How to make a Cinematic Interior in Blender, in 20 minutes

so I was a huge fan of the movie gone girl I walked into it knowing almost nothing about what it was or what to expect and I came out of it knowing all about the horrors of married life now I like the movie for a lot of reasons but one of them was because of how aesthetically pleasing the whole movie was like in every shot the composition the lighting the colors like it looked both professional and polished but also like real and raw and I really like that and it made me wonder like what is it that these Hollywood experts are doing what do they know that I don't like why can't I get that cinematic look in one of my blender renders so I decided to as a learning experiment try to recreate one of the shots from the movie in blender hoping that through the process I would learn the secret to to achieving that look so I took the the scene at the start of the movie the lounge room where Ben Affleck walks into the room realizes it just got real and I took that and I recreated it in blender so in this video I'm gonna give you a sped up sort of summary tutorial stopping at all of the interesting techniques and tricks and things that you can apply to your own scenes in blender and then at the end of the video I'm gonna give you the overall lesson that I learned through this before we start though I should say a big thank you to Captain disillusion for shaming my green screening abilities in his recent video and guess what captain Big D I listened to everything you said I set up premiere of fact with all the crazy settings multiple effects one after the other I even rearranged my office you inspired me to try it so I move my green screen back got proper lighting using a DSLR now instead of a webcam and guess what it's way better it is actually way better I agree with that but to my viewers don't get your hopes up because in the future quality will suffer because this setup is too much work one of the principles that I live my life by and I stand by this principle never use more than one effect in Premiere so unfortunately it's gonna be ultra key all the way for me but I appreciate the learning experience anyways appreciate the slamming captain D and now it's time to create that scene from gone girl alright so the first step of any sort of photo recreation is one of the most important but also one of the most tedious and that is getting your 3d camera to match the camera that the photo was taken with because as anybody who's tried this knows if you don't get this right at the start you just start adding stuff into the scene pretty quickly you realize that nothing is lining up at all so you've got to get it right at the start so as I mentioned in my previous subway card or video I discovered the add-on blam which makes this a lot easier so basically using the add-on you draw out the perspective lines on the photo and you hit the button it goes blam whatever and it's supposed to guess the focal length the position and the rotation of the camera and I found it does a really good job with the focal length not so much with the rotation in the position like some scenes is better than others but for this interior was a pain it took me like an extra thirty painstaking minutes trying to get everything to line up it was a nightmare but I've since figured out like a few things you can do to make this easier so this is what you do first of all after you've done the blam step right you look at the photo and you find something that you can figure for sure what the measurement of that object is so for example like a doorway you can google the height of an average doorway and then you know what that is in this case I have something better I have one Ben Affleck so if Google is to be trusted he's 193 centimeters high so I got my default cube first of all I changed the blender units to be metric and then I took my default cube and then I scale it to be exactly 193 centimeters high and roughly the shape of a body then I moved my camera to be basically in line with Ben Affleck in the photo then at this point it's lining up but the rotation of the camera is gonna be totally off so you want to try to figure out like where the rotation is like vertically so I add in a plane and scale it out to be as far as it can go like a really large plane and that's gonna be like a placeholder horizon so looking at the photo I then try to guess where is the horizon of this photo pretty hard for an interior shot but I did my best guess then you delete the plane then you want to find out what is the height of the camera like how high off the ground is the camera because that's really really important to getting everything to line up so looking at the photo you can see that if you were to sort of like look at it the camera is probably about in line with his thighs or like his hips right so I took my camera and looking at the cube I sort of did my best to sort of position it about there then once you've got the rotation there right and the cube is over Ben Affleck then if you add in a plane and you scale it out to be the width of the wooden floor and then the depth like to the edge of that countertop in the background then you were to extrude that up it should then fit the basic scale of the room if you've got that right everything else is going to be fine it usually requires a little bit of tweaking like moving the camera up or down it's a fiddly process I wish it was easy but as anyone that does like visual effects knows like getting the camera to match it's like a really fiddly job there's tools like cynthaiz which I believe makes it a lot easier but it's paid but using the free blam add-on is okay you just gonna do all this fiddly stuff anyways so once everything is matching you just model the rest of the room so like the alcove in the background a counter top the little archways all that extra stuff then I want to put holes in the walls for the windows because I want to try to see what it looks like with lighting in the room as soon as possible so previously the way that I created holes in the walls was to do like loop cuts and then delete the face but now blender handles boolean's a lot better so now what I do is I create a cube and then I position that on the wall wherever I want there to be a hole for the window so then I select the wall I add a boolean modifier click the little eyedropper select the cube and then I set the cut type to be different and then I do that for every window across it then wherever there that cube is that is gonna be a hole in the wall so just make sure you put the cube on another layer that isn't rendered the advantage to this then is that you can move the cube wherever you want and and there's gonna be that whole you don't have to worry about loop cuts and all that other jazz so once all the window cutouts are in place we can add in some basic lighting just to see if we're on the right track so looking at the reference photo you can see the majority of light seems to come through the windows obviously which is like this light blue sky color which I actually learned through reading on all the making of gong-gong but actually that would be fake light because actually the entire interior of GaN go like in the house it's actually recreated on a soundstage in LA so it's actually like indoor indoor so there's no actually skylight in the actual scene but but anyways so in our case we're actually gonna use like real sky lighting so we're gonna go to the world settings set that to a light blue and then I used a strength of 30 there's also a Sun in the background again it would be a fake Sun to be like a spot lamp but in our case I'm gonna use the Sun set that to 10 the most important thing is that you use the filmic color space though which if you don't know what I'm talking about or why it's important make sure you watch my video on that there's a link in the description it's absolutely vital everybody use the filmic color space not just for photorealistic stuff but anything you do in blender so please watch that video because it's a it's pretty important anyways so you can see we're on the right track not so bad not too far off from the reference photo um so now let's do some detail so starting with the window frames so it's pretty basic it's just cubes and you screwed it up and put some bars and stuff on it and then you've got a window right interesting thing though is that I did not use any glass in the windows so they're actually empty frames you might be asking why well I usually find that glass is more trouble than it's worth because whenever you use glass cycles always tries to calculate caustics as well as shadows so if you actually use like a glass plane on a window and then you shine light through it you get end up making the whole interior like this noisy noisy mess and a lot of people have that in their scene and they don't even realize what's causing it but it's a horrible thing now you can there's ways around it like you can use a node setup like this one which will basically treat it like it's invisible to the scene but to the camera it looks like glass but I always find it's not quite right and a reflection it won't appear in another reflection and I don't know it's just I figured you can barely see the window anyway because it's gonna be a blind or not so who cares about the glass so I just left the class off but yeah so the blinds that was pretty simple that's just like a plane and then I set that to a translucent shada and then put a little cylinder at the bottom really basic stuff anyways once the window frames are done it's time to get into something a little bit more complex and that is modeling that which the devil hath created himself which is cabinets so for some reason every kitchen designer in the world decided that all kitchens need to have unnecessarily detailed doors like every vertical surfers got to have this little inset upon inset and curved shapes and I'm sure just to make if the guy that knows how to do that with the would like give him a job but it just makes a life hotter when you're trying to visualize you gonna try and model this thing so there's a few ways to do it you could you know start with a plain and inset and do all that stuff but I find it's a little fiddly and it's hard to hard to do it so I want to share a method that I use now which is to actually start by just modeling like a cross-section of the detail like looking from the top down so what I do is I start with a plane and I delete all the vertices except for one and then I use that versity and i extrude it out and then I create the detail of that section in a cross-section form then when you go into front view you extrude it up and now you have one edge of that door then to create the corner right that complex corner how do you do that because you'll know that if you just rotate you end up getting like a tapered edge and I'm embarrassed to say that for the first ten years of my life as a blender user I I solved that problem by like scaling along the X and then the Y and just trying to get it as close as I could was never perfect but I since learned there's a tool called shear shear which I just activate by hitting space and typing in Shia which allows you to rotate it you pick the X or the Y axes whichever one works and it rotates it then correctly so for a 45 degree angle or 90 degree or whatever 45 degree it's always either one or minus one which you can see in the bottom left hand corner of the screen so you can type that in or get to it manually but anyways once you go out that then you just extrude that out and now you've got one 90-degree corner and then you just use a mirror modifier with clipping turned on and out of face there and finally you've got a cabinet so that method is like if you need to do lots of complex little detail and I find it's easier to use than doing that in setting method anyways so I use that same method on all the cabinets in the kitchens the drawers resized everything the cabinet on the right hand side that method as well and I also used it for things like the skirting board like around the base of all the hat house that the top ceiling bits the actual inset ceiling as well I think I use the inset method for that but I mean this stuff it's not hard it's just time consuming you can't really like download a model of this stuff you've got to do it yourself so I just Chuck on some podcasts and just go at it you know one evening after the other until you finish but there you go then it's time to add what I call are the scene fillers which are the little models which you need to have in the scene in order for it to feel real but are so small and insignificant really that you shouldn't be modeling them yourselves so I'm talking about like decorations pot plants microwave toasters teapots basically stuff that could potentially take you weeks if you were to model it yourself for stuff like this you've got to use a model library so whether it's a free one like blend swap or a paid one like turbosquid there is no shame in using somebody else's model in your sink and I'm making a special point to say this because I know myself when I was a beginner I I felt that it was like cheating to use somebody else's models but I later learned that all professionals use third-party models and actually your disadvantaging yourself if you try to do everything yourself because you are not able to complete scenes you're not able to finish something or you end up if you try and do everything yourself you end up with a very bare-bones looking interior that's very obvious that you tried to model everything yourself because there's just not enough models in it so make use of any model library you can because it's really it's required for environments interiors there's too much for one person to do by themselves so in my case I actually used some old models leftover from the architecture Academy which was an old course that I had it's no longer available but if you did actually want these specific models we are actually in the process of updating them and we're putting them on polygons later on this year so you will be able to get seen fellows from polygon later if you wanted them but anyways use whatever model library you can so in some cases matching a photo like in this case you will actually end up modeling a lot of things by yourself like for example the tables and chairs I wanted it to look like exactly like the photo so I modeled them my selves which are always very easy to do because it's just tables and chairs it's like a cube but extruded and scaled on different axes the oven that was quite unique so I made that myself as well as the ivy so that was something I wasn't really looking forward to doing but I knew that like you couldn't really purchase this exact Ivy like on a model library because it's so unique looking so I actually used the Ivy GN add-on which comes with blender basically you turn it on you select the object that you want the Ivy to grow on you go shift a curve and Ivy and then you bring up the toolbar and you get all these options I will say it's not a very artist friendly add-on because you end up like moving one value and going like alright that looks good and then you move the other value and then it's like an invert of the other value and so you end up like pulling levers for hours going back and forth it but anyways it's free and it works so I eventually got there in the end the add-on by the way like it gives you the option to add leaves I never use that because it creates these flat plains with no option to tilt or rotate them which is really crazy so instead I just got rid of the leaves and then I added my own with a particle system so I just added a particle created my own leaf and then made that the instance of the particles and then I could control the rotation the amount and all that stuff but anyways it all looked good in the end so at this point all the modeling is pretty well done now we can move on to the materials so obviously as the owner of polygons I used a lot of polygons materials goes without saying so starting with the wooden floor like that's the biggest one so this material was pretty well like a perfect match for the scene like unintentional but it seemed to me like the exact one from the movie so that was really cool now normally when you download a texture set like this you know it's got the color the displacement the normal map all that stuff you have to load those into blender manually right so you got Prince Abboud shader you import and then you connect each one you know the normal into the normal and it's not hard but it's very repetitive work so I'm excited to show this cuz I don't think I've showed this before but we've created an add-on that does this for you so it's a free add-on you can download it in the youtube description and basically you enable it and then when you go to the materials you'll find that there's this little section underneath called the polygon material converter and then all you do is you define wherever it is that you've downloaded your textures to and then it will automatically link them and find each of those texture sets based on their names and then if you hit load it will automatically create materials based on all of those those Maps so you can see with the plane here selected if I just go to the material as you can see that I've got a wooden floor material there and if I click it you can see it's already set up so if you go to the node editor you'll see that it's correctly loaded in all of those maps and it's still customizable so that's really important for me like I don't want an ad and an add-on to lock anything off like I still want customisation so you can change all those values so it's like you'd added it in properly yourself but just takes out all the legwork we've also got like a scale setting up there so it's like very quick to change the scale of a texture which is really handy oh and this add-on by the way will actually work with all of your own textures as well not just ours just provided they have the same naming conventions that we use it'll work with your own so it's really cool so other materials the back wall has got this white tile so again I found like a perfect match for it on polygon this like subway tile so just loaded that in really easy I have a countertop you can barely see it in the the render but I used this marble texture there the table set the table and chairs I use these like wood fine material and then I added in a hue/saturation node to the color Channel and then I just turned the value way down so that it's as dark as I needed it like it's like a blackish wooden sort of thing so turn that down and it's looks pretty good then the rug so the rug was like pretty simple to model it's just like a plane that's been extruded up with a subsurf modifier on it and then I used this material off polygons which you can see is like bright blue but if you add it in and then again use that hue saturation value node in the color channel then if I turn the saturation way down and the hue change that to the right sort of color tint that I want to get to be this brown II sort of color you can see that it's a close enough match to the reference photo so that was cool I used a bunch of other materials as well like like a leaf texture for the the ivy this painting I put that on the wall there a bunch of other little things but that's the the brunt of it so going back to the wooden floor it looks okay at the moment but it looked a little too clean for what I wanted so I want to just make make it look like an interior that's been walked on every day so I used this texture off polygon which is probably one of my favorites like I'm used to probably like 50 times but basically you take that it's like a black and white map and then you add that into the wooden floor material and you make it effect the glossy input right so you add in like a mix RGB node and you set it to screen and then you just put that into the bottom value there and then that will basically influence just the roughness of the reflection which will in turn make it look like sticky footprints across it and you want to do it subtle like really subtle you don't want to go too far with it but if you do it right it can just make it look like just enough that it feels real like people have actually been walking across the floor so that's really easy so the rest of the scene had pretty generic materials like it's mostly like white walls so it's just like a principle shader with the roughness turned all the way up the one different material though was the dishwasher which is a brushed metal so how I create brush metal is you essentially are going to be using an anisotropic shader which is now built into the principal shader so it's really easy to just turn up that anisotropic shader value I do want to say something though about this anisotropic shader because it came in on 2012 and I was super excited when it came out made a tutorial on and everything but since then I haven't really used it because truthfully I avoid using it because it's so annoying to use when I say annoying what I'm saying is it you don't actually know which direction the reflection is being stretched because that's what an anisotropic say does it stretches the reflection in one direction but it's really hard to tell which direction it's being stretched in like the only way I figured is like you isolate the object then you turn off the all the lights in the scene then you add one light and then maybe if you look at it correctly you can sort of guess which way the reflection is being tilted but you can even get it wrong even in that scenario and I just it's just annoying to use so I thought like if any developers are watching like just I'm gonna use this platform to hopefully get something put in Wenda but like it'd be really cool if like when you you turn up the anisotropic value that like little dots appear on the on the material and then when you turn it up like it starts to stretch them and then you can see like which direction they're being stretched so if you're like a small thing but I think like artists would really start to use that shade of it because a really cool shader but it's such a pain to use that I just always avoid it but if you anyway if anybody wants to make my day that would be really cool to see that in blender so that's the dishwasher the next thing you need to do is you need to give some context to the interior and by that I mean you need to show something through a window or a door which tells the viewer where it is in the world because if you don't have that in your scene if you've got an interior and there's like there's no windows or there's no doors and you can't see anything other than the interior it feels very claustrophobic which is why I think probably deliberately in this frame here the cinematographers made sure that that back window there's just a little bit of of trees in the background there and you think it wouldn't add much to the same but it really does it just suddenly the same feels real so anyway so I used this backdrop image from polygon which is like a tree line that's been alpha massed and then I used the import images as planes add-on and the advantage of using this this add-on for this is that not only will it import the image to a plane with the exact dimensions of the image but it also enables you to enable an alpha and shadeless material so it takes the Alpha mask Channel makes it transparent and it makes it shadeless so there's no like lighting changes in it so it's basically perfect for this exact thing for trees there was probably a hundred other small little tweaks throughout the scene like you know adding the overhead ceiling lights like bar stools I put some spot lamps over the stove like tiny little things just everywhere it's the reason why often when you finish a tutorial that your result doesn't look as good as the tutors is because there's like a hundreds of other things you can't fit into a video that need to be tweaked in order to get that final result so there's a bunch of all that stuff but that is the basics so did I discover the secret to making a David Fincher shot sort of but not really originally I thought it was all gonna be color grading like that was what gonna be where the magic came and like I did a little bit in the compositor add a color balance node and I crushed the mid-tones a little bit and I added a tint of yellow to the highlights but that really didn't do a lot to it that was just to sort of match the original frame personally I think that the most of the look comes from the lighting and making the lighting look natural to real life like when you look at the movie every single frame even though it's been artificially lit to death or not like a soundstage it looks real it looks like you know you stepped into someone's house and they were standing on a warm chandelier like you would see that sort of lighting or coming in from outside you would see that sort of blue cool morning lighting I think that's why that's why the movie just looks so good it feels natural so I think if you want to create like a movie feel to your frame or you know specifically David Fincher maybe you should really just try to focus on how to make it look natural so I learned a lot in this exercise and I would definitely recommend this as a loading toss like taking a frame from a movie and then recreating it in blender it's a lot of work but you will learn heaps so I've actually created a Pinterest board don't laugh I know Pinterest is horrible but it's it's very good for collecting lots of like references and sharing it so I've created a Pinterest board there's a link in the description so if you want to have a look through some frames and maybe pick one and then there's a little little homework or a little project for anybody who wants to delve deeper you can pick one of those things and make it and then if you want to share it because I want to see what you guys make if you want to post it in the blender guru subreddit that's right a blend of guru subreddit something that I'm trying out then then I can see what you've made and hey guys guess what we cracked five hundred thousand subscribers that's pretty crazy for a blended Channel I was feeling pretty good the other day cuz I I saw I was a ho five hundred thousand that's pretty good like that's that's a pretty that's that's a sizable user group right and so I thought like what if my user base was a country what country would it be so I thought what's the the smallest least important country in the world and obviously the one that came to mind was New Zealand it's what everyone thinks of but then I googled New Zealand population and it's 4.6 million so I'm not gonna sleep easy until I've cracked at least New Zealand's population so long ways to go it's all about perspective anyways seriously thanks guys and thank you for watching bye you

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 723,465

Rating: 4.9469566 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, gone girl, photorealism, cg, 3d, 3d software, recreation

Id: Or9bMxAuICc

Length: 28min 24sec (1704 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mnkymnk]

Dude you beat me with his Tutorial by maybe a week. Mine, on recreating movie frames, is scripted and half edited. Thats crazy hahaha wtf.

[u/inkplay_]

I am more impressed he upped his green screen game.

[u/OpusGeo]

We blender users are lucky to have you!

[u/DummiesBelow]

Love love love these new tutorials. Keep it up dude.

[u/gyrocam]

Check out this sub. Maybe you could find something to post there, after you follow the tutorial that is? Ha! https://www.reddit.com/r/BlenderDoughnuts/

[u/theDoctorAteMyBaby]

Kind of a random subject, but it does look good.