How to Add a Car Using VFX In Blender

by the end of this tutorial you'll have everything that you'll need to know in order to make car visual effects shots and you can apply that to integrating anything into a 3D environment like always you can go ahead and download everything that I use down in the description below and also if you want to download my blend file I also have that as well okay so jumping into blender I went ahead and converted my footage to an image sequence so we're gonna go ahead and go ahead and motion track that so open up the footage here is the image sequence you just want to convert it to an image sequence and open the clip then I'm going to go ahead and come up here I'm going to set it to Cycles then GPU compute come over here I'm going to set the frame rate to be around 8 30 and then we can go ahead and come to the render settings go down to color management and set it back to standard now I just want to set the scene frames and pre-fetch the footage just so it's in our cache next let's just do some basic camera tracking so I'm just going to set my pattern size down to like a 15 and then going to decrease my search size a little bit I'm going to set it to be location then previous frame normal five and then we can set the correlation to be 8.9 and then we can go ahead and detect some features now I'm going to set the threshold to be a 0.01 and the distance we can just move that down let's say to like a 50 just because I want a lot of tracking markers in our scene that is looking good and then with everything selected I'm just going to hold Ctrl T to start tracking the scene okay so now that we're at the end of the footage you can see we have all these markers I just want to go ahead and get a solve real quick so I'm going to select an A B keyframe I noticed that around frame 130 to like 180 is a good spot just because we have all this Parallax so I'm going to set that to be my frame range so again 130 to 180 and then I already know my focal length because I shot on an iPhone so I can actually come over to the track settings camera lens I'm going to set that to be a 26 focal length so what we can do is just refine the optical center and the radial Distortion and solve the camera okay so we got a solve error of a 1.87 which is actually pretty decent but I want to go ahead and try to clean that up as much as possible so I'm going to go clean up clean up tracks and then let's just move this reprojection error up until we just have a few selected so somewhere around there I'm just going to delete all those and solve the emotion again okay so that already got us down to a 0.45 I'm going to go ahead and do that a couple more times and try to get that as low as possible okay so I was able to get my solvera down to a 0.28 which is actually really good and my line down here is very straight which is very important for your scene you just want to make sure it doesn't have any like bumps over here I noticed a little bit right here but we don't really have to worry about that for this tutorial go ahead and join the areas just so we can see our 3D scene a little bit easier I actually need to go ahead and set up the orientation for our scene so to do that I'm going to select three points on our floor right here and then gonna go down to orientation set that to be our floor first of all I have to set up a background and tracking scene and the floor looks pretty correct right there I can always change it later and then I'm going to set this point to be our origin and then this point to be our x-axis and then I can just select the two and then set our scale and I'm just going to increase that a little bit and that is looking pretty well tracked to our scene so I'm going to stick with that but just play around with it for your your own sake so let's come back out to the layout tab blender automatically set up some stuff that I'm not really a big fan of so I'm going to go ahead and delete this light along with the cube then up here it created a background and a foreground view layers I don't like that and then background uh or sorry delete the foreground and background Collections and also the background view layer and then we can come up here to compositing I'm just going to delete these four nodes that blender automatically sits up and plug that into the alpha over we're actually going to end up changing some of the compositing later so we'll get to that when we do so now what we want to go ahead and do is Import in our car now I actually have a asset pack for some cars but I have laying down some free car assets if you want to look at that it's basically the same workflow when you import in the car but for me I'm just going to come up here go to my asset pack I'm going to come down here to Urban I'm also going to link the asset pack that I use in the description below but uh for this scene I'm just going to stick with the low poly version and go ahead and add that into our scene you can see that that has uh basically done a pretty good size for our scene I'm just going to rotate it along the z-axis until it roughly kind of follows where I want the car to sit in RC so that is looking really good next thing that we need to do is actually go ahead and go into the rendered View I'm just going to hit n to hide this panel we need to set up some settings here so I'm going to go to the render properties go down to film and make sure that's on transparent and then also we need to update the lighting in our scene so I'm going to come to the world settings I like to use HRI so I'm going to go ahead and use an environment texture and then I'm going to open up an HRI link is in the description below to download that so once you have it selected just open the image and then you can see uh we now have lighting and some shadows in our scene the Shadows are a little messed up so I'm actually going to go ahead and bring out a new tab I'm gonna go down to the shading editor come up here to world just so we can view this you want to make sure you have the node Wrangler add-on installed so edit preferences add-ons and then if you type in node you just want to make sure that's checked and so now with that checked we can go ahead and control T to add a texture coordinate and mapping node I want to go ahead and play around with the rotation just to match kind of the rotation of the lighting in our scene you can see we have this tree here and the Shadows are kind of following over here and so if I bring this out you can see that like the sun would kind of be up here casting Shadow down there and then the shadow of the tree you know would be falling that way so that's my basic rough you know drawing of that let me just go ahead and delete that and so now what we want to do is we want to match that like I said I want to rotate the X because it's not that long of a shadow I'm just going to rotate the X until right around there I will say and then I gotta rotate the Z until it roughly follows that as well and so that is uh pretty good we can even make this a little bit shorter that looks pretty good for what I need it for okay so next we can go ahead and right click join the areas I want to go ahead and set up a material for our shadow collector uh just because uh it's white right now and so we're getting a lot of like white balance light it's very ugly looking so what I want to do is I want to go ahead and add a new material to this I'm going to call this just image for my sake and then um we can actually go to we'll just go to the shading uh tab up here and then if I zoom in we want to add a image texture node like that I'm just going to open up the footage so the image sequence okay so here's the image sequence we can just have that selected I'm going to open the image and then plug that into the base color let's actually go ahead and turn the shadow off so visibility Shadow catcher just so we can see what we're working with so that has not really done anything and uh so what we need to do is go ahead and set that to be mirror the clipping and then we also need it to be Auto uh refresh okay so now we can go ahead and again hold Ctrl T to make this into windowed just so we're seeing it from the camera's point of view so that correctly maps onto the object you can see that we actually have some issues here so I'm going to go ahead and again render properties this time I want to change it to filmic since we're going to be uh rendering it out separately from the actual footage we're not going to be compositing in blender so we can get away with that and then I just want to go ahead and add a gamma node plug that in there and then just change the gamma up until it roughly matches kind of the human saturation we can also uh go ahead and turn the specular down and the roughness up um just so it matches a little bit better and so that's what I'm going to stick with just something that roughly matches our scene um turn the roughness up just a little bit more and so that is looking good now we can go back and select the object and we want to turn it back to a shadow catcher object okay so now we are ready to go ahead and start dealing with some of the reflections and also getting some Shadows of the trees because you'll notice uh that we have trees kind of that would be falling on the car in real life some of the Shadows there and so first thing that we want to do is go ahead and add some fake Reflections in the scene to kind of blend in the reflections on the core so what I'm going to do I'm going to add a new plane just going to rotate that on the X and then the Z just a little bit and then I'm just going to move that over here and what we want to do is kind of scale that up just so it's kind of going alongside of our car somewhere around there and then I actually want to add in that image um texture that we had before and so now it's being projected there what I'm going to go ahead and do is add a new collection I'm just going to call this the reflection collection and I'm just going to add all of our reflection objects into that collection so we can actually use that as an indirect pass for our car and it's not actually going to be rendered so uh let's also go ahead and uh alt D to duplicate that um and set it as an instance and I'm going to go ahead and G shift Z just move that kind of in the background and then rotate that on the Z somewhere around there that is looking good um I will notice that the gamma is a lot darker than uh what the background play is going to be so what I actually need to do is come over here you can see that we can just affect and so we can just come over here uh we want to set the gamma maybe down a little bit just trying to match that as closely as possible we can actually come over here let's undo what we just did for the gamma and so what we can do is I want to make this a new material so I'm going to name this new material gonna make that the background image and now with that we can now uh affect this gamma separately from the other object so I'm basically just trying to match that as closely as possible and actually since they're instance they're going to have the same exact thing so what I'm I'm actually going to do delete the first one we did I'm gonna shift or sorry yeah shift d this time instead won't be uh just so that they're their own objects now and now if I kind of position that uh where it was before we can now uh separately affect these so if I put this one as the image and then this one is the image background that's much better and so I'm just gonna go and um up the gamma or sorry decrease the gamma so something like that where basically all I'm doing for that is just trying to get a good uh kind of Reflections in here you can see the base plate behind our windows and so if we didn't have that we would just have kind of the default World texture in the back that is all looking good let's go ahead and turn the reflection uh collection on to indirect so just press that button and make that indirect just so now we can't see that anymore what I will notice is we're still seeing some of the shadows and everything so what we actually need to do is go to the object properties go down to visibility and we just want to set kind of all these off um except I believe diffuse and glossy maybe transmission as well um so yeah so just those three so we can actually see through the car now and then I'm going to do the same thing so volume Setter and that off and I believe that is good so now that we have some Reflections in our scene you can see our car is looking pretty realistic um the only other thing like I said earlier is just the Shadows on the car itself so what I'm gonna do is kind of do a hacky method I want to add a plane real quick I'm just going to go back into solid view then go to top view by hitting seven on the numpad I'm just going to bring this uh kind of over here and what we're basically trying to create is like a little kind of Branch section and so I'm going to go into the edit mode hit k for the knife and then I'm just going to kind of make a basic cut out of like a branch it doesn't have to be like anything crazy just because uh we're not actually gonna see the actual object on the camera just uh kind of the Shadows it creates so something like that and I delete those faces uh then a if you select everything then G and we want to move it so the origin point is kind of resting here and I might even make uh s might want to shift it into Z just or sorry y just to make it a little bit longer and then I could put it there and so that's going to be kind of our Branch so now we can go ahead and create a new plane and we're going to try to use this like as a particle system let's go to rendered View and kind of just move this up I kind of want the um the plane to kind of be on the core and so let's move that up some more and then size in x might need to play around with this bit so size in the ax move on the X let's size it up a little bit on the Z okay so something like that um that is looking pretty good I don't want this into in the reflection anymore I'm gonna put that out there and we'll just leave that for now um I want to go ahead and make a particle system so I'm going to add a new particle system hair Advanced and we're going to go down to render we're going to make this an object and then set that object to B r um branch that we made which is somewhere there we go I don't know why it's uh see-through oh that's actually because we have it in the reflection collection as well so let's bring that out um and so again we're just going to go to object and pick select that so now we have a ton of objects on this thing I actually need to go ahead and rotate the plain 180 degrees like that so the branches are facing this way now and so if I just kind of play around with the thing uh so we actually can't see you know the leaves or anything it's being affected by right now so what we need to do is go into first of all we can go ahead and show the emitter off but that doesn't uh change the viewport for some reason and so what we need to do let's go ahead and add a new material I'm just going to leave it as default and then change the alpha down so now only the particles are kind of being shown to us so with that plane selected uh let's come back up here I think I need to increase the number and so yes so now now that we have the number increase let's actually come up here to denoise it a little bit just so we can see but now we can see we have some kind of uh shadowy objects and stuff I try to mess around it with it before to do kind of like a Musgrave texture and have that be affected but for some reason it wasn't working out for me so I just found that this kind of particle system is um you know an easier way to kind of do it let's add some random rotation so I'm going to make my phase a little bit and then change that so we can go up here and View kind of what that's doing I basically just want to kind of create some Randomness maybe some random velocity as well something like that and then let's do a random scale so something like that let's see how that is looking on our car and so that just gives us kind of like some Shadows of uh you know the sun kind of going through our tree so that's what I'm gonna stick with so now let's set up our different collections so we can go ahead and render this thing out so we can edit it in uh post so I'm going to go ahead and make a new collection I'm going to call this car and of course I'm gonna put the BMW into our car um and then we also need to create a shadow collection and so I'm gonna make a new collection call that shadow we're gonna put the ground in our shadow collection and so now what we can basically do is make different uh view layers to have our specific parts so this I'm going to name the car view layer so what I want is I want the shadow to be indirectly affecting everything and so now we just have the car and nothing else being rendered but everything else is still being kind of directly affecting that and then I want to go ahead and create a new one and I want this one to be um we'll say shadow so for this one I want the car to be indirectly affecting everything but also I want um I don't want to see the shadows of you know the plane that we created so what I might do I might set these back let me see um let's go ahead and create a new collection we'll name this uh Free Shadow I'm gonna Place uh both of my planes in there um into the tree Shadow collection and then I'll just turn that off for this layer then we need to go back to the core layer and just make sure that it is still turned off so now we have the car layer and one uh kind of you know view layer and then the Shadow and a separate V layer and so uh we can actually still see your the reflection so we need to go ahead and turn that off too and so now we pretty much have everything set up and ready to render out we just have to set up a few nodes and set up where we want it to be exported to so let's go ahead and do that I'm going to come up to the composing section I don't need this movie clip or Alpha over now there are many ways to actually um you know export out these passes uh you can of course use a file output node um and you know come up here to node properties make it whatever you want um and then set it to be exr and multi-layer what I find is that that really doesn't work for my workflow because there's some like kind of color error that happens when I export it out to Nuke and it just gives me like these super Overexposed images so I have to still like figure that uh process out there's some like color transform that's happening but what we could do instead is go ahead and shift d I'm going to duplicate this you can see this one is the car and then this one is the shadow so what I'm going to do is I'm going to set um this up here and then we can go ahead and render them render them out together so I'm going to come up here I'm going to make a new folder okay so in this new folder we can just hit accept and then we want to make sure we do have Alpha so rgba I'm going to change the compression down to zero then we can add any input and I'm going to name this one uh car and then this one I'm going to name shadow like that and then of course we're just going to plug the image into there and then the image into there for their respective uh passes that we want and so let's go ahead and render out an image just to see what that's doing okay so once the screen is black you can actually come back out here I'm gonna go into the compositing and the shift control click that so we can see we have this pass as our car and then this pass as our shadow and if we actually go into where we saved our uh pass we can now see that we have uh two separate images here one as the car and then one as the Shadow and so as we continuously render that out basically in this entire folder there's going to be a car pass and a shadow pass separately saved as PNG images so that is all looking good we can go ahead and close this out let's uh go ahead and uh update some of the render properties just to give this a little bit faster render time so come over here we're gonna go change the D noise off for both of them we're just going to increase our sample count to a 256 is what I find works best for me um and that's for the shadow I think if we go to the car it's the same thing and so um that's all looking good I do want to update the light paths I'm gonna change those down to all three just so we can kind of um you know make sure that's all kind of simplified a little bit if we come over here we'll notice that we don't have the reflections anymore and that's actually because we need to go ahead and go back to Light Pass set the transmission up and the total up and so now uh just a four um and evidently that gives us you know an extra kind of Bounce to the back of the windows and now we can see out of the back of the window so you just want to make sure that that uh is all correct before you change anything and then I'm also going to set up fast GI approximation now I'm gonna just gonna set the viewport balances up to two I believe go up to three you can test but two is where I'm going to stick to and then finally we can just go ahead and hit simplify and then uh this is just because I want to kind of render this out as fast as possible but um of course play around with what you want to do but I'm going to set this time limit to pay 10 seconds so depending on you know how many uh samples is at at 10 seconds it's going to stop the sample count and actually just go ahead and render it out as is um I just found with testing this kind of works for me to get fast and easy results but if you do want this for real then I would just leave that off and uh up the sample count and so now we are actually ready to go ahead and render the final animation so let's come up here and render animation okay so hopefully that didn't take too long to render uh now let's go ahead and go into the compositing I'm going to go ahead and just compose it inside of nuke but of course you can composite in whatever program that you feel comfortable with After Effects uh even DaVinci Resolve has a free compositing software called Fusion inside of its program which is not too bad so inside of nuke if you want to follow along I'm going to go ahead and hit R to read in our files so here is the car pass I'm just going to read that in and then also I did a little bit differently in my testing but it should be the same workflow and so I'm just going to open up my thing I did an exr and so I'm going to use that for my kind of Shadow pass so let's rename this just Shadow and uh just for the sake of this I need to add a shuffle node to shuffle the shadow out again this was when I was testing and found out that exr does kind of a weird color sequence so basically you just want to have um you know the shadow pass that you rendered out and then also your car pass so these are just what uh the two are again you shouldn't have to do the shuffle this is just what I needed to do so finally let's Import in the uh image sequence of the footage and so footage image sequence just going to import that in go ahead and set some of our settings so I'm going to click s make this uh 30 FPS and then set this to be HD 1080 and we can close out of all those now let's go ahead and start getting into the composite so I'm just going to hit M to merge I want the core over top of our base footage and I'm using the viewer by just hitting one and then up here I can change from RGB and a for this uh you know specific channels that you want to use and so now let's go ahead and I'm going to come up here to the workspace and go to large viewer just so we can see this a little bit easier the nicer workflow to do and so let's zoom in to our car you'll notice that there's kind of the like this white band that goes around it and that's actually because we don't have our car pre-multiplied and so what we need to do add a pre-mold node uh right at the very end it's very important that it's at the very end because whatever color and adjustments we want to do we want to do before that promote and then everything after the Primo like blurs and you know all that stuff that's where we want those things just to kind of keep the color data intact and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and add uh for this I just find that we just need a color correct since it's just a white and black image there's not really many colors to uh you know correct with our grade node which is what you would normally do so since it's just black and white we can get away with a color correct node so let's just try to match this kind of as closely as possible I might turn the gamma down just a little bit just kind of play around with some of these numbers um and see what kind of looks good I might turn the gain up in the mid-tones a little bit and then we'll leave that for now since that already looks pretty well integrated in our scene let's actually go ahead and add some Shadow I'm just going to bring kind of this uh node down here and then we want to add another color correct now so again C to add that and then this Mass section I'm going to put that over here to the shuffle and then if we go ahead and just you know for example change that around you can see that's already you know added some uh you know shadow in our scene it's not looking too realistic and so one thing that we can do is try to get some of these highlights out if this car was in the real world it'd be blocking out all those highlights and all the color would kind of be this kind of bluish grayish color right there so we want to try to mimic that as much as possible I'm going to come up here I'm going to try doing let's see the gamma on the mid tones yeah you can see like if you see under the car it's kind of just affecting those kind of bright highlight spots I'm just going to try to get those out as much as possible I might even blur the uh the thing in just a little bit because I noticed some of these Shadows are very soft compared to the harshness of that so that's looking pretty good I kind of like the under the car Shadow uh not really this kind of blob Shadow over here what I actually might do is go ahead and add another color correct to our shadow mask and then if I come up here to make that the alpha I might be able to uh play around with the gamma there we go and so that'll just dull kind of this but kind of increase the undercar shadow so that that's looking pretty good um for the shadow I might come over here um I'm trying to get the correct black levels if you can see over here like the Shadows over here are very kind of more bright in our scene whereas like here it's fully black and so what I want to do is try to mimic that as much as possible so I might actually offset it just a little bit like that and then let's go back to the shadows and turn see yeah turn those down just a little bit um so it's really just playing around with a lot of these um kind of things over here and trying to get a result there we go that kind of matches as close as possible and you can spend a lot of time trying to match it but I think this is pretty pretty decent for what we're applying it to um yeah so that is what I'm gonna leave it at I think that looks pretty alright I might do some testing later um to you know play around with that but just kind of whatever uh works for you just kind of play uh play around with it uh one thing I do notice is that with iPhone footage there's a lot of haze with stuff with uh bright highlights and stuff and so what we're gonna do is I'm going to go ahead and add in a glow node this glow node is basically just going to add kind of like a bloom type effect and uh we can tolerate that way down and then we also need to bring the brightness down as well and so now you can see um like if I was shooting this with iPhone 8 uh it'll be so blown out and basically just have like a little bit of a glow around our car and turn that down just a little bit more that just helps match in the scene a little bit more also I will notice if I kind of Zoom down here uh the grass is kind of like very like out of focus almost um whereas this is like very sharp and so we can also add a the focus node right there after our glow and that's that's way too much um I need to decrease that down to like a 0.3 which is looking better um yeah I think that I think that matches pretty well uh with our scene again uh compositing is all about just kind of playing around and trying to get a good result and uh if I was trying to do this like shot for like a a film and stuff um I would definitely try to like mess around with the Shadows a little bit more um to kind of uh get rid of some of these highlight things you know and blend it into the the ground a little bit better but this is pretty pretty good for you know the time we spin on it I'm going to go ahead and write that out I'm gonna just save it as a video file I don't need to save as a uh you know sequence just because it's going to render out so fast okay so let's just name this car the effects the one uh then dot mob and I'm Gonna Save this just as a h.264 30fps is fine and then we can go ahead and just render and then put it to Global and then hit OK and that should calculate and render out the final video okay guys here is the final result if I was really nitpicking this shot I would maybe go back and play around with these Shadows a little bit more but um for a beginner Series this is you know what I'm gonna stick with anyways I mean a lot to me if you consider liking and subscribing to help me with the YouTube algorithm and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 14,992

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender tutorial, vfx, beginner blender tutorial, tracking, visual effects, vfx blender, blender vfx tutorial, blender beginner vfx tutorial, beginner vfx tutorial, blender vfx, vfx in blender tutorial, easy vfx in blender, blender easy vfx tutorial, vfx breakdown, blender beginner tutorial, blender beginner, blender beginner vfx, 3D integration in blender, blender car tutorial, blender car vfx, blender camera tracking, blender camera tracking tutorial

Id: YM5LL--GASU

Length: 30min 30sec (1830 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2023