The Secret To Mastering VFX Faster

if you're just starting out learning visual effects you might want to jump to the most interesting shot that you can do however in this video I hope to show why mastering the simple visual effects is so important before we jump into it I just want to say a massive thank you to all of my patreon members if you are interested in joining or learning about any of the perks I offer I'll have a link to join down below also I just quickly wanted to say I just released a new visual effects course talking about everything visual effects advertising and so I'll have that along with some of my other courses down below if you do want a more slow low Place beginner friendly environment okay so let's go ahead and jump into the video so today I want to hammer home why it's so important to start out simple with your visual effects and what I mean by that is literally uh today all we're going to look at is how to put a CGI object into an environment in a still image uh you know making it as easy as possible in every single aspect and so as you can see here we basically have uh you know this shot right here and we're adding a CGI cat statue to this and so basically why I want to drive with this is we want to make this Uber realistic we want to get all of the varable variables out so that we can make this look as realistic as it looks right now um you can see over here if I kind of check this uh this is purely what we're doing inside a blender and then in the compositing process is when we're really breaking it down all the way down to the pixel level to get exact kind of results like this you can uh really tell down in the shadows uh you know the connection point and everything it looks a lot more realistic uh and this is some of the stuff that clients are going to be looking for and breaking down so it's really really important if you're starting out for visual effects to really nail down those Concepts it might not be as flashy or as interesting but trust me when people look at demo reels and stuff like that they are going to be looking for that level of detail and so it's really important to nail that down okay so what I want you guys to do is I want you guys to go out and find a photo not a video we're going to keep it super simple just a still photograph that we're going to use to place a CGI object into some things to look out for and that will definitely help us along inside a blender uh is we want a flat ground so you can see here this is the photo that I chose uh just because it has a flat ground here if you get a little bit more into uh you know ground geometry and stuff like that it is going to be a little bit more difficult to deal especially with the shadows and so again in the nature of this video I want to keep it super simple so let's do a flat ground uh you can use this image I'll provide a link down below but I strongly suggest you find your own image the other caveat uh that I also want you to find in this Photograph whatever photograph you choose we want a solid color for the ground uh that's going to be very important because it's basically going to provide some bounce sliding onto our object so right here you can see we pretty much just have a tan ground that uh is going to be below our object and the final kind of thing that I want you to find in whatever photograph that you use uh again you can use this one or any other one that you want uh is I want you guys to find something that is sunl so you can see over here this is just a super simple scene with a blue sky and sun lighting no other complicated lighting setups such as lamp post uh you know lamps inside Interiors are especially more difficult for beginners so those are the three things so uh flat ground uh solid color ground and then a sunlet scene and so hopefully you can find that again I'll use this picture for the rest of this tutorial okay so go ahead and download whatever photo that you're going to use next thing we need to do is find out what object that we're going to put into the SE and so I'm not going to be worrying about modeling texturing anything like that a great resource that I actually found is using this website called poly Haven poly Haven has a bunch of great resources such as textures hdris which is where we're going to be using in a little bit to get our lighting and our scene but more importantly for now is models and the nice thing about this site is it actually provides a blender file and so up here you can see it actually gives you a blender file with this for free it's amazing highly highly recommend you guys check this out if you are a beginner gets out a lot of those things that you don't want to have to deal with uh and you'll learn later on in the process so uh you know this is where you can be a little bit more creative you can find whatever kind of model that you want to use uh for your own scene I actually believe I ended up using a cat statue and so this is one I'm going to be using today so you can come down here you can see all of the maps that it kind of offers all of the textures again since you are a beginner let's not worry about that this does all of the work for you and so all you have to do is just come up here and choose the texture size I'm going to stick to 2K and then uh you do want to make sure you're selecting the blender file and then let's go ahead and just download that uh so again just you know we need an image and then an object that we're going to use to place in that image okay so now that we have that explained let's go ahead and jump into the visual effects side of things so the first thing that we need to do is we basically need to take our photograph and recreate the camera that was shot uh with that photograph and so this is going to be different depending on what photo that you actually used what I'm going to be using today is a program called fspy which basically allows us to recreate the camera uh exactly inside of the 3D space and so you want to go ahead and download the fspy program along with the fspy input or add-on let's just go ahead and download the add-on first of all so if we come up to edit and then preferences we can go to the add-on section then you just want to hit install and you want to locate wherever you installed that zip file uh I'll have a link to that down below for both the program and the add-on and so just go ahead and install that wherever you have that zip file installed then uh you should come back out here and if it's installed correctly it should pop up in this menu and so you should be seeing something like this you just want to make sure we have that checked and so uh you can see mine is checked right here we can exit off here and uh just to double check that everything is installed correctly we can go to file and then import and at the very bottom you should see a fspy import option next you just want to go ahead and go through the installation process for fspy I believe it's super super super simple literally just double clicking the exe and then downloading that uh once that is downloaded it should automatically pop up but you just want to run the program and so now we're in the program let's go ahead and drop whatever image that you are using we want to drop that into the program so we're just going to drag and drop there and so fspy is a great program to give us a lot of kind of camera data that we don't already have since we didn't shoot this camera ourselves uh and so most importantly it's going to give us a focal length and it's also going to determine our Vanishing points and so that's going to give us the correct orientation inside a blender it's a great resource to use so let's dim the image off and I basically want to line some of these lines around the scene so uh let's think about this uh first of all I want to figure out where I want the CGI because this influences a lot of uh this process right here so of course uh for My Scene I'm going to place the CGI over here and so hopefully with your own footage uh you will be able to select some of these lines based on uh you know whatever kind of photo that you chose so since I want my CGI over here I want to stick all of these lines kind of over here uh to be as accurate as possible so let's come over here I'm going to place the Y Line uh along this kind of line here it might be a little bit hard to see on YouTube uh but what you can do is you can hold shift and it'll kind of zoom in a little bit and so you can barely tell it right there and then I'm going to place this line over here as well so right there so that is the Y Line we do need to place the other one and so uh we do want to make sure that both of these lines are basically parall parallel to each other in the 3D space and so I'll notice we have this nice garage kind of Shadow line down here so I'll kind of use the bottom of that Shad out to be our other Y Line so right there so yeah so now we have the y- AIS basically defined and it's going to give us some really good rotation inside blender let's go ahead and do the x-axis uh you can also change the axes if you want to do the z-axis you can also do that as well but we actually have some pretty good uh x-axis right here uh the only thing to take into account is X and Y are perpendicular to each other inside blender if you actually come up here you can see exactly what I'm talking about up here we have the Z the Y and then the X and all of those are basically perpendicular to each other and so we have to make sure that we follow that rule inside of f spy as well and so let's come back to FS spy and in the X line up here let's just place this along this crack so again just holding shift to zoom in and then let's uh place the other side over here again I do want to make sure both of the x lines are going to be parallel to each other so uh I know in the real world you know basically this uh driveway these lines are you know pretty much parallel it might not be perfect uh but it's going to give us a totally fine result because this is a still uh photograph and so uh this is looking pretty good to me uh some tests I like to kind of run is I can place this origin point this is going to be the origin point of our scene inside a blender so I just want to place that wherever I want my CGI and so my CGI is going to be around around here that's where I'm going to place my origin point and then let's go ahead and uh do the XY grid floor and now you can see it's basically uh this is what the grid floor is going to be inside blender and so it matches up perfectly and so yeah so that's pretty much it it gives us a nice uh field of view and focal length over here so you can tell We have basically a 34 focal length so that's going to be really good to match our scene as realistically as possible so let's uh I'm going to contrl S to save this project you can name it whatever you want I'm just going to version it like that and now we are done inside of SP buy let's exit out of here and now uh I'm going to hit a and d uh delete to delete everything in my scene I just want to start exactly from scratch for this beginner tutorial so yeah so now we pretty much have our camera set up um let's actually Import in that data from fpy into this blender project and so that's super easy again go ahead and download that add-on uh but we just need to go to file import and then fspy and let's just locate that fspy project we just made okay so here is mine I'm just going to select that and import that in and now you can see it's automatically created a new camera inside of our thing uh if we go into the camera properties we can see that it has the exact field of view that we had inside of the program uh you know I showed you the focal length and so it also has that focal length number and there is just kind of another unit we can uh determine that and so yes you can see that 34 number is uh you know defined in everything and so now if we shift a we're going to add a mesh plane and now you can see if we G shift uh Z we can move it around the floor plane and everything is looking like it's tracked and um you know going along that ground plane uh that is very very important I find too many beginners don't really set the correct focal length or I get the ground rotation or anything right and then it ends up looking a little bit wonky in terms of your CG it looks like your CG might not be sitting perfectly on the ground plane of the footage and so that's a very important process to get uh correct especially if you're about to go into camera tracking uh I know this tutorial we're not going to deal with it cuz I want to stay as simple as possible but it is very important for camera tracking to have the right uh focal length and so that's just kind of the process we use there okay so we pretty much have this uh default scene set up we already have uh the camera and our scene let's go ahead and go to Cycles because Cycles is going to be the better render engine to use for visual effects I don't really find anybody uses eeve uh besides you know animators and stuff like that uh so really Cycles is going to be our best uh kind of use case scenario just uh some of the light calculations are a little bit better with Cycles uh now if you have a dedicated graphics card let's go ahead and set GPU compute and then I want to go ahead and Denise the viewport just so everything isn't noisy and grainy and we can actually tell what it's going to look like in the final render so let's go ahead and we have this uh default scene set up let's go ahead and add in that CG uh CGI model or uh whatever you want to place in the scene we want to go ahead and place that in so what I like to do is let's go ahead and right click I'm going to create a new collection and I'm just going to name that collection cat for me but um you know name it whatever you want there and the reason I'm doing that is because I want to basically start uh organizing stuff so that later on we can uh render out uh different things and different CGI passes uh and so yeah so that's why I'm creating that let's go ahead and uh import that in the scene and so if you remember before when we were downloading our CGI model that we're going to be placing in our scene uh from poly Haven we went ahead and selected the blender option and that's going to be really nice because it's going to give us a blender scene and so it's going to make the import process super quick and easy all we need to do if we have a blender scene is let's just go up to file and append and then let's locate that uh you know wherever you have that saved okay so here's the folder that I placed my download into you might have to extract uh some of these files out but the nice thing is it comes with a blend file and also a textures folder and it does a pretty good job of uh linking those two so you shouldn't run into any issues there all we want to do is we want to select that blend file let's go into the object settings and this one is very nice some might have multiple objects in the blender uh file however this one is just a One Singular object you just want to select everything there and let's appin that into our scene so now you can see uh you know it's in our folder which is nice but now we actually have our cap model into our scene right here so the other thing that I always find that beginners uh really struggle with is uh finding the correct scale of a scene and so what I mean by by that is uh we need to basically uh scale this scene so that it is the exact scale as our real life uh kind of objects and stuff in our scene and so uh the reason that's very important by the way is for um you know many different things such as depth of field if you have any you know Focus racking or anything like that blender actually uses accurate data to the real world and so we want to make sure our scale is set up correctly for that uh the more important thing is going to be for shadow fall off and so the further away a shadow is from an object uh the more hazy and the more uh soft that shadow is going to be and so if we set up the uh scale incorrectly that shadow falloff is going to look very wonky and not give us accurate results however if we do set up our scale correctly it's going to give us much more real world uh results and look a lot more natural and so uh in order to go ahead and do that what we need to do is we basically need to define a object inside of here that uh you know we give it a set size and then we can scale our entire scene to that size and so what I'm going to do I'm just going to use my CGI object I basically want this statue right here I want the statue to be 6 feet tall and so that's super easy to do inside a blender let's hit in to go to this side panel over here and in the item tab up in the top we can see all of this information uh that down at the very bottom we can see these Dimensions so these dimensions are going to basically uh tell blender hey this thing is you know for now it's. 283 M and so that's in the Z Direction and so the Z direction is the up and down Direction I basically want that uh number to be six feet um now shout out to this user thank you so much for telling me this I never knew about this uh but what we can actually do is let's put in uh just six and then ft for feet and press enter it'll automatically do the calculation for us uh into MERS and so just a quick uh kind of tip there so thank you to that user again uh so yeah so now you can see our uh cat is you know 6 feet tall in the real world and so that is basically like that it looks super wonky now and that's just because over here the scale uh for the Z is 6.4 but the X and Y has not changed so all we need to do is let's just copy uh this six uh point4 number and we'll just copy and paste those in the X and Y axes as well and so now it's the exact same uh cat kind of dimensions and everything uh just scaled like that and so what I'm going to do I'm going to go ahead and contr a to apply our scale so again I'm just going to contr a hit s to scale and now these numbers are basically one over here and so uh that you know happens uh is a good kind of rule of thumb and you know uh to always apply your scale if you ever do that so yeah so this is a 6 foot cat now so let's uh double check that this is accurate uh so what I can do is we have this garage back here what I'm going to do is G shift Z we'll just move this cat kind of back here so it's touching the garage so you can see that uh the garage from top to bottom is basically 6 feet um I believe garages in the US uh typically are around uh you know 8 to 10 feet um and so we want to try to match this as much as possible now in order to actually affect the scale uh but again we don't want to affect our cat statue because that is correctly scaled uh we're basically using the cat as reference for the scale on our scene so uh the way I like to do it inside blender there are many ways to affect that skill is I like to shift a we're going to add a and plain axis and now you can see our plain axis is in the middle of our origin and so now what I want to do is I want to parent my camera so that the empty is basically affecting my camera and so that's super easy Let's uh select my camera up here shift select the empty and I'm going to hit contrl p and parent to object and so now what that has done is if I select my empty over here and I hit G or you know RS all that stuff it actually uh moves around my camera as well the nice thing about that is now with the empty selected if I hit s to scale we can see that our um you know cat is getting smaller if I actually bring a new window out here I can just kind of demonstrate this a little bit better uh but as you can see if I hit S2 scale our cat is not moving however our camera is moving and since that empty is on the ground plane it's actually not affecting any of the orientation or anything we did inside of f spot and so that's a really good uh kind of process to do there so uh now all we have to do is just uh scale this cat down so it would be basically about 6 ft and so I would imagine in this uh you know kind of world uh 6 ft would roughly be like around this line for the garage you know I'm kind of just guesstimating there uh if I actually took this footage in the real world uh you know a data Wrangler or something like that uh would actually be taking real world measurements for a CGI artist to be uh using for the scale of the scene and so if you've ever heard of a d data Wrangler that's just one of their kind of jobs that they would do anyways let's hit s to scale this up and I basically just want to scale up my cat so it's roughly around there I I think that would be around like 6 feet give or take uh again we do just want to kind of double check and yeah so if I place my cat around uh you know in the Z space where the uh garage would be that's roughly 6 feet and so yes so that is now the scale set up correctly uh now you know specifically for this use case since I'm not animating the camera or anything what I can actually do is I want to go ahead and delete this empty and just get it out of my scene if I go ahead and delete it you can see our scale is you know reset back to its original position and that's because it's just deleting all of that information we're actually not giving any information to the camera it's only being applied to the empty so what we need to do is let's go ahead and with our camera we need to unparent the camera to the empty so if we right click we can go to parent and we want to clear parent and then keep the transformation and so that's going to give us exactly what we want so let's again right click go to parent and clear uh clear and keep transformation so now you can see nothing has happened and but now if we go ahead and delete our empty since it's not parented anymore it's not changing the scale and everything uh just clears out a little bit of space we don't really need that empty anymore anyways so yeah so that's pretty much how to set up the scale of the scene and so yeah so that's pretty much how to set up the scale of our scene now we are actually ready to start uh kind of you know getting ready to light this thing and get it looking realistic so let's come and uh if you hit uh Z we can go to the render View and first of all I want to position where my CGI is going to be so I'm going to RZ we're just going to move that over here and then uh I might want it a little bit bigger in the frame so we'll move it here and then hit just s to scale that up so yeah so roughly around there you we can play around with this as we go uh but yeah now you can see we basically have my CGI exactly where I want it in my scene it is on the floor plane you always have to kind of double check that um the models are pretty good with having it kind of defaultly set on the floor plane uh but yeah so now you can see everything is on that floor plane that's again just something we set up with SP spy that you just always want to double check anyways we pretty much have all of this set up let's talk about how to actually add some lighting and get this looking to a more professional result so let's go ahead and come over here we want to go to the world properties and the World Properties is uh basically all of the lighting in our seam uh by now uh you know right now everything's just this gray color color and so you can actually change around the color you know so if I wanted it a brighter we'll say like red or something like that it's actually affecting the lighting of our scene so we actually don't want that of course it's not a red uh scene if it was you maybe would be adding this but we need a environment texture and so let's go ahead and change up environment texture uh and basically uh you can see it's pink now pink and blender basically just means there's no material assigned to it uh but basically what an environment texture is is now we need to find a HDR image uh that has some lighting and some reflection data baked into it uh to act as our sunlight and so that's going to be super quick and easy for you beginners again uh not having to deal with the blender lighting system we're just going to use a image for our lighting that's the reason why I wanted to do a sunlight scene is because sunlight and blender with h your eyes are super quick and easy so let's go ahead and find that we're going to come back over here to poly Haven again poly Haven is a great great resource if you're a beginner I even use it a ton uh to this day and so uh you know highly highly recommend that let's come to the HD hdris and what we need to kind of determine in our scene let's go uh back to solid view just so we can see everything I might go ahead and change my opacity all the way up uh over here uh just so I can see this a little bit better but yeah so we can kind of break this down a little bit uh first thing I want to tell is there's a blue sky you know we don't have many clouds in the sky and then secondly I kind of want to find any uh shadows in my scene there's a lot of shadowing of this awning over here um and especially you know closer to our CGI we can see that there's a lot of shadowing of this kind of part of the roof that's coming over top of it um the kind of best one over here is actually this tree on the side we can see that uh it basically gives us a direction and so if we kind of line up the point so it looks like this point is kind of this part of the Shadow down here and so we basically can tell that the sun is kind of up in this direction and so we need to match that as uh kind of perfectly as possible uh When selecting our h your eye so first let's come back over here what I like to do personally is I like to go into the sky settings let's go into pure skies and so pure Skies uh basically is a new thing where it doesn't have any ground texture onto it if you come to some of the other uh hdis inside of poly Haven you'll see that some of them actually have some ground texture and so that's great if you find an H that perfectly matches up to your 3D environment that you shot in however most of the times these aren't going to be as good and so what I like to do is I like to just again I like to use pure Skies so we're going to come over here next thing I want to do is I want to figure out uh you know the uh amount of clouds in here so there are a ton of clouds over here what I like to do is if it's a situation where there isn't any clouds in the sky I like to come to clear okay so finally we just need to uh kind of find a sun angle and uh kind of you know Lumin its value that closely matches to our uh footage and so right here you can see that everything's a little bit warmer on the warmer side in terms of uh a little bit more orange if that makes sense and then I can also tell just from the Sun angle that is uh you know roughly midday um slash like you know midafternoon something like that it's not sunset or morning and so it's not super Long Shadows uh it's looking like it's uh you know around 11 to 2 uh you know in the midday and so what we need to do is we just need to come over here and kind of view some of these um you can tell like some of these right here the sun is much lower in the sky and so it's giving longer shadows and so that might not be a good HRI to pick um so yeah so let's go through these These are super low day uh what I want to do is I want to find one that's uh you know a little bit midday and so right here is a pretty good one you can see these Shadows are a little bit uh you know matching to our environment um there's also this one down here the reason I like this one better is because it gives us a little bit more of those warmer tones and so you can see especially on this white ball it has a lot more warm light whereas down here it's much cooler it's much more uh like white uh LED light if that makes sense so uh yeah so this is the one I'm going to choose that's my process of kind of choosing the correct one I just download the 4K exr and just download that and so that's my whole process of kind of determining uh the lighting and getting that to match as uh as well as possible as we can Okay so let's go ahead and drag this into the scene now so we're going to go ahead and open up that environment texture as we had it before here is my exr so let's open that image and now we finally have some lighting in our scene I'm just going to quickly shift a and add a mesh plane and we're just going to S to scale that up and now we can actually see we have some Shadow and everything in our scene and actually if I come back out here now you can see the HD we picked uh in the sun Direction everything is looking good there so I don't want to see uh kind of this background I want to see the transparency of my scene so let's come over here uh to the render properties we just need to go to film and select transparent and so yeah so this is pretty much it and this is all that we have uh let's do some final things so first of all I do want to uh set the correct rotation of my seam uh you can see the Shadows going in the wrong way as uh compared to our tree over there so in order to kind of see all of this data uh you can come over here and uh do some stuff here what I like to do is I like to see the node uh tree that it's actually doing in the background and so we'll come over here to the Shader editor and we'll go and instead of object we can go to world and so this is the H that we picked this is just the node setup that it's doing now a great resource to use and something you're definitely going to run into uh if you do continue blender visual effects is you're going to want to enable this add-on so let's go to edit preferences we'll enable the node Wrangler add-on it's basically just a add-on that comes free with blender so you don't need to download anything but it's going to give us a lot of quality of life features there so again just make sure that that is checked right there uh but with that what we can do do is let's select this image texture node and hit controll and T and that will add a texture coordinate and mapping node and uh now we can see this is stuff that uh is kind of automatically going on in the background so we basically just unid that uh and now we can just affect the rotation here and so let's just move the rotation I'm trying to use this as reference I notice our H isn't perfect it's a little bit too long in my opinion again I'm kind of just using the reference of this tree over here to kind of influence that and maybe some of this a little bit over here too so what I might do is I'll play around with the X ever so slightly so we can just make that a little bit shorter so something like that is looking much much better and so yeah so that matches pretty well again I'm just looking at the direction and uh between the two and so yes that matches within reason I I feel pretty comfortable with that so that's how we basically get our lighting and our lighting is U you know looking good again uh if you got a correct image uh that's basically being sunl this should be everything that we need to do this is the exact reason I want a sunlet scene for this uh simple tutorial so yeah so uh we are in the home stretch now we are almost ready to render this thing out uh to go into compositing so some final things I want to do uh first of all is we have this white uh kind of texture on our plane down here uh let's just quickly demonstrate what that is doing and so if I select this I'll make a new material just for demonstration purposes and I'll put this to be like a red color and so now you can see on our cat statue we have a lot of red light bouncing off to it uh and that is to do with how light works in the real world basically the uh rays of the of the sun are bouncing off of the floor down here and then reflecting back up into uh kind of this chest area and everything of the statue and so that is uh you know all of that to say our ground we want to be the same color as our ground of our actual scene again this is why I wanted a super simplistic ground what we normally do in a situation like this is we would project the texture of our footage onto this uh um you know kind of object on our ground uh but that gets a little bit too involved again I just want to be as simple as possible since this is most likely going to be your first ever visual effect shot uh from scratch and so what we want to do again I H told you guys to select a solid color for the ground all we're going to do is we're just going to pick select the uh color of whatever ground that you're using so I'll pick select that uh we can see it doesn't match perfectly and so I'm going to come over here let's turn the uh roughness up uh roughness is basically just the reflections of your uh you know material and then uh same thing with the specular just kind of uh some more of the highlights and deals with reflectivity uh so that just turns it all off we don't want any kind of C stics or anything bouncing uh weirdly off of there so already you can see that's giving us a much uh more accurate result to how it would look like uh I'm going to go and uh I do want to kind of come down here and make sure the connection Point uh is fine and so I'm not seeing any kind of weird connection Point uh so that's probably what I'm going to leave it as you can maybe try to match it a little bit better you know if I bump I I'll bump the saturation up just ever so slce something like that looks pretty good so yeah so that's uh the exact reason I kind of wanted to do a simple kind of solid ground uh just so we can literally do a super simple material there uh next thing we need to do is we need to go ahead and set up uh this to be a shadow Catcher And so in the object properties we'll go to visibility and Shadow Catcher And yeah so now we have uh this set up and basically it's giving us our shadow uh and you know uh we're not seeing the actual material so that's nice uh I do heavily want to caution you um this is still affecting the lighting of our cat object if I actually didn't have uh this over here what I'll do is I'll zoom in here and I'll hide the plane you can see that is still affecting our lighting of our cat uh and so we still want to have this in the scene uh you know when we uh do this especially down here at kind of the connection point this point is called uh basically the ambient occlusion it's basically when contact points come together there's a little bit more shading and area and diffusion there and so uh if I kind of turn that on and off you can see just look how different that looks you can see with it off it just looks um not as realistic at all it just looks super fake and with it on you can see that connection point is there and it's giving us much more accurate lighting uh you'll see in compositing we're going to do some more fancy stuff with this but um yeah that's pretty much it so yeah so uh you know we have everything set up now let's just go ahead and render out some different CGI passes so we can go into compositing uh now the you know final kind of biggest mistake I feel a lot of beginners make is that they will render this image straight out of blender and do nothing with it and uh that's perfectly fine you can uh get pretty good results uh straight out of blender however they're skipping an entire process of visual effects and that process is compositing compositing in my opinion is what takes a all right shot to being uh Next Level and so you know personally when I'm doing visual effects projects I spend uh the same if not more time in compositing just to make sure the visual effects looks that much more realistic so that's why it's so important and if uh there's anything that you take away from this tutorial it's to go ahead and composite your visual effects I cannot tell you how many times I've seen people just render straight out of blender and Skip compositing all together they're just missing out on so much opportunity to make this as realistic as possible anyways uh let's go ahead and get this out to compositing so we can composite this realistically uh now in order to do that I do need to organize some stuff over here so let's make a new collection I'm just going to name this one we'll name this Shadow all we want to do is we basically just want to have two passes I want to have uh one of the cap uh or whatever CGI object that you're doing and then I want to have one where it's just our shadow pass down here just so we can affect those separately and uh you know get it a little bit more uh involved into that kind of process so with this uh new collection we can drag our plane into that collection and now we have the ability to turn on and off uh these separate objects and so what we need to do now we'll go into the compositing workspace we need to hit use nodes and we need to go ahead and render out some different passes so that is what these render layers are for we can go ahead and Shifty I'll duplicate this and now you can see we can select uh different layers of our project right now we only have one and so we do want uh you know basically one view layer per pass that we're going to do and so uh that's super quick and easy I actually love uh this inside blender it's one of my favorite things that they have done for visual effects it's let's uh come to a new view layer we're going to name this one C and then we're going to create a brand new view layer up here and we'll just name this one Shadow and so now we have uh basically two view layers let's go back into compositing and now we can select the uh Shadow VI layer down here and now we basically have two duplicates of our scene that we can turn on the different collections for in order to render out different passes that we need so let's come back out to layout and for this pass I want just the uh cat basically we'll switch it to the cap view layer first so yes so we just want the cap if I come over here we can disable the shadow collection however we actually just did uh something wrong if you remember before we were using that shadow uh for some of the bounce sliding and it's specifically down here with the connection point and our ambient occlusion and so instead of disabling it we still want it to indirectly affect uh everything that's happening with the cap and so that's super nice we can uh go up here and enable the indirect only filter and so filters are basically uh you know something only for collections uh that we can use to definitely affect uh you know different collections inside of a Sim same view layer and so all of that to say we just need to select this to be on for our shadow and now you can see it's still giving us all of our indirect uh kind of you know collision and stuff the ambient inclusion looks fine up here it's still giving us some of that bounce lighting and so that's kind of the process that we do there to uh make sure we're not uh losing data with these different passes so let's uh come to the shadow pass now we just need to do the opposite we want the cat to be indirect only uh so that now we have our shadow down here so again super quick and easy uh this is literally the most Bare Bones that you can do in a situation like this and uh will give us a great result and so yeah so that is pretty much everything broken up let's come and go into the composing section and now I want to render this stuff out let's go ahead uh in order to render out multiple passes at the same time instead of using this composite node up here I'm going to go ahead and add a file output node and the file output node is basically just a composite node however it allows you to uh render out multiple things at a time and have different sockets down here so let's go to node and down to properties we can see all of these properties now and let's add a input so uh we basically have two render passes that we're going to render out uh I'm going to put this one as catcore uh and then I'm going to render this one out as our shadowcore uh let's just place the images into the correct sockets so image in there and image into there and so yeah so now uh this pretty much is going to render wherever we want this uh to render out to and so uh let's set some settings uh the only caveat here if you are used to blender is uh anything in the output section over here uh this output section is purely for the composite node and so we're not going to be using the composite node so we can just leave that up here uh and we don't want to change any uh these values around these won't do anything for us uh what we do want to change is in the file output node we want to change these properties and so just a little bit of a strange workaround there uh but for me I'm going to be uh compositing inside of After Effects today so I'm going to be sticking with PNG uh After Effects doesn't love exr it's a kind of difficult process there uh but we do want Alpha so rgba for the alpha channel uh compression since we're just going to be rendering one still frame uh I'm going to push this all the way up to 100 because uh PNG specifically is a lossless format and so all this means is it's going to compress our file size down lower however it's going to render out a little bit slower and so that's uh the trade-off there finally let's just do a new base path and uh basically render this out wherever you want this to be saved okay so I made a new folder for that let's hit accept and yeah we are pretty much done I believe we are ready to Rend this render this thing out so let's go ahead and uh the nice thing about the file output node is that uh if you're normally using the composite node the render image up here actually won't save the file it'll just give you a preview inside of blender however since we are using the file output node if we do hit render image it'll actually save that file out and so just a nice little thing uh for that uh file output no okay so once that frame has finished rendering we are ready to go ahead and hop into compositing and so let's back out of here uh first of all you can see this is the folder I saved into so we have a cat 00001 and then a shadow 00001 and so you can see this is our cat pass and then this is our shadow pass and so this is what we're going to be using to get our final composite so let's go ahead and go into whatever compositing program that you're going to be using I'm going to be using after effect since it's so beginner friendly and so for you absolute beginners out there after effects is going to be the program for you okay so inside of After Effects let's go ahead and drag in everything so our two passes here and then we need to also uh drag in our original photo so I'm just going to drag that in and so yeah so first of all I want to import this in to create a new composition so I'm just going to drag and drop that into this button down here to create a new composition let's drag the cat on top of this so like that just make a new layer after effects is very user friendly because instead of being node based it's actually layer based and so for you beginners it's a little bit of a different process uh if you're thinking about nodes and so it just makes it a little bit easier here uh so next thing we need to do let's just drag this uh shadow in between here and now you can see this is the result that we're getting straight out of uh you know blender and everything there uh and so yeah so this doesn't look terrible there's a lot of stuff wrong with it and so let's kind of break this down because this is usually uh the point where I see a lot of beginners leave it and they'll upload it you know do their breakdowns and reels and all that stuff and these are things that are red flags to um fyers uh and so some of those things first of all our gray and all of our uh luminous values are very muted and so as you can see back here we have some nice reference of like some uh black dark areas and then we o have some nice reference of some white areas and stuff here and so as you can see here uh everything the blacks are too uh light and then the uh highlight values so like uh there's some white up here and everything looks too gray and so we need to uh correct our luminance and levels there uh and so that's the first thing that uh some you know people would be kind of looking for the second is I'm not totally happy with the connection Point down here the ambient occlusion if you will um I I want to get this to look a little bit more integrated and like uh you know the cat is actually in the scene it looks a little amateur amateurish there uh finally the big red flag here and you could probably tell this already uh is the shadow down here and so the shadow uh looks nothing like the other shadows in the scene and so we have to break that out and get that to look a little bit more realistic okay so first thing I want to do is I want to go ahead and just focus on the cat I kind of like to break uh things down step by step so first thing for the cat is I want to effect the levels and so let's select our cat layer down here and I want to go into effect controls let's add a new color correction effect so I'm going to go to effects color correction and uh typically I like to use curves uh for my luminance value changes uh you could use levels uh we'll be using levels a little bit later uh but for luminous values and all that stuff I like to use curves down here uh so by default it's set to RGB and that's totally fine I'm going to keep it super simple for you guys but you can change this and break it out to the individual channels if you so want but anyway so we have RGB here let's go ahead and uh you know this is looking a little too dark for me overall and so the middle values are all of our kind of midtones and so midtones if you want to think about it it's just gray values uh values that you know are a little bit on the middle end of the Spectrum in terms of how dark they are that's a very kind of you know simplistic uh kind of explanation uh the other side this is all of the black areas and then these are all of the white areas or the uh highlights if you want to say like that so anyways uh let's kind of break this down first of all I kind of want to bump everything up so that is uh the gamma and so let's just bump the gamma up so something around there is looking pretty good uh for this I'm just going to eyeball it um usually what will happen is they'll go in and actually like pick points of the uh you know the lightest pixels and the darkest pixels to match them uh but I'm not going to have to worry about that uh for you guys uh let's bring the darks ever so slightly down so that is this area down here let's bring those down a little bit just trying to match this area to some of these areas down here so something like that is looking a little bit more interesting and then finally the white values uh I'll notice we have like a little bit of white values over here and then some of our sunlight spots uh you know down here uh might need to be be a little bit higher so that is this area up here I'll just kind of bring this ever so slightly up I don't want to go too much because um you know since it is a gray material it wouldn't be totally white it'd still be a little bit of gray but yeah so now you can see our whites are matching a little bit better so again overall bumping up the gamma uh bumping up the highlights a little bit there and then bumping down the uh kind of dark points there and so that's all I'm doing uh to kind of break those down and so yes that automatically looks so much better you can see uh just if I turn that on and off uh it just sits in the scene much better in terms of lighting uh so yes that's pretty much all I'm going to do for the curves I could maybe play around with that a little bit more later uh next thing I want to do is I want to match the focus level and so as you can see now everything is super super sharp on my C and so I want to make this uh be a little bit more more defocused like some of these branches and stuff back here so what we can do we'll add a new effect we'll go to blur and then camera lens blur is the one I like using for that uh by default it's set to five pixels uh I believe for this shot I ended up being a 2 pixel blur and so it might be hard to see on YouTube uh but that is matching a little bit better all you want to do here is just uh find in the zspace uh you know a kind of reference point and so I'm using like some of this stuff as reference this line down here and basically just trying to match the edge blur um of that and so we can see that matches a little bit better now again just super subtle for the scene since uh the camera uh it honestly looks like a phone camera and so phone cameras don't have a lot of depth of field uh or blur in that case so yeah so those are the two things that make it match uh a lot better let's go ahead and deal with the shadow because the shadow is the next thing so how do we use uh utilize our shadow and make it look a lot more realistic if we kind of come up here I can kind of demonstrate this uh you can see the shadow in the background is influenced by the color and the reflectiveness of uh you know whatever that shadow is hitting so as you can see here this is like a darker uh kind of brown color however up here since the material is more of a lighter brown color uh we're getting you know some different shadowing and different effects up here uh than down here down here basically what is happening right now is it's basically just a one solid layer uh and basically has a little bit of opacity down and so you can see exactly what that is basically doing back here and so what we need to do instead of using this as a layer we need to use this Shadow as a mask and so uh all we need to do it's super nice and easy instead of after effects let's go ahead and uh duplicate our footage and so the um you know image that you're using you just want to make a new layer down here and if you don't see this we're going to be using this track mat you can just toggle these switches in mode down here until you see track map uh but track M all it does is it it's going to take the alpha channel of the uh layer that we select and it's going to use that Alpha Channel as a mask and so since we already have this shadow kind of layer up here we're going to use that uh Alpha to influence the mask of that layer so if I select Shadow right there uh you can see it's vanished and what's actually happening if I kind of disable and hide the uh lower layer is now uh this layer by default is basically just having that Alpha applied to it and so this is the only part that it's affecting the reason this is nice is because now we actually have the pixels data that we can actually use for the Shadow and color to get it a little bit more accurate and so that's going to kind of dial it in like I was showing up there how uh you know whatever material it's going to be bouncing off of is actually going to affect how the shadow looks uh so yeah so all we need to do is uh this is our kind of Shadow layer now let come up to effect uh this is where I want to go ahead and go into color correction and I'll use levels this time I find for anything uh you know shadowing or aim and occlusion or anything to do with like more black values uh I like using the levels um color correction you can of course use curves if you're more uh kind of uh used to Curves there as well but um yeah so this is where I want to go ahead and break up the Shadow and so what I could do is I'll bump the uh this is the gamma slider down so we can bump that down that's looking pretty good I'll bump this uh kind of down as well so something like that looking pretty good and I believe if we bump this white thing down it also kind of bring over the overall um like offset value so yeah so that's looking much much better and so you can see that is giving us this result now what I might do everything's a little bit too red here and if I kind of go to some of the other um you know things we can see up here especially on this white post area here everything's a little bit more blue hue especially down here you can see a lot more uh kind of blue and green values um that is a little bit to do with the grass over here uh but we want to try to recreate that as much as possible so let's come over here to the red Channel I'll just dial the gamma of the red down so something like that and automatically that's doing a much much better job uh and now you can see uh we're getting much better Shadows down here and it's looking a lot more integrated into the environment uh so here here is what we had before you can see it's a black blob mess and stuff and then this is after you can see we're getting a lot more uh better fallof and uh the colors are matching much more accurately and so yeah so that is uh looking pretty good uh we're dealing with a little bit of compression issues and stuff like that so that is the unfortunate thing um you know in a client like this I'd probably send it through a denoiser and denoise some of that and uh of course we have this grass over here and so uh the grass is not perfectly flat however our shadow looks a little bit perfectly flat uh I'm not going to really worry about that that's getting a little too nitpicky uh for what I want to accomplish with this tutorial anyways uh that looks pretty decent I think it's a little bit too sharp you know if I kind of come back here um we'll see that the sun is very sharp however um I think it's due to the focus you know how we defocused it before so let's go ahead and uh you know defocus it a little bit let's go to effect and I'll go to blur and sharpen instead of using camera lens blur for this I'm just going to use a gaj and blur so right here and we'll just bump that blurriness up oh um you know quickly I am doing it to the wrong layer I'm doing it to uh my uh basically the track mat layer I want to do it to the alpha layer that we're using so we'll select the Shadow and now we'll go to effect blur and gosh and blur uh so now again because we're using the Alpha from that layer it is uh a different there so we do have to be working in our shadow layer but yeah so now you can see that's basically blurred it ever so slightly again not too much uh and it might be a little bit hard to tell but especially on this corner you can see it's just helping that match a lot better so yes so that is uh you know our shadow done the final step that I want to do that I really think U makes and breaks uh these type of realistic shots is the connection point and when I talk about that I'm mainly talking about the aim and occlusion and so right down here uh it's actually not terrible for this shot uh you know I think it's h pretty accurate there however I might want to try to cheat that a little bit more just to kind of blend in uh this cat to make sure it's actually you know uh looks like it's sitting on the ground in the real world so uh you know normally I'm a nuke compositor and so this might not be the total accurate way to do it uh inside of uh After Effects however this is the method that I've used before for these type of shots is let's go ahead and I want to basically create um some uh color correction around this cap and then I also want to uh basically color correct and have it layer uh just for around the cat on the floor so we'll do the cat one first so I'm just going to duplicate my cat layer like that so it's just a pure duplication now I only want to color correct um this bottom portion right here so in order to do that I'm just going to mask out the uh area that I want so I'm just selecting this pin tool up here so select that and we can just kind of zoom in I just want to kind of create a little bit of an edge outline over here I maybe going inside of the object maybe like you know five pixels um like two to five pixels I'm not being super accurate in here just a very rough mask it also helps that it's a still scene um you know so I can get away with that but yes I'm just making a uh kind of crude little Mass down here and let's connect it back up onto the side and so there uh now we basically have this layer if I delete the other layer you can see that it's uh you know ever so slightly just the bottom section of our cat there what I'm actually going to do is let's go into the mask settings um which is which one there are two mask here I actually created a duplicate whoops we'll go to mask one is what I had before and let's uh change your uh the feather up and so that'll just feather that out a little bit and we might need to move this around uh you can see basically now it's just selecting the bottom of our cat object right there and so now with that now that we have that set up and it's over top of our previous cat layer what we can do is uh in this Top Cat layer we can add another effect we'll go to color correction and go to levels and all we want to do is we simply just want to make everything a little bit darker so it might be a little bit hard to see and I might need to adjust my mask but now you can see just on that cat we can see at the connection point it's getting it much much darker around that area so yeah so what I'm going to do is let's go back to our mask so let's select this mask and I'm just going to select everything so we'll select all of our objects I hate I hate the way mask work inside of uh uh After Effects it's very finicky sometimes uh so let's select all of these there we go I'll just move these ever so slightly up and yes so that's giving us a little bit more area and so uh what is that more of like a 10 pixel uh Edge Gap right there so anyways we can come back over here and this is where we can dial in in a little bit more uh so as you can see I'm just adding some more uh ambient occlusion and stuff there I do believe there are some ways you can do it with uh some passes inside of blender however again that gets a little bit more complicated into all of those processes there so yeah so if I turn this layer on and off you can see we're getting more of that ambient occlusion and so that's really nice and I feel like it's tying the shot uh in a lot more you don't want to overdo it you know because uh it it is um you know it definitely can be overdone and the final thing I want to do is I kind of want to add some ambient occlusion on the ground you can still see if we Zoom really tight end there's still a little bit of uh kind of noticeable uh seam in line here and so we're basically going to do the exact same process but now opposite for the ground and so uh in order to do that let's go ahead and I'll select we'll go ahead and select uh the original footage I believe so select that and duplicate that and I'll place this above our shadow and everything there and all I want to do is I want to go ahead and just mask out the same kind of line over here but now on the ground and so again we're just doing that like 5 to 10 pixel area on the ground around here uh we don't have to be super precise because we are going to be Feathering it uh and you know expanding that out just so it you know do look purely opaque so right there and yeah so that looks pretty good I might also get some bit of that area so yeah so now uh we pretty much have that let's connect this back up and yeah so now we have this and this is where we want to go ahead and color correct this some more so I'm going to uh feather our mask so our feather we we'll just do it something like that and so yeah so now you can see this is the same exact process uh this layer is going to be on top of our other layer just acting as a additional kind of color correction in that specific area so let's go to effect and I like to use the levels again or any shadows and I'll just bring this black number down and so we'll keep decreasing that you know I kind of get a little bit tight in over here but yeah so now I'm not I'm getting rid of some of that line those harsh seams over there and so yeah so that's helping a little bit um what I might do is I might come back and play around with the feather ever so slightly again something like that is looking good and then I might also select the path again so right down here double click inside of here and let's just move this up so we'll move it up to like there yeah that's looking much much better and so yeah so I can play around with this a little bit more try to get it a little bit more dialed in but you can just see ever so slightly we're just adding some more ambient occlusion back into the ground of our object here uh so yeah so that's pretty much the exact process you can see it's blending in especially like these kind of Darker areas over here it's BL helping blend that in a little bit more um and that's exactly what ambient occlusion would do in the real world and so yeah so that's pretty much it and uh kind of all the processes I would do now I actually uh spend a little bit more time just kind of dialing in all these those numbers uh compositing is kind of a more timec consuming process so I'm not going to show uh technically like everything I'm doing uh but this is kind of the final result we were able to basically go uh from this is you know typically what I see with a lot of beginners you know straight out of blender not doing any compositing uh and if you get really really tied into here it starts to stand out you know especially down here you know it looks very fake very uh you know uh computer generated and so uh just with a little bit of compositing and some stuff there we are able to get this which is a much kind of nicer result sits much nicer in the scene and if uh you gave this to a friend or anything like that um you you know they would question uh is that re really there or you know what there so yeah so if I kind of just turn those on and off you can see uh kind of that uh that switch and so yeah so that that is pretty much my entire process that I go through to uh get a shot like this again if you are learning visual effects this tutorial I cannot stress enough instead of doing all the flashy things such as camera tracking you know modeling uh you know animation all that stuff or whatever if you can nail down these Concepts you know maybe do two or three of these shots where you're literally uh going down all the way down to the pixel level I'm telling you client uh clients and uh you know potential employers if they're looking at your demo real stuff are going to be zooming in all the way here to check uh your work and everything like that especially with your breakdown because they can see the before and after of everything there and so yeah so that's pretty much it um I hope you guys have gotten a lot of information out of this tutorial I know again it wasn't the most glamorous but um you know it's very important to nail this concept down uh anyways thank you so so much for watching uh I have a course if you are more interested in some more of the advertising visual effects side of things and I also have one where we go through literally everything learning blender from scratch specifically for visual effects so I'll have both of those links down below if you are interested anyways thanks so so much for watching and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Jacob Zirkle

Views: 6,128

Keywords: blender vfx, visual effects, tutorial, vfx, vfx tutorial, blender vfx tutorial, cgi, how to, blender tutorial, blender visual effects tutorial, camera, blender to After effects tutorial, after effects, after effects tutorial, Blender to After effects vfx, blender to after effects workflow, blender vfx tutorial for beginners, beginner vfx, beginner vfx after effects, beginner vfx blender, beginner vfx tutorial

Id: iEfzP4lxh8o

Length: 58min 1sec (3481 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2024