Turn your Living Room into a Horror Cave with Blender and AI #blender #ai #aftereffects

okay so finally we get to the most interesting part of this short film series uh which is the cave and as mentioned earlier this was kind of like an experiment actually for another short film that I was working on for quite a while now and the main question was how can we isolate an actor and play some CG elements into space without having the need for a green screen or something else and after some research I found a few tools which can do the job one is the mask prompt as mentioned in the other tutorial already and the other one is the magic mask which you can find in the DaVinci studio version and actually both of these tools really help to create these kind of scenes and even though we make a lot of mistakes throughout the shot especially when it comes to the 3D tracking it really helps up pretty good for this cheap setup so let's take a look okay so here's the light setup and as you can see actually pretty simple and so we use three LEDs one from small wig one from aperture and one sucani light and one thing that all of these lights have in common is that they have some sort of special effects like a Paparazzi or lightning effect or some sort of strobe light and this is pretty cool because you just have to set this one up and then it will just repeat itself over time so we just don't have to care too much about the light and then we needed some sort of additional practical light originally we used a torch light but as you can see this light source was way too weak so we switched to a camping LED which turns out to be great because it continuously light up my face a little bit which makes the shot a little bit better to read and after several gimbal tags we finally reached the shot with the right pacing fill up the scene with some handheld close-up shots and then shooted some oversided shot using a tripod and a cheap DSLR crane to mimic a shot of me looking up to the cave ceiling so I just imported the clips into after effects and just added in The Mask prompt effect the cool thing about mask prompter is even though you have a pretty tricky shot which we have you can use multiple tools at the same time to really tell the AI behind this tool Which object you want to mask out so the easiest way is to draw rectangle mask are to tell the program Which object you want to isolate and then just simply animate The Mask path to ensure that the mask is staying consistent with the object Additionally you to six tracking points to tell the program once again which subject needs to be isolated and this is helpful because as you can see the rectangle mask was not enough to isolate our object Additionally you can use some negative points to tell the program which space inside of the shot is the one that you don't want to get isolated and this way it gets pretty messy after some time because you have to add in a lot of keyframes with additional stuff and sometimes a keyframe of one point just kind of like misleads the tracking of the other point so it's a little bit of a back and forth to get a workable shot and after some tweaking with the mask prompter I get this result and that's not really good right at this stage I really had to find a better solution for masking out this shot okay so inside of DaVinci Resolve we can go to the color page and down here you will find the magic mask and you can choose between an object mask or a person mask I tend to use the object mask even though we have a person shot here but in my opinion the object mask did a better job actually and then you just start painting the area inside of the shot that you want to mask out in this case me and if you like you can Define areas by holding down the Ctrl key to paint out areas that really needs to be masked out and then you can start the track and see whether Da Vinci is able to follow your mask and isolate the person correctly and then you can take a look at a different frame and see whether the magic mask did a good job or not and then you can repaint specific areas by adding or just subtracting different areas that needs to be masked out and repeat this process track again just search for another areas where the magic mask failed and repaint the areas that need to be repainted and actually like the mask prompter this takes some time to really get a solid result so that your object in this case me is perfectly isolated and don't get me wrong uh the mask prompter was the better tool for the other shot of the cave I think both tools are great but it was a pretty complicated shot too so there were a lot of strobe lights going on it was pretty dark and pretty high contrast so for the next time I think I will have to shoot on a more neutral background so that the tools have better control to really isolate the object from everything else anyway the next problem was the tracking uh because I really didn't think about this when I shoot the whole stuff so I had the great luck that the 3D tracker actually identifies one exact one solid tracking point and that was the pillar on the couch and without that the complete shot would be unusable so in this case it wasn't happy incident so as well as the neutral background next time we will have to take care a little bit more about our tracking points so now let's bring our solid and our 3D camera into blender once again using the blender AI add-on then we can render out our raw footage and add in a background image for our 3D camera inside of blender so we have a reference how we can position our 3D objects inside of our shot and actually what I can tell I completely created the whole cave with only two assets believe it or not so one was an asset from the quixel mega scans Library which is this Mossyrock and the other one was a pretty cool model that I found on sketchfap which is kind of like an alien-like Egg and I really just tweak a little bit of the settings for the different shaders and really just use these two assets as my main source for the whole comp which is pretty crazy when you look at the shot because maybe it looks a little bit more complicated and a little bit more detailed but really you just only need two of them pretty cool huh and then all you need to do is just to play around with these two assets just move them around in 3D space and see what works and what not and because of this pretty low poly approach you can duplicate a lot of these stuff or just create instances and without any computer power create a complex scene which is pretty handy because when it comes to the light recreation it's pretty helpful to have full feedback with 24 frames to match the light of the shots and replicate this one in 3D so I think this is the secret ingredient to all of this to add in every light change in the live action footage and replicate this one in 3D makes the footage really really really integrated into the shot so like you would do with any other green screen footage matching the color and the tone and the light and the light changes inside of a scene makes footage look a little bit more realistic once you add a completely CGI background to this one and don't get me wrong it sounds easy but really I failed a lot and I had a lot of misleading tracks which just turns out to be the wrong way stay patient and really trust in your skills and after some time and some tweaking you really get to a point where you start to like your overall shot and then you repeat the whole process for the other shot so once again isolate your talent with the tools mass prompter or magic mask bring all of this into blender use the background image for the camera for better references and then use the Assets in this case it's only two and replicate the lights of the shot especially the LED light in my hand is pretty important for the CG version because when you animate the light inside of a 3D environment it feels like it reacts to the live action shot and that really gives the illusion of a more integrated shot and when everything goes well there are just a few tweaks you can do in After Effects for example like adding this dripping slime effect which I got from Video Copilot once again it's a free collection so grab it as long as it is online it's pretty great and really it's for free so grab it and the other one is just adding in some optical flares to get kind of like this result so if you take a look at the breakdown it's actually pretty self-explanatory once you get used to the workflow and with the same approach I did the other shots in the cave so it's always the same mask out your object then just try to mimic the background elements in the CG environment add in some elements like slime and optical flares and a little bit of color grading and really you create kind of the illusion even though you just shoot the whole stuff inside of your living room with three cheap LED lights and I think this is cool you really can create awesome stuff and the last piece of the puzzle is of course the complete CG environment and this is actually also not that complicated once you get used to it um so let me show you what I did So based on the existing cave I just extended the cave a little bit further which means just duplicating the two assets the mossy Rock and the Egg and just place them randomly throughout the cave and just add in some lights and try to mimic the lightning effects with some area and some point lines inside the cave so I think you get the idea it's really just a little bit of kid bashing so you can see I can even do this in Cycles which is pretty great even though I switched to ev4 the camera animation to get kind of like this POV shot and then just animated the lamp that I hold in my hand and just try to get a nice look for this cave scenery for the mask it's pretty simple I use the mask and shoot it in front of the green screen and then use the Aperture light to get some kind of nice Reflections into the glass of the mask and then just shoot different positions of the light and this way we're fairly quickly created the mask and instead of after effects it was just getting rid of the green screen with the key light effect and some Advanced spill just use the camera lens blur effect to make the mask a little bit more unsharp and really just use it as an overlay effect for the render of blender and then just added in some color grading and that's all so really really simple and last but not least there was the monster and actually I found a very cool model on CG Trader this was perfect for what I had in mind so I quickly added in some ice with just the sphere and the black material which was pretty reflective and then I used the autorig pro add-on to get a skeleton for the monster and then really quickly weight painted the most important parts like the arms and the legs and the face add to animate a pretty simple 5 Seconds shot for this I use actually the same cave setup like I would use before for the other shots and simply just add in some random movements to the monster to create this and that's all really it's not that complicated once you really just take a look behind the scenes and see what I did uh so yeah I hope this was really helpful for you and I'm pretty sure you can grab some cool information to create your own little story and really think about this you just don't need a big crew to create something that looks interesting so have a nice day watching and see you next time

Channel: Thies Grünewald

Views: 4,626

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Id: V1HK8N55eMI

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023