My Bulletproof VFX Workflow (from start to finish)

[Music] what's up y'all so i've been doing vfx for a few years now and i feel like i've come up with a pretty solid workflow of how to start with a piece of footage and end up with a vfx shot with some cgi in it so in this video i'm going to take you guys through my workflow what works for me the decisions i make and the steps i take to make stuff look good if you want to try it out yourself i've created a handy dandy flowchart poster you can download the high-res image or purchase a poster version so yeah let's get into it you know it's it's funny we're talking about rendering stuff because micro center has all the computer stuff you would ever need to make the most spanking renders at really good prices it seems like everything this these days is being done on zoom calls and through the ethernet go to micro center computers they got laptops anything you need for your tech needs you know this black friday thing that's going on all the good deals people are stressing out my mom's going to like wait in line somewhere you don't need to worry about any of that it's going all month so you don't need to worry about waiting in line or stressing out or hanging out with my mom just buy it online and then pick it up in the store it's easy explicitly told me not to say this in the ad new customers can get 128 gigabyte flash drive and 128 gigabyte micro sd card in store no purchase necessary limited time offer limit one per customer but like be cool about it though so head on over to micro center for all of your holiday shopping needs and electronic stuff they're great people and i support them supporting me supporting you i'm specifically talking about when you have a piece of footage and you need to put some cgi into it i'm not talking about like full animated shots or anything like that and this is more of just a general guideline all right first thing we're going to do in our vfx pipeline is prepare an image sequence you could just bring the raw video file into blender but i found that with that there can be some hiccups with compression or frame rate issues things like that and having an image sequence is a pretty software agnostic way to go it's very reliable so in after effects i'm going to bring in my footage so i got a piece of footage here of me walking through a forest path waving at a rock like a crazy person and walking up to it this is actually looking pretty good how it is so i could just render this straight out as an image sequence but if you have footage that was shot in a log profile or in a flat profile meaning the contrast is a bit low and the saturation is a bit low i would bump those back up so that you have a reliable reference when you're starting to create your scene in blender so i'm going to kick this out as an image sequence at its native resolution of 1080p if you have high resolution footage feel free to export that as well in blender you can actually create proxies in downres if it's not playing smooth so let's bring it into blender i'm going to start in the movie clip editor and bring in the footage we want the length of our animation to match the length of our footage so i'm going to hit set scene frames that'll fix everything up and if i hit play it's going pretty slow now that's just because blender is loading the footage into itself caching it whatever but if you want your footage to play real smooth you can actually create proxies inside of blender which is awesome so over at the proxy slash timecode tab i'm going to enable that and i'm going to build a proxy at 50 resolution then under proxy size i'm going to select 50 now we're playing nice and buttery smooth the next thing to do is to figure out the camera movement for the shot and there are three different options for this depending on your footage if your camera is moving around in 3d space you're going to use the blender camera tracker ian hubert has a great tutorial on this i'll link it below if your camera is tilting and panning around but it's just staying in one spot that's called a nodal pan and you can use blender's camera tracker for that as well just be sure to select the tripod option however that doesn't give you focal length data which is how zoomed in your camera is and for that we're going to be using a free program called f-spy which i love in f-spy you bring in a single frame from your footage and show the software a couple sets of parallel lines in your scene then using math and it'll calculate the angle and the focal length of your camera it also has a handy dandy blender importer add-on so you can bring that camera right into your scene if your camera isn't moving at all just use f-spy and you're good to go the next thing i like to do is recreate the geometry of the environment in which the shot was captured this does a few things for one it just helps you know where to put things once you start animating the objects in your scene it can also help influence lighting later to make your render look more realistic you can use it to create contact shadows if your object is going to be touching the floor or a wall or something and if you're going to be doing physics simulations you'll have objects to collide with so it's always good to recreate your scene in 3d there are a few different ways of doing this my favorite way is to on the day you're filming 3d scan the environment and then you can bring that in and have a perfect representation of both the textures and the geometry of the scene you're working with now you don't always have that luxury so sometimes you gotta hand model it but if you have your camera and your angles set up right it shouldn't be too bad hot tip to make your render way more realistic is use your footage as a texture for your virtual environment you just project it from the camera and that way the textures are actually real they're from your footage and so then light bouncing off of that is going to hit your object and make it look much more grounded in the scene now's the fun part import your assets animate do your thing go crazy now that all the animation is finished it's time to focus on how this actually looks so if you hop into rendered view it's probably gonna look bad but that's why we have these next three steps the first thing i like to do is grab an hdri to wrap around the scene as a nice foundation for the lighting i get most of my hdris from polyhaven.com they have an amazing selection of free 8k hdrs you're going to want to pick an hdri where the lighting best matches the lighting in your footage once you have it in blender you can dial in that look by rotating it around to find the correct lighting angle bumping up or taking down the saturation and increasing or decreasing the strength of the hdr now if your scene is pretty simple and doesn't have a lot of lights you might be good to go but if your footage has some lamps or studio lights in it or something like that you're going to want to recreate those virtually as well what's important to keep in mind is the distance the size and the color of the lights make sure to match those things as closely as you can to your footage and you should be good to go now we're ready to set up the scene for rendering if you modeled a virtual version of your environment you're going to want to make sure that it is not visible to the camera and you can specify that in the object tab however if you modeled a floor and your object is touching the floor or near it or needs to be casting a shadow on it make sure it is visible to the camera and select shadow catcher instead then it's time to render i usually render out a few still images beforehand to dial in the amount of samples you'll need i try and pick the least amount of samples that i can without the footage looking too noisy also if your hdri is showing up in your renders make sure under the film tab to check transparent and it'll fix that all right feel free to render take a break go on a walk do some meditation drink some water you know then when that's done it's time to bring your sexy new render into your compositor you can use blender for compositing but personally i use adobe after effects because the layer based system it just makes it really easy to do quick and dirty compositing and it looks pretty good smack that render on top of your original footage and now it's time to do some color tweaking the first thing i like to do is match the black and white values of the render to the footage you can find these values in your footage by using a color picker and finding the darkest and brightest points of your scene these are going to be your references for the darkest and brightest points of your render i usually throw a levels adjustment onto the render and tweak those values until those dark and bright points are matching you can also use that color picker to find how saturated your footage is and match your render to that oftentimes footage will have a bit of a green or magenta or orange or blue tint and you can match that in your render by using your levels adjustment just slide around those rgb values until it looks right the last little thing to match is the blur of your footage if you zoom in most pieces of footage aren't perfectly sharp and so you want to match that with your render next oftentimes in your footage you'll have things obscuring your render in this case i have my hand waving over the uh little guy and so i had to mask that out pretty easy i used after effects's rotobrush 2 which is an artificial intelligence assisted rotobrush tool which is it's just amazing and that's it now we have a full render ready to go ready to upload ready to enjoy obviously this workflow doesn't account for all situations but it's always at least for me a great place to start and i hope it helps you too feel free to download the hi-res image or purchase a poster and thank you for watching let me know if you have any other suggestions for tutorials or anything you'd like to see down in the comments peace [Music] you

Channel: Peter France

Views: 120,721

Keywords: workflow, pipeline, blender, 3d, start to finish

Id: -A_vQ8fYRAo

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 24 2021