My BEST TIPS for Making a 3D Music Video *WISH I KNEW WHEN STARTING*

[Music] what i learned making a 3d music video welcome back to the channel guys today this video is going to be a little bit different than my normal upload the other day i got a dm from somebody asking me what can i do to improve my videos i feel like i'm using the same visual effects the same editing techniques in a lot of my videos i want to step it up try some new things take it to the next level and i recommended that they look into 3d learning how to create 3d elements how to incorporate that into your video footage how to even make entire 3d animated scenes is something that can open so many different doors of opportunity to you guys i started using cinema 4d about a year ago and it's been difficult because i feel like there's not too much information out there there are a lot of really nice tutorials but for the most part i had to learn a lot of it just going through trial and error and this video is my solution to that this is what i wish i would have had about a year ago when i first started trying to experiment with 3d and videos i also want to say that i'm not an expert when it comes to this i'm still learning myself i'm still a student of it myself so as i grow as i evolve my skill set i want to share what i learned and help somebody who may have been in my shoes i also want to keep this very general i don't want it to be very step-by-step so those of you who don't have cinema 4d maybe you have blender which is free maybe you're using 3ds max maya whatever it is i want you to be able to take something away from this even if you're just first starting out so what i learned number one design process and pre-planning i want to quickly show you some of my design process for coming up with something like this because i think one of the most enjoyable parts of creating a 3d music video as well as one of the most important parts keeping track of the design you want have some reference images for what you're trying to create i have this little mood board folder here and i just went on behance.com and i just looked up a bunch of different cyberpunk imagery things that i'd like to pull from things that inspire me some looks that i like so here's some different images that i thought were really interesting and i think you can really see how these images translate into the final product that i made so if you look at some of these night shots here this really inspired the bridge stuff that you see in the music video um if you look at giant structure in the back of this bridge shots very much inspiration to place my own giant structure here here's a look at some of the fog i wanted to really have this foggy washed out buildings in the background um the colors are very similar as you can see the washed out greens and blues and some of the inspiration for some of the city street scenes some of the inspiration for some of the villain characters when you're trying to put something together that can be very complex and confusing i really recommend you pay attention to the design process and really nail down what you want to create because it can be super useful as you go along and save you a lot of time in the long run moving on to the second thing that helped me a huge amount and that is creating your characters finding objects for your scene you know what you want to make now you actually have to start putting it together you have to start creating the things that are going to go into it so here's a little bit of my process when it comes to that let's get into some of the useful information some of the things that might be going through your mind when first opening up the software and wanting to create something like this on your own from scratch so number one let's talk about finding characters finding animations for your characters because that's what you want to direct your audience to you want to have some subject matter in your 3d scene so i made an entire video on this but turbosquid.com cgtrader you can find a lot of really awesome free 3d things if you just do a quick google search so if you're looking for something simple like a simple base character model you can find something on turbosquid there's a lot of free options like i said i've also made a video using adobe fuse which is a free adobe product so if you have the adobe creative cloud suite you guys can create and design your own little 3d character and bring that into your desired 3d software so that's another useful thing in terms of getting things for free now if you want to get a little more advanced into it you want a little bump in quality if you want to get a little more advanced this is what i've been using lately this is character creator three this is a software by re-illusion and it's a very useful tool for creating your own 3d characters they also have the sister software that you can grab with this iclone which you may have heard of i'll leave links to all of this in the description but you can get a lot of animations for your characters there we'll talk about getting free animations for your character after this but for now let me just tell you a little bit more about character creator now the reason why i went with character creators they have this very useful plug-in called headshot and of course this all costs money but if you're willing to invest this is a very powerful tool you can load a headshot of a person into the software and it will create a 3d face and paste it onto your 3d character there's two settings for this plugin either the auto or the pro i did this example extremely quick so i'm using the auto version which allows you to have a 1k texture map of the face as well as it actually generates 3d hair for you based on the picture which is pretty cool the pro setting in the plugin gives you more high definition textures for the face as well as it gives you a lot more options in terms of creating the exact likeness of the image you're trying to replicate so here's a little look at me just throwing some clothes onto the character some of the built-in ones they have a marketplace but again you can find clothes on some other websites we'll mention later here's a look at some of the posing and the morphing you can set a manual facial feature you can animate it you can even connect with an iphone app provide your own facial motion capture so that your character can be speaking the words that you wanted to say i highly recommend you guys look into it so in terms of the character creation i could really go down the rabbit hole with this i'll probably make a separate video just talking about all the ins and outs of the workflow of making a custom character but to give you a general overview of some useful things i've been using daz.com which is free there's a wide marketplace of different clothing there's marvelous designer which lets you customize clothing for your character i use that a lot in this project which we're going to break down in a bit last thing i want to talk about is getting animations i always use mixamo.com free library of a bunch of different assets very useful stuff so that is a quick little rundown of creating a character how to go about doing that some of the things that might set you down the right path all right guys so now you've done your pre-planning you've gathered your assets you've created your characters ready to actually hop into the software let me show you some of my number one tips when it comes to actually putting everything together so tip number three is to think like a cinematographer while you're creating your 3d scenes alright so we're going to fire up this project file talk about creating some of the scenes again i want to make this general for people using any different 3d software but let's give you some useful information things that i've learned that i think are very important a lot of the information that you may know when it comes to making something look good with a camera is exactly the same very similar when it comes to making something look good in 3d so if you guys have that knowledge of depth of field if you guys have that knowledge of how manipulating lighting can really affect the scene if you have that knowledge of motion blur shutter speed creating different camera movements this is all going to be very very useful for you again when it comes to 3d and if you don't have that much knowledge on any of that don't worry because you can still learn a lot as you go again it's a huge part of 3d so maybe you start with 3d you get interested in camera stuff later you'll have a lot of bass knowledge because they're very similar and intertwined so let's take a look at the first little mock-up of this music video i gave it to the client he gave me some feedback on it he said it's a little bit too cartoony i want to make it a little bit more dark i had a little more realism to it and that was actually great criticism because it forced me to try things in a different way and to really try and hone down and improve the look as much as possible so some of the things that did improve the look here's the new and improved version of what i just showed you and of course you can tell it just looks a lot better the first version looks a little more video game cartoony kind of like borderlands the second version it's still a little video game cartoony because we're not spending thousands of dollars on the character creation and mograph animations so some of the things that didn't prove this is a using more realistic materials if you just take a quick look in the project file here you'll see that a lot of these materials that i'm using are octane mix materials now this is something very specific to cinema 4d and octane but basically what i'm doing is i'm making a bunch of materials and i'm mixing them together to try and get the best look as possible i'm not using anything basic a lot of these are on metallic material type glossy material type so we're getting reflections in there these things add a little bit more into the render time but it looks a lot better than just a normal diffuse based texture if you can learn about the different channels for these materials and what they do so learn about your specular learn about your bump your normal opacity if you don't know what any of that is try and find some tutorials that talk about it because it's going to really take you to the next level you'll see i have all these crazy designs in here because of this normal texture that i have if i turn that off and you can find all these normal maps textures all of this stuff just for free google images or on free texture websites it's very readily available so the next thing that brought this to the next level is my camera settings and this is very very important now you'll notice in the first version that i show you here one of the biggest difference is the depth of field in the first version i'm just using a wide camera angle i'm showing everything there's no there's no bokeh in the background there's no blurring there's no singling out a specific subject again like how i mentioned that cinematography background camera settings in of itself can do a lot for the look so if i just click on my octane tag here kind of pop this out so it's easier for you guys to see you can see some of the things that we're working with motion blur you guys can enable this within your 3d software or i'll talk about how to add motion blur manually in after effects after the fact thin lens this is very important so i fired up just a little quick render in octane and it's still rendering here it's still a little bit blurry we still have some fireflies but if i zoom in you can see the nice blurring on the lights in the background the separation from the foreground here which is very clear and crisp and blurring of the background this is one of the first things you learn about improving your quality in photography or cinematography getting a lens that's f 1.8 changing it so that you're not shooting at f 3.3 or whatever create that nice bokeh and improve the overall quality of the subject image now if i was to go through here in my octane camera settings and let's just go ahead and just turn all this off took off my octane camera tag and you'll be able to see here that now it looks a lot less realistic i'm there's no blurring of the background so everything's clear and in view and it depends on the shot you are doing you're not always going to be blurring the background you're not always going to be creating that bokeh for example here's some shots where i didn't use that blurring i had to rely on realistic textures on different lighting so that's one thing i wanted to get across with you depth of field all those things that you learned about improving an image with a camera it all translates into 3d you can change your f-stop here just like with a normal camera you'll see if i crank it all the way up it's going to blur all of this stuff you guys can use cinema 4d octane or i'm sure there's a lot of different camera tools where you can literally just click this button pick focus i'll just select the object and it'll focus on whatever i select there so that's a useful tool that i learned with octane specifically probably one of the most important things for crafting a nice look is the lighting creating depth in your scene with lighting there's so much you can do with lighting as you can see here we have your front light you got a little bit of side light i also have this tracked light with cinema 4d octane you can have a light targeted onto a camera and that's very useful when it comes to making this cinematic lighting lighting was very very important when it came to these side building areas so taking a look at this wall the left side here you can see that i'm using these octane lights to really accent and create these shadows create the look that i really want for this so i placed an octane light here i made it orange and i made it so that it's kind of facing under you can kind of see them here and here is the one that's inside as well so if i take this octane light and if i just turn it off go ahead and turn this one off as well you're gonna see it's not as nice of a scene now that it doesn't have those accent lightings that i took to time that i took the time to really put in here's another little angle from the shot and again this is all unrendered i haven't added any post blah blah onto it things that i've figured out while doing this that made this look a lot better is again the lighting placing lighting underneath an object to create that highlight that accent to the shape of it like placing this orange light underneath the bridge that really improved the look in my opinion as i went forward here's some more of these amisa materials on the signs here you'll see i have a light here i have a light facing into the alleyway to create this sort of red i also have a light in the alleyway just to have this orange light kind of coming out of it so that you can tell it's an actual alley we have some more lighting up here just to kind of separate this top bridge for this scene in particular i created this little puddle texture which is extremely simple to do i literally just created a plane object here i created a glossy material and then in the roughness channel i just looked up puddle roughly roughness map on google images and just drop this in here the key to really getting the good reflections though is from the lighting from your hdri environment i gave the basic info that i wanted to get across in terms of things that can help so your camera settings is huge um your materials is very big your lighting is very big depth of field all the things that make an image look good with the camera again it all translates into 3d let's just go through some of the scenes here and just break down some of the project files and some of the and some of my thought processing behind what went into a lot of it in this first example i'll show you here i had him kind of see these villains react to them and then run away now the issue here is i'm using these free mix mo animations there's a lot of issues i'm not the best again i'm not professional um involved with a lot of it so sometimes there's little glitches sometimes things don't look as good so here's the first alley scene where i kind of have them running these different angles and then here's the new and improved alley scene so first off the lighting in this scene is a lot better i have lighting again to kind of accent things when i talked about lighting the bridge before um you'll see i have this orange light to show that this is an alley instead of having just a static camera i have this camera locked onto him and this is a cool little technique where if you see above my head it says new camera and this is what we're locked into and you'll see this is actually um all of the different objects for the main character here and this right here this mix mo hips this is the actual rig of his little running animation so i took the rig part of his head and i locked the camera i made the camera a child of the head so that means all of the movements of the head the camera is going to follow this is a nice little locked-on technique just to add a bit more variation into the movement into the style of it and i thought it was a lot better than just a static camera animated so it kind of dips over a shoulder so you can see them chasing him here so just using some camera techniques like that to mask the things that you don't like and to show the things that you do like alright guys so we talked about the pre-planning we talked about gathering your materials and your characters and now we talked about some useful things that helped me along the way such as lighting on the importance of the importance of realistic materials and textures lighting thinking like a cinematographer for 3d camera settings all the things that you're going to have to struggle with while you are putting together your scene now let's talk about post work i think a lot of people are focused on what comes out of the 3d software but a lot of the time you can take what comes out of the 3d software and heavily improve it with some post work in photoshop if you're working with pictures or after effects if you're working with animations alright guys post work i used after effects for the majority of this just to put my finishing touches i also want to mention if you're wondering about my cinema 4d render settings for any reason i'm going to leave some links below on some of the videos that i used to render all of this out i'm also going to leave a link below to stuzor if you know if you've heard of that name from instagram super awesome 3d artist he created a tutorial about using fog and cinema 4d in after effects without using octane fog or an actual fog volume in your 3d scene i'll link that below because that was the workflow i used to put the fog in some of these scenes so one thing that you can do if you think that if you think that the movement of your 3d scenes are looking a little bit too stiff static unrealistic i recommend that you go to your effects and presets in after effects and i recommend you look up motion blur and you apply a pixel motion blur now this may take a little bit to render i'll crank it up so it's a little bit easier to see but if you pay attention to this part of the clothing right here and i just toggle this on and off you'll be able to see the motion blur what it really does i'm blurring some of here i actually did some mask work because i thought it was the it was blurring the face a little bit too much as well i wanted that to really be in focus so you see i just duplicated the footage here use this little mask around the face to be able to get what i ultimately wanted so motion blur using some blurring to kind of blend things in with the environment you can also use a gaussian blur if there's one specific thing you're trying to composite in that just looks a little bit too out of place sometimes just adding a little bit of blur trying to match camera settings can be very useful here's a good look at that bokeh from the camera settings i was talking about previously so let's go into some of the more advanced scenes here where i had to do a lot more post work and that fog tutorial is actually very great use this exposure value here to really manipulate where the fog is as you can see so some super useful stuff in creating the volumetrics if you pay attention to different spots this is what it looks like without any fog again it just kind of looks like there's floating buildings there this is what it looks like when i have that fog kind of masking the fact that they're floating there and that's the look i really wanted to go for also pay attention to these little gaps over on the right it really fills up the area using z distance so all you really need to do is export your z distance using cinema 4d octane and again that tutorial will show you exactly how so here we go here it is with everything just straight out of the 3d software so this is what the fog added using those exact same steps i explained it to you a little earlier we've got your gradient ramp here with your gaussian blur and your noise that's really making up the tone the environment of everything then i could have just left it at that i wanted to add a bit more so i used a little technique where i just tracked in some attract in some background buildings as you can see here and i'll just duplicate this and i'll show you what this really looks like if i just put it on normal i will delete the mask here's just what this image looks like so pretty similar for what i was going for in terms of the shape i want some more background buildings in here and then i use blending modes i use tracking 3d tracking so that it would match the movement and then i just use some simple masking just to soften some parts up where it was conflicting with some of the background buildings and that's how i was able to ultimately get this specific look for the scene and then of course we added color grade on top if it wasn't for the post work adding those few extra steps i'd really be limiting myself to what just comes out of cinema 4d or whatever 3d software you're using so that's a very important thing i learned if you'd like to see how i did this tracking method in particular again this is a more general video i'm not really showing step by steps film riot made a very useful sky replacement tutorial i learned all the steps from that specific easy quick tutorial so i'll leave that linked below another tiny little touch which i think just adds a lot you'll see i added some little fog layers these are just some 4k fog that i just put on screen but having some fog behind the buildings behind the bridge i think it just breathed a little bit more life into this and really just kind of showed more of the depth tiny things like that again are things that can really improve the look anyways guys i hope you enjoyed the tutorial hopefully you learned something new let me know what you'd like to see next in the comments down below i'm planning on creating this whole facial vfx after effects technique next so i'm excited for that hopefully you guys are as well anyways guys thank you so much for watching thank you so much for supporting and i'll see you guys in the next

Channel: Max Novak

Views: 49,894

Keywords: how, to, make, 3d, music, video, what i learned, blender, c4d, adobe, premiere, after effects, more, realistic, tutorial, max novak, smooth, motion, marvelous designer, how to make 3d character, create, design, animated, characters, fuse, element 3d, iclone, character creator, headshot, cgi, vfx, reacts, 3ds max, atom visuals, slow motion, trippy, editing, greyscale gorilla, brthr, how to make a 3d music video, preset, pack, plugin, free

Id: 82nJYq3VsNs

Length: 19min 55sec (1195 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020