MERIDIAN - Cyberpunk VFX Breakdown - Blender x After Effects

hey everyone and welcome back to another video so i wanted today to show you a new project that i've been working on or really good friend of mine and she's just released a new album would go and recommend checking it out immediately because it's absolutely bloody amazing i'll put a link to everything in the description below but the new video that she released for the track meridian features a cinemagraph by myself and i wanted to show you today how i made it but if we switch over here you'll see that this is the file in its raw format within blender 3d which is what i use to create the city as you can see looks very different to the final result now i wanted to basically run through with you the different passes and the effects that we're using to get it from basic models to looking textured and with all the bloom and everything so what we're using is the eevee engine because it's nice quick simple easy to render and because it's a static image it means that things like screen space reflections won't be too obviously messy because everything's going to be in the same place so we can position everything exactly where we need it to be and if we go into the textured view you'll see essentially well a couple of things firstly we have this neon sign over here which says meridian which has all the cabling everything attached to it as well has an inner layer and outer layer and this is all stuff that you actually don't even see the detail in once the final render is done but it just it goes a long way to add that there is a bit of clipping here but you really don't notice it once the final render is is done little easter egg down in the corner here which says qui noir which is another project that the artist is part of which you can't really actually see in the final window because it's too out of focus but you know love a good easter egg one of the effects that glued everything together here was creating this skyline look by adding all of these windows in the globe now all that this is is basically a single texture that i got from the interwebs of a building exterior just literally a couple of windows glued together and then using an array modifier here and adding a fixed count of one to the side and using an array modifier on the y-axis to take everything upwards just multiplying it by five you see if we move this down it takes these down and it's basically yeah that's all it is it's just copying that up as many times as i need and what it meant was that i could basically duplicate this move it back to where i needed it to and then however many extensions that left or right or up or down i could just add the number on each individual one so for there we've got five going up for the ones back here we've got two counts across on the side there and then nine counts going up because it's a tall building uh so that's just a really easy effective way in order to create the illusion of building windows um you know we're not getting too close to it so we don't actually need to model each individual window we don't need to see inside just this texture with an emission going into it is all that we needed to do i did have to adjust the individual emission values the further back into the scene that the lights went because as they went further back the volumetric fog basically covered it so much it was so dense that you really couldn't see it and i still wanted it to be visible is it physically accurate no because as the fog goes off these lights wouldn't be three times brighter than this so they wouldn't actually fade off but because we have our own creative control it meant that i could uh input it just so it wasn't too dark seeing as we're switching into the rendered view now i'm gonna take off things such as bloom which is just your basic glow which adds a lot screen space reflections which again as i say aren't massively important here because one everything's quite dark and two you're not really getting objects moving past enough and the angles that everything's that you're not really seeing much reflection so it's not critical but it's still worth having just to get small details that you might not completely notice to reflect like down here for example uh this is now reflecting light below it whereas before it was completely dark so screen space reflections do go a long way you'll see if i take us into material preview which doesn't have any volumetric fog in it [Music] you'll see as i take us into material preview mode which doesn't have any volumetric fog in it just how bright these lights at the back are in comparison to the ones at the front and that really does show you just how bright these lights at the back actually are and have to be in order to get through that fog which if i pass into render view now and take us to uh take us into the shading the world is actually i take the volumetric fog out the volume it's actually just a nightscape 360 degree hdri map that's around the back and all that does is just give anything that's reflecting away from camera just something like even in the walls here just something to give a bit more texture and because it's night time and city it should mean that it just fits the better with the seam the actual hdri is not very high quality but that doesn't matter here because once you have the fog plugged in it doesn't really make a difference if i take the fog out again you can see that down here i've actually added in some additional volumetric fog which is essentially just cubes with a principal volume attached into the volume and a lower density of 0.6 just to really add some more thickness into the lower areas and using this technique can really help draw focus to certain areas of your scene and also imply that there are just different densities of atmosphere in different parts of your scene obviously having the same level of fog throughout the entire depth of your scene is great but it means that when you get sort of down into the city if i move these away you can see it's very bright down there whereas actually in reality there's probably going to be a lot more smog down closer to the street level so moving these couple of extra bits of fog and density down there just helps burn that in a bit better and naturally it begins to disperse as it gets higher up into the scene in terms of animation we've just got a couple of spaceships going past and what i did was make sure that none of these spaceships actually crossed over each other's path and what this meant was i could have these ships flying in to the scene in one go and it meant that rendering out the scene i didn't have to basically do three different renders of the entire scene all the way through i could render out the sequence once and because there nothing crosses over each other's path i can just basically in after effects mask out each bit of the frame and keep everything separate which worked really well and saved me a lot of render time instead of rendering this whole thing out three times over by the time you get to frame 300 i've already got both of those ships animations done and then this ship at the top can move through i was thinking of just cutting this ship out rendering it as a still image and then putting it in the scene and then in after effects moving it from left to right but a you don't get any of the depth perspective warping as it moves from left to right and also you don't get anything like the lights reflecting off of it and glistening in certain areas it would just be one static image going through which doesn't doesn't look great and it also the fact that it's reacting with the light and reflecting everything as it would really goes a long way in helping sell the effect even though it's very subtle now what i wanted to show you next before we get into after effects is just the general layout of the scene now obviously from this perspective if i go into mat cap and let's go on random so you can see the distinction better obviously from here it looks like a pretty dense scene but actually if i move the camera and let's go back into the layout view for this this is where the camera is positioned if i actually move the camera around you'll see that actually everything is really far away from each other and that's because i didn't need to create the entire city in order to create this shot i just needed to create what was in the shot there's no point in me putting all the buildings on this side and on all the buildings over here because we're never going to see them because the camera stays in one place the entire time and it just means that yes from this perspective and if i wanted to do any sort of animation movement on the camera that goes beyond this window then yeah i probably need to fill in the gaps but as long as from the perspective of the camera there are no massive gaps this is this was fine it saved so much time for you as an artist and also on the render times because anything that's in the scene it will try and render so having anything that's out of frame a camera not even there in the scene it means that blender is not calculating that perspective it's not calculating those triangles those faces and it just cuts down on your end of times massively now we'll have a little bit of a close-up look at the sign here which again as i say is if i render it out and we put the blue back on is yeah just a very basic effect i've actually it's actually just all types so i can actually change this and change it to say something completely different if i wanted and that's well that's how i created quite a while ago down here which again has a higher brightness value because it's further off in the scene so without that you won't really see it and then just some placements of your basic point lights throughout the scene uh just to just to highlight the shapes of some of the objects because without any of the lights and in fact if i go here and i hide the lights everything becomes lost and there's no definition in the shapes so adding these lights and placing them in certain places around to really highlight and give shape you see if i move this one around uh we can really emphasize different parts of the scene like if i put that there suddenly this quinoa building becomes really quite distinct in its shape so that's a good little trick uh make sure you've got backlighting to really make your subject stand out and just give a lot of depth to your shots that's particularly effective back here uh when you've got these buildings really far off in the distance like this light here because without that you just lose all of this information back here but just adding that light there just shows you a bit more of the geometry without it and with there you go right now we've moved into after effects which is where all of the glue really comes together to get this whole scene looking like it is intended to be now if we solo some of these layers you'll see this is the original plate that was rendered out with a camera lens blur applied because the the blender camera lens blur in eb is it's not great it's passable of certain situations but you really don't get this nice uh control it's not as accurate as using it in after effects and you don't get that control over the shape such as being able to change it from pentagon hexagon etc or just a circle which i personally prefer using so to be honest i don't know why there's two layers of that so we could forget the first layer this bottom layer is the first frame of the animation which is blank which has nothing going on in it it's the default frame it's our sort of reference point that if there were no animations going through the scene this still frame is absolutely fine and what we need so it means if there's any holes in the animated sections it means that we're always going through to this single base frame which is exactly what we need now i've taken the animated comp which is basically those 500 frames that were from blender they go over the top here and you'll see that that's your standard you've got the uh and that's going as intended you got ships flying through and there you go that's fine now this is where it came in really handy as i say in order to make sure nothing overlapped because it meant that i could copy the meridian sign which actually has a glow going on with inside blender itself which means there's no animation needed to be done within after effects it's the actual emission value of the light is all animated within blender so that means this png sequence is animating on its own i can mask that out keep a certain section of it and now we just have this nicely blended with nice feather and that is going to go underneath the ship going over it which means that when we get to big ship top five uh which is as you can tell the ship going past which is masked out again as well it means that it can nicely overlap and everything works as it should uh same with the big ship uh where else what else we've got big ship top which is this one up here again masked out and then the ship that lifts up here at the start and goes away that just stays on this base animation so just thinking ahead like that can really make a difference and save you a lot of hassle when you're trying to render out multiple passes and timelines of the same thing just you know masking it out can save you a lot of hassle now beyond the actual animations what i did was actually just take one of these out focus blurs and let's take off you and you can see that all i did was actually go into one of these compositions i essentially took a single light that was in the back of the scene added the gaussian blur to it because camera lens blur can add a lot to your render time so gaussian blur was absolutely fine duplicated it multiple times and we've just got it passing from right to left composed all of precomposed all of those into one single timeline duplicated that on top reversed it in 3d space and made it go the other way and then that composition comes into our main one and then we basically just got overlapping versions of that so that it becomes seamless if we say all of these then you really can't see the point where it shifts over and there's just another layer of that back there to create the illusion of traffic in the distance without having to simulate loads and loads of lights within blender without having to simulate models it's literally just a single out of focus blur and taking that and animating it from left to right on the screen of course when we apply a blur to the entire of our blender layer it applied a blur to the window frame which of course we don't want to be out of focus so duplicated that put it on front and then mask it out and put it over the top so that the blur is not affecting that and everything that should be behind the window frame goes behind it because now this mask is on top so all of these lights that are going behind fit nicely now the original photograph that i used was captured by the artist herself and she sent it to me and what i made sure was really clear was to have a clear background out the back and also to have a light source illuminating from the outside in because if there's going to be a city outside of her within the scene naturally there would be light coming from that side it's really difficult to simulate light hitting a subject if it doesn't actually happen so having that light source behind this window and actually illuminating her with the yellow and illuminating glass was key and also illuminating here was really key in helping glue the effect all together so planning your 3d shot in advance thinking about how the composition is going to work and adjusting your lighting accordingly is very very valuable so i took the image in to after effects and the first thing i did was mask out anything that was not going to become transparent so i masked out all of the artists around her hands around her fingers around her hair around the curtain they were the main things that were going to say completely solid opaque nothing needed to be done to them moving on to the rest of the shop with the window i masked the opposite area out and applied first of all a unmolt which removes any black values from the shot which was really great and then secondly applied a screen which just further helps add a level of transparency so you'll see that adding a unmold effect removes any of the black and then adding a screen really helps just blend it in that little bit more keeping these highlights from the light coming through but removing any of the black values and there we have it now we have our reflections and stains and lighting coming and staying on the window but removing anything that was on the outside i also added a bit of a feather round uh up here which helped blend her hair through and also this reflection the last thing we did was remove the the fingerprints because that was just a personal artistic choice that we made in the end i just removed the fingerprints and that was just a case of masking and duplicating another section of the window lastly but not least we have the rain effect which is just very simple cc rainfall and just playing around with the settings adding a lot of wind to it so that it's not just straight all in one line there's a bit of wind added to it and adds a bit of almost chaos to look and that's the idea that the city is pretty wild and there's so much going on outside that the wind is just all over the place and you can see that within the rain itself and that is underneath this pillar which means that everything is already auto masked for us and because we've put all these images of the artist on the very top again it means any effect underneath is going to be automatically masked and should all work together perfectly usually you could just pre-compose this entire sequence because as you'll see with there's then one more round of compositing which is the final bits of gloss that are added such as the chromatic aberration the smoke etc but because i knew that this was completely done and ready to go it would have been so much hassle having to render all of this out in real time and having the playback speed was just becoming too much as it was trying to render all of this out and then having to do all of the other effects on here on top it was just too much so i made the decision once we finalized this completely to render all of this out as a quicktime sequence up until 2 minutes 35 which was basically when all of the unique events had happened whether that be the ships flying past and rendered that out as a high-res prores quicktime file and that just kept all the data but just compressed into one file that was all rendered out which meant that dropping this now into where potentially a precomposed version of the plate could have gone just meant that there was no additional rendering to be done this was just one video file on its own and it made the the process of editing this last bit much much quicker a few things i did were for example just masking out the door handle that was left by just duplicating another area and putting it over the top a few adjustment layers which included some heads up display the components that were animated so you've got the effect over here you've got dashing lights on the background and then you've also at the very back uh these sort of arrows flickering i was going to add some swirly dust which looked a bit like this but it added too much to the render time and there was so much going on with the particles from the rain that i just felt there was no need for it so i hit that layer in the end and this smoke comp is again very similar to the way i created the traffic which was you know when you've only got a certain elemental file that needs to last longer than the actual file length itself and your shot is longer then together especially stuff like smoke is when you get towards the end of your layer with the opacity just start lowering the opacity and over the top start bringing in the layer again but from the start and because it's smoke the blending should work well enough that you don't actually notice that transition and i just did that enough times to get us through to the very end pre-composed all of that into a few different smoke layers and position those throughout the scene like so and i just meant that added a realistic element to all of the shots lastly i had to create another mask again because obviously all of the smoke and these heads-up display elements need to be behind the window and of course the mask layer from here has already been baked essentially into this right at the bottom so without this all of the smoke was just crossing over and all of the heads up display so that wasn't ideal so another mask was made for that and lastly an adjustment layer which just used a chromatic aberration from red giant universe which is a really cool effect adds a bit of lens distortion i masked it because i didn't want the artist to have this effect you'll see without the mask she starts to become really blurred as well which is not what i wanted i wanted her to be completely in focus so by masking that it just meant as it went off to the side you get this really nice distortion with the rgb channel and you're drawn mostly to her because she's completely in focus and then as you go up to the left it becomes well there was a point made to have red light here go to orange go to purple and then off the blue which gives there a sort of natural rainbow look and your eyes are following the color spectrum across there's not a jumble of colors there is an order to the way that your eyes are viewing the color on this scene and as you get all the way to this left side as i say the colors start actually splitting and it just gives almost almost some sort of narrative to this very static image in the way that the colors are being used and lastly just a curves value to add a bit more contrast and there we go we have our scene all com all composited together all working really nicely and that was just one render out and then in adobe premiere i basically did the same technique that i did with the smoke and took so the last 15 20 seconds of this clip duplicated it use the opacity to blend it in and then that took me to the end and it just meant again render times you know it took me a full hour to render just this out and then going this extra further would have been another sort of 30 to 45 minutes so just to do this chuck that into premiere and then render that out in one go so it just saved me so so much time you still get the same result that you need again as i say it's a cinemagraph we're using looping elements so in this case it was absolutely fine for a shot as long as three minutes and 43 seconds which is a very long time for a single shot where a lot of effects had to be duplicated that was absolutely fine and because the shot's in the same place that's all you need so there you go that's a breakdown of the meridian music video cinemagraph i hope you enjoyed and hopefully learned a few tips tricks and techniques for both blender and after effects if you have any questions about how i did anything or want to learn more or want to see a more in-depth tutorial on any of these specific elements then please do let me know more than happy to create that for you i hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look and i've got some more content on the way for you soon which is going to be interesting again we're actually doing some more artwork together so i look forward to showing you what else we come up with alright thanks everyone for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Toby Rawal

Views: 1,673

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: after, effects, after effects, blender, premiere, adobe, creative, film, eevee, dark following, ps5, rtx, tutorial, how to

Id: J-EW9korW4M

Length: 24min 31sec (1471 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020