Yes.. VFX is THIS Easy (Blender Tutorial)

so visual effects in today's modern day and age is getting easier and easier so easy actually that we're gonna leave the studio and all of our equipment behind taking nothing but a laptop and a few cameras to create some visual effects on location in no time at all so let's go and see what the lighting is looking like we want to switch it to cycles render engine here that should actually work so so easy it should probably be illegal to be a photo straight into the app holy cow [Music] a big thanks to msi for making this video possible with their creator 15 laptop series here which will work amazing for visual effects on the go because it has a super bright 4k hdr compatible screen paired with a 100 watt battery making it possible to work outdoors on it for hours it's also lightweight and portable for how much power it packs with the nvidia rtx 3070 mobile paired with a fast intel 8 core 16 thread processor to learn more about the msi crater 15 check out the links in the description below i'll also include a few links down there where you can find the creator 15 series on sale and bundled with some goodies so thanks again to msi for partnering on this video and now let's see how fast we can create some dope visual effects so obviously to add visual effects to something we need some video to add effects into and so you should film something probably handheld because it looks more impressive and it's more of a pain in the ass but no making some handheld footage because we're definitely doing some camera tracking one way to do this is so so easy it should probably be illegal because it's just that cheating and it's using one of the newer iphones because you can now use an app called cam track ar which uses the ar elements in an iphone to actually camera track and film video at the same time and there's a free add-on for blender that allows you to import your tracking data straight into blender after you capture it through this app so it's really easy you just set up a pivot point in the app and start filming footage this is super great for really fast and dirty visual effects but the downsides are you have to film with iphone quality video and then you also lose any ability to adjust the track later on so you're kind of stuck with whatever results you get probably something you shouldn't use in more professional work then the other option is filming with your phone camera that's something everyone has access to or a dslr like i'm filming with here that should actually work oh hey something i'm actually pretty excited about is the cgg cat just released the first cj geek merch actually available with the link in the description there and down in the merch self it's a wait it's a wait wait it's a great way to support the channel if you guys enjoy the content and get a cool looking hat okay so now that we have some camera footage that we can use in our scene we need a few more elements from the environment that we're using to add cg into the first one is 360 lighting to get the best looking results you actually kind of want to get a 360 of the environment that you're dropping your 3d elements into so for your environment lighting there's also a few methods depending on what you might have available to you the best method is actually capturing your own 360 environment for dynamic lighting in the scene that you're actually dropping your elements into and that would be using something like a 360 camera like i have here this little insta 360 one camera is actually quite affordable nowadays and it will capture a full 360 photo and then just using the insta 360 app on your phone you can wirelessly control your camera using bluetooth to capture different photos at different exposures when you have a handful of different 360 photos shot at different exposures you can drop them all into an app like photoshop and here you can quickly combine them all using an automated process to create a high dynamic range 360 image one that can be opened right up into blender so that's all great and fine and dandy if you happen to have a 360 camera but if you didn't spend a few hundred bucks to have a 360 camera you're not out of luck because there's websites like hdr haven which offer a huge range of 360 hdrs that you can download for free and use in your scenes so if you're not making your own hdr just download an hdr that matches the overcastness of the day that you shot your footage on along with the color of the sky which will be the most important elements of the photo to match your 3d lighting to that of your footage then the next step that i recommend you do and it's super easy nowadays is a photo scan of the environment where you're dropping your 3d elements into this will work really well for light bounces shadows and masking and as always you have a few methods for capturing these 3d photo scans so the super quick and dirty way of photo scanning is using an app on your phone if you happen to have an iphone that has the lidar scanner on it this can happen in a matter of seconds that's how easy it is just download a free app the one i'm using in this video is the 3d scanner app and literally all you have to do is push the record button and then as you move around with your phone camera the app automatically starts 3d photo scanning everything you pass with your lens as if it was taking a video so this is extremely fun to actually play around with now everyone doesn't have access to the newer iphones and the 3d liner scanner but that's okay because there's another free option that will work for everyone and that is using the free open source software mushroom like i've used a few times on the channel already and any old camera the one that comes in your smartphone is going to work just fine just take a wide range of photos some clothes some far from every different angle again capturing some of the outside elements of the environment as well so now you have all of your photos captured you can download the free open source software mushroom and drag all of your photos straight into the app holy cow this is cows right there hey cows oh hey say hi cow donate my computer cow there you go there you go i uh i guess i just continue yeah we'll just continue so within mushroom if you want the quickest fastest results you really don't actually have to change anything the default settings are pretty good all you have to do is save your project once your photos are loaded in and then click start the length of how long this will take to process is going to depend on your hardware a little bit but running on the creator 15 laptop here with the rtx 3070 mobile gpu along with intel's i7 8 core 16 thread cpu it's happening pretty quickly as you might imagine so within blender the first thing you want to do is just create a new visual effects file scene and then of course just open up the clip we just captured then under the output properties we can just put in the frame rate that we shot the video at along with the aspect ratio which was 1080p but now it's time to do a quick and dirty track on our footage so what i'm gonna start off by doing is just changing the tracking settings to the preset by clicking the option here and going to blurry footage as i found this just does the best overall tracking job with a wide variety of footage you can increase the pattern size a little bit going up to something like 51 is pretty good along with the search size 101 is pretty good it will slow down the track just a little bit a slow way of tracking is to put a million trackers by hand all over the scene fast way is to cheat and just go detect features now the tech features isn't going to be the greatest because it's gonna track things that we don't really want to track super well like myself but that's okay because we can clean it all up later so i'm just going to detect features and then with all of them selected track all of those markers forward as you can see most of those are actually tracking pretty well still here it is at 240 frames so we can just change the end frame here to 240. there's some loud birds up there shut up crowds trying to film stunting thank you appreciate it so now what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna hit a and hide all of those tracks that i just made by hitting h and then i'm going to jump to the end frame which is 240 here click detect features again to add in all new tracks and tracks and then track them back the opposite direction so if i go alt h to unhide the tracks from the first round we have a lot of tracks to work with here so what i can do here now is jump over to the soft tab and because i know what the focal length of the camera was i can save a little bit of time and effort by punching those settings in manually so under track i'm going to go down to the camera settings and here under lens i'm just going to make sure that it's set to 24 millimeters which is actually what i shot this footage on so the first settings in the self tab are keyframe a and b you want to set these between two frames on your video clip that has the most sort of perspective change shift in the lens it's a little confusing but just kind of scrub through your video right around 130 to 140 it actually looks pretty good for me with that done there's a few trackers that we can obviously delete before we get to solving and that's going to be the trackers on myself here so just go ahead and hit x and delete any trackers that are on your character that might be moving around because obviously those aren't going to track too well but with that said and done select all your trackers and click solve camera motion as you can see we actually got a pretty good solve error of just .87 there that's actually pretty respectable but we can clean that up more by going down to the cleanup tab here we're going to set the frames to 25 and the air to 3. i don't want any of those tracks so i'm just going to hit x and delete them now and with just that done we should be able to just solve the camera motion again here great anything under a 1 in the solid air is pretty solid and we can totally work with that so now you can just click set up tracking scene and set as background and if we switched over to the 3d viewport you can see that we now have a cube here with a plane and if i play the video back here you can see that that cube is locked onto our footage and moves exactly with our camera motion now it's time to add in some of that lighting whether or not you captured it with a 360 camera or you're just gonna use hdr haven to find some awesome hdrs to sort of match your lighting now's it's time to do it so to open up that hdr now and blender we're just going to jump to the world properties here and click the little button next to the color here we're just going to choose environment texture and open up an hdr now if i jump to viewport shading rendering bang bang boom you can see our hdr loaded up in the background there hey look it's me now what you want to do is open up a new window with the shader editor change it to the world settings and if you have the node wrangler add-on enabled which you totally should all you have to do is grab your hdr node and go ctrl t to add in a mapping node so what we're going to do here is we're just going to rotate the hdr now around on the z axis to position it very similarly to the way the footage was shot as you can see that's going to work as we have the sunlight coming from over there you can delete any lamps in the scene already because we're not going to need those and to see what the lighting is looking like we want to switch it to cycles render engine which actually uses the environment lighting accurately switch it to gpu compute so we're using the rtx 3070 in the creator 15 laptop here for rendering hey let's take a look at how that photo scan is processing hey it's looking pretty good let's drop like a cool looking robot now into the background of our scene and to do that it's quite easy let's just make sure that we're on our foreground collection layer there and now i'm just going to go a pen this is the simple quad bot from tears of steel if you guys want to add the same robot to your scene you can download it from blend swap i've just added all of the elements to this robot to a single collection that i'm going to go and jump into the collection here all right and with our big bot here scaled up in the background we'll just go ahead and give it a quick render see what it looks like in the viewport and that's actually looking really sweet you can see the environment lighting letting it light the scene accurately to the way it was shot so now it's time to use that 3d photo scan of the ground that we captured as you can see it was processing in the background here on the laptop and mesh room and it has now completely finished so let's go ahead and import that photo scan and see what we got i'm just gonna go ahead and quick hide the objects in the scene and now i'm just going to go file import obj under the photo scan you're gonna go to where you saved your file and if you go to the texturing tab you'll see a folder that contains your finished textured mesh we're just gonna grab the object file right there and click import object there's our photo scan of the environment looks like it's upside down right now so i'm going to rotate that 180 degrees we'll jump to our camera view and we'll scale it up and before i do anything i'm going to reduce the quality of this mesh quite a bit by adding in a decimate modifier here as you can see we're sitting at over 300 000 faces that's more than we need i'm going to collapse that down to 0.2 and that'll still have plenty of quality in it for our needs here and run a lot faster in the viewport so with that done i'm just going to click the drop down there click apply now i'm gonna do with this mesh is i'm gonna actually drop it right into the background layer there as well just like we have with the ground mesh except we don't need the ground mesh anymore and then out of the properties we're gonna make this just a shadow catcher so it renders as nothing but the shadows but i also want some of those environment light bounces so what i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate that mesh you can see we now have two of them here and we'll drag this one into our foreground collection and in this one i'm going to uncheck shadow catcher so it's actually rendering but i'm just going to turn off the ray visibility to the camera so we'll still have it interacting with light bounces and stuff to the objects bonus tip is you can actually also add some foliage to this plane that has a particle system and that will work as more masks to make it look like there's maybe blades of grass or something in front of the robot making it blend better with the environment not something we're gonna bother with this video but just a tip that you guys can take so a few render settings now to put some extra realism to the scene we're going to jump to the render layers here we'll start off by enabling the missed pass that will help give a little bit of extra detail then scroll down and enable the indirect and direct glossy passes scroll down a little bit further enable ambient occlusion and that will do it now you also want to jump to the background layer and enable ambient occlusion on this layer as well with the camera selected you can enable depth of field as well in the viewport display if you choose limits and missed you can kind of see what the camera settings are going to be set to here i'm going to choose the distance of a little bit closer leave the focal length at around a 2. that'll give just a very little bit of blur to our character which will make it look a little bit more realistic being rendered there i'm gonna pull a focus distance in a little bit closer as the camera was focused on myself in the video not the robot behind me and then if we go to the world settings we can change the missed pass here a little bit those are actually set pretty good by default in this scene but if you need to adjust them the world settings here is where you would do that all right with all those settings set up though we can give our scene a quick render as you can see the camera motion's there character is ready to be rendered we just need a little bit of compositing to finish off this scene under the film settings in the world properties you also want to make sure that transparent is checked should now be ready to render an image [Music] and there we go our render is finished as you can see just using the default nodes that we get when we click setup tracking scene our composite actually already looks kind of cool it definitely can be improved though and that's what we're gonna do now by adding in some of those extra render passes that we just rendered out so let's work on the ambient occlusion and we'll go ahead and add that to our background layer here so if i control shift click on the layer you can see we have the ambient occlusion path which looks pretty cool but needs to be cleaned up a little bit so for starters we can add it to our scene by adding in a color mix node dropping it right after the first alpha over there and changing it to multiply we'll add the ao right into the bottom socket and as you can see we now have ambient occlusion but we also have the background being added to it we don't want that we can clean that up real quick with another mix node so i'm gonna go shift a add in a color mix node drag it right into the ao pass there this time we'll change it to screen and all you have to do is connect the alpha to the bottom socket there invert the alpha there by going shift a color invert dragging it right into the alpha past there and we can see we get rid of the background and this little bit of ambient occlusion adds a little bit of realism to the scene while we're doing the ambient occlusion thing let's go ahead and add it to our quad bot as well it's time to add the glossy render passes that we rendered out for this i'm going to use a color mix node as well drag it to the end of your node tree here change it to add and then we'll drag the glossy indirect right into the bottom socket there and as you can see that's a very strong amount of glossy but it already is kind of tying in the environment by giving you those green reflections on the robot i'll take it down to a value of about 0.2 so it's not over the top and then we'll duplicate that add node one more time this time grab the glossy direct drag it into the bottom socket and as you can see that's looking pretty cool as well adding that extra layer of shine over the robot again maybe a little strong so we'll take it down to about a point one two but it is looking pretty cool now the last step to really pull the robot into the environment is to add just a subtle amount of mist and as you remembered we rendered out a missed pass as well so we'll go ahead and duplicate that add node drive right at the bottom change it over to mix drag the mist pass put it into the top socket there then you want to select the mispass on your quadbot render layer and drag it into the factor of that mix node here you're going to want to pick sort of a light blue barely light blue maybe color to mix the haze in the scene that it might have been shot in and then just like with our ao passes we need to remove the background here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to add in a color mix node again we'll change this one to multiply and we're just going to take the alpha from that quadbot layer into the bottom socket the mist into the top socket we now have just our robot without the mist affecting the background at all but you can see the edges are a little bit jagged here that can be cleaned up really easy for this we're just going to go shift a add in a filter dilate any road we'll go ahead and drag it over the alpha pass here in our multiply node we're just going to change it to feather and i'll give it a distance of something like seven as you can see that's the wrong direction so we want to go negative seven and that looks pretty clean so now we're gonna use this as the new mix factor right there a little strong i might say so we'll go ahead and duplicate that mix node drag the previous node to the bottom socket so we can control how much this node is actually doing anything here with this value also if you have some edges showing up on your 3d model try checking convert pre-multiply that can often fix these alpha issues and now the last step to tie in your monster robot with your visual effects might be to actually set it behind your character because if i zoom in here you can actually see the quad bot is in front of me i'm supposed to be behind it this is done really easy with masking right inside a blender that would just switch to the masking tap as you can see here and we'll switch from tracking over to mask here we can go ahead and create a very quick mask right inside the blender by holding down control and left clicking this will drag out a handle and if you just continue clicking you can see that we drag out multiple handles and we'll just go ahead and if i shift select the last handle you can go shift c to close that off or is it alt c yes it's all c there we go just a quick and dirty mask to show you the process now if you jump back to your compositing tab and if you want to open up that mask you're just going to go shift a add in an input this time we're going to choose mask and under that mask we're going to select the only mask there that we created now the easiest way to just add this back in without changing any of your visual effects is simply grab an alpha over note here duplicate it drag it to the very bottom take your footage go ahead and drag that into the bottom socket of that new alpha over node and then take your mask and use that as the factor to that alpha over node but boom we just stuck our head right over the monster for an animation of course you just want to enable automatic keyframing and then move through your footage and grab that mask and move it to match your character so you'll have to tweak this throughout your frames and if you want to render out an animation you could have a sweet robot right in the background of your scene doing whatever you want him to do maybe a dance or something i i don't know but that's something new for me thanks so much for watching if you liked the video well did you know what to do and if you had a question leave it in the comment section below thanks so much again to msi for sponsoring this video and i'll probably see you all in another video so

Channel: CG Geek

Views: 615,014

Keywords: Blender, Tutorial, VFX, Easy, Fast, Free, Funny, Fun, Robot, Dani, Unreal, Game engine, Realistic, CG Geek, Animation, CGI

Id: -BYH5pDYakk

Length: 18min 19sec (1099 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 25 2021