Realistic VFX in Blender - The Ultimate Guide

let's take this opportunity to demonstrate how we can add CGI elements and completely blend them into our environment using blender now there are four steps to this process first you have to solve the camera in 3D which basically Maps the camera movement of the shot to the 3D camera then you have to place the appropriate elements in the solved scene then you match the lighting and finally you composite it all together let's go you can download the footage from the link in the description now in order to solve the camera motion we go into motion tracking workspace and we import our footage for the motion model we select the location and rotation because there is not much perspective shift and the camera does not move closer to the subject for things to change scale the aine model is used if the track points change shape over time we then click on detect features to automatically detect trackable points and then we can track forward after that is done we filter tracks based on the tracking error to remove problematic track points then we select the track points that did not track all the way through and might give us solve errors and we delete them and then we click on solve camera motion we have an average solve era of 0.3 pixels which is really good anything below one pixel is great we're happy with it we set the footage as background and click set up tracking scene so that all the track points are transferred over to to the 3D scene now we select at least three track points and use them to Define our ground plane then selecting a point in the center to set as the origin now if we play the footage we can see that the cube sticks to the ground without sliding this is a perfect track if we then select a point and add a cube on it we can see that it sticks perfectly congratulations we have a good camera solve this gives us immense control and this is great let's crack on let's bring our robot model as a subject to match the lighting of the 3D scene to our footage it has a glossy surface and it helps in matching the lighting a bit better to set the basic lighting we start with taking a screen grab from the footage and setting it up as an hdri I admit it's a bit hacky way to do it but it works at least in setting the basic lighting up and we can push on from there since this is not a true hdri we need to tweak it to match the look increasing the strength sets up the basic lighting we augment this by adding a sunlamp coming from the same direction as the light in the footage if you draw a line between the object and its corresponding Shadow you can make a guess on where the direction of the light is in this case it's at about 1l position from the camera's perspective we can then scale the ground plane and roughly recreate the ground and walls in 3D we do this to get appropriate Shadows for our CG objects by making a shadow catcher it sounds like a super hero character doesn't it we can use the track markers to guide us where these walls are supposed to exist in the 3D space so right around these markers will be the front wall we extrude the edges to match the window sill and extrude it further in the local x-axis to make it a shelf if we set the viewport display to wire we can see our Fage underneath we can then continue recreating the main structure H let's now think what is the story of this person so it looks like resting in his base of operations like he hiding some radioactive material in his fridge interesting let's bring in a fridge the models are free and Linked In the description so you can freely follow along as you like what is also completely free is my email newsletter to give you some more value apart from YouTube videos I write it myself and share my tips and tricks workflows assets and Snippets from the books that I'm currently reading so it's an ultra filtrate of my learning processes and and I think it will help you as well okay onto the scene again let's place the fridge model on the side of the wall to give some depth to the composition we need to add something that goes from the foreground to the midr let it be a small robot playing with a ball now in order to make correct Shadows on the robot we need to close down this space from the right side to avoid light coming from that direction this is a pre-animated robot with a walk cycle using assets like these and building a library of if your own assets speeds up your workflow quite a lot so I always recommend building a resource Library a rebel friend here needs a communication Channel with his friends so we place a military grid radio to send and receive Communications now what is a rebel without a weapon let's arrange it for our friend this massive shotgun with first air equipment seems like a suitable weapon of choice we place it here alongside our friend let's think what else can happen in an apocalypse there is a possibility of zombies lurking around I suppose so we can add in a guitar which is actually a flamethrower this should take care of all the zombies out there let's also add in a water tower outside now as a foreground element that we will eventually blur out but it does give some death to the scene we add a spider Sentinel robot ready for orders on the wall our friend has pictures of his heroes from the past the Polaroids give a little bit more worn out effect to the scene now when the radio is being jammed our friend has a redundancy for communication it's an old Soviet ARA phone using landlines to add in more character we add some graffiti to the wall this graffiti plane is shrink wrapped to the wall so that we can move it around without having a detach from the wall all right let's Now set up a rigid body simulation for the ball that the small robot is training with we add a sphere and make it an active rigid body make the floor as a passive rigid body and shape as mesh we set the friction at 0.25 and bounciness at 0.65 next we need to give the ball an initial push for it to roll towards the midr we can do this by setting up a cube as an animated passive rigid body this Collision throws the ball in the direction of the fridge the bow is without texture so let's do it now it's a simple texture with the metallic Shader mixed with a missive Shader with a wave texture as a factor it's a little bit too simple so let's add some roughness we can do this by putting down a noise texture and plugging it in the roughness channel of the metallic Shader adjusting the fall off by using a color ramp we have our ball texture plot twist this ball is actually an EMP grenade good figure now we also need some radar monitoring of the air space of our base so let's add some radar monitoring equipment right here with Clos circuit camera control system the fridge is yellow colored which I don't think really goes well with the surrounding we can give it somewhat of a military color I think all these elements cover all the basic equipment that a rebel would need now before we render we need to set up render lays we will render each CG element as a separate render to have good control in the compositing stage for this we Mak separate collections for each CG element and we enable only the ones that we want in the rander a so Shadow catcher will be in every randay since we need Shadows of the object along with itself importantly in the fridge layer we also enable the flying drone layer and set it as indirect only this renders only the Shadow and reflections of the drone on the fridge surface we do this for all layers that receive the Drone shatter in the compositor all the render layers are set to render out in separate folders once all of it is rendered as separate renderers it's time to composite it all together in After Effects we import our base footage and render layers in the after effects composition let's arrange it from the backmost element to the frontmost element now if you play blast this and the render layers appear out of syn with the back plate it might be due to frame rate mismatch this footage is 25 frames per second whereas After Effects reads an image sequence at 24 frames per second by default so right click interpret footage Main and set the frame rate at 25 frames per second now the first thing we need to do is to rotoscope out this front staircase and put it on top of the render because it is a foreground element we'll duplicate the back plate and place on top and we can try rotoscoping it using the ARX rotoscope tool but the problem is it gives unreliable and often unusable results results what we will use is another built-in tool in the after effects which is called mocha CC and it is a good tool to do this sort of stuff we apply it as an effect onto the layer in the after effects and then open it using a pen tool we trace the margins of the staircase that we need to Roto out we give all the edges a little bit of roundedness so it's not too sharp after the tracking is done we save this tracking data and go back and into the after effects in the mat section we view mat to see if the data has been transferred over which it indeed has we can then apply mat and create a mask here we can feather out the mask a little and decrease mask expansion to cover for the Feathering perfect let's now adjust the render layers here we add a levels effect and Hue saturation we adjust the values to integrate it with the foreground colors we also need to masch the foreground blur for this we add a camera lens blur effect and IB the blur values with the staircase this looks great now the next bit is interesting the little robot on the Right Moves from the shade into the sunlight and therefore this change in lighting condition needs to reflect on it as well and this is important for proper integration in order to do this we add an adjustment layer and precompose it with our mini bot render layer here we'll add the same Hue saturation levels and camera lens blur effect and we try and match these values to the surroundings we'll then duplicate this adjustment layer and move the playhead to where the robot is in the sunlight we adjust all the parameters for this layer again and match it to the surroundings now we'll have a smooth transition from one adjustment layer to the other by setting key frames for the opacity of the these layers the foreground adjustment progressively decreases in the opacity and the midr adjustment progressively increases as the robot moves closer and closer to the sunlight I think this looks fine we can then copy the same layers for the EMP grenade since it under goes the same change in lighting we have the same three effects on the next render layers and tweak them a little for better integration the renders from the render engine do come out a bit sh so adjusting the camera lens blur effect gels it with the back plate now to make the scene a little bit Fuller we render out a missed pass from blender we set the transfer mode to screen and adjust the influence using the levels adjustment to make it fall within the midr we add a small amount of winette and a color correction layer to give it a cohesive look on top of it we add a stock radio of subtle dust through a light shaft and set the transfer mode to screen this tiny movement adds more life into the scene with this done we finally have our composite with a little sound design this is the final sequence an authorized equipment detected please produce ID while I scan the air commencing SC radioactive Source identified you are in violation of Co 435 V I sincerely hope you learned something and if you did please leave a like and if you enjoyed it do you consider subscribing I will see you soon in the next one farewell

Channel: Hamza N. Meo

Views: 94,537

Keywords: environment, blender, 3d, unreal engine, 3d environments, unreal, visual effects, cgi, vfx, compositing, blender vfx, blender cgi, after effects vfx, after effects

Id: _T_3hMirhjw

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Sun May 12 2024