VFX In 2024 Has Become THIS Easy (Blender Tutorial)

it's December now which means the new year is just around the corner and I want to take this as an opportunity to show you how easy visual effects in blender has become if you're familiar with the basics you can create some super professional shots that's right guys today we're going to add a 3D model to our video in my case it's going to be a car but feel free to use whatever you want I've made sure to keep it as simple as possible so that all of you can follow along and achieve a result similar to [Music] this for this effect all you need is some footage of the street preferably with a lot of details for the tracker and if you have one you can use a 360 camera to capture an HDI a high dynamic range image used for lighting and Reflections on your 3D model if you don't have a 360 camera that's no problem you can also just download one from the internet so once you shot your your footage or downloaded the one that I'm using with a link in the description we can download our 3D model and the best websites to get free 3D models are CG Trader and sketchfab I found my model on sketchfab so just type in what you're looking for select downloadable and then you can download it here if it has a blend file you can use it if not you could use gatf for example and for an HDI you can go to poly Haven and search for an HDI where a reflection matches with your footage and also the lighting and once we have everything we can open up blender I'm using blender 4.0 so I'm just going to click away and first of all I'm going to go to the plus here and select motion tracking and then this window opens here and the first thing we need to do is track our footage because we shut our footage hand head and our camera is shaking so blender needs to analyze our camera movement so that our 3D model can stick to one place to do it just click open and search for your footage select your footage and then open clip and then you can see that blender loaded our video you can just click F to fill out the entire window and select prefetch here so that the video gets loaded into the ram but before we're going to track anything we first need to set up blender correctly so go up here in the output options make sure that your first frame and your last frame es select the correct frame rate and also the correct resolution if you don't know this you can just alt double click on your footage go to details and check your data here next we're going to track our footage and we could either go in manually and create our own tracking dots by control clicking or let blender do it automatically for us so to let blender do the work for us I'm going to go to the last frame and select detect features over here and then blender automatically creates a lot lot of tracking points for us and we just need to go down here and track all of them backwards if we scrub to the footage we can see that a lot of tracking markers get lost so I'm going to go to the position where all of them get lost and just select detect features again and track them backwards as well now here a lot of tracking markers get lost as well so I'm going to do the same thing again next we can go to the solve Tab and open up the cleanup options select an arrow of five and filter tracks then just hit X and delete next we need to select two frames where the perspective shift is the highest so my case is going to be 1 and 200 and then just select sve camera motion so we got a sve arrow of 0.25 which is actually really good everything under the value of one can be considered as a good track if you have a higher number you can go up to the track option and maybe manually add in some tracking points by control and left clicking next we need to select An Origin point for our scene if you import 3D models for example it's going to appear at this point so make sure it's in the center and visible the entire time if you found such a tracking dot just select it and set it as the origin here on the left side now we can select three tracking points that are on the ground and set it as our floor also select a tracking Point that's right in front of you and set it up as our y axis and lastly set up as background and set up tracking scene now we can go back to our layout tab select zero and look at it from the camera's perspective the cube is in our way so we're just going to delete it and then also scale down the plane and then hit play to see if the tracking has worked if you now notice any mistakes you can go back to the motion tracking Tab and correct them so now it's time to import our 3D model if you have a blend file like me you can just go up to file append and search for your blend blend file select it click append and search for the collection option and then search for the collection with everything in it if you don't know which collection that is or you don't even see the option then you first need to open the blend file put everything in one collection save and then try to append it again now the model is imported but way too big like you can see so we are just going to select s and scale it down so to now see our model we need to do a a couple of things first go to the render options and select Cycles as your render engine as well as your GPU for rendering if you have one then go to the environment tab select environment texture and open your HDI now go back to the render options and under film check transparent and if we now change our view to rendered we should see our car it's not looking very realistic so let's change that and check the transparent option down here then go to the shading tab go here in render view as well and change the Shader type to word and if you have the node Wrangler add-on enable it which you can do by going up to edit preferences and then searching for node Wrangler here so check that add-on and if you now select our HD you can click contrl T and it's going to add two noes with a rotation option so we can now just use that to align our HDI with our footage next we're going to press shift a and create a plane press G shift Z so we can move it on every axis except for the z-axis and then just scale it up and delete the default ground plane if we now select the plane we just created and go into the object tab under visibility we can check Shadow catcher now this already looks better than before but we still have this light here in our scene it's a default light which you can just delete so now only the HDI is casting the Shadows on the car and if you want to make your footage better visible just select your camera and then go to the camera tab under background images we can increase the opacity and there you go your 3D model is now realistically on top of your footage depending on your 3D model that might already be it but in my case I still want to do some things like changing the color gray just doesn't really pop so I'm going to select my car and head up to shading and here in the material options select paint and then here I can just change the base color now you can really change your model however you want if you know how you could even make a model more dirty that would add a lot of realism to the scene but I want to keep this as beginner friendly as possible so I'm not going to do that the only thing I'm going to change for my car is this logo here because for some reason it comes in this janky way delete both of these notes and import a texture that I made in Photoshop and connect everything basically I just imported this texture here in Photoshop and added a background in the exact same color as the car but as you might have a different model I'm not going to go into more detail now I still want to animate my car to drive and stop right in front of me if you really want to do it professionally you need to Rick your car but as this is a beginner tutorial I'm going to show you a more easy way first of all we're going to need an empty which the car is parented to and we can now just take this empty and put it right on the front axis in the middle of the car now it's really important to put this in the correct position because the car is later going to rotate around this axis now just select all the parts of your car in the top right corner and then shift select the empty as well and then press contrl p and parent to object and keep the transform and if we now move the empty the car moves with it next we need to create a curve on which the Porsche is driving along so go shift a curve add a Basia curve um go to the top view select tab and X delete select the curve pen and then just create a curve here and with the selection tool we can still change it then with the empty selected we can add a follow path constraint and then we can use the offset to make a drive forward and backwards now to make the animation just go to the first frame and while hovering with the mouse over the offset option just click I to create a key frame and then move forward to the position where the car should stop and then move it towards the camera and click I again to make another key frame notice how the car starts low and then gradually becomes faster we have course don't want that so just take your timeline here make it bigger and then press contrl and tab at the same time to change it into the graph editor and here we can now zoom out and see the entire animation and to make it start fast just select the beginning hit R to rotate and move it up here and this already looks a lot better as a last step we still need to animate the reads and as we don't really see them in our shot we don't need to put a lot of work into them so just select them on the first frame click I and create a key frame for the rotation then move a little bit forward and then just click n and rotate it on the x-axis and then just create another key frame by clicking I and then repeat the same for the other wheels and if you drive around the curve you can obviously also rotate it on the Zed AIS create a key frame and then later make it straight again so now we only need to take our ground plane hit s for scale Y for the Y AIS and make it longer then also g y AIS and move it back so we also have shadows at the back but if we now turn our ground plane on and off we notice that it doesn't only add Shadows but also reflects a bright light from the bottom because by default our plane is white but we can easily fix that by just selecting the plane going to the material tab giving it a material and then here's the base color you can just select the color from the ground and that should fix the problem if you want you can still download a driver put it in the car and parent it to the empty so it follows along and now you have two options you can either just stop here and render a video out of blender or if you have After Effects we can also only render out the car and then still do some compositing like color matching matching grain and all of that stuff in After Effects to make it even more realistic for blender we really don't need to do much anymore we can still go up to the compositing tab and do some compositing here and once we are finished we only need to set our samples I think in this case 50012 will work just fine choose an output folder and if you want you can run that as a PNG sequence so every frame is a new image which you can then later put together as a video in a program like Premiere or the V Reserve this has the advantage that if your computer crashes while rendering your progress won't be lost and you can just keep on rendering where you left at and you other option is to change it to a video so that you don't need to do anything anymore once you're finished now if you want to render for Adobe After Effects it's going to be a little bit different first of all we're going to switch to the background render layer and delete it right here and also delete the folder right here and then open up the compositing tab and in the compositing tab we already have this pre-made layout which is here to put the background below the video but we only want to rent out our 3D model without the background so I'm just going to move this notes down right here and then connect the images right here with the output and do the same for the alpha then just select PNG sequence and then render render animation in After Effects we first of all going to import our footage and then right click in the project panel select import file search for your files select the first one and check PNG sequence or if you rendered an open exr like B you check open exr sequence and then click on import then still go to interpet footage and check that the frame rate here matches with the frame rate of your render and then import it into after effects and from here on you can really do whatever you want you could for example duplicate the layer and then use mocha AE to put it behind the trash can and all the other stuff or select your footage and search for a curves effect to match the colors even better maybe it's a little bit too bright and needs to be darker what you can also do is duplicate your footage delete the curves effect add an extract effect solo the layer so you can see it better and remove everything except the whites and add a glow effect on top of it increase the radius and decrease the intensity so it just makes it look a little bit more realistic what you could also do is add a noise effect to the car set it to 1% or create an adjustment layer with a curves effect and add some contrast in here maybe even add some sound effects really do whatever you want I'm not going to go into detail here and once you're finished make sure to tag me on Instagram or send it to me as I would love to see what you've created if you had some problems however and would like to complete the entire 3D part in After Effects you're in luck Adobe has added a brand new feature that allows you to import 3D models in After Effects and do everything in one place it has its limitations but if you want to see how you can use it to create this rock levitation effect then click on the video here

Channel: BSP Studios

Views: 39,874

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Id: rM5i5qqeirQ

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2023