How to Get Started with VFX in Blender

[Music] so hey guys today we're going to be doing a very basic uh blender vpx tutorial uh now this is actually the first vfx shot i ever did inside of blender uh this was really helpful for me so i hope you guys learned something now down in the description below you can actually download the footage i am going to be using inside this video along with my uh blind file if you're interested now to get started first we're going to need some paper and a sharpie we're basically just going to be creating a little surface that we can actually uh track onto next we just need to make nine little dots across the paper i like to do a three by three a little sheet on the piece of paper uh i also like to put little crosses uh in between those dots just to add a little bit more detail once that is done we just need to film our footage now you do want to make sure that your footage is as uh still as possible you don't want it to be as shaky but you still want to move around and everything uh what helps with that i actually have a phone gimbal now uh that kind of removes some of the shakes and everything this is the result i got with my footage so if you're doing your own footage just try to match that as close as possible now that we have that we are ready to jump inside a blender okay so now that we have our footage we are actually ready to bring it inside of blender itself uh so i'm just going to come up here to the vfx tab motion tracking then i'm just going to open up our clip okay once that is inside of blender you will notice that the colors are off so to change that let's just go to the render properties down to color management and instead of filmic we're going to change it to standard so now you can see that's fixed our actual colors next we can actually set the start and end keyframe you'll notice that by default it's 1 to 250 but if we hit the set scene frames you'll see that my clip actually goes to 297. now blender does this weird thing if i actually come to the end of the clip here uh you'll notice that the very last uh frame is actually blank like this uh and that's just something weird that blender does with the set scene frame so i just like to uh hit this little error right here to make the frame count one less that should fix it so now if i actually scrub throughout this footage you will notice that it's very choppy uh even on good hardware it will be choppy that's just something blender isn't really good at at the moment so if we come back to the first frame we can actually come up here and hit the this prefetch button this basically bakes all of the frames of the video into our cache that just basically speeds up the process of the video you'll notice that it's done prefetching when this little bar down here is all the way blue that's when you know it's done now if for any reason your video actually isn't uh being cached all the way uh let's say there's a little gray part over here what you can do is actually come to edit preferences and then we're going to go to the system section and down here in the video sequencer you can see this memory cache limit by default i think it's set to somewhere around 4000 or something basically this is the megabytes so that it's going to use so for me i just set it to half of my ram my ram is 16 gigs so i just set mine to 8 like that so we can just exit out of that next let's actually start motion tracking uh so first of all we're just going to come kind of zoom in right here these are our tracking dots that we made earlier uh we can see the pattern size search size motion model and match so if i just hold ctrl and then click you can kind of see what's happening and then if we hold alt and then hit s we can see the search error so like i said before this is the search area uh this is basically the area where uh blender is going to search for whatever is in this box this little box in the center is actually the pattern size right here you can see that we can change this around and everything but also if we get back out of that and change around these values you can see that it changes it like that uh so right now for mine i'm just going to set this to 40 and then maybe the search size to a 100 let's see how that looks okay so i ended up going with a 32 for my pattern size in an 81 basically you just want to play around until you get a big enough pattern size that it encompasses your whole uh dot and a small enough search size that it's not going to really affect the tracking at all okay so let's go ahead and delete that next is the motion model for this you don't really have to worry about it now since we have so many good tracking markers we don't really need to worry about this for the match i always find that a previous frame actually works better than keyframe so make sure to change that next we want to make sure that normalize is checked now i don't really know what this does i just know it leads to better tracking so i just keep that on finally before we go ahead and start tracking uh let's come to this tracking settings extra uh we want to set this correlation to be 8.9 this basically means that blender has to be 90 sure that the tracker is correct or it will stop tracking the actual point okay so now that we are on frame one we can actually go ahead and start tracking uh let's first of all hold ctrl again and just click in the middle here you'll notice that we have added a tracking dot if you want a closer look at that you can actually select this uh track a little menu over here that gives you like a zoomed in version you can also move it around and stuff it just a little tip there okay so now that we have our first tracking dot on there uh we're just going to go ahead and add all the others so again you just want to hold ctrl then click at all of our dots trying to be as centered as possible for these little crosses you do want to be in the center as much as possible so you can actually come over here and make sure it's in the exact center okay so now i have tracking dots on all of our little dots on the paper now let's just hit a to select all of these and since we're on the first frame we can just go ahead and hold ctrl and hit t and you can see that the trackers are actually starting to track throughout rc okay as you can see for mine uh all my trackers made it to the end this is a really good sign you can kind of come through here and go throughout all of them make sure that none of them go off or anything make sure that they all stay kind of on their doc you can also see down here basically if any point goes crazily above it or below kind of like this but as you can see i don't have any anomalies or any tracking markers actually going off the paper so we are good next we actually need to solve our camera motion this will allow blender to actually tell where the object is in 3d space so let's go to the solve tab we're going to set it to be keyframe a and b are basically just keyframes that blender uses to actually correct make the solve we want to refine the focal length k1 and k2 all this does is basically just gonna uh tell blender to try to find what uh camera settings we are using uh next we just want to go ahead and solve the camera motion so once that is finished solving we can actually see we got our solve error up here now for mine i got a 0.21 and that is actually really good you want to keep it as low as possible i recommend anything below a 0.3 is very good so if for any reason you're getting a solve error greater than this then i highly recommend you go look throughout your trackers really make sure to see if all of them stay on the exact point you can actually just click on one and kind of scrub throughout the clip and look over here to make sure that they do stay in that one location so now we're actually ready to set up our tracking scene i'm just going to go in the solid panel scroll down and then set up tracking scene like that you can see up here it's kind of made a little plain and cute so that is looking good but you will notice that our orientation is off this plane should actually be on our table but if we scrub out you can see that it's not so a way we're going to change that is to come to the first frame again then we're going to go to this orientation tab over here we're going to select three points uh you can just select whatever three points are on your floor uh so since we made this just a paper all of those planes are gonna be on our floor so i'm just gonna select a random three and hit four like that uh you will notice that it's kind of uh gotten a lot of crazy so if we want to view that better let's just select two of these points and set the scale like that so now the plane is actually on r4 uh but it's not really aligned a nice way so to align it better we're going to set this middle point to be our origin just set the origin like that and then since we did a grid form we can actually set our y-axis so i'm going to select this a little point right here now you can either set a x-axis or y-axis i usually just always stick to setting the y-axis let's just set that now if we come up here we can see that our floor is defined and we actually have uh it kind of following our table along there okay so now that we have this we can go ahead and go into the layout tab uh and let's actually go to the camera you just to see what we have let's play this okay so that is looking pretty good you'll notice if i scrub throughout here you can see that our plane kind of sticks to the floor of the table so that is uh what we're wanting uh let's just go ahead and delete this cube we don't really need it for now uh so just delete it like that okay so now let's actually place in our object uh into our scene uh now for this i'm just gonna stick with a basic object uh let's just add suzanne the monkey like that just scale her up a bit like that and then i'm just going to hit 1 sorry 3 on my numpad i'm going to hit r to rotate about right there and then if we go into wireframe mode we can actually see where our plane is resting and that's right on here along this green little line so if we just hit g and then z to move it up we can just rest it on that little line and now if we come into solid view again we can actually see that uh our monkey is actually resting on the plane itself okay so that is looking good uh one thing i do want to bring up real quick is that we can actually see our tracking markers and see that in the scene uh right now we can't but if you want to enable that you can come up here and then go into motion tracking and then these little uh empties right here those are actually our tracking dots if i come into uh the camera view and then go into wireflame frame you can actually see that all of these empties are where our tracking dots are so that's just a better representation of where our actual paper is inside 3d viewport okay so now let's go into the rendered view just to see what this is going to look like we can see a few issues number one uh the lighting is off and number two we don't really have shadow in the scene now this plane is actually set up to be a shadow catcher object uh by default inside a blender but since we are in ev we actually can't see any shadows so we need to switch over to cycles let's just go ahead and do that i'm going to render all my gpu now you will notice we do have our plane here now but number one is not having any shadows on it and also we can see its actual outline and everything and we don't want that so what we can do is actually get this ground object and put it in the foreground collection now we can actually see its shadow but we can still see this kind of gray mess right here so what we're going to change out is to come over to the render properties then go down to film and hit transparent once we do that we can actually see that we now have transparency and this plane object is acting as we want it okay so i'm just going to go ahead and quickly delete some stuff that blender automatically set up in the tracking scene first of all this background collection we're not going to really use that so i'm just going to go ahead and delete that also we have this new background view layer so let's just go to that and delete that also if we go into the compositing tab we'll notice a lot of nodes were set up we actually don't need a lot of these so i'm just going to go ahead and delete these three up here along with this regular layers node right here then you can just bring the movie clip over and then plug the image of the movie clip into the image of our alpha over now let's go back to the layout tab and let's go ahead and render out an image now you will notice that the render is looking pretty good we have our render layers with a transparent grip background on top of our actual video clip now there are a few things that we can actually change around uh to actually make this scene a little bit more realistic first of all we can see that the shadow is kind of going off the edge of the table here so let's just change that i'm going to select the table object right here then i'm going to go into edit mode by hitting tab i'm going to go into the edge select mode up here and select this little edge then we can double ch tap g to move it on to our edge over here you will notice that it's actually not perfectly straight along the table so i'm just going to get out of edit mode and i'm basically just going to rotate this little pane by hitting r then z to lock it to the z axis next i'm just going to move it until it basically aligns uh with that little edge of the table you might need to zoom in to actually see it now let's go ahead and render that let's see what that looks like okay so here is the result that we got we can actually see the edge of the table actually goes along with our shadow a little bit better now so that is looking very good uh we can actually go ahead and exit out of that okay so now we're actually ready to start compositing our little monkey head with the video first thing you won't really notice but it is still true is that the actual coloring of the monkey is a little bit off uh compared to our background video and that's actually because our video that we shot has a different color space than the actual render layers so an easy way we can do to change that is to come to the render properties we're going to come down here to the color management and you can see that it is set on standard that's actually what our video is shot in but that is not what our monkey is uh in so what we need to do is to go it changes from standard to filmic and you can see that that's brightened up the colors and just made the colors way more accurate so now that we have it on filmic let's just come to the compositing tab real quick now if we go ahead and look at the background of this uh this is what the filmic color space does uh basically just livens up the monkey a little bit but our background is very bright so uh what we actually need to do is just render out this render layers node so to easily do that we're just going to plug the image of the ritter layers into the image of the composite this basically tells blender that we're only compositing the render layers and not the video so let's go ahead and render that out to see what that looks like okay so here is what that looks like we can see that we only have the monkey and the shadow along with the transparent background but we actually don't have our video clip so that's what we want uh we can composite in the video clip after this so let's exit out of that uh next we just want to go ahead and set the some output properties we're going to come over to the output properties section uh we're going to set a new folder for all of these uh files to go into now you do want to make it its own folder because we will be doing a lot of png sequences so i'm just going to add a new folder and i'm going to name mine image sequence you can double click into that and then hit accept next you want to come down here and make sure the file format is on png rgba and then the compression is down to zero percent uh you do want to make sure it's in rgba since we are using this little alpha channel right here after that is finished you want to make sure that you are in the film uh filmic uh view transform so we are and then we can just go ahead and render out our animation okay guys so my render just finished uh we can go and exit out of that uh then we can actually go and uh bring this render layers down here and just press m to mute that let's just go ahead and bring in a image note just plug that in up there then we're just going to go ahead and open up all of the images uh we can just hit a to hit that then open image like that you should see that it automatically sets it to be a image sequence uh so that is looking good we're just going to place uh we're basically just going to replace the render layers with this image so just plug that there and then we can plug this alpha over into our composite like that so now if we look back in the background now we can actually see that we have the monkey composited on top of our movie clip but the colors are still off so now we can actually come to the render properties go all the way down and then instead of the filmic view transform we can actually hit standard uh and so now that is the more accurate color finally to render it out uh into our final video format we're just going to come over to the output properties uh we're going to specify a new location for our video once we have that we can change the file format uh to ffmpeg video and then in the encoding section we're gonna change the container to be an mp4 uh and then for the output quality we're gonna set this to be high finally we can just go ahead and come up here and render the animation again okay guys here is our final result uh i think it turned out pretty well uh now for my scenes particularly uh the lighting actually worked out very well inside a blender i didn't really have to mess around too much inside of that uh but for any reason uh your lighting in your own scene uh isn't that great i just recommend downloading a hri uh off of hdri haven and linking that into your scene you can look at how to do that uh i have other tutorials on my channel as well uh of how to do that uh so make sure to go check those out but anyways guys hopefully this was a good starting point for you and your vfx career uh now this was very basic uh just camera tracking uh and basically modeling and stuff in our scene so i hope you learned something from this video anyways guys uh we have a patreon and discord links to those are in the description below but anyways guys thank you guys so much for watching and i will see you guys later peace

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 71,696

Rating: 4.9506831 out of 5

Keywords: how to make your first vfx shot, how to get started with vfx in blender, how to make vfx in blender, blender basic vfx tutorial, make your own vfx in blender, how to make easy vfx in blender, blender vfx, blender easy vfx, how to make your first vfx shot in blender, blender first vfx shot, first vfx, vfx, vfx shot, vfx blender, blender vfx tutorial, blender camera tracking, blender camera tracking tutorial, how to camera track in blender, how to motion track in blender, blend

Id: wCge7Y-CmHk

Length: 17min 25sec (1045 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021