the 3D camera tracker and there's the problem um if you're doing a 3D camera tracker and you get the the data from the 3D camera tracker plugin within After Effects this script is really really neat and really helpful uh so if you're doing doing a track like here and you get a perfect result if you translate these camera datas over to blender but in our case the script is doing something weird so let me show you quickly what it will do we prepared our camera as shown in the video before nothing special here and when you install the script you will find it on the scripts and you can export the composition data to adjacent file so let's quickly do that and we can use our work area that's fine the selected uh elements in this case the camera to uh we can bake our transforms I'm not pretty sure whether we have to and we can put this on our desktop that's fine and we hit export and that's all we have to do and inside of blender uh once again you have to install the uh add-on that comes with this script and then you have the option to import the after effects composition data uh down here and if we now click on that and import our Json file and we can say everything by default I think is fine maybe we can use the com Center as the origin but we don't have to and if we import that uh we get our camera so everything looks good let's delete the default camera and the light and if we go into our camera inside of blender you get the movement of our camera and it seems to be fine and I was I was working my way through all of this with the script and maybe this works for you I don't know but and this is the big butt uh there is something weird happening and this is the the focal length of the camera so um if we take a look at this we got here 41.4 mm while in After Effects as you might remember we used the 35 mm preset so for whatever reason the script is changing the focal length and uh more importantly it is changing the movement and the speed of the camera and I have no idea why this is happening with this free script if you're doing this with tracked camera data it worked perfectly but if you create your own 3D camera and then try to translate this over to blender this is kind of like the result so you're getting close but it's it's not the same camera movement and if you just for example render out this Cube and would try to bring this back into After Effects there would be some sort of slighting uh because it is it is not exactly the same camera movements that we've rendered out in after effect so at least at my stage I get some quirky and weird results uh so let me know in the comments if you have a fix for that because other than that this which is free is pretty awesome so um yeah if you are on a low budget this might be a good solution for you okay let's delete all of that and my solution if you followed up other tutorials from me uh is a little bit differently so I got my my layer and I can select my camera and inside of blender I bought a script on AIS script.com and I use the add-on blender AE uh which is pretty similar in what the uh add-on is doing so it connects blender and after effects as so you can go from blender to After Effects and from after effects to blender which is awesome but it's a little bit pricey so $30 for uh one single license but it will do a much better job and let me show you what this add-on will do I don't have any affiliation with then but it just seems to work a little bit better at least in my workflow so let's select our camera and go into our plug-in so here and then you just have to connect to After Effects like a click you can use the AI com Center and we can import the layers and then it jumps shortly back to um After Effects and if we now take a look in blender we get this so we got our camera with all the motion that is happening and more importantly the focal Ang was correct so I have no idea why the free script is doing this weird thing but but this camera transition works so uh if we import our After Effects camera like this everything stays consistent I can load up my background image I can start to build a world around this camera movement and if I repport this later on in After Effects it works uh so just for you as a as a warning let's hope that someone else is finding a solution for my problem because I was trying to uh search for lowbudget version but blender AE seems to be the better plugin in this case so yeah just for you as a quick reminder but this is how we uh import a camera from After Effects into blender if you have the budget and you can spend 30 bucks on this awesome add-on then do it other than that try the script and search for a solution that just deals with this focal length issue okay let's quickly talk about the file that comes with this tutorial project uh so these are assets that I've created completely on my own uh even though uh for the base Mees of some of the Tombstones or gravestones I used the free pack that you can download on gumroad thanks to Santiago uh for this awesome free IMM brush pack uh so these are IMM brushes for zbrush but I guess they come with a fbx file too uh so if you're not into sculpting yet uh you can try these base measures and put a little bit more detail on this like I would do here with more you know some some mass and some text and some aging effects like breaking up the edges and stuff like that um yeah so your pack will look something more or less like this so these are some base elements I've created on my own and don't worry too much because if we take a look at the project that I've been working on in the tutorial it will look something like this uh so it's still the same file but I've added in some external but still free assets but don't worry I will put a PDF file in the download folder so you can find the resources on sketchfab and quickel I guess but I cannot share the whole folder with you because these are not my assets uh so you just have to add them by yourself but other than that let's continue with the tutorial

Channel: Thies Grünewald

Views: 18,990

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Id: RlPHS6EwZeE

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 27 2024