Justice League CYBORG VFX for FREE | Blender + HitFilm Express Tutorial

[Music] hello everyone i'm zach and welcome back to another hit film and blender tutorial today i'll be showing you how to become cyborg inspired by zack snyder's justice league we'll use blender to track a 3d model onto tom's head and will composite the rendered result for free in hitfilm express with no add-ons i'd recommend getting familiar with blender before following along so be sure to check out the other blender videos on this channel linked in the description you can find the project files for this effect in the description as well if you'd like to follow along integrating 3d models into your footage like this is a complex process and requires some planning even before you hit record to keep things simple the camera was locked off on a tripod so tom's head was the only thing moving tracking markers were drawn on tom's face to give blender some easy features to track and they were placed where they would be covered by the cyborg model to prevent the need for any paint at work also be sure to take note of your lighting setup while filming so you can replicate it digitally later on it's also helpful to keep track of your camera lenses focal length for the digital camera to work with our footage in blender we'll first have to convert it to an image sequence i'll import the video clip into hitfilm express and before exporting i'll add some more contrast with the curves effect to help with the tracking create a new folder and export the clip as a png image sequence start a new blender project using the vfx workspace this part of blender's interface may be unfamiliar to you if you've only used it for modeling load in your image sequence then click set scene frames to make the blender timeline the same length as your video set the project resolution and frame rate to match your footage then set the color management profile to standard so blender doesn't alter the colors click the prefetch button to load the frames into ram similar to hitfilm's ram preview we aren't tracking the camera so create an object instead i'll set the tracker type to a fine this will allow the trackers to be distorted so they can better follow the movement of tom's face enable normalize so blender tries to ignore any lighting changes also try changing the track match type to previous frame so blender doesn't stop tracking when the feature appearance changes over the course of the shot use control click to place a tracker on your video then press and hold the e key dragging your mouse to either track forward or track backward whoa that was fast to better monitor the tracking process i'll set the speed to double so it doesn't complete instantly when you are happy with your tracker lock it with ctrl l so it won't be accidentally changed track as many identifiable features as you can we need at least eight for an object solve try to spread them out on the object to give blender more information instead of tracking only a small area also avoid any details that move differently to the main head motion like tom's eyebrows here if a track goes all crazy on you delete it by pressing x i've tracked all the usable markers but i'll add even more trackers on other parts of tom's face it may not seem like a very identifiable feature but blender is surprisingly good at locking onto subtle details with all these solid tracks in place we can move on to solving the object hit the solve button and yikes that's a big error value something we can do to reduce the solve error is to set our keyframes the keyframes are two frames in our shot that best represent the motion or a large perspective change i'll set my a and b keyframes before and after tom turns his head hit solve again and there much better before we move on make sure to enter the focal length of the lens you used now hit solve again blender gave us an even lower error great if your error value got a little higher that is still okay as the correct focal length is more important than a slightly higher error if your solve error is much higher than 1 you may need more trackers your tracks might be too jittery or tracking incorrect movement like tom's eyebrow or you may have the incorrect focal length regardless of what blender thinks the error is it's worth checking out the result anyway as it could still be very usable before we apply this track to an actual 3d object we should reposition our camera the object will be moving relative to the camera so it'll make our scene easier to understand if the camera is looking in the right direction i'll add a new layout workspace so it's easier to work in 3d then i'll center the camera and move it into roughly the right position now that our camera is in place we can go ahead and click this button to create a 3d mesh representing our trackers also click the set as background button so we can see our video footage through the 3d camera if you scrub the timeline these points aren't moving to fix this add an object solver constraint selecting the camera and object we created make sure to click the set inverse button to realign the object there i'll select the camera and increase the opacity of the background images so they aren't transparent to get a better idea of how good our track is go into edit mode with the tracks object and fill the points with a convex hull in the object settings i'll set it to display as wire i'll also disable it from showing in renders nice our track appears to stick right onto tom's face [Music] now it is time to add in a model representing tom's head this model is free from blendswap.com in the file menu choose append and navigate to the 3d head model selecting the base object in edit mode select a vertex that is close to where one of our tracking points is move the 3d cursor to that point with shift s then in object mode set the head object's origin point to the 3d cursor move the 3d cursor to the corresponding tracking point then move the head object to the cursor now our head model will scale and rotate from this point making it easier to align with tom parent the head object to the trackers with control p so it follows the movement then scale rotate and position it as close as possible in wireframe view [Music] of course this isn't an accurate model of tom's head so it won't line up perfectly to improve the alignment go into edit mode select some vertices and move them with proportional editing enabled you can adjust the radius that your movement affects with your scroll wheel if some parts of the mesh are distracting to look at you can hide them with a mask modifier add a new vertex group and in edit mode select all and hit a sign select the unnecessary geometry and remove the selection from the vertex group choose this vertex group and the mask modifier to see the effect make sure to disable this modifier from rendering keep selecting and moving things until the model matches your actor's face you may want to go to another frame on the timeline to see the scene from a different angle add a subdivision surface modifier to the head to make it higher resolution and enable smooth shading you may want to adjust the mesh some more now that it has been smoothed out after playing this back the 3d model seems to follow the movement of tom's head accurately this digital head will help us position the cyborg head model and will receive shadows and lighting it will also cast some reflections onto the cyborg model but first we need to texture it a quick and easy way to do this is to uv unwrap the model using the project from view method while looking through our camera then in the material settings load in the current frame as the image texture from the camera view the texture looks right just don't rotate around too far with our base head model in place we can now move on to adding our cyborg head i created this 3d model in blender by starting with a head model from earlier and deleted all of the geometry where tom's face would show through the metal then modified the resulting model to more closely match the design of cyborg from the justice league i used some image textures from cc0textures.com to add more detail to the metal material making some parts rougher and less reflective than others the cyborg eye has a few different materials to make the center glow red and the outside glow and look like glass this model is available for download in the video description similar to before align this model to the head by moving the origin point make sure it is parented to the head as well you can copy the rotation and scale values from the head to quickly align it then use proportional editing to match the cyborg head to the track head [Music] [Music] cyborg's eye is a separate object so it can be animated to match where your actor is looking hide the other objects and go into wireframe view you can now insert keyframes for the object's rotation from the right-click menu you may need to reposition the eye object after rotating it now that our cyborg head is tracked in we need to add some lighting to match our video footage i'll set the render engine to cycles as it is more realistic and i'll choose gpu compute as rendering on my graphics card will be much faster than rendering on my cpu i used three different area lights to approximate the lighting setup seen in the video there's a key light hitting tom from the front a fill light being reflected onto the side of tom and a backlight on the other side of tom fine tune the position and intensity of these lights in rendered view to add more lighting and reflections to our model i'll use an hdri from hdrihaven.com since this green screen footage will later be composited into a dark cityscape i'll use hdris that look similar i actually mix two hdris together to get the city lights from one and the cloudy sky from the other you can adjust the brightness of each background image with the strength slider on the background node and can combine them using a mix shader node these reflections really make our metal cyborg head look much more interesting and we'll add to the realism by integrating it with the city background later on the final step in blender before we can composite and hit film is to set up the scene for rendering i'll start by enabling transparent in the film settings this will give our render a transparent background we only want the head model's shadows to be seen so enable shadow catcher in the object's visibility settings i want the cyborg head and the shadows to be two separate image sequences so i can adjust them individually in hitfilm to do this we'll be using view layers first create new collections for each of our different objects one for lights one for the camera one for our cyborg and one for the head these collections are basically groups that can be enabled or disabled select each object and move them into the appropriate collection at the top of the screen click this button to add a new view layer i'll call it shadows a view layer gives you control over how each object and collection is visible in the render right click on the cyborg collection and choose indirect only now the cyborg head doesn't appear but it still casts shadows back in our original view layer right click the head collection and choose set holdout this will cause the head object to be cut out of the cyborg head now only the parts of the cyborg head that are not occluded by tom's head will be rendered i also want a separate render of some red lighting being cast onto tom's face duplicate the head collection and disable it from appearing in both view layers create a new view layer disabling the shadows and enabling the lighting give it a new black material with no texture also make sure to disable shadow catcher i chose to add a red area light then positioned it to create the red glow on tom's face make sure it is parented to the head as well adjust the material roughness until you like how the red reflection looks disable the main light collection from this view layer so only the red light will be visible i also chose to set the cyborg collection as a holdout this object is still receiving reflections from our hdri so we'll have to render it out separately with our hdri disabled another detail i chose to add is an additional red light this time a point light parented to the cyborg eye object the radius and intensity were turned way down so would only add a small red reflection onto the metal cyborg to render all three of these image sequences first disable compositing in the post processing settings you can now select your file type and create a folder for each image sequence where we will render each view layer individually you can test the render by going to render render image you should see each view layer render separately we'll start with the main view layer so in the view layer properties enable render single layer before rendering i chose to set the color management back to filmic to reduce the contrast and give more color information to play with in hitfilm increasing the render samples will produce a cleaner less noisy result at the cost of render time when you are happy with your scene select the proper output folder and go to render render animation depending on your resolution shot duration and sample count this will take some time once that render has completed disable the main view layer from rendering and enable rendering for the shadow view layer being sure to select the proper folder once that render is done isolate the lighting view layer disconnect the hdris select its folder and render again time to composite i've already gone ahead and keyed out the green screen footage click the card on screen to learn how to remove green screen and hit film express import the three image sequences and drag them onto the timeline above your video footage i'll start with the shadows then place the red lighting with a blend mode of add then end with a cyborg render because our 3d model didn't line up with tom perfectly the lighting and shadows hang off the edge a little this can be easily fixed with the set matte effect sourcing the alpha of the keyed video footage this looks pretty good already but there's some extra details we can add to really integrate this digital model into the live action video to make this cyborg head seem like it was actually filmed with tom i'll start by adding a curves effect the dark areas of cyborg are currently too dark compared to tom in the footage so i'll drag up the bottom point in the curves effect to make it brighter the render is also very sharp so i'll add a very small blur effect to soften it that's a little too soft so we'll add a subtle sharpen effect the video footage also has a slight amount of grain and while it's barely noticeable the movement of some subtle grain on the model will make it feel like it was actually filmed i also ended up using some more color correction effects to match the footage further i removed a little bit of blue and adjusted the hue of the yellow reflections on the model to better match the yellow of the city image the red lighting on the face is a little too intense so i'll soften it with a blur and dial back the intensity with a curves effect i'll also slightly blur the shadows and lower their opacity let's add some movement and depth to the shot so it isn't so static in a new composite shot drag in the video footage in the background set the layers to 3d and move the background image far back from the camera scale it up so it fills the frame now we can add a subtle camera movement showing some parallax as the background is farther away from the camera than tom to finish off the composite i'll layer up some light wrap effects to blend tom into the background i'll also add a new grade layer with some color correction effects to tie everything together and that's how you can create your own justice league cyborg effects in blender and hitfill feel free to explore the project files provided in the video description and to leave a comment if you have any questions or if you learned something new tune in next week for another justice league themed effect subscribe for more tutorials like this and be sure to give this video a like see you next time done don't worry

Channel: FXhome

Views: 34,775

Keywords: HitFilm, HitFilm Pro, HitFilm Express, filmmaking, VFX, editing, software, video software, video editing, visual effects, how to, blender, motion tracking, 3D modelling, Justice League, Snyder Cut, Cyborg, Ray Fisher, Victor Stone, Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Flash, robotic, futuristic

Id: Gs9yI3NX5Tc

Length: 22min 18sec (1338 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021