Stunning Product Ads To Impress Clients and Make Money

hey everyone today I'm going to be showcasing my own personal workflow that I use for my own visual effects clients specifically for product placement videos so I'm going to be using blender and after effects in today's tutorial so let's go ahead and jump into it before we get started I just want to say a massive thank you to all my patreon and YouTube members without your guys' continued support I don't know if I could provide free content for you guys on YouTube so if you are interested I will have links down below again I am super grateful also down below I'll provide a link with all of my files that I use including my blender file my After Effects file all of that stuff if you guys do want to check that out okay so let's go go ahead and jump inside a blender uh now for today's uh tutorial we're going to be looking at this image now I basically want to recreate this uh orientation of our camera uh inside of 3D space and so the best way to do that is actually using the fspy um program and so we can go ahead and I'm just going to drop my footage inside of here we can dim image off and then I want to use these lines to basically align our scene and so these are my uh y lines and so the green lines are yde I just want to position those on the lines on this roow down here and I I am holding shift just to kind of zoom in like that now there aren't really too many great x lines in this scene so what I'm going to use is instead of X I'm going to do Z since I noticed we have a lot of up and down lines like that uh so let's go ahead and position some of those so right there is a pretty good line and then I'm going to assume these buildings are roughly parallel with each other um in real life they might not be totally parallel but I don't think it's going to matter for our specific scene uh so now let's turn the XY grid floor on and you can see that now we are basically rotated and our camera is set in our scene so let's go ahead and shift s I'm going to save this right here save that as and replace that uh now let's come back out of here let's go into blender now now you do need the fspy Importer add-on I will have that link down below as well uh we can go to file import that in and our fspy uh project and then of course I do want to just locate the script that we just made so this uh version 3 FS spy uh project right there and when we import that in we can go ahead and delete everything and and now we actually have our camera set up inside blender and it's uh correctly rotated and all that stuff so super easy there and then let's go ahead and actually add in our bottle so I'm going to be using the blender kit add-on uh I'll have a link down below this is actually a great add-on for kind of these use cases where you just need assets and fasts so I'm going to type in makeup and if I come up here I can select free first uh and we actually have this one right here so shout out to this crater this is an amazing model uh so you know definitely give a checkout to them uh so let's go ahead and I'm going to drag and drop this into our scene and it's created a new thing up here we can just scale that up and now I don't need this Splender kit add-on anymore so I'll just hide that let's go ahead and delete this box since we don't really need that and then I'm going to go ahead and put the cap on the actual bottle so let's go ahead and RX 90° there and then I can go ahead and come to the top view we're just going to position that roughly on the bottle like that and then of course we need to come to the side view and position it so that the cap is on the bottle like that so that is looking good of course we do have the lipstick actually poking out from the top so we're going to g z move that so let's go back into the camera view now I just want to position my bottle a little bit better so I'm going to just move that back here and we'll scale it up like that and now we can mess around a little bit with the lighting of our scene because if we go into rendered there is no lighting so let's go ahead and add in a HDR image so now let's go to environment texture and we can just open up a uh HR image I'll have that link down below if you guys do want to follow along but here it is we can go ahead and open that up now we actually have uh lighting and reflection data into our scene so let's go ahead and uh first I want to go to render properties and set film to uh transparent right here also I noticed that we're still on the EV render engine so I'm going to be working in Cycles today so we can just set up our GPU and then Den noising that I might also copy this over to our render right now just because we're in that kind of creative stage still so now we have this scene looking pretty nice the first thing I noticed is that we don't really have any of the bu building Reflections in our scene such as these buildings and stuff over here so let's go ahead and import that into our scene so I'm going to go ahead and shift a going to add a mesh plane and let's just scale This Plane up roughly like that and let's go ahead and actually uh change the opacity up on our background image just so I can see that a little bit uh better over here so again let's scale this up and then I'm going to go edit mode and uh you know move some of this around over here and I'm move this back here just so it's you know kind of going all the way to our building over here and now I can take these two edges right here and just e and extrude those up on the uh Z just like that so now we actually have our scene you know roughly modeled out I'm not actually going to be worrying about modeling out the cars but um if you do need a highly reflective object object um then you know you might need to model out the cars as well and so right now we can go ahead and I want to make a new material on this so let's go to the Shader editor I'm just going to make a new material so I'm going to name this uh buildings like that uh now for uh because we're going to be using this for Reflections only we actually don't need this principal bsdf so I'm going to go ahead and delete that let's go ahead and add in a image texture because again we want to project our image so our FS spy image we want to project on the surface of our material uh so now we have this we need to hold control and hit t uh and make sure it's set to window and so now we can actually see the texture is projected from our view uh and since we're in the camera view it's basically being projected on the object like that uh so of course we need to set it from repeat to mirror uh just so that this fallof is a little bit better right here and now you can see that we're actually having some of this reflection data on the side uh now this a good point to go ahead and deal with our animation so what I'm going to do is I basically want the cap to kind of raise up and then I want the lipstick to actually spin up and you know uh actually be in view so on frame 10 we'll say is when I want the animation to start so I'll hit I and set a location and rotation key frame and then we'll go to frame around like frame 60 we say gz move that up and I'll hit another location and rotation um you know key frame up here so now it's raising up of course I do want the makeup bottle to be raising up as well so around like 25 for me I'm going to go ahead and select that uh makeup thing I believe if we come up here we can select the uh color the stick color right there uh so now of course we can set a i and location rotation key frame again and then we'll come to like frame 90 and we'll say that's when we want it to stop we want to Z move that up so it's like roughly right there and then of course I do want it to rotate so we'll rotate it on the z-axis uh 360° like that and so of course let's hit I and location and rotation again and so now if we play this animation we can see that the lipstick raises up and Spins like it's being you know protruded like that uh so that looks pretty good of course let's set our n key frame now because if I play this uh we can see that it it doesn't go all the way to 250 so we can stop at around we'll say 130 so I'm going to set a in key frame of 130 down there uh so now let's uh view what we actually have rendered we can see that we have correct um you know reflection stuff here what we're actually missing right now is Reflections behind the camera and so if I come uh out here we actually have no geometry out here for blender to actually reflect onto our bottle and so that is giving us all this white space here and so I want to try to match it as closely as possible to the real world scene what I'm going to do is just uh use some of this building texture to actually uh make it behind our camera so let's go ahead and do that what I'm going to do is uh let's select This Plane object that we had created I'm just going to select This Plane uh right here let's uh shift e to duplicate that and I can right click to reset that I'm going to hit P to separate by selection and now we have its own kind of object over here uh I'm just going to you know put it you know roughly right there where the building would be and then I want to go ahead and project the texture onto it and bake it in because right now if I kind of view out here I'll go ahead and hide that other plane that we just made uh you can see no matter where we look from it's always going to project the texture like that so I want to go ahead and bake in that texture so to do that we can go to tab I want to go ahead and select a to select all my geometry I want to right click and then subdivide now we're going to subdivide it and give a lot more geometry for this scene so let's do it to like 50 and now you can see that we have a lot more geometry for this specific object the reason that we have to do this is because blender actually uses the geometry to project textures onto so if we don't have enough geometry it's actually going to distort the image and all of that so now that we have all of the geometry in our scene what we can do is uh in edit mode we hit U to unwrap and then we want to go ahead and project from View and now if we come over here what I can do is I want to make a new material so we don't overwrite our previous material so I'm going to just click that and now I want to set it from UV uh from window to UV now and so now uh you can see if we set it like that we now have the actual texture baked in and no matter where we actually view it from it's going to be uh you know the exact same so that is very good now what we can do is I want to position this behind here so what I actually might do is come over here let's uh go go to the 3D viewport go into uh the camera view over here just so we can see the actual Reflection live and uh let's alt H to un hiide our previous reflection uh so let's select that building material I'm just going to move this back here again behind our camera let's just go ahead and rotate on the z90 de and so now let's just place it back here and now you can see it's automatically updating uh so what I do want to do is this kind of gold material is way too reflective for my taste so I'm going to go ahead and go into the Shader editor and I'm just going to bump up that uh roughness value so now you can see that we're having much more accurate you know shading and some Reflections and stuff in our scene uh now we are actually ready to go ahead and render out our CGI because basically the only thing that we want to do uh inside of compositing is that we want our CG pass and then we want to go ahead and add in some Reflections in compositing to actually make it look more realistic uh so now that I have all of that set up let's go ahead and come to the uh sorry the compositing tab we can hit use nodes and then shift control click click to add a viewer node let's go ahead and uh render out an image just to see uh what we are working with okay so we have a couple of things wrong first of all we can see the uh reflection kind of material and then also we don't have any shadows in our scene you can see down here we should be having some Shadows right here again that is because uh if we come back out to the layout tab that is because this material we actually deleted the principal BSF and so basically I want to use these two sides as reflection objects and then this bottom section as a shadow catcher and so what we're going to do is let's go ahead and right click and add a new collection we're going to name this Reflections like that I'm going to place that plane and uh both of our reflection ples uh so these objects in the reflections collection now I uh again I want to separate out this bottom kind of ground uh layer to be a shadow catcher object so what I'm going to do is into edit mode I'll just select this face we'll hit P to separate by selection again so now this one I want to be our shadow so I'm going to bring this out of our Reflections and uh now that we have that we can go ahead and set this to be a shadow Catcher And so we'll come down to the visibility temp go to mask Shadow catcher and now you can see nothing has changed and that's actually because we don't have the principal bsdf add-on so what we have to do is we have to make another duplicate to this texture so we're going to do another duplicate we'll name this one Shadow so we can separate it from the others then we need to shift a we're going to add a principal BSF so now if we plug that into the Chanel kind of texture right here you'll notice that we finally have Shadow back but of course it is very dark and you know very weird looking and that is because we actually have some of these objects affecting the shading of uh this kind of Shadow catcher so let's go ahead and change that I'm going to select these objects and in the object properties we can turn the diffuse and Shadow off uh now you can see that is um matching much more closely we also need to do the exact same thing to the other plane as well so diffuse and Shadow off there as well but now we have this so that is looking good let's go ahead and uh you know turn everything on so first I want to to go ahead and make the reflections only uh indirect only so now we can see that we're not actually viewing the reflections however they're still kind of you know affecting our scene so that is looking good and you know very accurate there also one quick thing is that we do want to go ahead and turn all of the reflections off you can actually see that we see a lot of the uh kind of you know reflection and stuff in this scene so what I want to do is turn the roughness up and then we'll turn the specular down so that'll just remove that kind of black section out there uh so now we have correctly you know separated our shadow from our reflection and our Reflections aren't actually being rendered uh in the camera and so we actually have reflection data but we can't actually see those objects that we created uh so now that this is looking good and we are actually ready to go ahead and render out our CGI so let's go ahead to the output properties you can of course set a uh your own folder for that uh I'm going to be saving as a PNG sequence with a alpha channel so rgba now the compression ratio I believe uh PNG is actually a lossless format and so depending uh depending on how long you actually have to render you can set that number up high fire I'm just going to set it as 15 as default uh so we can save that and then once you have all of that saved uh we do want to come up here and render the final animation okay so once it has all rendered out we are ready to go into compositing so let's go ahead and Import in our image right there and then we also need our CGI and so you just want to drag that folder in there as well so now that we have that let's drag our CGI and make a new composition and then we can add our image uh down below that so now let's go ahead and start compositing so first thing I want to do is Match the black level so let's go and add an effect color correction levels and then I'll just turn this input black to like a neg five uh I noticed that the blacks actually match pretty well to the uh you know underneath of this car and everything so neg five is just you know lightening that up ever so slightly so now that we have that we'll notice that our bottle is a little bit too in Focus so what I'm going to do is go ahead and add a uh you know an effect let's go to blur and sharpen and we'll add a camera lens blur and now this it's way too much let's add it to just one and now you you can see that just blurs it every so slightly to match it to this uh kind of environment here uh now let's go ahead and add in our reflection so let's go ahead and I want to duplicate this uh layer and then with this uh layer underneath of here what I want to do is I want to go ahead and uh flip that so if we hit R we can rotate at 180° uh so now we basically have it flipped and then we can position it down here uh now you will see that the logo is kind of uh you know flip backwards now and we can actually change that by adding a flop you know kind of effect over here so if you type in flock uh in the effects presets over here we can add that into this layer and now we actually have our uh kind of you know labeling going the correct way uh now I'm going to go and delete the camera lens blur since we need to add another type of blur to this and now I'm going to be keeping the reflection super simple in this tutorial so let's go ahead and just add in a super simple uh gajan blur so right here and let's just turn that up uh something like that now again this isn't the most accurate way because um what what actually happen in real life the further away you are from the reflection and so down here would actually be a lot more blurred uh then closer to the bottle and stuff like that you can actually see that effect in our scene but again I'm just trying to keep it super basic for this part so now we need to make this reflection look a little bit better and so what we're going to do is basically use some of the luminance values to actually determine where it's more reflective versus less reflective so let's go ahead and add that in I'm going to uh just copy and paste this uh last thing let's go ahead and put it and sandwich it in between our uh you know above layer and our uh low layer and now we basically need to create a luminance mat uh to actually you know project certain textures onto this so let's go ahead and do that so I'm going to add what's called a luminance key and so luminance key is basically going to key out um the different luminance values of our footage and so I want to key out the brighter spot in my image so now we have this back and I want to change this threshold up and uh we'll just increase that and now you can see that some of the darker spots are actually uh being eliminated from our um you know actual uh key that we have so now this is giving us this result let's go ahead and I want to uh you know feather the edges just a little bit uh so that is looking better and so now you can see that we have this effect going on let's of course uh make the opacity way less for the actual key so something like that just so we have a little bit more reflection here and you know a little bit um you know reflection here and so now we can play of course around with the opacity of the actual plate and so maybe decrease the opacity there something like that is matching much more closely uh and giving us a pretty cool result and so this is uh you know how we're going to do with the reflections here and we'll just uh match it a lot more than we could before uh and so here is without the luminance key and so you can see the reflections look very fake and then the luminance key just you know adds a little bit more texture into that reflection and blends it in a little bit more uh so now let's go ahead and uh pre-compose everything because now we want to add some uh you know camera shake and some other effects to actually make it look like a video and so let's right click I'm going to pre-compose and we can just hit okay here okay so now that we have everything as its own uh layer right here let's go ahead and add some camera Shake now I'm going to be using the wiggle uh kind of expression inside of after effect so let's go ahead hit P to go to position I'm going to right kick and uh edit the expression and so let's add in a wiggle expression so just wiggle right here and then what we need to do is let's add two numbers so the first number I believe is going to be how fast it actually goes so I believe with testing I just stuck around a one and then the second number is going to be how much it actually moves in the frame and so uh I believe in testing I set it to 20 it's just a real subtle effect and so you can play around with some of those numbers there uh to get your own kind of result but now you can see our camera is actually moving uh of course we do have like some black uh sections over here so we actually do need to scale in our footage to actually eliminate some of those black area so let's go ahead and hit S I believe a 102 is going to get them out uh and so now we can see uh we're never going to have kind of those black bars on the top or bottom uh so that is looking good now let's go ahead and add in some other stuff so um what footage has that images don't is grain is moving grain and so let's go ahead and add a moving grain into our shot so I'm going to go ahead and add in a noise and grain add grain and then uh the intensity we'll go ahead and uh put this to final output uh the size is way too big so I'm going to turn that size down to a zero like that and then I can go ahead and turn the intensity down as well we'll do like a three maybe uh yeah so now you can see it's just adding some grain like that and gives us some cool results so uh next thing we need to do is I want to add some lens Distortion because all cameras kind of have lens Distortion and it's going to blend in the shot a little bit more so let's go to effect I'm going to go or actually I'll type in over here I'll just go to lens and then we have the CC lens to store so let's go ahead and add that in of course I do want my grain pass to be the final thing that we do if you think about real life cameras uh the grain is kind of um over top of everything and so again uh whatever we do we want the AD grain to be our last kind of effect that we're going to be doing uh so next of course this size is way too small we need to increase that all the way up to 500 so now that's basically not doing anything in our shop uh so I believe in testing I set to around a 450 and so now you can see that just adds a little bit of distortion at the edges of our uh lens to kind of mimic what a real world camera would actually be shooting in uh so that is looking good the final thing I want to do is a little bit of uh chromatic aberration so let's add that in over here so chromatic operations uh again we just need to add that above our AD grain so now you can see this doing this effect this is way too much what I actually need to do let's set this to like negative one and I'll set this uh one over here to like one so now you can see it's giving us just a super subtle effect over here uh with some of these chromatic aberration on the side of course it's doing the entire image and so it looks a little bit out of focus to me so what I actually like doing is uh let's invert the fallof and so that's basically going to just uh Delete the inside and you know only affect the outside edges uh and so now let's bump this number up I believe in testing I found that 93 worked the most for me uh so now you can see it's doing a really subtle effect if we zoom in here it's actually giving us some chromatic aberration and some effects on the outside edges of our thing but in the middle it's actually not affecting that and that's how actual chromatic aberration in lenses would actually work uh and so that is pretty much all I'm going to add to uh you know make this image feel a little bit more lively um I do highly recommend that you guys maybe add like some wind effects and some stuff like that if you really want to make this look um you know like you actually shot it for real instead of it being a uh you know static image um let's go ahead and render this out now so I'm going to come up to file we're going to go to export and add to render CU um now h.264 is going to be totally fine for me so I'm not going to mess around with any of these settings here um and then we can go ahead and save it in a new location once you have it named and saved we can come and render the final animation okay so here is the final result that we got from this tutorial hopefully you guys got something similar or learned a thing or two on the way of course if you do want my specific files I'll have a link for that down below so you can break it down and see exactly what I did uh but as you can see we have the correct Reflections we have a cool animation and everything is looking cool uh so again thank you guys so much for watching if you did make it this far in the video it' mean a lot to me if you consider liking and subscribing uh but anyways I will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 47,379

Keywords: blender, blender tutorial, vfx, beginner blender tutorial, vfx blender, blender vfx tutorial, blender beginner vfx tutorial, beginner vfx tutorial, blender vfx, vfx in blender tutorial, blender beginner vfx, how to make professional vfx, cgi, visual effects, professional vfx ads, 3D ads, vfx advertising, vfx advertising blender, digital marketing blender, vfx marketing, vfx digital marketing, make money with blender, how to make money in blender, get clients in blender

Id: YFmpMFYv-WM

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024