How to Duplicate yourself with Blender! (VFX Tutorial)

[Music] welcome everyone to this really exciting tutorial in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to duplicate yourself multiple times like you can see here in this video so this is a pretty fun thing to make and it's actually not too hard if you do it correctly and film your footage correctly it's actually not very hard and you can do it pretty easily this is the final result uh so the first thing we need to do is to go out and film your footage so right here in my file browser i have the footage that i filmed this is the raw footage and i'm just going to show you how i filmed it just give you some tips on the best way to film it first of all if you have somebody that can help you film it that can be very helpful because basically you need to make sure that you don't overlap yourself if you are too close to each other like while you're filming the different parts of yourself that can be really hard to fix you can mask it out like you can mask around yourself on each frame but it is kind of hard to do and is a lot more time consuming so if you have somebody helping you then they can look through the camera and just make sure that you're not overlapping yourself but what i did is my camera has this lcd panel which i can rotate so i rotated it and then i just looked at it and just kind of made sure that i wasn't overlapping myself uh and i also set it on a tripod which is super important because you need to set the camera on a tripod the uh the camera can't be moving at all because that's just gonna totally mess up the masking in between the different frames so make sure your camera is on a tripod that's super important and then if somebody can help you film it that's uh really important too so i just uh stood right here and then i just like pretended i was talking to my duplicate and when i filmed this every time i stood at a different position in my head i counted up to about 10 seconds because i knew that i wanted my footage to be about 10 seconds and then about 5 seconds into that 10 seconds i kind of looked up because i was noticing my real self coming in and then i started to wave at myself so that they kind of all wave at the same time and then i move to the next spot so here i am now i move to the next spot and i just pretended to talk to my other self and another really important thing to be aware of is that if your camera gets bumped at all it's probably going to mess it up so just make sure your camera doesn't get bumped around you know make sure it's on a tripod and make sure it's stable and if it does get bumped at all then it's probably a good idea to just retake that just re-film it another thing you need to be aware of is that if you're filming outside especially outside um the sun can change there could also be like clouds going over and the lighting can change even in just like a few seconds or a few minutes the lighting can actually change very slightly um so if you're filming this on a sunny day where there's like clouds going by and it's changing or if you're filming this when the sun's coming up or going down so sunrise or sunset you can actually notice a difference in the colors and the amount of light so i filmed this on a pretty ideal day because it was the middle of the day actually i think it was the morning but um the sun was already up and it was also cloudy so it was just overcast and that way the lighting wasn't going to change that much you could film this inside if you want to be extra careful because when you're inside you can kind of have better control of the lights so if the lighting does change a little bit we can fix that by color correcting the different shots that they're the same now something that you could do on your camera is you could change the exposure or change the amount of light that it's taking in i think it might be called the aperture basically it's the amount of light the exposure and the amount of light that your camera is taking in so you know how if you have like your phone camera and you have it on manual and you point it up at the sky or at the sun the camera adjusts so that you can actually see the clouds and everything isn't blown out if you set that to manual and then film this then there's a lot less chance that the lighting is going to change so if you can do that on your camera that's something that you might want to do as well and then i did actually film myself over here but i didn't realize it but uh my duplicate right here is actually uh coming in front of this so it's overlapping now if i wanted to i could actually go and mask myself out and then have it but that is going to take a lot more work and it's going to take more time so i decided to not do it for this tutorial and then the last one is my real self well maybe where i come in and i see all the duplicates and then i look over at the camera and here i am in blender 2.9 uh this is my first tutorial with blender 2.9 because as i'm recording this 2.9 just came out i'm just going to go over here to the video editing tab if you don't have this you can go over here and go file new and then go to video editing and also if you're on the splash screen you can click on video editing right there if you want to learn how to do video editing with blender i have a complete tutorial series it's like seven parts long and i'll put a card over there on the screen if you want to watch my tutorial series on video editing so i'm just going to drag and drop this video from my file browser into the scene now the frame rate blender automatically detected the frame rate from the footage and it set it to 59.94 frames per second i'm also going to scroll out here and move the end frame a lot bigger so we have a lot more room and space to work with and then also i know that i filmed my resolution in 1920 by 1080. if you don't know what resolution you filmed in you can select this darker blue strip and then go strip and then movie strip and click on set render size and you can see it's still 1920 by 1080. also if you're on filmic blender let me just go over here to the rendering tab and go down you can see right here if you're using filmic blender it might change the color correction of your video filmic should be set on default but you can see here this looks really bad it's all gray and stuff because this is used for the 3d side of blender but if you're not using that just change this back to standard and now it's the correct colors i'm going to select both the audio and video and press control g and that way it'll turn it into a meta strip so the audio and video don't get moved around or messed up from each other and now i'm just going to edit through and find all the different spots so i start acting right here so i'll press k to cut this and then delete this with x or delete key and then i'll press the spacebar i use the spacebar for playing and stopping and i'll just move along here and then you can see i kind of stopped acting there so i'll press k to cut this and then move along to the second part and then i'll press k right here and just delete this side and here's the end of this one right about there so i'll cut that go over to the third one cut this and i'll just delete this and then i can just move these all over and there's the end of that so i'll cut that cut this right here with k and then x to delete this strip move this over let's save this file so i'm going to go ctrl s to save and i'm just going to call this like photos maybe just name it something that makes sense to you because we are going to be rendering these out to images as an image sequence and then we're going to be adding these into a new blender file to do the masking so i'm just going to call it like photos.blend just save it in a folder somewhere and then here's the ending of this one and then this one this is the thing where i was overlapping myself so i'm just not going to deal with that so i'll just cut this out and delete it move this over and then i just need to find the last one so i'll cut this and there we go and then i'll just end it right there so i'll cut that and delete that now what i'm going to do is i'm going to overlap all these videos on top of each other so i'll press g and move this up just move it above the other one shift click on this one g and move this one up and then just continue to select these and move them they're all on top of each other because we're going to be compiling this all into one video so they all need to be the same length so i'm just going to press g move these over and i'll go to frame 1 and then i'm going to select this strip and press h to hide it and continue to just hide all of them except for the last one or the first one actually it's on the top and then i'll just watch through this until it gets to about 10 seconds and then i'll just grab this handle and press g and move it over and then i'm going to set the end frame probably about here so what i can do is press control end and that way the end frame will be set to the end of this blue line and then i'll select the second strip and i'll press alt h to unhide it and now you can see it's unhidden and now i can preview it so now i can just move it to the place where i want it to start that's all good now i'll press h to hide this one select the next one and press alt h and then just find the spot where i just start acting because i do want this to be longer if it can be longer so that's pretty good move this out and there we go so there's the third one and i'll press h to hide this one select this one and press alt h and then do the same thing and then h to hide this one select this one alt h and just do the same thing just make sure this one is long enough so there we go now i'm going to select all of them so i can press a to select everything press alt h to unhide all of them and then i'll move to frame one and i'll press k to cut all of them and then i'll just delete all of that side then i'll move over to the end frame and then i'll select all of these just make sure i'm at the very end frame and press k to cut these and then x to delete them so now every single shot of all the duplicates they're all the exact same length and this way it's not going to be as confusing and everything is just going to work a lot smoother so now i need to render each one of these strips into an image sequence so over here on my file browser this is the tutorial i'm going to make five folders so i'll make a new folder call this one another folder two another folder 3 another folder 4 and another folder 5. and then each one of these folders i'm going to put all the frames so over here back in blender you can see the output here i'm going to click on this and then i'm going to locate to the first folder and i'll just accept that and then i'm going to render them out to jpegs because jpegs are less file size because we are going to be rendering out a lot of frames so i'm just going to make it jpeg so that we don't have to deal with as much file size and now you can click contr you can press ctrl f12 or click on render and render animation and you can see if i go over here and i jump into the frames you can see it's very quickly rendering out all of the frames and now it finished so let's press escape to go out of this now i need to do that for all the others so i'll click on this one press h to hide it and that way we can see the next one below it because this one is hidden and then what we'll do is click on this and go back out and we're going to go into the second folder press accept and it's still set as jpeg and i'll press ctrl f12 and we'll do that so we just need to do this for all the different ones that we're doing okay the second one's done so i'll escape out of this press h to hide this one and then open this up again we'll go back out and go into folder three press accept and then ctrl f12 to render that all right and it's finally finished so now if we go into all these folders you can see here's all the frames and uh you may be wondering why we're doing this and why we're not just exporting it to a video you could export it to a video but i found that sometimes it can actually be kind of glitchy and frames just work better and you can totally just delete the frames once you're actually done with the video okay so let's just go file and save this again and then i'll just close actually i'll just go file and new we're just going to open up a new general and now i'm going to go over to compositing i'll press n to close this panel i'll just drag this down because i don't want it to be that big i'll click on use nodes and then also make sure backdrop is on now this render layers i'll just click on this and press x to delete it and then i'll press shift a and i'm going to click on search and i'm going to search for image just add in this image and then click on open and then you can find the frame so i'm just going to start off with the first one so i'll open this up and then i'll press a to select all of the frames and hit open image and that way it's going to open it up as an image sequence so you can see here the frames is 747 and the start frame is one so that's good now the end frames here we need to make this match the amount of frames so if i go into this folder you can see that the end frame is 747 and that's the same as this one so i need to make this end seven four seven and then also the frame rate it needs to be the same so i know that my camera films in 59.94 frames per second so i'm going to set it to that now i'm going to be using the node wrangler add-on if you don't have that enabled it's really easy to enable you just go file actually go edit and go to preferences and then on the add-ons tab you can start typing in node wrangler and you can see you can turn this on so i'll press ctrl shift and click and that's using a node wrangler feature and that way it adds a viewer node so we can view what we're seeing in the background now to make this background smaller you can press v or alt v so i'm just going to press v a few times to make it smaller and then let's press shift a and i'm going to search for an alpha over so i'll grab this alpha over just drop it in here so it wires it up and then we need to have the compositing connected to that as well so now what i want to do is i want to mix two video files together so here's the first one and then the alpha over is going to mix them together so what i want to do is click on this one press shift d and just kind of move it back here i'll connect this to the bottom one and then i need to click on this file so i can change the files and i'll go back out and then i'll go to the second one a to select all of the photos and then click on open image so now i'm going to use the node wrangler features so if i press ctrl shift and click on this node you can preview just what it is so you can see this one is where i walk in and then if i ctrl shift and click on this one you can see there's this one here and then if i ctrl shift and click on the alpha over now we're back to seeing both of them but you can see they're overlapping each other if i change this factor this is the amount of how they're going to be blended together you can see they're kind of fading so i want to blend these together but if i just change the factor like this it's just blending them evenly so i need to tell the alpha over node where i want it to blend together so to do that we're going to add the mask so i'll press shift a i'm going to search for the mask node i'll just drop it right above here and i'll connect the mask to the factor so now it's not just using a factor value it's going to use the mask data to tell it where there's going to be one video and where there's going to be another video so now let's actually do some masking so i'll go over here i'll just scroll over here to the plus button i'll hit plus and i'll go to vfx and go to masking now it opens up this masking tab i don't need these things up here so i'll just click with the crosshair and drag over here and then let go and then i'll also go here click with the crosshair drag up and let go and then i don't need this so i'll press t to close that and i'll pull this timeline up a bit now we need to open up the same footage that we have so that we can know where we need to mask it out so i'll hit open and now i can add in the second one so you could add in the first one if you want but i want to add in the second one so i'll just open this up press a to select all of them and click on open clip and because we have the frame rate the correct frame rate and we also have the amount of frames right here the end frame is 747 that way it's going to be the exact same so it's going to be exactly aligned with the other ones in the compositor and actually what's happening is you can't see any of them that's because we need to flip this and now you can see it's this one is going to be on top now but you can see it's the same exact frame so if i go over to masking it's the same exact frame so to do the masking i'm going to hit this new button and i can call this like mask one and i'll press n and t to close these panels and now i can zoom in and i can press ctrl and click and i'll just keep on pressing holding down control i'll click and just make a mask around this character and because i throw the ball up i need to make the mask go up here and then to animate this i'm going to click on this button and this is the auto keyframe so that way whenever we move the mask it's going to automatically add a keyframe to the mask so now i can just move along the timeline and the entire time i just need to make sure that the character is in the frame my hand is getting a little bit close here so i'll just grab these pull them out to add a keyframe and then right here my arm is going to go out of the mask so i'll move this out a bit and you can also press a to select and deselect so i'll press b box select here g and pull it up and then i'll keep on moving this around and my elbow gets pretty close there so i'll beat a box like this and pull this over and if you're getting these little weird handle things i do find them kind of annoying you can use them if you want but i usually don't really like to use them so to remove them i can select all of the mask and then press v and then i can change it to vector and that way there's not going to be those little annoying handles there and we're done so that's the end of this mask so i can go back to compositing now and let's just save this file so i'll go file and save and i'll just save this as like masking.blend so now on this masked node if we select the mask that we made which we called it mask one now this factor it's going to use the mask and now if i just move this and refresh it you can see there's two of me now you might need to swap these um because right here you can see it's masked it out the other way but if i switch this then you can see there's both of me right there now there is a small problem right here if you can see that my shadow is being casted on this piece of wood here but i can actually blur the edges of this mask so that there's a smooth transition between the different footages so if i press shift a search for a blur node i can add this blur node drop it in here and then i can change this value up to maybe i don't know 20 30 something like that and now it blurs that transition and you can't really tell that there's a cut there if i control shift and click on this blur node you can see that's what it's doing so this is basically how i do it so now uh depending on how many duplicates you want to make you just have to continue to do this over and over again and keep on adding more frames on top of each other so to do this i'm going to press shift d on this alpha over to duplicate it and i'll just pop it right here to the compositing i'll move all of these up just to give myself a little bit more space and then i also want to connect the viewer to the alpha over here so i'll press ctrl alt and click and now i want to just add another video on top of the ones that we've already made so i'll just select three of these i'll select this one shift select this one and shift and click on this one because we're going to need to use all of these and i'll press shift d and just move them right here and let me just box like this pull it out a bit to give myself some more space and now i want to take this alpha over which is two of my duplicates and i want to mix it with another one so this image right here i'll click on this file icon right here to add a new image sequence and i'll go up here we'll go to the third one and then i'll press a twice to select all of those images and i'll click on open image so now if i control shift and click on this one you can see here is the third duplicate so what i'll do now is just plug this one into the top one and this one will just go into the bottom one and then if i control shift and click on the alpha over now if i blend between these you can see there's these two which is one because of this alpha over and then we're adding on top of it this one which is the third duplicate and then what we need to do is connect the blur up to the factor here but we don't want to use the same mask because this mask isn't going to help us because it's in the wrong spot so i'll press x to delete this mask then i'll go over to the masking right here and i'm going to remove it this doesn't actually delete it this just removes it from our view but you can see if i press x and then click right here it's still there so i'm going to click new i'll call this mask 2 and then i need to import the other footage so i know what to mask so i'll press x to delete this and then click on open and then i'll go to the third one because this is the third duplicate i'll press a to select all the frames and click on open clip so now i'll just do the same thing so i'll go to the starting and i'll control shift or i'll control click and go around me and i know that right here it gets pretty tight so i'm going to make sure this is pretty close because there is another one of me right here so i'll just go over like this and now just start to go and animate this and the uh the auto keying is still on so that way it'll be animated and it gets a little bit close right here so i'll just be the box look and just make sure there's always a little bit of space here so i need to move oop i can press r to rotate this and just move it up and then i'll need a box like this pull this up and i wait for there so i need to give this a lot more room so that i can wave that all looks good so i'll go back now into uh compositing now on this mask the second one if i just select mask 2 and then just kind of move a frame over to refresh it you can see now there's i'm all disappeared again that's because i need to switch this and now there's three of me so now let's do the same thing and you may have less duplicates you may have more but you basically just have to continue to do the same thing over and over and over again just keep on adding yourself over and over again until you have the amount that you want so again i'll click on this album over shift d it and then just wire it up here i'll give myself some more space and then these three nodes i'll press shift d to duplicate them wire this one up here and then click on this file and change it so i'm going to use the fourth set of images press a to select all of them and open them and then delete this mask because it's the wrong mask we'll plug this into the factor and then i need to go back to the masking exit out of this one make a new one i can just call this mask three and then exit this footage open up a new one we'll open up the fourth one click on open clip and now just do the same exact thing try to keep this one pretty close because i don't want it to go into the other mask right here i'm going to give this a little bit more space if the mask is too close then the blur that you added might actually start to blur out and fade out uh the duplicate so just make sure it's not too close and this one is finished now so i'll go back into the compositing and then open up this one mask three and then there we go so now there's four of me now i did want to show you guys how to do the color correction if you're having some issues with that um so let's say that this one maybe the sun went behind a cloud or something what i can do is there's a few different things i can add i can press shift a and i can add the brightness and contrast and then i can change that so let's say that maybe let me just change the contrast a bit maybe the sun went behind a cloud and it got a lot darker and it just kind of looks weird you can actually see the outline uh you could change this just a little bit um to fix it also if your characters are far enough away you could change this floor value even more you can see if i start to turn it up too much it starts to blur out the things that are close to it and then also another thing you could add is the hue saturation node so hue saturation value this way if like your video has gotten a little less saturated or something you could change this value you could also animate this value so if the sun goes behind a cloud and then comes back out you can actually animate this by um pressing i to add a keyframe with your mouse over this and then you can move over to somewhere else and then change the value maybe make it a lot more saturated and then press i again to add another keyframe and now if you move in between these you can see it slowly becomes less and less saturated another thing you could use is the rgb curves node this one i don't think you're able to animate this but if you want to just make something a little bit brighter or a little bit darker or you know make it a little bit more red or a little bit less red you can use this so you can see i've done that three times now i have to do it one more time to add in the last duplicate so let me just move these over just do this one more time so i'll press shift d on the alpha over plug it up and then i'll select these three shift d and move them over then i'll plug this one up i will click right here go back out we'll go to the fifth and last set of frames open the image plug the blur into the factor and then delete this mask we'll go back to masking delete this one and delete the video right here we'll click open one more time go to the fifth one open that up and that one i don't even need to animate because let me just actually just move these a little bit closer just to make sure they don't uh get in the way of the other one but yeah this one i don't really move around too much so and there is lots of extra space so i don't really need to worry about animating that too carefully back to compositing i'll open up mask four so let's go to the output settings right down here i'm going to render these out to jpegs again and just make sure the quality is at 100 and then right here on the output i'm going to add a new folder by clicking this new folder and i'm going to call it like final images so we'll go inside there press accept and then save again by going file save or control s and then we'll go ctrl f12 to render out those frames okay and the render is finished now so i'll just go file and save this again and now i'll just open up the splash screen and i'm going to open up the other blender file that we have the photos one now i'll go over to frame one and then i'll press shift a and i'll add image sequence and you can see here's the folder final images so i'll select all these and click on add image strip and then i'll press g and move this image strip up so that you can actually preview it and if you want to have the audio for all the different footages at once you can press alt h to unhide all these but because this one is at the very top you're not going to be able to see the others but i don't actually want to do this because there will be probably a lot of background noise so i'll just use one so i'll just press b and select these and press h to hide them so that way it's just one kind of background noise okay so let's render this into a final video now so what i'm going to do is make sure the end frame is where you want and then i'm going to change this to ffmpeg video if you haven't watched my video editing tutorial series i do talk about what i like to use for the file format but let me just go down here the encoding i like to use mpeg-4 on the video i like to use h.264 and just the default of medium quality and good and then on the audio here i usually use acc if you're going to upload your video to youtube i found that htc won't work well because youtube can't process the video on the audio codec so if i'm uploading it to youtube then i will use mp3 and then make an output where you want to save it so i'm just going to save it right here as final video and just press accept and then you can press ctrl f12 and this shouldn't take very long if it's not a very long video and here we go so i really enjoy doing this i think it's a really fun thing to do if you guys do this tutorial and you post your result online i'd love to see it so if you want to leave a link in the comments to your finished video i really enjoy seeing what you guys create if you'd like to support me and this channel i do have a blender market store and i also have a gumroad store where i'm selling 3d models and assets and tutorials and on my patreon i have all these 3d models and assets and tutorials that you can get and i also have all the tutorial files on my patreon so these are some great ways to support me if you'd like to help out but even just following me on youtube and watching my videos are a really great way to help out so thank you for your support thank you so much for watching i hope you had fun with this tutorial and i hope it was helpful and i'll see you in a future video [Music]

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 4,164

Keywords: VFX, close, effect, Visual effect, Blender, Blender tutorial, learning, video, footage, clone vfx, duplicate, ryan king, Ryan King Art, Ryan King, Tutorial, 3d

Id: HES7Kn7RF2Y

Length: 30min 28sec (1828 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020