The secret to INSANELY REALISTIC animation in Blender! Camera tracking tutorial, all steps included!

I'm always getting asked how do I make my animations look more realistic what techniques can I use to make my renders look more like real life well the answer is so simple use real life in your renders I've been experimenting a lot with this recently and now I'm ready to share my technique for easy camera tracking blender I put a link to my footage not all the models used in the description below okay so in blender instead of clicking Jam rollers you normally probably do click on the VFX setup this will open up a tracking setup ready to go I'm just going to slide this up a bit because we don't need these two top windows at the minute the next thing we're going to do is open the tracking footage so click open in the middle navigate to your tracking footage it's called tracked footage open clip now you can see just over here actually there's some information about the frame rate and the resolution of the clip so just in your settings over here make sure the resolution of the blender project matches your footage and also make sure the frame rate this is a 25 frames per second make sure that matches as well the next thing we're going to do is Click set scene frames this basically makes the blender project the same length as your clip in frames click prefetch to load the footage into the cache file and then we're going to set let me just make this a little bit bigger set motion model to location rotation and scale just over here and the render settings a couple of other things just change the color management from filmic to standard and also process film here set this to transparent change your render engine to Cycles GPU compute and 16 frames should be enough for both rendering and the viewport okay now looking at the tracking footage I'm just going to play it for you so it's quite a simple scene it's um basically a camera sort of rotating around this space here you'll see I put a couple of tripods in where I want the car to stand in this is just to give a blender an extra help in terms of where things are and how the camera is moving you'll also notice that it's an overcast day with no strong Shadows so if you look at underneath the tripod you can actually see the the shadow is very soft with no hard edges this is going to be important later so pay attention to that so the next thing we're going to do is actually add markers to the scene to for length to track so go back to the start of your frame one and if you click on detect features over here blend automatically finds points of high contrast within the image that it can use to track click down here where it says detect features and the distance that's basically the the minimum distance between the two tracking markers we're going to reduce that from 120 to 60. gives us a whole lot more markers to play with okay the next thing we need to do is basically track forward so click this little button down here and you'll see here now that blender all of these lines down here the red and the green lines basically show how blender has tracked those markers across the scene right through to the end and actually it shows you as we get to the end it's only managed to track one two three four five six seven markers all together so to give blender a bit of a hand make it a bit easier go to about frame 100. click on detect features again and then track forward again and we can repeat this a couple of times so basically what I'm doing I'm just looking for anywhere in the foot in the footage down below where there's not too many well sort of these lines sort of um start to disappear so about frame 180 detect features track forward and I'll perhaps do the same again around frame 240. detect features track forward okay that gives blender loads and loads of uh tracking markers to work with so now we've got all the tracking markers set we just need to go to the solve tab okay so we're going to solve for focal length you can leave the rest of these things the same keyframe A and B are kind of basically it's asking for two points where nothing much changes so all you need to do now is Click solve camera motion Okay now what's happened here you can actually see the blue line down here shows where the camera movement is and we've got a solvera up here of 30 pixels which is not not great we really want to get this down to sort of one pixel or less um basically what's happened is blender's picking up some markers which are either disappearing or moving in an erratic way I can see one up here it's just kind of cracking something that's not there all of these points where it's not correctly tracked is kind of upsetting the solving of the camera motion so what we need to do is basically filter out all the dud markers so if you click on the cleanup little icon here click on filter tracks uh where is this track threshold increase that to say 20. let's try 20 for start so now all the markers with a bad track is basically are filtered now so just press X to delete them and now you'll see down here we've kind of lost some of these more crazy tracks so if you just click solve camera motion again we've got a solvera now of just 11 pixels so it's not there yet but it's getting better so we'll filter the tracks again let's try a threshold of 10. press X to delete those markers and solve the camera motion one more time now we've got solve error of just 0.55 pixels which is perfect for what we need okay a couple more things before we hop back into the regular blender window if you just zoom in by Rolling the mouse wheel what I'm looking for is markers that are on the floor that are green so there's one there so click it with your left Mouse button and hold down shift find another green marker there's one there and there's one there so basically by clicking three green markers that are on the floor we're telling blender that this is the floor so where it says orientation you can now click floor and it'll basically know that this is basically the zero point on the z-axis in your blender scene so now we've done that we can click set as background which sets the tracked footage as the camera background and we can click setup tracking scene right now if you go up here we're going to add a workspace the general layout workspace and this big default cube in the middle which you can click and press X to delete that and now if you play it you can kind of see this camera is moving around in the middle and that basically now blender has actually worked out not only where the camera is in 3D space and how it's moving but also if you select it you can see it's also worked out the focal length of the cameras 35.56 millimeters which is practically spot on so by pressing 0 on your number pad we can actually view the camera view and what we've done so blend is quite good here so it's set up a couple of things really so this big ground plane here actually doesn't appear in the render so if we press F12 to render the scene you'll see that that plane doesn't appear so the use of this plane is what called a shadow catcher so any object now that we add to the scene a shadow will be cast on on this plane and we'll see the shadow in the render but not the rest of this plane so if you go to the compositing tab blender setup really nice sort of scene setup so we've got the movie clip over here which is basically just what we shot in the camera and then we've got render layers we've got two render layers A foreground render layer and a background render layer let's add a card to our scene so press n on your keyboard to bring up this menu here and click on blender kit if you haven't got blender kit installed by now um then it's well worth it it's got loads of free models and hdrs which we're going to use in this very project so I'll put some instructions on how to download it in here as well click on this little eye icon I'm going to go to click search filters and we're going to search in fact let's just type in Ferrari okay we're kind of just going to hide this ground plane here and we're going to click on the foreground um collection find a Ferrari that you like this one here Ferrari 260 is the one I'm going to choose click and just drag it down onto your scene I'm just basically lining up with this sort of label on the tripod now this is quite a big um dense model if your computer's struggling I'd recommend you choose another car okay the first thing we can see this car is just too big so click on the car and the outliner click on item and where it says scale we're going to select all three of those we're going to type in 0.35 that brings the Ferrari to about the correct scale we also need to rotate the Ferrari on the z-axis I'm just going to go to wireframe mode just to make this a little bit quicker so just adjust the Z angle of your car till it lines up with the parking Bay you can actually scroll through your footage now and see the Ferrari is actually tracking nicely into the car park without sliding across so we're just going to grab this little bit so press G to grab press shift and Z to make sure you're not moving it up or down and just tweak it on the X and Y axes until you're happy with the position okay that looks good blenders also put a light in the scene which we don't need so just going to click on the light and press X to delete the light and what we're going to do we're going to add a hdri to light the car so if you click on hdri in blender kit you can see we've got all of these hdris now what we want to try and do is match the sky that's actually in the video footage so you can see we don't need a sort of a very bright sunny Blue Sky because unfortunately in England here we quite often have very cloudy gray skies so I already found an hdri earlier that I thought matched if you just type in train over here we've got this one here called old train station so just click and drag that into your scene just click ok instant light on the car so if we press F12 now you can see the render of that so as we're rendering it I'll just talk you through a couple of things blender actually does two renders two separate renders for this project there's a render of the foreground a render of the Shadow and then in the compositor it joins all together so a couple of things I've just noticed firstly it looks like we have motion bar checked this isn't quite sharp so let me just switch that off okay that's great now we can actually work a little bit of magic in the compositing settings okay so in the compositor we can see we've got the footage that we shot the video film we've got the shadow which has been rendered separately and then we've got the car which doesn't have a shadow so by adjusting these Alpha over nodes you can actually reduce the opacity of The Shadow but the nice thing about having these layers separately is that you can actually adjust them separately as well so for example if you wanted to add a hue saturation node let's do shift note a and search for hue we could actually just increase the saturation of the car and change the color of the car without affecting any of the other parts of the image so one thing we can do to kind of bring the image all together is actually add some color correction on the final image so by doing shift and a to add a node go to color and click on the color balance now we're going to add that in here you want to make sure that the output of the color balance nodes goes to both composite and the viewer so now we can actually add in like a cyan an orange sort processor but we can make the um the Shadows more blue we can make the highlights more orange I think that's probably a little bit too much so you can actually dial it back using the factor but by color correcting the whole of the image here it brings the whole image together and just makes it look even more realistic one last little thing I've just noticed if you zoom in on the car the wheels the car wheels are actually not quite touching the floor so let's just go back and fix that so pop back into the layout tab click on your Ferrari and if you go into this if you go into viewport shading View and just click show on the ground we can actually just grab the Ferrari let's just move it down by point zero two okay I think those tires are just touching the floor a little bit too much let's just reduce that to minus point zero one seven that's perfect we can just see the tires touching the ground now so all that's left to do now is render out the whole animation so go to your render settings uh choose a directory the file format needs to be ffmpeg video encoding change that from matroska to mpeg4 output quality can be perceptually lossless and you're good to go really so click on render animation up here I'm going to render it out and I'll show you the results in a minute [Music]

Channel: MediaWay

Views: 10,258

Keywords: blender tutorial, blender 3d, blender camera tracking, tutorial, camera tracking, tracking markers, how to film for camera track

Id: KeIshZ3f37I

Length: 14min 51sec (891 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 21 2023