How to Make Your FIRST VFX Shot in Blender

are you a wannabe visual effects artist but don't know where to start well then this video is for you since we're going to be making a visual effects shot that literally anybody of any skill level can do so let's go ahead and jump in the tutorial now like all my tutorials you can work along with us just go in the description below and download the footage right here and then we also need to download an HRI so now inside blender the first thing that we need to do like always is to go ahead and convert our footage to a image sequence so let's press this plus go to video editing video editing and then we need to add a movie locate wherever you save the video sequence here is mine I'm just going to make sure that's clicked and add the movie strip we just have to set our frame range I'm going to scroll out around here I just like the end of the footage so what I'm going to do is go ahead and use let's say 275 and then we can just scroll the end of our timeline down here to the very end of our footage so around 465 for me and then we can just come up here to the output section we're going to go ahead and set a new folder location I highly recommend that you make it its own folder so I have this image sequence folder we can double click it into here and you can see I've already rendered out my image but you basically want to name it something like this where you have a dash at the end just so blender can automatically populate that section with the frame number so once you have it save however you want you want to hit accept and blender automatically has PNG selected that is totally fine for what we're going to be working in and I want to set it to RGB since we don't have any Alpha Channel and set the compression down to zero percent and now let's come up here and hit render and render animation so once that has fully rendered out we can go ahead and open up a new blender project file new general then don't save since we don't need any of that information anymore now we need to go ahead and import our footage in and go ahead and Camera track it so let's come up here plus VFX motion tracking and then go ahead and open up our image sequence so here's my image sequence I'm just going to hit a to select all of the images and open the clip now you can see that blender has automatically populated in our screen I'm just going to pull some of these windows down so we have more room to work with now the first thing I notice is that we actually don't have the correct color space so if we come to the render properties and go down to color management we want to set it instead of filmic into standard next we can go ahead and set the scene frames and then pre-fetch our footage into our cache so that the playback is much smoother now I'm not going to be going over all the tracking settings however if you are interested in the reasons why we picked these numbers I have a link in the description for a video on how to camera track but let's go ahead and set some settings so I'm going to match the previous frame normalize and then in the tracking settings extra I'm just going to make sure that's 8.9 and then we can go ahead and detect some features so press that button open this little menu down here and then I want a 0.01 threshold and a distance of an 80. so now now we have a lot of trackers in our scene we can go ahead and hit Ctrl t or press this button to make the markers track forward and then we want to do the same thing but in Reverse we want to go ahead and detect the features at the end of our footage so frame 193 for me and then we want to go ahead and hit Ctrl shift and then T and that should make the markers track backwards so now we have markers at the beginning of our clip and the end of our clip I also like to have a set of markers in the middle of our clip so around frame 94 for me I'm just going to detect some more features and then Ctrl T to track those forward and then once they are finished we want to come back to frame 94 and then hit control shift T to track them backwards so that we have a range in the middle beginning and the end of our footage so now you can see that we have all these markers kind of tracked on our scene what we can do to do kind of a manual pass is to go down here and you can see that we have a graph of all of our markers we basically just want to see if there are any outliers in our scene so we can notice that generally all the green markers kind of do a downwards turn however there are some over here that kind of go a little Haywire so I'm just going to select those and then delete those and the reason we are deleting them and not trying to preserve them is because we have so many markers in our scene that it doesn't really matter if we delete some of the bad ones so again I can see some spikes here this little thing let me try to zoom in to select that so if you see any spikes in the red or the green areas you just want to kind of get those out because those are actually Parts where blender is not able to track the marker that correctly and the rest blender can automatically detect so let's go ahead and get a solve so without a solve The Trackers are useless blender is basically going to try to take all these markers information and actually give us a camera path so what we want to do is go ahead and select an A and B keyframe that's basically just a range that blender is going to use to try to detect the camera movement so we want to try to give an area where it's going to be moving the most as possible so I'm just going to automatically select mine to be 80. starting the frame range at 80 and then ending at 140 since that is a part of our clip that moves the most the next thing we need to do is refine all of our focal length and Radial Distortion and everything then we can go ahead and solve the camera motion we can see that we've got a solve error of a 18.59 and that's not too bad but we can see our little graph down here is going a little Haywire so we actually want to get that down as low as possible I'm going to try to get it below 8.3 for this video so let's go ahead and clean up clean tracks and then we can boost our reproduction error until we get not a lot of tracks selected up here so I'm going to stick around a19 for me and then go ahead and delete those tracks and we want to solve the camera motion again you can see now that our solve error curve is much lower and it's also not bouncing up and down as much as it was before and we have a solver of a 5.32 now we can actually go ahead and clean up the tracks some more times to get that lower and low so again let's clean the tracks and then set the reprojection error to a number that we are comfortable with just to select a few of the top tracks and then we can go ahead and delete tracks and solve the camera motion again and the reason we are doing this is basically every single time that we detect the tracks we're trying to detect the tracks that kind of move the most and will give us a bad motion track and so every time we do that we make our average tracks error lower and lower so I'm just going to do that a couple more times and try to get our solve error down to below 8.3 okay so I actually went ahead and cleaned my tracks four or five more times and was actually able to get our solve error down to a 0.3 so that is what we're going to be working with so now that we have a good saw we can go ahead and set up a background and tracking scene and that will go ahead and set up some objects in our scene and also make a camera so now let's actually right click I'm going to go ahead and join the areas up here and then we can go ahead and make sure our floor is actually on the road since it's kind of floating in midair right now so what we can do is come down here I want to select three objects that are on the road so those three right there I'm going to hit floor and that's basically scale up the scene uh very much so to zoom that out we can select two points set the scale and then make the distance just increase that so now you can see our plane is sitting on the road a little bit better and so now we can actually Define some of the rotation for our scenes so I'm going to select this point and make that be our origin of our world and then this point since it's along that same line I'm going to make this the x-axis just so it's kind of going along our line you can see if I zoom up here that red line is actually following our white line very well so you can tell that that is a good track scene so now we are actually done with camera tracking I will say if you are having any trouble with camera tracking since this is a super beginner tutorial I will actually link a download to where you can download the blend file up at this moment so in case you are having trouble with camera tracking you can go ahead and still work along with us so now in the layout view what I basically want to do is create a new scene with basically just a super simple object in the middle of the road so what we can go ahead and do is delete some of the stuff that blender automatically created when it created our tracking scene so I'm going to go ahead and delete the cube and the light since we're not going to be using that and then up here at the background and foreground collection we're not going to use that along with this background view layer we're not really going to use that blender just automatically sets it up in case you do but since we don't we can just delete all all that and then these four nodes we can also delete and plug the image into our image in the alpha over so now let's come back out to the layout tab go back in layout we actually need to go ahead and set up our render properties so if we come up here and we want to select cycles and then set our device to GPU compute and then we can just deselect this denoise node and I want to set our sample count for now to be a 64 for both the render and the viewport also now is a good time to come up to the very top we're going to go to edit preferences if you have a Nvidia GPU you want to make sure that you are running it on Optics so you have the best performance and then also we need to enable an add-on let's come here to add-ons and then if you type in node you want to make sure that you have this node Wrangler add-on that will be useful later so let's exit out of this and now this plane is set to be a shadow catcher object if you actually want to see where that is that's in object properties and visibility and down here the mask is set to Shadow catcher so basically that's going to allows to just use this as the shadow for our scene so let's go ahead and shift a add a mesh we're going to go down to monkey and now we have a monkey in our scene we're going to go ahead and hit three on our numpad to go to the side view and basically we want to hit tab to go into the edit mode we want to hit a to select all the vertices and we can just kind of rotate by hitting R and then using our Mouse to write that and then hit G and align that with this green line down here the reason we're doing this in edit mode is to actually be able to scale it correctly once we get out of that amount so let's hit Tab and now if we come back to the camera mode we can hit SQ scale and now we are scaling the monkey but it is staying on our ground plane and that's a very important note we want to make sure that whatever we do that we want to be on our road uh is going to be connected to this ground plane you can see here because if it's not it'll actually be floating in midair and depending on what you want to do you want that or you don't want that but for our scene we want the monkey to be on the road so we're going to make sure that the monkey is always connected to our ground plane I went ahead and turned on the shortcuts there down here but let's go ahead and position where we want our monkey so I'm going to rotate it on the z-axis so just hit Z there then I'm just going to make it face the camera something like that then I'm going to hit G shift Z to rotate it or move it on every axis besides the easy axis so I want it around that area you can see now that our camera track footage is looking pretty good so we can go ahead and scale the monkey up and roughly around that size is what I want it to be now wherever our shadow catcher is is going to be where the shadow is actually going to be seen and so we just want to make sure our shadow is around the monkey and we can go ahead and give it some width in the X Direction so s x to move in the x-axis and then if I actually scale it down to the y-axis let's position it on the row just to show how good the camera track that we got you can see that if I actually go ahead and g x we can move it along the road let's go ahead and hit H to hide the monkey so GX and you can see it follows the road very very well and so you can know that we got a excellent camera track for this so all H to unhide our monkey and so now let's go into the render view holding down Z and going up to rendered now you can see that we don't have any Lighting in our scene and this is actually where that HRI that we downloaded comes into play so what we want to do is go over to the world settings we're just going to click this little button go to the environment texture and then open up our HRI so here it is the exr I'm just going to open the image and you can see that we can now see the HRI and it's also giving a shadow but what we want to do is not see the HRI so let's go to render and then go down to film and make sure that's set to transparent and now we can see our background footage again so you can see our lighting is matching really well to the scene if I actually come up here to the camera I like to go to the background images and make the opacity up just so we can see the entire scene and so that matches pretty well with the Shadows you can see the shadow direction is kind of coming towards the camera so we want to try to match that as closely as possible with our visual effects so if I come up to the shading tab then go into the world section I just want to make sure again go to rendered I just want to make sure that our shadow are rotated the way that we want it so with the node Wrangler add-on you can actually hold Ctrl T if you select this HRI node and I'll actually add a texture coordinate and mapping node we just want to go ahead and play around with the rotation so I'm just going to rotate the actual hdri a bit until it matches kind of the direction that I'm looking for and then we can also rotate it in the Y to make it a little bit longer since I noticed that the Shadows down here are a little bit longer so right around here is what we are looking for so we can go ahead and set that back to object and come back out to the layout tab and so now let's go up to the compositing tab and if I go ahead and render out a image you can see this is the result that we got which is not too bad but there's a lot of stuff that we can do to make it a lot more realistic so let's exit out of here and then we actually need to go ahead and separate our monkey from our actual Shadow layer so to do that a very simple method is to go ahead and come over to this view layer properties window over here and then if you scroll down you'll notice a shadow catcher pass and that will basically add this and now we need to go to render another image you'll notice this time we don't have our shadow anymore and that's actually because blender is uh rendering out the monkey and then rendering out this Shadow catcher pass separately and so what we can do is go ahead and use this Shadow catcher pass to influence the actual Shadows of our footage so what I want to do is go ahead and shift a add I'm going to add a set Alpha node and what's that's going to do is basically convert our image right here and make that into an alpha so I'm just going to take the shadow catcher node and plug that into our Alpha and now if we view that you can see if we come up here and click this button we now have this set to be our Alpha Channel let's just come back and click this button and now what we need to do since we now have the shadow catcher pass as our Alpha we can go ahead and make that influence our original clip to do this I'm going to go ahead and add a color balance node right here and then plug that into the movie clip and then there's this Factor node the factor will basically take the alpha of whatever we set into it and uh affect this node specifically so now if I come back out here and let's say I play around with this a little bit say I set the game uh way down you can see that it's actually affecting everything besides um you know the part that we have set as our Alpha we actually want the opposite effect we want whatever our Alpha is affecting uh to be the only thing that this node is affecting so if we shift a we just want to add a quick invert color node and set that there and that will invert everything including the alpha so now whatever we have set here is basically affecting this node right here so the reason we are doing this is to actually go ahead and use the actual footages uh pixels to determine the shadow like it would in an actual uh you know video that you shot so what we can do we can see that we already got uh kind of halfway there we want to set kind of a value of Darkness that we want our shadow to be and that is looking roughly the same uh if you actually look down here you will notice that the Shadows are a little bit Bluer Than the shadow of our astral monkey and so what we can do is come up here with the color wheel and just shift that a tiny bit to the blue we want to shift that until we notice uh some more blue coming through kind of like that that actually might be a little too much so I'm going to dial it back just a hair and now you can see uh with that on and off you can see that we now have Shadow back in our scene and this is a much better way to do Shadows inside of blender I highly recommend you guys learn to composite uh so you can do this inside of a program like Nuke or Fusion or after effects but inside a blender that is the workflow to get our shadows so now some final things that we need to do I'll notice that the monkey is very noisy and that's actually to do with our sample count so let's come back out here you can play around with the sample count however you want I find that my for me I like around a 256 is the best sample count for me but I'm also going to go ahead and denoise the footage as well so to do a better denoise than this little denoise thing we can come to the view layer properties we want to do down here to denoising data we want to turn that on and then we're going to go ahead and add a denoise node select that I'm going to place the image here and then the normal into the normal and then the Albedo into the Albedo and then we can just replace our image up here where it's plugged in and so now that's actually going to be a better denoiser than the default value for blender so what we can go ahead and do is go ahead and render another image okay so now if I zoom into here you can see that we have this result this is actually looking very realistic um to you know kind of beginner standards there's a lot more stuff we can do if you're doing this shot you know kind of more advanced level VFX like adding grain back into it and adding some you know Hue Corrections and all this stuff but we're just going to leave it like this for this uh beginner tutorial since this is a really good result as a beginner I'd be very happy if I made this you know within the first week of learning blender so let's come back out here and let's go ahead and set this up to be rendered as an animation we're going to go ahead and render this as a PNG sequence since it's going to take so long and if blender crashes we won't have uh lost all of our progress so let's come here to the output section we're going to save this in a new location so I made it its own folder again we're just going to double click into that and I'm just going to name this first VFX underscore it's very important to have that underscore again because we want to separate the numbers from the actual text and then we want to hit accept again blender sets these settings we want to go RGB and then compression down to zero and then all that's left to do is go ahead and render out the animation so after that has finished rendering now what we have to do is go ahead and open up a new file again we're just going to go back to video editing video editing we're going to add a image sequence and locate the sequence we just rendered out here's mine again just hit a add image strip and then we're going to set the end frame down here to be our frame before so 193 I believe this was shot in 30 FPS so I'm going to hit 30fps there and then we can scroll down we're going to save a new file location and then I'm just going to name this uh first VFX and then we don't need a thing at the end since we're going to be saving it as a video file and then I'm just going to hit accept I'm going to set this to be a ffmpeg video go to a coding set that to be a quick time and then set that to be a high quality preset and then we can just go ahead and render out the animation one final time this is the final result that we got from the tutorial now this is the time where I also ask you to please like And subscribe if you like this video it really helped me out with the YouTube algorithm I'm trying to hit 30 000 subscribers by the end of this year so I really appreciate it also if you want to give more to the channel we have a patreon link is in the description below if you are interested anyways I hope that was a fun first shot to do inside of visual effects and your journey is just getting started

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 54,852

Keywords: blender, blender 3d, blender tutorial, vfx, beginner blender tutorial, visual effects, vfx blender, blender vfx tutorial, blender beginner vfx tutorial, beginner vfx tutorial, blender vfx, vfx in blender tutorial, easy vfx in blender, blender easy vfx tutorial, vfx breakdown, how to make your first vfx shot, first vfx shot, first vfx, super beginner vfx tutorial, vfx for the absolute beginner, camera tracking, camera tracking vfx blender, camera tracking blender tutorial

Id: o2uy7SDcQak

Length: 19min 42sec (1182 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 06 2023