How to Make a QUICK Matte Painting in Resolve (with BIRDS!)

[Music] hello i'm mal director this is el director vision and you are watching indie rebel hollywood effects without the hollywood budget let's just jump right in i'm going to show you what we're going to do today let's make this full screen and we have this shot it's rather unremarkable i just shot this with an iphone 11 pro and you can see we're in the middle of a downtown area of a big city we got birds flying through the air and stuff like that cars driving by whipping by um and i mean if you look like we're we're there we're in the middle of the city we've got power lines coming in front of stuff and all these crazy things over here no just kidding uh we are doing visual effects that is what this channel is all about if i make this like this this is what the shot actually looked like originally in downtown kalispell we don't have big cities we actually have a limit here in the city that you can't have a building higher than three stories um so if you wanted a uh a big city look and vibe and feel to your shot and this is about the best you're gonna get to it so we have to rely on visual effects to fill in the background put the city back there and that kind of a thing so let's take a look at how we did this um visual effects is all about problem solving and you guys have heard me say that before and we've got a lot of problems we've got the trees we've got the power lines we've got these little light duper hickeys over here and that kind of a deal and yet we're going to solve the problems we're going to make this all happen and let's just take a look at how we do it so starting over from scratch we will bring in our plate this is the plate very nice and let's jump right into the fusion page first thing i want to do is go and delete my media out node you guys know i don't like working with that and it's going to make this to viewer one i like working with one viewer you can have your two viewers if you want but coming from nuke i like having one to work with keeps all my attention in one spot so first thing we need to do is we need to bring in our city element so i'm going to go ahead and bring up the media pool and bring in my city all right close me pool get that out of the way we've got our city we've got our background in fact we can come through and re-enable rename these if we wanted to let's see f2 i'm going to call this one the plate and then f2 again on this one we're going to call this one the city very original i know and we want to go and put this on top of the background but first we need to make this thing large enough because if i just drop this on right now we'll just take a really quick look uh we can see real quick if i apply my like an overlay mode of something like that just right now just i can see both of them the scale on that looks good but the problem is is that the shot moves and pans around so i need to uh basically if you came from after effects we would replied the shot and we don't have rubber up tile function in here but we can go ahead and make our own so let's see how we might do that first thing i want to do is create a new background node and this new background we're going to give a like obscenely large size let's go and turn off auto resolution we'll make it like 3 000 pixels wide and 2 000 pixels tall and we're gonna go and merge our city on top of that let's take a look uh i think we need to go even wider with the background let's go and make the background like 4000. there we go looking a lot better next thing we want to do is add a transform node run the city into the transform merge that transform on top of the previous merge take a look at that looking good go back up to the transform node flip it and we're just going to move it out of the way we're going to create our own reptile function here so let's go and just zoom in a little bit and move it right until that seam disappears nope got a little bit of the seam left move it back there seamless perfect let's go and take a look at the other end jumba and we're going to add another transform node run the city into it merge it on top view that final merge and we're going to do the exact same thing take the transform node flip the shot and pull it all the way over to here again making sure that we get that seamless as much as possible nope not quite go back into it almost there there that looks pretty seamless like that so if we go ahead and zoom on out we can see we've repetiled the city essentially in just a matter of seconds or minutes depending on how quick you're fast forwarding through the tutorial all right let's go and throw all this into an underlay node right here and we'll go ahead and just scale this up a bit make sure everything stays locked in the way we want it to very nice very nice and uh we'll take the underlay we'll make it just to keep track of it yeah gray's a good color for the city why not it's kind of a tan color but we we can work with that move that up and out of the way now we need to track the shot if we go ahead and just throw this on top of the shot and we take a look at it and we flip the apply mode back over to something zoom back in actually let's just go scale to fit uh yeah the city's not moving the background's moving but the city's not moving so how are we going to fix that well we need to track it and again talking about problem solving in visual effects when i first did this i tried the point tracker i tried planar tracking nothing was working so finally i broke down and did a 3d track so that's we're going to go ahead and do bring our plate down and let's just go ahead and add the old camera tracker there it is right there and i'm just going to go ahead and use default settings on it i am going to though preview the track location so i can see what it's intending to do here and uh yeah let's just auto track it see what happens i didn't change any of the settings i didn't try to dial in my sensor size or anything like that next i'm going to go over to solve and hit solve and check this out using the built-in settings not changing a thing you know just a couple of seconds i have a solver 0.3268 pixels that should be plenty good enough for what i'm looking to do so the next thing i want to do is go ahead and with this we're going to export a 3d scene and let's go and export it where is it there it is we're going to move it down off to the side over here and i'm going to get rid of the ground plane i don't need the ground plane in it oops too many there it is just like that so we've got a point cloud we have a virtual camera a merge 3d and a render node this is rendering our 3d scene so if we jump into the 3d scene we can see what it did here let's zoom out rotate around and it did a a decent job it's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but i think it'll do what we need it to do so let's go ahead and pivot over to a top view here and zoom out a little bit more and we can see that all of our our points are kind of right here on the same surface plane right about here and that's where i'm going to stick the background so let's add an image plane 3d node run that into the shot run the background into that and let's go ahead and scale this bad boy up just so we can see what we're doing and we can go ahead and move it back into the frame a little bit we can scale it even quite a bit larger let's make it like 25. and let's make it 50 15 50 should work 58 i think is good okay so we have our image plane 3d and i'm just lining it up right here at the end of this point cloud just trying to get it close it's all we're trying to do is get it close um i might want to come through and do a rotation on it let's see x y pivot the y rotation a little pull it back that way and let's go ahead and now merge this on top of our shot so i'm going to move my camera tracker out of the way we don't need it right now grab the output of the render node merge it on top get rid of the camera tracker from there okay that should go to the camera tracker that way and let's go and view that render node all right go ahead and flip our apply mode back over to something like multiply just so we can see how it's all tracked into the shot and let's go ahead and play it and see what we got now here inside our resolve i've only got 24 gigs of ram by the way and i've got a six gig video card so my playback is not the best and i get a lot of these dropped frame areas so i'm actually going to jump over to the edit page and let it cache itself up right here and once this is done i'll be able to play it back uh just perfectly so we're just going to sit here and let it kind of render itself out you can see it's moving fairly quick why is it rendering quick well because there's nothing here we've got to connect that media out node so let's go ahead and do that real quick come to our last node add a media out there it is we're just going to drag this off to the side and jump back to the edit page right let's go and take a look at it and real quick i can see that's tracked in just beautifully i'm really only concerned about the uh the line where they overlap right about here where i've got the buildings in the sky and then i've got the original building set in the shot and that's tracked in pretty dang good so bounce back into fusion and let's just go ahead and improve upon this and make it a little bit better first thing i want to do is go ahead and scale up the buildings a little bit or at least reposition them in the shot so i'm going to select that image plane that the city is plugged into and again staying organized i like straight lines so we don't like this diagonal junk that's going on let's do that okay that one's fine down there good select the city and we're just gonna go ahead and move it up in the shot until they are lined up about where they need to be and what i'm looking at too is i can see i've got this yellow uh orange fall leave colors i don't like those so i want to make sure that those stay oops want to make sure that those stay buried just below my skyline something about like that and let's go to the beginning of the shot let's go move this back over just a smidge maybe right about there go to the end of the shot almost perfect i got a little bit more sticking up here so let's see if we can scale this up a little bit more let's go 60 60 work 60 is good and then i need to fix my orientation here a little bit let's go and rotate this side to side until we get our city standing about straight up and down something about like that very nice cool so let's go ahead and uh fix our mats here we need to go and map this thing out and again playing with stuff as i like to do clean up our node graph just a little bit there we are uh playing with it and again doing problem solving what we need to do is figure out how the heck we're going to get rid of the sky but still keep all of our details well if you notice we did on this merge node right here we multiplied the shot on top so this allows us if we go and zoom in close we've got all of our details we've got the power lines we've got fine details here we got the trees right we've got all these fine details that we've been able to keep what we need to do now is mat out the rest of it just like we did in that sky replacement tutorial a few months back so scale that back to fit and uh let's come back to the beginning here and we're just going to add a luma key here we're actually going to use the luma keyer fusion does come with one i'm going to run my background plate into the luma key let's go and take a look at it oh it's looking so hideous but that's okay and i'm going to run the luma keyer output into the mask input of my merge where the city is merged into the shot and now we can start to see this is maybe going to work if we come back into our luma keyer and we start crunching this down a little bit hey check it out we're getting details coming back into the shot something about like that crunch it down more and you can see the more i crunch it the more haste out it begins to get so it's looking we're just walking a fine line here trying to figure out how far i can take it to keep the city something about like that so now we've got the city in the shot and we've got our foreground uh masking it but we've got more problems we've got all these nasty white halos so what i want to do is actually come down here and blur this mask out a little bit and then we will go ahead and contract it down maybe expand it yep and just ever so slightly maybe increase the blur and we're just going to walk this back and forth until we get something that looks uh halfway decent here all right coming back here so i can view it full screen and that's not too bad let's go and let this cash out and we'll take another look at it all right watch full screen all right that's not looking too bad at all yeah i think that'll work for our purposes we need to fix some matting we've got some stuff showing through um kind of all over the place here we go back take a look got the cars some stuff going on back here but uh all this is very very very easy to fix so let's go ahead and take a look at what we can do to clean that up a little bit more jump back into fusion and let's just go ahead and add a really quick garbage mask and uh we'll go to frame one here i'm going to add my polyline mask and i want to run it into my luma key to mask this out and i'll show you what's going to happen here so let's go and take the mask and run it through select a bunch of stuff like this all right and all the way down across the buildings down over and up short sweet easy if i just drag it into the effect mask it doesn't quite work it's not doing what i wanted to do that's because it went into the effect mask so i want to do is actually drag it into the garbage mat hey there we go now it's bringing everything back in fact if i go to my luma keyer and you can see the alpha channel now if i flip it just to this you can see we've masked that out just beautifully and what i want to do now is go to the polyline and we're just going to soften that edge a bit maybe about like that increase the border so it does blur up a little bit into the shot that's okay go go back to our rgb values and take a look at the final and we're going to come back in and tweak the soft edge a little bit now and you can see we've created basically some haze hazing out the city a little bit something about like that that looks nice and it blends that line all the way up into it and uh we can also now come back go back to the polyline and we need to animate it so i want to come to the center and we'll go and set a keyframe here for that and we're going to go ahead and jump to the end of the shot i'm going to move the polyline around line it back up in here with the trees go and expand some of this back out making sure we're blocking everything that we want to be blocking keeping that down below something right about there and then we'll come into the middle and we'll fix up our keyframes here now too about like that and we're just going to go through and check our keyframes make sure they're all lined up okay those are looking pretty good right about here jump into the end i can move a little bit faster that way all right and that should be all we need it's just a really quick and dirty simple way of garbage matting out the shot in the city and uh what we could do now is come up here and let's do some more color correction on the city really start blending this all together so let's come up to the city right after this final merge we're gonna add a color corrector and now we can use this to start really dialing in the shot so if i make this full screen or at least scale to fit i can come in and start playing with my saturation i can either pull saturation out we can add saturation to it and just try to match keep in mind it is the background it shouldn't be nearly as rich as the foreground but something like that i think looks uh quite nice just like that and finally let's go ahead and add some birds to really give this shot some life so to add our birds we're going to use blender uh it's just what i'm familiar with and i've actually got a asset online if you head over to the link in the description you can go to blendswap.com and download this very same bird file that i'm using right here if i go and pull up my widget for it you can see that i've got these birds that i can move around the screen and if i just play through we've got flapping wings and they're nothing fancy um i made these couple years ago actually for a project i was working on and i got inspired to make these after watching a video by a man named john kennedy and he is a visual effects artist working in hollywood and he has used blunderbirds on numerous high-profile hollywood films that i guarantee you've probably seen and he used blender to make the birds now he applied them to a particle system uh the version that i supply does not have a particle system however another user on blend swap has gone ahead and made a particle system his name is magdesign mag design and he made a particle system for the birds you can download that and just use that if you want or even better so you can learn from the master himself head on over to the description box where i've got a link to sean kennedy's video showing how to make birds how to apply them to a real particle system and all that good stuff however just for for my purposes right now because we're trying to get this done as quickly as possible let's just go ahead and um we'll just add them straight up into the shot so i'm going to add a shift a add a camera and i'm just going to use them with the way i designed them it's worked fine we used them in a high profile documentary and they worked out great i like to come down with the camera selected go to the camera options go to viewport display and we want to show the limits just so i can see where the camera is pointed and yeah it should be just fine okay i'm now going to use my bird controller object we're going to scale it down super super small into the shot something about like this position it where we want it to be make sure we're back at the first frame i set a keyframe for the location jump forward to the end we'll just maybe do 150 frames fact let's go and set it right now 150 and bounces forward all the way to the end of where we want it add another location keyframe and then we're going to go into our animation editor with our keyframe selected right click keyframe type and actually handle to where's interpolation mode there we are set that to linear and that's going to make sure that just if we look at the birds here that they move smoothly throughout the shot go ahead and render it out and we'll bring that back into fusion so we're going to jump back into resolve here we are bring up our media pool i've already got my birds we're just going to go and quickly drop them into the frame these are just going to be some simple blackbirds too let's add an image plane for them merge them into the scene and let's go and just take a look at our scene and we can see where these birds are being added to uh we'll go ahead and scale the image plane up just so we can see a little bit more of kind of what's going on here all right so i want to put my birds not quite into the background level but not all the way into the foreground so i'm going to just looking at my dots here whoops i'm going to position the bird plane somewhere see if i'm more top down like that somewhere right around here in the middle of it let's go ahead and rotate them make them all line up something about like that and uh let's take a look at our scale here too go back to our final shot let's make them super big make them 50. there's my birds found the birds all right so let's go ahead and scale them down a little bit we don't want them quite that big somewhere right around here and we're going to use just our tools to kind of position them where we want them to be birds like to fly high something about like that and that and we'll scale them down a little bit more we're just really looking for a little bit of motion in the frame of their fluttering wings i'll position them right about here and where are we at the end there they are over here that should look pretty good and let's go and color correct them so we can make the match a little bit better select the image playing actually let's go and select our birds and add our color corrector there we'll color correct them before the image plane and uh i may want to play with my contrast or gamma let's lighten them up a little bit something about like that i think that works out actually quite nice the other thing we could do is we could blur them a little bit if we wanted to so i'm going to come up here add a blur and that just softens them it's a blur of about one pixel and that looks actually really really nice i think that's gonna be about perfect let's make sure everything else in the shot is looking good here let me jump back to the edit page let this cache up and we'll view it full frame and see what we got now we're done make it full screen and let's take a look i can see my starting is right about here so we want to keep that in mind so i can watch this on loop and that's not bad um there's a lot more stuff we could do to this we can make a lot of crazy things happen with it let's come back up to here yeah that's looking really really really good i actually really like how this has turned out for a speed composite this is you're not bad we worked on this now for what less than 20 minutes and we've gotten to this point which is just great and that's that's the beauty about compositing and speed compositing in particular i now have a shot that i could go you know here in resolve go back into my main edit page and go start working on other shots and come back later and start refining this a little bit more there's a little bit more things we could do if we really wanted to finish this off i can come into my camera tracker and i'm going to go into settings and make sure i have motion blur turned on that's going to make sure that everything's moving the way it should in the frame and the other thing i might want to go ahead and do is add some grain to help match our digital elements to the foreground shot so if we zoom in here just a little bit like this i can see i've got grain here on the foreground and there's no grain on the background so let's add just a little bit of grain to this real quick there's our grain i'm going to add it here off to the side again keeping track of things move that merge node over something like that it's a bit too much grain so we'll just go and turn it down a little maybe uh increase the size something about like that let's see how that looks yeah i think that looks out quite nice and then you've got yourselves a a final shot that we did in just a matter of minutes uh and you know just to recap kind of what we did here let's go and zoom back out we'll take a look at our scene we've got in fact we separate these out a little bit more here let's throw these into their own underlay okay we'll make that underlay orange we've got our 3d scene as well let's go and take a look at that throw that into an underlay we're going to make that one teal and then this should actually be down here as part of the scene perfect so to recap now that we got this all organized we took our original plate shot here we did a 3d camera track on it you can see by our points and we went ahead and took a shot of a city and we created our own version of reptile just by using a couple transform nodes and all that get got thrown into the middle of our 3d track that gave us this right here and that then got merged on top of our background shot and in order to if we go ahead and uh pass through on this one in order to make sure that we cut out our foreground mats we used just a quick little luma keyer that allowed us to create an alpha channel to merge everything back on top and again we're here now at about 90 95 of the way to a final shot at this point and definitely does pass the the squint factor that is a real term and if you want to learn more about uh visual effects stay tuned i have a video coming up called the top five tips you need to know for visual effects squint factor being one of them so with that said go ahead and give this video a like and leave a comment in the description below if you've got any questions as always iml director this is l dracuvision and you've been watching indie rebel hollywood effects without the hollywood budget you

Channel: El Director Vision

Views: 962

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Id: zpSIKShJMn4

Length: 26min 12sec (1572 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021