How to Create a Hole Using VFX | Blender Beginner VFX Tutorial

today we're going to be looking at how to place a hole on the ground with a super beginner workflow like always you can download everything I use down below so let's go ahead and get started so inside a blender the first thing that we need to do is go ahead and motion track our footage so I'm going to go ahead and plus VFX and motion tracking and then open up our footage I went ahead and converted my video into a image sequence so I'm just going to hit a to select all the PNG sequences and then open the clip and then we can go ahead and set the scene frames and prefetch our footage also we notice that the color is off so I'm going to come up to render uh color management and then down to standard and now it's looking a lot better let's also go ahead and set the frame rate so I'm going to come to the output settings go to frame rate and set it to 30 FPS so if I scroll throughout our footage we'll notice that we're closer to the paper at the end so that's where I'm actually going to start the tracking process so let's go ahead uh control click to add that and then sh alt s sorry to add a search size we actually want to increase this so that the pattern size is going over our entire X right here so I'm going to make this say to a 40 um pattern size uh so that's much better now our search size is much smaller so I'm going to change it up to like a 95 let's see that I just found with testing this is kind of the uh size that works the best for this specific shot so I'm going to a delete those and then we need to go ahead instead of TR tracking just the location we can do the location rotation and scale and then normalize our footage and also we want to set the match to previous frame these are just kind of all the settings that work best when I was testing this scene uh now we just need to control click all the middle of our little X's so that we can actually track the scene now that we have markers on all of those I want to go ahead and add some more markers around this area just whatever blender things that it can track to so I'm going to come up here and detect some features and we're going to come down here I'm going to go set the threshold to a 01 and then the distance to an 80 just so we have a ton of trackers on our scene let's go ahead and hit a again to select all the previous trackers we had and then if we hold control shift T it'll actually track backwards or you can hit this button right here okay so what's nice is that we actually have a lot of markers that made it to the very beginning of our footage so that's going to be very useful to for tracking so let's go ahead and get a solve let's come up to the solve section uh my am key frame with the most Parallax I notice that it's around like a 140 to 180 is where I really like shift a lot in my camera movement so again 140 to 180 right there uh then let's refine all of this stuff and go ahead and solve our camera motion okay so we got a 6 solve eror and the line is relatively straight right here so that's all looking good let's go ahead and clean that up a little bit so I'm going to clean the tracks and then put the reprojection up to let's say like a 75 then delete those and resolve our motion okay so that got it down to a04 let's just do that a couple more times until we get a good result okay so I cleaned my tracks a couple more times and was able to get a19 solve eror which is really really good the most important thing of course is that our blue little solve line down here is straight all the way across uh so that's going to give us a really good track so let's go ahead and set up our tracking scene because you'll notice up here we don't have anything set up yet so I'm going to scroll down let's go ahead and set the background and the trkking scene up and it's not orientated to our screen uh luckily we have our piece of paper which is a flat object and we can use that to Define our floor so I'm going to select this point this point and this point to be our floor and press the floor IC over there and then we need to go ahead and set the origin I'm just going to set it to be this Middle Point right there so set the origin there and then one of these in line uh in this line I'm going to set to be our x axis and then let's go ahead and set up the correct scale for our scene which is going to be very important for depth of field and if you need to place any you know realistically sized objects in your scene so we have this piece of paper which is a good reference uh normal piece of paper is about 11 in uh long waist and so we'll notice that uh about you know 2 inches are cut off from the side here from these two points so let's go ahead and first just select these two points right here and then let's actually convert that in two meters so I actually have up here we need to convert 9 in into M and so here is the um you know 9 in into meters we're copy that number and then what we can do is set the scale and then paste that number into our distance and now that's basically made the correct size of our entire scene and so now let's come out to the layout View and just to have some fun let's see how well our uh camera is actually matched let's come to the first frame just going to hide these for now uh come to the side view and I'm about a 6'2 guy I was roughly filming around my waist so we'll say it was about 3 ft and so let's get our measuring stick over here uh and then that and so 1 point we'll say 1.1 M let's do 1.1 m 2 ft is roughly 3.6 M which is is exactly where I was filming roughly around my waist area so half of my size so that just shows that we can get a very accurate kind of you know scene scale in our scene let's go ahe and get out of that alt H to unhide everything and uh blender went ahead and set up some stuff we're just going to undo some of the stuff it's set up so delete the background and foreground view layer we can go ahead and delete all this stuff so the light ground and the cube we're going to go ahead and delete all those stuff so we just have the camera now and then we actually need to go to the background view layer we're just going to delete that and then in the compositing tab let's just delete these four nodes and then plug our movie clip into the alpha over so now we can go back out to the layout tab and we actually want to go ahead and start setting up our uh hole that we want in our scene so to do that what I'm going to do is uh shift a add a mesh Circle and we're just going to size that down roughly around like there for now and then we actually want kind of to make our hole a little bit Jagged you know to add some uh you know 3D realism in the scene like a metor came down and you know Struck it and tore the fabric and everything the carpet so what we can do is add a uh displace modifier and what that's going to do is whatever we set our as our texture it's actually going to displace the geometry so I'm going to make a new texture just going to name that the ho then we can come down to the texture properties and instead of it being a movie or image uh sequence we can go ahead and make this clouds which you can always think it's clouds it's kind of just the noise um of the texture settings we can play around with a little bit of this you'll notice that we don't have a lot of geometry to work with so I'm going to come back up to the uh modifier section add a subdivision surface modifier and we're just going to place that before our displace modifier just so we have some more vertices I am going to increase the amount to like a three uh maybe even a four just so we have a lot of vertices to work with let's go back to the texture section and let's play around with uh some of the size let's say like around a there you can play with it yourself um of course we can also increase the brightness to shrink it and then the contrast to make it you know more Jagged or less Jagged or whatever you want honestly this is kind of just uh where you can play around with it and have a little bit of fun you will see it sticking very uh closely to a four which is very important because that's going to really sell the in effect so once you're happy with kind of the result that you have right here so what we can do is go ahead and apply all of our modifiers so I'm going to go ahead and apply the subdivision for surface and the displace modifier and so now we have actual geometry to work with um so what we can do is I'm going to go ahead and hit uh go to Edge select just so we in the edge select uh also we're in edit mode just uh come up here to the edit mode then if we hit e that'll extrude and then if we hit s that'll scale everything out so basically we just want uh our you know scaled out version over here to basically cover the entire frame okay so now we can see that we have our base footage in the middle here and that's the only thing that we can see what we actually want to do now is set all of this material out here to basically show only the transparency of our scene and so to do that first of all Let's uh go ahead and do some render settings so I'm going to come up to render let's go to Cycles I'm just going to turn the D noise off for me and then set this down to like 512 and this can just be a 64 since we don't really need that much resolution also if you have a GPU I recommend setting it to GPU compute uh now what we can do is go ahead and add a material to our scene cuz if we come out to the render view everything is just an ugly gray color um so let's go ahead and add a new material and name this material hold out and of course what that means is we're going to set it to be a holdout object and so let's come up here and then select the holdout preset and what that is going to basically do is whatever is set to be your hold out is basically just going to show the transparency of the scene and basically everything else behind it is not going to be rendered at all uh so that's why you can see we basically have our world texture right now cut out in here let's go ahead and get a little Fancy with it I want to uh increase the kind of you know cavity down here to where there's a little bit of overhang you know like uh the carpet is overhanging a little bit so let's uh you know alt select that if you are in Edge select mode Let's e to extrude that and then Z to just extrude that down a little bit now you can see we basically created like a little Edge uh that adds some 3D into our scene and so let's go ahead and ALT click that in face mode just to select the face Loop and then what we can do is add a new material and this material we're going to name the carpet like that and then if we have all this selected we can just hit assign and now we can see that all this uh all these faces up here are set to be our holdout texture and then all the faces in the middle are said to be our carpet texture okay so we'll worry about texturing a little bit later let's go ahead and set up the hole in our uh little scene right here so again we're just going to go ahead and shift a add a mesh we're going to do the same exact thing we're going to add a circle just make that a little bit less uh we do want to make sure it covers up the entire size of the Hole uh then again we're just going to add a displace modifier we're going to add a new texture we're just going to call this whole two cuz why not um we're going to come back down to the texture settings again just go to clouds uh just so we get all that and then add a a subdivision surface modifier above our displace modifier and increase that uh so now that we have this effect I'm actually just going to incre decrease that just a little bit we don't need that many uh vertices there um then texture settings uh then let's play around with this a little bit because we want this to kind of be more circular rather than Jagged like this and so the size will increase that to like something like that and then we can do the brightness we'll just keep it around there uh we also need let's just go ahead and rotate it on the z-axis and then I think that's pretty much all I'm going to do um cuz I again I don't want it as Jagged as you know our whole Center piece so let's come back up to the modifiers Tab and again let's just go ahead and apply both of those and now let's go ahead and we want to come to the side view I want to make the hole um lower than our floor plane so I'm just going to jezy move that there okay so now we just have to extrude this down let's go into the edit mode by hitting tab up there uh first let's make a face so uh hit F to you know select all that um and then we need to hit e to extrude that down and we're just going to we need to actually come first let's select the top and then delete the top face just so we have like kind of a cylinder looking thing then let's select the bottom again uh we want to go to like the place where we we're going to see the most down and I don't want to see the bottom of the hole so I'm just going to pull it all the way down until we don't really see the bottom uh so if I scrub throughout here we don't see the bottom so that's good so right there is where I'm going to leave that um and then we can actually go ahead and shade smooth and let's go ahead and do some texturing just because our hole is now you know in there um and of course you can do whatever on the other side of this you can even make it a portal into another world um so just play around have some fun with that but I'm going to make into a hole and so if you go to polygon or sorry poly Haven uh you can download this uh texture I just downloaded the 2K since uh any higher you know kind of lags up my machine and so let's go ahead and apply that texture let's come over here I'm just going to bring out a new shading editor hit and hide that and then let's add a new uh material I'm going to name this just whole now I'm naming a lot of stuff ho and then if you have the node Wrangler add-on what we can do is just click that and then control shift t um to add a principal texture setup and then just locate wherever you downloaded your files I'm just going to select all of them hit the principal texture setup that's done a pretty good job already um you will see that we don't have like any you know Lighting in our scene so it's very hard to see anything right now so I'm just going to add a simple um area light right there and bring that up a little bit and maybe you know change the power up uh just for now we can play around with that a little bit later uh but nothing is showing and that's actually because we haven't unwrapped our scene so let's go ahead and do that instead of letting blender kind of you know smart UV unwrap it um let's just go ahead and unwrap it ourselves and so with the bottom kind of selected here what I can do is if I'm in Edge select mode I can just right click and then go ahead and Mark a seam like that and then since we're not really seeing this side I can go ahead and Mark this as a seam too so I'm just going to right click uh Mark seam right there and then now what we can do is hit a to select everything and then go hit U and unwrap and we basically just UV unwrapped it if you want to check out your UV you can come out to the UV uh editing workspace you can see this is a pretty nice UV uh that's why I unwrapped it the way I did um so now if we come back over here go into render view you can now see that we have our rock layer and then if we alt or yeah alt H to uh unhide our hold out we can see that we're only seeing the uh you know the rock layer in here which is really nice if I you know hide this top layer we can see all this render down here and so that's just a nice thing that the hold out does is kind of remove all the rendering down here so now that looked awful like that looks uh super urish uh lighting needs a lot of work all this stuff so let's go ahead and uh you know use this displacement to actually get some nice uh displacement in our scene and so right now it's not using any of uh the points for any of the displacement and that's actually because by default every texture is set to only use the uh normal uh you know map to you know only affect the texture geometry and that's good for if you wanting to see far away objects and objects that aren't close to you but since we are so close that we're actually going to see the 3D detail of the Rocks we can actually use this displacement map which is giving us this data uh to actually affect the actual geometry of the thing so if I come down to these settings and then scroll all the way down to displacement or sorry go to settings and then uh displacement down here you'll see that right now it's set to be bump only and that's again only affecting the kind of texturing of the of the image uh not really affecting the geometry so what we want to do instead is set it to be a displacement only and you can see that that's done some weird stuff and basically that's using this uh again displacement map that we have in our textures uh to basically displace the geometry but if we go to edit mode again uh we'll notice that we don't have a lot of geometry we basically have you know one face going all the way down so what I want to do is I want to go ahead and I'm just going to manually add um some you know geometry of course you could use the subdivision surface modifier but I just like kind of manually adding the geometry I need so I'm going to hit control R and I'm just going to with my scroll scr scroll all the way up until we get you know a lot of uh lot of you know Edge Loops there and now we have a ton more geometry so now if we go back out to the render tab we can see that we have uh our rocks actually you know protruding how they would um in the actual you know space um so what we need to do is you know this looks terrible again we need to affect our mid level which if I hide this you'll notice that if I come up here and select this uh object the mid level is basically just how extruded out um the faces are so if I go ahead and affect that it will bring the faces back in line basically uh with this yellow line um so that the Rocks kind of stick around there if I come to the um camera mode now uh we will see that the rocks are extruding way too far out and that's where the scale comes into place play so we're just going to you know scale that down a little bit something like that that that's looking a little bit better and then um let's go ahead and render out a image let's just see what we're working with okay so now you can see that we're getting a lot more detail with our rocks and it's looking a lot more realistic of course you can if you want more detail and you want to crank up uh the realism a lot um it will you know eat into your PC but if you have a good good enough PC you might as well uh add a you know subdivision surface modifier this is fine for I'm using it for um so we're going to leave it like that next let's actually go ahead and make some texture for our carpet so I'm going to come up here go to the carpet Tab and then uh we can go ahead and go down to the materials we're uh in the carpet material which is good uh we want to go ahead and just add a image texture and then we can just use our image sequence as before so here it is I'm going to hit a open the image sequence and plug that into the base color and then what we want to do is I want to go ahead and and go into the edit editing mode hit a to select everything and then U and we're going to do uh project from View and what that will do is basically project everything from our view um to the actual object so now if we you know move around the scene you can see that we have some of our carpet texture actually uh kind of baked into the material right here first of all let's come up to the camera Tab and then uh let's make our background images you know opacity a little bit higher so we can actually see uh what we're working with a little bit more um I do want to make the actual material a little bit darker so let's do a gamma NN just plug that into there and then we can uh turn down the gamma just a little bit just so it's you know a darker Edge right there uh we're going to do a few compositing tricks to kind of blend it in a little bit more and so now what we can do is we need to actually play around with the lighting of our scene now the lighting of uh my actual real world scene scene that I shot in was pretty bright and very tan so I'm just going to make the you know ambient uh color kind of this tan color and now with our area light let's just play around with that a little bit more to get a more you know realistic result the power is way too high so I'm going to do something like that and then the size we can just increase that uh or decrease that just a little bit um so something like that of course you can play around with it on your own but this is looking fine for uh what I'm using this scene for um so yeah so that is pretty much everything that I'm going to be doing for this shot of course you know play around with uh some of the materials and have some fun with it you know add like a a world down here uh make it fun and exciting um now this is the part where I actually take it into compositing now usually I do this in Nuke and actually the example you saw at the start was in Nuke uh but of course I want to stick inside a blender for this so let's go up to the compositing tab and again let's render out an image so we can see uh the actual hole that we're working with okay so it's not looking too too bad um this camera does have like a lot of grain and all that stuff unfortunately I don't know a great way to add grain inside a blender um so that's something I did inside a nuke that's nuk's like really great at um and so that helped match it a lot but let's go ahead and play around with some settings just to match it a little bit nicer so I will notice that um the hole is a little too dark compared to the scene so let's go ahead and add an exposure node to just lighten that up a little bit okay you can play around with it but around a one is looking pretty good for uh me I need to go ahead and uh I want to decrease the saturation just a tad cuz it's a little too saturated right there so uh that just helps you know get red to some of the Reds mostly and then I want to go ahead and decrease the contrast so I'm just going to add a bright new contrast node and let's decrease some of that as well okay so now with these three nodes we basically just color corrected it a little bit more um to kind of match you know how the camera would actually see it what I can do now is I want to darken the area kind of around this hole a little bit so what I want to do is actually use the alpha channel to affect our footage layer so I'm going to go ahead and add a color balance to our footage just going to decrease the gain a little bit like that and then we need to actually set this uh factor to be our Alpha like that so now it's affecting basically the entire Alpha of our thing of course we can't see anything and that's because we need to dilate it uh sorry let's a rote it uh a little bit so I'm just going to put put that there um and then I'm going to change this let's see we're just going to change that up to like a nine uh just so it has like a little bit of the edge right there then of course we need to blur it so let's add a blur just going to set it to fast gajan right there and then let's increase this up to get a nice like subtle blur effect and so now that that Bridges the Gap a little bit more you can see before and after you just helps it um kind of feel a little bit more realistic of course you can do a lot more with this scene inside of other programs um I recommend uh D Vinci resolve if you want to have a free compositing option but this is result that we're going to leave it inside a blender again the one thing I would recommend you doing if you do do this on your own is of course adding a lot of grain uh to it again blender doesn't have a you know great grain node or any uh method I know how to add grain and so that's what really sells a shot in my opinion um but this is you know the setup I would use inside a blender to get a pretty good result on your end uh we do need to play around a little bit with the motion blur and then also the depth of fuel just to really blend it into the shot so let's go back out to the layout section uh we want to go ahead we can join these areas we don't need these anymore let's go to uh the renter properties go down to motion blur the lower you set it the less motion blur and then the higher you set it the more motion blur so I'm just going to change this to like a 6 um I think I shot it in like a super high shutter speed um so there's not a ton of motion blur but just because it's a phone it you know has a lot of um kind of weird artifact motion blur type stuff so next Let's uh go to the light pads I'm going to set all these down to three just to speed up our scene I'm going to change the reflective and refra refractive off change the fast GI approximation to A2 um just to have you know some faster rendering and then uh of course I want to go to film just hit transparent I don't think we need it for the scene but you never know it's just kind of a rule thumb I like to have and then finally what we can do is uh I'm going to add add a empty plane axis right there and since it's in the origin I'm just going to leave it at the origin and if we come up to the camera we're going to go down to that check depth of field and then set it to be our empty object and then uh 2.8 is way too high because uh everything is pretty much in uh you know focus and so I want to change that up to let's try like a 5 six maybe I'm just kind of looking at the depths down here to make sure um that's still a little too much I'm maybe going to go to an eight Eight's looking much better and so you can see like before uh we don't have any kind of death of field blur down there and now um with it added we can see it's much more realistic and how you know the iPhone would actually shoot it and so now the final thing is just to render uh render it out you can either render it out as a movie sequence uh or a PNG sequence um since it's going to render so fast on my end I'm just going to render as a movie sequence uh since it's going to render within 15 minutes minutes so if it ever you know does uh stop working but of course if it renders longer for you I always recommend doing a PNG sequence uh so that if blender crashes you can always pick up uh back from where you left off but again I'm rendering as a movie clip so I'm going to go FF EG video and then going to encoding changing it to a uh EG 4 or sorry let's go ahead and do uh quick time which is mov format and then let's go ahead and high quality and we can go ahead and render the animation okay so here is the final result hopefully you guys got something similar or learned something along the way to help out with your own projects I'd really appreciate it if you consider liking and subscribing as it would help out the channel but anyways I hope to see you guys in the next tutorial

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 10,465

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender tutorial, vfx, cgi, 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, blender camera tracking, camera tracking in blender, camera tracking tutorial, camera tracking tutorial blender

Id: NsenTwvpS6A

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023