Blender and After Effects VFX Masterclass

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to this blender and aftereffects VFX course. My name is Ryan and I'm a VFX and 3D artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. I currently work in the advertising industry and doing VFX work for international clients such as Disney, record, leptin, and Hasbro to name a few. In this exciting course, you will learn how to create fantastic worlds by adding 3D objects and characters into any live action scene. We will begin by going step-by-step through the camera tracking process. Then we will look at how you can add objects or characters to the scene. You will also learn how to add shadows and R2 match the lighting and new 3D scene to the live action footage. Next, we will focus on Render passes and how to render a multi-layer EX or sequence. And finally, you will learn how to composite these different arena posters together using Adobe After Effects. You will also learn how to use crypto mats to easily mosque objects to make specific adjustments without re-rendering from Blender. We will do some rotoscoping, look at how to use track mattes. And finally, we will calibrate the shot at some film grain to blend everything together and render your final VFS shot. I'm including the footage and assets that you are required to follow along, but feel free to use your own footage if you wish. I really hope that you will learn a lot during this course and feel free to reach out if you have any questions, I will be more than happy to assist ready to create some amazing VFX shots. I will see you in the first lesson. 2. Lesson01: Exporting a PNG Sequence: Hi and welcome to the first lesson. In this lesson, we're going to look at how we can convert our footage, the MOV file to a PNG image sequence. Now the reason we're exporting an image sequence is when doing any types of visual effects. It's always better to use a PNG image sequence or any type of image sequence. You can either use a turf or a PNG or even a JPEG. Because then you don't have to really worry about the frame rate. And it will also ensure that you are using the correct number of frames. Now, you can use any software to do this. You can use Premier Pro, you can use After Effects. You can use the Vinci Resolve, or you can even use blender to convert a MOV or a video file to an image sequence. But in this course we're going to use After Effects to do that. So let's get our video clip inside of After Effects. I'm simply going to open finder and browse to my footage, the clip, the MOV file, which is a normal ten ADP file that I shot with my maverick drone. So it's about us to 6 s clip. And we're simply going to drag this into After Effects into the project section right here on the left-hand side. Now yet the topic and see the details of this clip. This is 1920 by 1080. And it's also, it's using the Apple ProRes four to two HQ codec. And it's running at 25 frames a second. But that's something we don't really need to worry about because we're going to convert all these frames to individual image sequence files, then you don't really have to worry about the frame rate, which makes everything so much easier. So I'm simply going to drag this clip into a new composition, into this icon at the bottom. And this will create a new composition for us. Now, if we play through this, you'll see this is a very simple shot of just this building, drones flying backwards. And that's what we're going to use inside of this course. Now, let's stop the playback and let's go to composition right here at the top. And we're going to add this to the render queue. And now we're going to set the parameters to export this as a PNG sequence. Now we've got some presets here at the bottom if I just drag this up, so we can see this better. You can click on this drop-down and you will find some presets. Now, I've already saved a PNG preset here, but if you don't see this, you can simply click on this custom to create your own preset. Now, right here at the top where it says format, we're going to change this to PNG sequence. Now you'll see there's some other options here like JPEG Sequence, open the XOR, or even you can use a tiff sequence as well. Now you can go ahead and you can use a tough or a J peg even. But I would recommend using PNG because it's better quality than a JPEG, and it's also a little bit smaller than a tiff sequence. So we're gonna go with PNG sequence. Next, we can look at the video output. Now for the channels we only want to export the RGB channel. We're not interested in doing alpha or RGB plus Alpha because we don't really have any alpha values inside of this clip. So just leave this on RGB. And you can leave these settings as default as well. Just below that you'll see use comp frame number. Now, if you untick this, you can actually specify the frame number of the first frame that will be exported. Now sometimes you want to start at zero. I really prefer to start at frame one because blender starts at frame one and not frame zero. That kinda just makes it a little bit easier to work with an image sequence starting at frame number one. And next we can click on this Format options just to look at the compression and make sure this is set to none because we don't want to compress our PNG file. Next click on Okay, and now you can click on Okay to save those settings. Now you can see at the bottom it says custom PNG sequence. You can go in and actually save this as a preset so you can reuse this next time. To do that, click on this drop-down and then click on Make Template right at the bottom. And here you can specify a name. You can maybe call it PNG sequence or anything you want, and then just simply click on Okay. Now you will see it will show that preset name right here at the bottom. Now, let's tell After Effects way we want to export this image sequence two. So next to output to just click on this not yet specified. And now we're going to browse to the location where we want to export this to. So I'm simply going to go to my folder. And I'm going to create a new folder called this image sequence like that. Click on Create. And now you can specify how you want to call that or your image sequence, the file name, basically, I'm just going to call this clip and then underscore. And then I want to leave these hashtags in. This will basically be the frame number, so it's going to be 00001 and so forth. So you can even make this a little bit less because we don't have a lot of frames. It's only 6 s. I'm going to decrease the number of hashtags here too. Let's make it four like that. And that's gonna give us zeros, zeros 010002 and so forth. Now you can also antique this saving subfolder because if you leave that on, it's going to create another sub folder. So just like that, That looks fine. Click on Save. Next, we're going to simply click on Render. And this is going to start exporting all those frames to the image sequence or to that folder. So once it's done, we can go into our folder that we selected and just to double-check if all our frames exported correctly. You can see we've got clip underscore 0001, and that's the first frame of our video. And if I scroll down all the way you will see it's going to go up to frame number 150. So this is all looking good. You can preview them by just kind of going through the image sequence. But this is looking great. So now that we have our clip as an image sequence, you can go ahead and close After Effects. You don't have to save this project because we just use this to export that image sequence. So you can close After Effects and we are now ready to start with a camera tracking in Blender. So I will see you in the next lesson. 3. Lesson 02: Camera Tracking Import PNG Sequence into Blender: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how we can import that image sequence that we export it from After Effects into Blender. So we can start with the camera tracking process. So I am using Blender 3.4, 0.1, but you can follow along with any latest or any newer version of Blender. Anything really after 2.8 should be fine. So inside of blender, you can delete everything. So just, let's just delete all of that. And then I'm gonna go to this little plus right here at the top you can see all the workspaces, layout, modeling, sculpting, etc. Right at the end you've got this little plus. So click on that. And then we're gonna go to VFX, and then we're going to click on motion tracking. And this will open up the motion tracking or the camera tracking workspace that we're going to use. So I usually just like to make this middle section a little bigger so you can just move this up to make this space bigger. And then we're simply going to click on this open button here to open or load our image sequence. So I'm gonna go to the folder where I exported that image sequence. And here you can see we've got all the images are all the frames from frame one all the way down to frame 150. So I'm going to select all of them by simply pressing a on the keyboard. And you can see now all the frames are highlighted. And then we simply going to click on Open Clip. And that's going to load that whole image sequence into this workspace. Now we can zoom out a bit using the same controls, holding in control and kinda just moving your mouse. So the first thing that I wanna do is you on the left-hand side, you can set your scene frames. Because currently blenders using the default frames, which is 250, you can see at the bottom it's starting at frame one and ending at frame 250. But if I click this sets in Frames button, Blender will set the in and out point to match. Our frames are the number of frames we have. So now you can see at the bottom it says it's starting at frame one and its ending at frame 150, which is correct. Now, another thing that you can do is you can click on this prefetched button right under sits in frames, and that will load all the frames into memory. So you can see it's kinda just prefetching at the bottom all the way to 100. And now if I scrub through, you can see it's playing the footage nice and smooth. Now you can also press Space to play back, but make sure your cursor is inside this modal window. If the cursor is yet the bottom, sometimes like that, it won't play the video. But if you hover your cursor over this modal window and press space, you will see the video playing back smoothly. Okay, so we have loaded our image sequence. Let's go ahead and save this Blender project. So I'm gonna go to File, Save as, and I'm just going to browse to a folder and you can give it a name. I'm going to call this camera tracking, underscore a one and click on Save. And now our Blender project has been saved. So I will see you in the next lesson. 4. Lesson 03: Camera Tracking Camera Sensor, Lens Focal Length and Color: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at the camera, focal length and census size, as well as the color management inside of Blender. So it's really important that you match your virtual camera inside of blender with the real-world camera that you used to shoot this footage. If you don't match it exactly, blenders going to really struggle to try and match the perspective of your footage. So it's just really important to kind of get that as close as possible. So you're on the right hand side in this workspace, you will see some tabs. What you need to do is click on the track Tab to go into the track settings and you will find some drop-downs. So first of all, let's look at the objects under, you will see camera, and that means the camera is what we are going to track. We're not going to track an object. We're going to track the camera movement in our scene. So you can leave that as default. Now if you go down slightly, you'll see camera. And if you expand that, you will also see lens. Make sure you expand lens as well. And you will see the sensor width, which is the camera sensor size of the camera that you used. And then also very importantly, the focal length of the lens that you use. Now you'll see by default the sensor would say to 35 mm and the focal length is set to 24 by default. Now, they're awesome presets included in blender that you can actually just click on these little dots. And you can see there's a whole list of cameras that you can actually select from here. So if you maybe used a red camera or a Blackmagic Pocket, you can also select that from here. Or what you can do is you can simply just Google the camera that you used and you can figure out what those sizes are. Now, I just googled my iMac Pro one because that's what I use to capture the footage worth. And here you can see the specs of the DJI maverick pro, one, which is the first Maverick Pro that came out. Now what I'm looking for is the lens focal length. And you can see here it says it's a 28 millimeter lens, but it says roughly equivalent to 35 mm. Now this means that if we use a 35-millimeter census size, this camera or this lens, focal length will be 28 mm. So that means we don't have to try and figure out how to multiply the crop factor and all of those things. So always kinda look for equivalent to a 35-millimeter. Because if we jump back into Blender, you will see that the sensor width is already set to 35 millimeter, which is kinda like the industry standard. So I'm simply going to use 28 millimeter for the lens focal length. So that's what you can to try and need to figure out. So I'm simply going to go to the focal length under the lens and just input 28 millimeter there. So this is basically the camera that I used. 28 millimeter focal length. When it's on a sensor worth of 35, it might sound a little bit confusing, but when you Google your camera model, you will usually find a 35-millimeter equivalent focal length for that specific, either camera or specific lens. So it's very important that you try and just get this right. Just Google a bit and try and figure out the settings if your camera is not listed here. Alright, so with this setting saved, you can just kinda minimize that. And then there's one more thing that we need to change. And that's the color settings inside of blend or the color management. Now, to get there, you need to go to the render properties, this little camera icon, and then scroll all the way down to color management at the bottom. Expand that. And we're going to change the view transform from full mic to standard. Now keep an eye on the image in the middle. If I change this to standard, you will see it gets a little bit more contrast and some details in the clouds actually show, show up better. So that's just a way to change the look of your footage as such, it really going to change anything else for now, but it's just going to make the footage a little bit more contrast so you can see better. And it will maybe just track a bit better as well. Alright, so that's the only things we need to change right now. You can go ahead and save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Lesson 04: Camera Tracking Configure Tracking Settings: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at the tracking settings you on the left-hand side, there's some important settings that you need to understand before we start tracking our footage. So if you expand tracking settings here, you will see some options such as patents size, search size, the motion model match, and then also pre-post and normalize, and then some extra settings here at the bottom. So let's start at the top. So the pattern size is basically the amount of pixels that it's going to track throughout the footage. It's basically the size of the tracking area. Now the search size is the area around the pattern size. So if you have a fast-moving camera, then you need to increase this search size. So that Blender basically expands the amount of pixels it's looking for that pattern that is trying to track. So I usually change my pattern size to around 40 or feel usually that's a good size to start with. The search size for relatively slow moving footage like we have here, I think 70 or 71 should be fine. So let's start with those settings for the pattern size and the search size. Now we get the motion model and currently that's set to location. And if you click on this drop-down, you'll see all these different options, location, location, rotation, location and scale, location rotation and scale, a fine and also perspective. Now these are the different models that Blender will try and use to match that track going through the footage. Now, location is simply up and down, left and right. Location rotation will include rotation as well. And location and scale will basically just be up, down, left, right and also scaled. So going closer and further away. And then you've got your location, rotation and scale, which will be all of those things, then a fine and perspective. These two are very similar. That is, when you have a lot of perspective change in your shot. So let's say the camera's panning up or down while moving in and out as well. So when you get a lot of perspective change, you will use these models. Now you can change the model for each track that we're gonna do. We're gonna do multiple tracks. And you can set this motion model for each of those tracks so you don't have to choose one and then stick with that throughout the whole process. You can go back and forth and change it as you like. So for now we're just going to leave this on location. We can change this once we actually start our tracking process. Underneath that you've got match and yeah, you've got two options, keyframe and also previous frame. Now key-frame means it's going to try and match that pattern to the first frame. So even if you tracking all the way through your footage, it's going to look at that first frame or that snapshot that I took on the first frame. And it's going to try and match all those patterns throughout the shot to that first frame. Usually I find that doesn't work too well because the pattern might change going further into the footage. So the second option that we have is previous frame. I always use previous frame because basically it's matching that pattern to the previous frame. Frame one it will track and a pattern. Then frame two, we'll look at frame one to match it from three, we'll then look at frame two and try and match that pattern. So I hope that kinda makes sense. That previous frame usually works better. I find I've never had a lot of success using the keyframe option C. I just changed this match to previous frame. Then underneath that, we've got pre-post. And if you hover over pre-post, you'll see it says, use a brute force translation only initialization when tracking. Now, I'm not exactly sure what that does, but I usually just leave it on and I get good results will add. Underneath that you've got normalize. And usually normalize is only when you have drastic lighting changes in your scene. So let's say there's maybe a light that comes on during the shot, then normalize will work. It will not look at the brightness of the shot, but it's going to try and just kinda manage if there's any big lighting changes. Now for this shot, we don't have any drastic lighting changes. You can see there the lighting stays very smooth throughout. So I'm going to leave this tick off. Alright, so if we go down a little further, we get to Tracking Settings extra. If you expand this, we've got the weight correlation and also the margin. We're not really going to use any of these. The margin you can kinda tell blender when to stop tracking if it gets close to the edge or the margin of the shot. But I'm going to leave the settings on default for now so you can minimize that. Then under the track section, this is where you get all the tracking controls. So here we've got things like track markers backwards by one frame, There's a striking all the frames backwards. There's a striking all the frames forward and that's tracking one frame forward. You've got these same controls over here as well. And then you also have clear, so clear backwards and clear forwards. We will get to that a little bit later. And then you also have refined backwards and forwards and then some Merge options as well. But yeah, just know that you've got your controls here. We've got your controls here at the bottom as well. And we're also going to make use of the keyboard shortcuts obviously. So once you've set these settings like so, you can go ahead and save your Blender project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 05: Camera Tracking Adding Trackers and Track Footage: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to start the tracking process. So basically what we're gonna do is we need to add trackers and track some features in the shot. Now, we basically need eight good tracks to solve this camera movement. Now, it's very important that you get the best tracks that you can possibly get. If you have, for instance, eight or nine or let's say you have ten good tracks, but you have one bad track. That one bad track can actually mess up your camera tracking results completely. So it's always good to have rather less trackers, but good tracks than having a lot of trackers, but you have some bad tracks if that makes sense. So, yeah, so basically minimum required tracks is eight. If you think of a cube, the cube has got eight points. So you've got four points at the top and for the base. And that's basically how tracking works. So we need some points on the floor and some points may be far in the distance, and then also maybe some points closer to the camera. And then we also want some points that's not on the floor. So maybe on the way the roof is, maybe and maybe some of these windows on the front section of the Spalding and maybe just some of the corners of the buildings as well. The more trackers you have at specific points in your shot, the easier it will be to reconstruct the scene in 3D space. But you will see what I mean when we get to that. So the most important thing to note or to remember is you need at least eight tracks that's going through the footage completely. So those 8-tracks must cover all the frames of your footage. And it's always better to have less but good tracks than having a lot of tracks that's not as good. And you're looking for high contrast points that we can track. So make sure that you are on frame one. You can either just scrub this timeline yet the bottom to go to frame one, or you can use the keyboard shortcut Shift and then the left arrow on your keyboard, and that will jump to the first frame. The shortcut to go to the last frame is Shift and the right arrow key on your keyboard. We're going to use that shortcut quite a lot. So try and get familiar with it. So shift and lift to jump to the first frame. And now we're going to look for our first feature that we're going to track. So for the first track we're going to leave the motion model on location, but we can experiment with these other ones as we go through this tracking process. So make sure there's a city location. We've got our pattern size set to 40. Search size is set to 71. Everything's looking good. I'm on frame one, and I'm going to zoom in around the footage and look for some thing to track. I think let's start with a point that's on the floor plane. So on the floor of the scene. And I want to maybe track this edge of this bolding right here. So maybe this area right there. So to place a new tracker, you simply hold Control and then just click once. And that's going to create that tracker for you. You can also go in and you can drag around to reposition that tracker, an e on the left-hand side under the track tab here on the side, you can also see the tracker just kinda in a close-up view here. You can also click and drag here to do some fine readjustments. The position of that track. Once you are happy to track forward, we are going to, you can either use the keys here at the bottom of these buttons. You can press this one that says track the selected markers forward for the entire clip. But we're going to use the shortcut keys because it's just so much easier. Now the shortcut for track forward is control and T for track. So press Control T on your keyboard and you're going to see it's going to jump out of view. If we zoom out, you can see that the tracker is still on that corner of the Bolding. And if I scrub through here, you can see the tracker is sticking to that point. Now, we can see in this top corner, this preview of that track. If I scrub through, you can see the track point is actually kinda moving a bit there. It's not staying exactly on that corner of that Bolding. And that's because the perspective is actually changing a bit. This wall immediately on the side, you can see that it's actually changing and that's a perspective change. So for this track, location is not really going to be the best option to use. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete this tracker and let's retract it using a different motion model. So to delete the track, simply click on it or click next to it to select it. And then press X and delete track. So now we're going to create a new track, but we're first going to change the motion model. And for this one, I want to try either perspective or a fine. So I think for this one, let's go with a fine. So just select the file name. Make sure you're on the first frame. Very important. Zooming year and place the first tracker by holding Control and click ones. You can see the preview in the top corner. And I'm going to track forward again. So pressing the shortcut Control T. Alright, so now I can see that our tracker actually kinda changed perspective. You can see if I scrub through that, that kinda goes from a square to kinda more like a flat square. Now if you look at this little preview here in the corner, if I scrub through that, you can see the tracker is staying on that corner. Exactly. And that's because the perspective change. So we changed our motion model to a feed and or a fine, I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but here you can see it's tracking much better. So that's a really, really good tracks. If you go to the last frame, you can see it's perfectly on that corner. If we go to the first frame, it's perfectly on the corner. And everything in-between, we have one track That's perfect. Basically, let's save our project. And I just quickly want to show you if we drag this down yet the top, you can see all the trackers year as well. So there's gonna be a list of all your Trackers here. And you can also see that this first track is going all the way from frame one all the way through to frame 150. So this is just an easy way to see the duration of that track because sometimes you can have a track that only covering half of the frames may be that feature goes out of the frame and then you will only have this a line canal covering halfway of the shot. Now we need a tracks that's covering the full duration of the shot. But we can also have some that only covering certain areas of the shot, but then we need more trackers if that makes sense. Alright, so we have one tracker. Let's go ahead and place our second track. So for this one I'm going to zoom around and let's see what we can track. Maybe this corner of this panel E on the floor, and that's also on the floor, which is great. And we can see it stays inside the shot all the way through the 150 frames. So I'm gonna go back to frame one, shift and lift arrow. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to place a tracker on this high contrast corner right here. So hold Control. Click once. We've got a little preview here in the top corner, and I'm going to press Control T to track forward. And let's check this track. So keep an eye on this little preview here at the top quarter. If I scrub through this, you can see it's perfect that stays on that corner and that means we have a very good track. So now if we look at this window here at the top, you can see we've got two trackers and both of them go all the way through the 150 frames, which is great. So here at the bottom we've got this funny looking graph. And this basically just shows you the movement of all your tracks. So it basically shows you that up and down movement of these tracks. And later on you might see if we have a bad track, it will not follow the default movement of the other tracks because most of the trackers in your scene will kind of follow the same movement. Obviously not exactly the same, but they will, they will follow the same pattern. And you will easily see if there's something that kinda jumps out here. And then you know, that track is not really a good track, but we'll get to that later. So don't worry about that graph too much for now. So we've got two good trackers. Let's place our third track. So go to frame one, and let's zoom in and look for our third feature to track this one, I'm going to try and track this tree right here at the back. And you can see it's also on the floor plane, so that's good for now. I'm going to track this corner right there. Alright, so you can see the little preview in the top window. Make sure on frame one and track forward by pressing Control T. Alright, so let's scrub through that. And that looks like a good track to me. Alright, so here at the top you can see we've got three tracks and they all the way through, which is great. So let's zoom out and find more features to track. Now we can also track from the back backwards to the front. So let's go to the last frame. So press Shift and right arrow to jump to frame 150. And let's zoom in and see what we can track. Maybe let's track this little white thing that's also on the floor plane. So I'm going to Control click on that corner. Now we want to track backwards. So because we're on frame 150, we're going to track all the way back to frame one. Now, the shortcut for tracking backwards is Control Shift and t. So remember to track forward, it's just Control T, track backwards, control shift T. Let's press that now, Control Shift T. And that's contract all the way back to frame number one. So we can scrub through this, keep an eye on this little preview window here at the top. And you can see that track is looking great. So you're in the top window, you can see we've got four trackers and they are all going through the shot. I want to quickly show you what happens if a feature leaves the shot. So you can see, let's look at this feature right here. If I scrub from the back forward, you will see that it's going to leave our shot there. So I want to show you what happens when we actually track that because sometimes we don't have enough features in the shot that covers all the frames. And then we have to track like little bits and pieces of frames even if they go outside the frame. So let me show you how that works. So I'm on frame 150, and you can see we've got this little high contrast feature right here that I want to track Control and click to place that tracker. Now we want to track backwards. So I'm going to press Control Shift and T. And now we're going to see that our tracker actually stopped here at frame 108. So if I scrub through year from 150, you can see in this top corner, attract that feature perfectly. And then suddenly it just went all wonky and weird and then it stopped tracking because of that feature, it's leaving the frame so the tracker just couldn't track it anymore. So what we wanna do is we want to tell blender the lost frame that that tracker was actually good before it kinda went haywire. So you can use your arrow keys to kinda scrub through frame-by-frame. And if I go backwards to about frame 110, you can see this is where things started to kinda go weird. So I'm gonna go forward to about frame hundred and 12. And now we want to delete any tracking data going backwards. So we want to keep the tracking data on this side from hundred and 5,212, but we want to delete everything going this way. So to do that, we can use either these icons on the left-hand side or you can use these icons here above the timeline. And what we wanna do is we want to use the Clear buttons. Now you'll see there's a clear backwards and also a clear forwards. And we want to clear everything that's this way which is backwards. So you simply click on this little clear with the x and the one pointing backwards. And now you will see that it's going to delete all the tracking data going this way. So this will just tell blender that the lost good tracking frame for this tracker was on 112 and there's nothing before that. So you just need to do that when you're track goes out of the frame. So now if we look at this little window here at the top, if I just make that a bit bigger, you can see that our track number four is only, this is only tracked on this area of frames. So it goes from 150, 212, and then there's nothing before that. So that's perfect, but this won't count as one of the eight trackers that we need. If we get another track now that's covering frames 1-112, then those two tracks will count as one complete track basically because it needs to cover all the frames. So I hope that kinda makes sense. So I'm just going to move that up again, move this down, and let's try and look for more features. So let's go to frame number one by pressing Shift and the left arrow key. And this time I want to track something that's not on the floor plan, so maybe something on the building itself. So let's zoom in around here and maybe this dark spot under this window, maybe we can track that feature. So on frame one, holding Control, click right there to place the tracker. And I'm going to track forward. So I'm going to press Control T to track forward. And let's scrub through and keep an eye on this top window to see if we have a good track. And you can see it's not bad. It's kinda changing a little bit of shape. But it looks like the tracker is kinda staying in relatively the same position. So I'm going to leave that track. And yeah, I think that's a good track. So let's look at another point. Also, maybe something on the building itself. So maybe let's zoom in here, maybe this corner right here. So make sure you're on frame one, place your tracker by holding Control, and I'm going to track this one forward. So Control T to track forward. And that looks like a good track. Keep an eye on this window. Quickly do a scrub through and make sure that track is sticking to that position. Yeah, that's looking good. Let's go ahead now and save our project. Alright, I also want to track the edge of the building yet the bottom, just so that we have a tracking that position. So if we want to rebuild the Bolding or we want those, those locations in 3D space. It's always good to then track them as well. So I'm going to track this corner right here. I'm going to place a tracker there on frame one, and I'm going to track that forward by pressing Control T. So you can see that looks like a good track. If I keep my eye on this little preview that is sticking really well. So we've got another good track. So now we want to maybe track something that's farther away in the background. Just to kinda help blender figure out the perspective and the movement of the shot. Basically, it's always good to have tracks that's closer to camera and also further away from the camera. So let's see what we can maybe track that back. Maybe I can track, Let's just zoom in here and see what we have. Maybe I can track this fence. Some people, maybe you want to track that cow in the background. But always, a very good rule of thumb is to never track something that moves. You don't want to track any animals, want to track any trees that's maybe blowing in the wind or anything that's kinda moving. Track people, things like that. You want to track static objects. So I think let's zoom in here on Frame hundred and 50. And I'm gonna see if we can track this base of this fence pole. So I'm just going to simply hold Control. Click there to place a tracker and let's see how far we get until that fence go goes out of the frame. So let's just do a track backwards now. So Control Shift and T. And you can see it actually went all the way through to frame one. So let's keep an eye on this preview window and see what happened. Yeah, that looks like a really good track. Yeah, I'm happy with that. Alright, so let's look for more things to track. So I want to show you when you track something where the background is changing a lot, you might get a track, a file track. So if we look at maybe this edge of the roof, this area right here. Now, keep an eye on the surrounding pixels. If I drag my mouse, you can see that the surrounding pixels are changing completely because of perspective and the distance of the gross and everything behind the roof. I'm going to try and go to the I'm going to try and track this section. I'm going to show you what happens when we have something like this. So make sure you're on frame 150, the last frame. I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to place my tracker on this corner right here. And I can see our pattern is basically everything inside of this box. So it's going to look at these pixels on the roof, but it's also going to look at these pixels behind the roof, which will change. And that's going to basically confused the tracker, but because the roof is going to stay exactly the same, but the background is going to change. So let's see what happens if we try and track this backwards. So I'm going to press Control Shift and T to track backwards. And you can see that our track failed. If I scrub through this, keep an eye on this preview window, you can see that it just couldn't figure out a way to keep track. And that's because of the background is completely changing. So let me show you how to track something like that. So I'm going to go back to the last frame 150. Make sure to delete this track. So simply click next to it to select it, press X and delete. And I'm going to place a tracker there is again at the same position. So hold control and click there. But now you can kinda use these points to change the patterns. I'm simply just going to do something like this. And you don't want to include any of the pixels at the back. And you can also use this thing to rotate it. And you can use, yeah, you can kinda just move it around and maybe reposition these points. This little point here in the middle, that's actually going to be the middle of the track. That's that crosshair right there. So you just want to kind of move these points around so it's not including those pixels at the back. So let's see if something like that might work. So I'm going to track backwards Control Shift T. And that looks a lot better. So now if I scrub through this hole, keep an eye on this little preview. And you can see that as actually looking perfect. You can also see at the end, the main preview or the video that it's tracking perfectly. So that's just a really good tip when tracking things where the background color changes. So yeah, we've got a good track there. So maybe let's track this window as well. So we have some tracking information where it is in the scene, which is always good. So let's go back to the first frame for this one. So Shift and left-click or left arrow to jump to frame number one. And I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to track this corner of this window. So Control, click, Place a tracker and simply Control T to track forward. And that's a real easy track and you can see it's seeking perfectly. Let's go back to frame one. And I think we probably have enough trackers by now. We've got ten trackers and nine of them, or maybe 11. 11 of them are going all the way through all the frames. So technically we do have enough trackers to basically solve our track. But as I mentioned earlier, it's always good to track features that you know, you might actually want to use wind rebuilding this scene in 3D. And that's why I did the corner of the building, that corner of the building, so we know where those points in space will be in 3D space. So there's a few more that I want to add, just that we have enough tracking points to rebuilt the scene basically. So I want to track this corner as well. Now we're going to have a similar issue where we track the roof, where the pixels behind the river's moving quite strangely. Now, if you keep an eye on this area, here, you can see the background is moving a little bit different. It's revealing more of the gross and that pathway right there. So we want to make sure we track this correctly. So on frame number one, I'm going to place my tracker on this corner, but I want to increase the tracking or the pattern, basically this to this side. Maybe they just move it like that. And then we can kinda just reposition this. No, I actually want to place my tracker on the corner like that. But I want to move these points. So it's not looking at those pixels right there. It's only looking at these pixels in front. Alright, let's, let's try that and see if it works. So Control T. And that's something Let's scrub through keeping an eye on this little preview. You can also look in the main window here. Yeah, that looks like a really good track. So now we have the corner of our building, the front corner, that one as well. So maybe we need this corner as well so that we can, we need to, we can then kinda rebuild this wall. If you want to maybe add something on this wall, then we have those points in 3D. So on the first frame, Let's zoom in all the way to this area and in that corner at your tracker control click. And now we're going to track forward control T. And that looks like a good one. Let's keep an eye on this little track. Scrub through. And yeah, you can see that is looking good. Okay. Let's look around our scene and let's see if there's anything else that we want to track. Maybe we can track one of these electrical boxes here on this wall. And maybe I want to track just this top edge or this top corner of this electrical box. So on frame one, I'm going to zoom in here, plays a tracker right there, Control T to track forward. And let's see if we have a good track. Yeah, that's looking perfect. Can see it's sticking to that corner. And I think we have enough tracks now. We've got some tracks in the background. We've got some trackers on the ground in the foreground. We've got some on bolding. Maybe we can add one more, maybe just one on this side somewhere. So we have a point in 3D way, these windows, or if you want to do something in that area, it's always important to kinda think of your end result and then play structures where you want to add objects. Now, I'm not exactly sure what you're gonna do with a shot yet. But I think if we have the ground plane and we've got the basics of the building, then we should be fine. So I'm just going to zoom in on this side, make sure you on frame number one. And I'm going to track this corner of this window right there. So Control T to track forward. And that is looking good. Scrubbing through. Yeah, that's perfect. So now let's go ahead and save our project. And let's quickly look at our trackers. So you can see we have 15 trackers in total. And all of them except one, go all the way through, through all the frames to 150 frames. So that's great. And if you look at the graph here at the bottom, you can see that kinda all moving in the same direction except this one. But this one is that track that we stopped off with through that wind out of frame. So if I click on this or just next to this graph, you can actually see that it's going to highlight that track in the shot. So if I just scrub over that area, you can see this white tracker that's been highlighted. That's the track that's kinda sticking out there. But it's fine because we only attracted to it kinda looks a little bit different. So I think we've got two really good tracks. So go ahead and save your project now. And I will see you in the next lesson. 7. Lesson 06: Camera Tracking Solving The Camera Track: Hey and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to try and solve our camera track. So we've placed our trekkers and we have quite a few trackers. We've got 15 trackers and they're all looking pretty good. And now we can go ahead and try and solve our camera motion or our camera move. And then blend is gonna give us a tracking score. And if we get a really bad score, we can refine our track a little bit, which I will cover in our next lesson. But for this lesson, we're just going to look at how to solve our camera track and how to view the error or the result error basically. So to do this, we are going to go to this little solve tab right here on the left-hand side of the viewport. And then you'll see we've got solve. And then underneath that, we've got all these settings. So there's only a few things we need to worry about in this drop-down. So first of all, there's a button that says tripod or a checkbox tripod. And that is if your camera was on a tripod and it's literally just a pan left to right or maybe a pen up and down, but the camera is staying in the exact same spot. So if you are using a tripod shot, just tick that obviously this shot was not done on a tripod. It's a drone shots, so the camera is actually moving through space. So we're not going to bother with ticking that. Next. We've got keyframe. Now this is basically the area of your shot that Blender will look at to try and determine the perspective change in the shot. So by default it's set to 1.30. So it's only going to look at this small section of the footage to try and determine the perspective in your shot. So usually I leave this on default one to 30. If you get a really bad solve error, you can always try and adjust this. The rule of thumb here is try and select two keyframes in your shot with the most perspective change. Let's say the cameras fairly stolen the beginning and maybe there's a big camera move, maybe between frames 60.90, showing the perspective a little bit better than I would suggest you change the frame a to say 60 and frame B2, let's say frame 90. So it's just kinda looking for the most perspective changes in the shot. And because the shot is very, very similar throughout, it's not really going fast or slow, or it's not changing perspective in a certain area. It's, it's kinda doing the same thing all the way through. So I think a keyframe of one entity should work fine. Next up we have our focal length and this means that blend, they can actually go ahead and change that focal length that we inserted year under the camera lens settings. Remember we set this to 28 millimeter focal length. Now, this checkbox means that blender can actually go ahead and it can refine that number a little. So if you're not 100% sure about the focal length, you can always check that box. And as I say, Blender will try and cannot refund that. But for this shot, we know the setting should be right. And that's why we don't want blender to change that focal length. So I'm not going to take it. The same goes with optical center and also the radial distortion. Now by default, I'm going to leave them off as well because we don't want blender to change the radial distortion or the optical center for this. There's cameras for these cameras settings. So I'm going to leave them all off. So all you need to do is click on this solve camera motion button. And now blend is going to go through and calculate everything. And right here at the top, you'll see it says solve error. It's giving me a solve error of 0.11 pixel, which is a really, really good result basically. So this number is in pixels, so it's basically 0.11 pixel error, which means there is a slight error of almost 0.1 pixels. So it's extremely small, which means there's not a lot of error. You always want your Solve error to be lower than one pixel. If you solve errors, let's say five or ten. That means that your camera track is off by OT can actually glide or move around by ten pixels outside of that tracking area. So always try and get a solid arrow that's lower than one pixel. Anything above one is not that great and you want to try and get that lower. So obviously with this example, we've got a great solve error of 0.1. But in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to refine that if you've got a really bad track. Now just something quickly I want to show you before we end this lesson. If we look at our tracks yet the top, you can see they've got these numbers now next to each track. And this number is the solve error for each individual track. So you can see this one here at the bottom is going to solve error of 0.05, which is really small, which is great. And if you go through them, they're all really, really great. You can see this one is slightly higher than the others, 0.10, which is still great. The highest one is this one at the top, which has got an error of 0.23, which is still way smaller than one. So it's still perfectly fine. But you can see if I, if I click on this track, it will actually highlight that track in the viewport. And we can now see that this tracker is giving us the highest error our tracks. So if we would say delete this track and maybe track something else, we will get a better overall school. But for now, I really don't think we should do anything there because there's solve errors. Great. But in the next lesson, I'm going to show you what to do if you get a really bad solve era. So for now, this is perfect. And you can go ahead and save your project for now. And I will see you in the next lesson. 8. Lesson 07: Camera Tracking Refining Your Camera Track: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how to refine our track if we got a very bad solve error. So let's say you solve arrow is bigger than one or maybe it's five or ten, then we know we've got a bad trackers some way that we need to remove. So in our case, we don't have any bad tracks at the moment. So I'm going to manually create some really, really bad tracks. And then we're going to see how we can refine them and delete them and to create a better solve. So I'm gonna go back to the track to be on the left-hand side because we're going to add some new trackers to the scene. Make sure you're on frame one. And I'm just going to add some really, really bad tracks here in the clouds maybe, so maybe let's add one here. And I'm just going to track that forward control T. And you can see it's actually tracking that. Not too bad, but I'm just going to break this track manually. So I'm gonna go to any random frame, and I'm simply just going to drag this tracker to maybe a new position and just go to another section, just drag it out. So I'm literally just breaking this track completely. So you can even see in the graph at the bottom, you can see some interesting things happening here. And that is just showing our very, very bad track that we are creating here. I'm just moving this around to create the worst track possible. So now let's see if we go back to our solver tab on the left-hand side, and I'm simply going to click on Solve camera motion. Now, watch what's going to happen to our solve error. Currently we have a solve error of 0.11, which is great. Now if I click on Solve camera motion, that number just jumped up to 1.33. So that means our track has got an error that's bigger than one pixel, which is not great. So now we need to figure out how we can make this better. We can get a better solve error basically for this track. Alright, so what we're gonna do next is on the left-hand side, under the solve menu, you'll see a clean up section. Now, if we expand this cleanup section, you'll see a few parameters here. And the only thing you need to change here is make sure that type is set to select. And that means it's only going to select the bad trackers. It's not going to delete them or anything. It's just going to highlight them for you. And then you can decide if you want to delete them or if you want to retract them, or what if you want to do. So make sure that's unselect. And then we're going to click this falter Tracks button. And it's going to bring up this little filter Tracks menu here in the viewport in the corner. And if I expand this, we can now basically scrub through. And it's going to basically highlight all the bad tracks. If we started a big number, if we drag this all the way down to, let's say zero, it's going to select all the tracks because zero is kinda, it's including a threshold, so it's including all the tracks. Now, if you slowly move this up, if you increase this number, you'll see it's going to de-select some of the better trackers in the scene. So you can see that it's starting to de-select the trackers because those are all under this threshold. And if we go bigger, you can see it's still keeping this bad track highlighted because it's got the worst error possible, even if I go up all the way to like 48, you can see at the bottom it says identified one problematic tracks and that's the one that's highlighted right here. We can go all the way up to 70, its twilight at 9,000, 105. Let's see, up to where it actually goes. So here we go. You can see, so it's kinda selecting it somewhere around here. So 167, bring it down. 165, v can see it's highlighted. So that just means it's filtering out all the good tracks from the bear tracks and it's highlighted. So now we can simply delete this track by pressing X and then delete that track. And now we can resolve our camera motion. So look at the solve arrow 1.33. I'm going to click on Solve camera motion again. Now we can see we've got a great solve error of 0.11 again. And yeah, that's just a perfect solve error right there. So the fault attracts basically is just an option to filter out all the bad tracks in your scene so that you can decide if you want to delete them and then re-solve your camera motion, or maybe you want to retract those trackers. So another way to do this is to look at the tracks here in this top window. And next to each track you will see the solve error for that specific track. And what you can do is you can look for high numbers here, anything that's maybe higher than one with assault error of one, you can simply click on those tracks and it's going to highlight it in the viewport. And then you can press X to delete that tracker with a high solve error. So that's just another way to look at your tracks and delete the bad ones. So what you wanna do is you just want to get rid of all the bad tracks. Keep all the good tracks. Resolve by pressing this solve camera motion button until you solve error is less than one, then you know your truck is good and we can continue with building or setting up our tracking seen. So go ahead and save your project now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 9. Lesson 08: Camera Tracking Setup Scene, Orienting the Scene and Set Scene Scale: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to set up our tracking scene. We're going to orient the scene. And then finally we also going to set the scale of the scene that we're working in, a real-world scale, which just makes everything easier when adding objects to our scene later on. So what we wanna do first is make sure you're on the solve tabby on the left-hand side. And then scroll all the way down until you get to this scene setup section right here. And what we're gonna do here is we simply going to click on Setup tracking scene. Now, this will create a camera and also a plane and also a cube inside of the scene. So if we go back to the layout tab at the top, you can see now we have a camera, we have a light area. It also sets up a light, and then a plane, and then also a cube. Alright? And then if we scrub through our timeline, you can see that we actually have some camera motion already. Now, our scene is not oriented. So if you look through the camera, you can see that things are not really aligned to the floor of our scene and it's not looking correct. So we're gonna go back to the motion tracking tab right here at the top. And now we're going to orient the scene and kinda tell blender, which is the center of the scene, whereas the floor and all of those things. Now, let's look at this orientation section here on the left-hand side, you can see we've got some options such as floor wall, set origin, x-axis, y-axis, and also the scale. So we're going to start with the origin first. We want to tell blender which tracker is going to be in the center of our 3D world. Now, if we go to the layout scene and we can just go out of the camera. Now the center of our scene is where the x and the y axes where they meet. That's the center of our world. So let's go back to the tracking motion tracking workspace. And we're going to select one of these trackers to set as a center point of our world. And it's usually good to use a tracker that's on the ground plane and also some way that's kinda in the center of the scene. Let's look at our scene and choose a tracker that will be the origin of our world. And I think this tracker right here will be a good center point for the world because it's on the floor, first of all. And that's got on the center of a frame and I think it's just a good center point to have just a tip when selecting any track is in your scene. Don't click on the track itself because you can actually mess up the track like that if you click and drag accidentally. So just a tip click next to the trackers like that. If you want to select the tracker, you can also lock them. If you are maybe scared that you might move them accidentally. So you can select all the trekkers by pressing a and then right-click and then click on Lock tracks. And that will just mean you won't be able to move them around. So if I click on this truck, you can't accidentally just move them around. So that's maybe just a good practice to do as well. So click next to this tracker to highlight or to select that one tracker and simply click on Set Origin. You're on the side. So that's going to tell blender that point is going to be at the center of our world. Now if we go back to the layout, you can see we look through our camera. Now, we just need to kind of hide the ground. And let's delete this cube completely by pressing X. Now you can see the center point of our axes is set to that point in space. But you can see it's not orienting the scene correctly. It's still up in the air. It's not it's not looking aligned. So let's go back to the motion tracking tab. Next, we want to tell blender where the floor ease of the scene. So you can see on the left-hand side we've got a button that says flow. Now, we need to select three trackers that's on the floor so that blender can figure out or triangulate those three tracks and then create the floor plane on that plane. So you can select any three trackers that's on the floor. But I would suggest you use trekkers that's not too close to each other. So I'm going to use this track right here. Let's just zoom in here slightly. So this drag hold Shift and then click next to a second track. So I'm going to use this point right here, and then hold Shift again and click next to a third track. So currently we've got this track on this corner selected. Then secondly, we've got this track selected right here. And thirdly, we've got this track selected right here. All three are on the floor plane of our world, of our scene. And now we're going to click on this floor button. Now it automatically sets that plane to match the floor. So now if we go back to the layout and we'd look through the camera, you can see things are looking a little better at kinda look at this. It looks like this is the floor of our scene, but you can see the axes are not matching our scene completely. Alright, so what we wanna do is we want to select a tracker that's either on the x-axis or the y-axis in relation with the center or the origin tracker. Now remember, we set this tracker as the origin point, the middle point of our scene. So we can either select this tracker because that's on the x-axis from that origin point. Or we can select this tracker which is on the y-axis from the origin point. So I'm going to select this tracker because it's on the x-axis from that original center point tracker. And then I'm going to simply click on Set x axes. Alright? So now if we go back to the layout, now you can see that it's actually matching the x-axis on that line. Because we told blender that this track on this point is on the x-axis in relation to the center of our world, the origin point. Now, if you don't have any trackers, That's exactly on that x-axis, on the y-axis, we can actually manually adjust this in our scene. So if I go to the layout section again, we can simply click on the camera. You can click it in the view on the outline here on the side to highlight the camera. Now press R to rotate and then press Z to rotate only on the z-axis. Now, I can kinda holding Shift to do some finer adjustments. And I can see I can manually align my scene to match the axes. So I'm just gonna kinda rotate it until I can see that the lines are actually following my scene. You can see these lines going back, these grid lines that are following the Bolding like that. This one is kind of following this, but it's not completely correct yet. So I'm just gonna kinda rotate it until it feels like it's in the scene. You can also move the camera around on the z plane. So if we want to do that, we can press G to move, but we only want to restrict it to the x and the y axis. We don't want to move up and down. So to restrict that, press Shift Z. And that will basically lock the camera movement now only to move in the x and the y positions. So you can see I can kinda move this around if I want to place that center point more kinda in that corner, I can do so just like that and just click to position that again. Now if we look through or if we exit our camera, we can actually delete this light as well. It's going to be delight. And I'm going to bring also the floor plan back that we actually hide from our scene. Now you can see we've got a floor plane, and I'm going to play through this by pressing Space. Alright, As you can see, our plane is moving with a scene that's obviously intersecting the building a bit. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go back to frame one. I'm just going to scale this plane down. So the plane selected press S to scale and just scale it down. So it's kinda matching a little bit better. And let's move it into the corner of this area. Because remember this plane is now on the ground plane. It looks like it's up higher, but it's actually on the ground plane. So I can move this in the x and the y axes to position it into this area. So I'm going to press G to move it in the x axes maybe to about here, and then press G, Y and then position it this way. Remember we don't want to move it up and down. We just want to move it left and right on the x and the y axis because we know our floor plane is now matching the floor in the scene. So simply just move it on the x, on the y position at some way that we can kinda see it's matching. And now if I play this back, you will see that that plane is matching the movement of the scene. And it's kinda stuck on the floor in this area and this is looking perfect. Finally, we also want to set the scale of our scene so that we're working with a real-world scale. Let's go back to the motion tracking tab. To do that. What we need to do is we need to find two trackers that we can kinda guess the distance between those two tracks. Then we can input that number either in meter or in any other unit you are comfortable with. And that will just set up our scene scale to that real-world scale. So I'm gonna kinda zoom in here. And let's say we want to take this tracker and this track and figure out the distance between these two tracks. Now, I'm going to work in meters, but you can work in feet or anything else that you feel comfortable worth depends how your blender is setup. But I'm going to work with meters. So I'm going to guess the distance between these two points are probably about 12345, maybe about 6 m, maybe even a little bit more, maybe 8 m. I'm going to set this up as 8 m. So I'm simply going to select these two tracks. So click next to the first one. Hold Shift, click next to the second one. Now here where it says Set scale, apply scale and distance. I'm going to enter that number that I just guessed year by distance. So I'm simply going to enter 8 m or eight right here. Then I'm going to click on Set scale. Just click Set scale, and that's it. Now if we go back to our layout section, you can see our plane looks a lot smaller because our scene scale has now been set. And if we play this back, you'll see that it's still matching perfectly with a camera movement. But our scene is now better set as real-world scale. You can see these boxes are basically 1 m boxes. So this will give us 123, 456-789-1011, 12 m for this wall. And I think that should be pretty close to a, what should be, should be fairly close to real-world scale. It's obviously not perfect because I didn't go and I didn't measure this distance. If you are on that set where this footage was taken, it's always good to get some real-world dimensions. Maybe measure one wall and then you know the distance. If you want to be really precise. But I think for this, it should be fine. We kinda close to the real-world scale. So I am happy with that. So go ahead and save your scene. And I will see you in the next lesson. 10. Lesson 09: Camera Tracking Adding Test Objects and Viewport Render to ensure the Camera Track is goo: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how to add some test objects into our scene and to then just do a viewport render to double-check if the track is perfect. The reason we do this is sometimes when you do a playback in the viewport, you might not get like a real time frame rates. It might be a little bit stuttering and you won't be able to save the track works perfectly or not. And doing a viewport render will just ensure that you can view it in real time and make sure that your track is perfect. So before we do that, I just want to show you in the outline here on the side, you will see that blend automatically created these two collections, a foreground collection and also a background collection. I don't really use this. I think it's a bit confusing. So I'm gonna go in and delete both these collections. So let's click on the background collection, press X to delete it. Click on the foreground collection, press X to delete that as well. And here in the top you can also see these view layers here. I usually just delete them as well and you need one. So this background, I'm simply just going to rename to scene. So just make sure you've got one layer at the top. You can name it anything you want. And I think it's just easier to work with tracking without all these collections. So next, you also see that your footage is kinda, the opacity is not looking right. Let's fix that quick. So click on the camera and the outliner to select the camera. And then if you go to the camera's settings, see on the right-hand side, expand background images. Just click on that to expand it. And then if you scroll down, you will see the opacity slider and just slide that up all the way to one. And you can see that our image is looking much better. Now, if we play this back, you can see we've got our plane in there as well. So go back to the first frame and it's going to duplicate this plane and move it around the scene so that we can double-check if our track is working perfectly. So click on the plane to select it. Then press Shift D to duplicate it. And then press why? Because we only want to move it in the y axes. So on the y-axis. So I'm gonna move it to this corner right here. Now, I want to move it on the x-axis so we can place it on this corner right here. So press G x and then move it. So it's kinda matching the corner of the building right there. We can maybe move it a little bit on the y-axis. So GY and then just kinda put it on the edge of that Bolding, that scrub through and see what's happening That is looking pretty good. You can see it's matching that location. So maybe let's add one more. I'm going to duplicate this plane, Shift D and then X to move it on the x-axis, I'm going to place it on the corner right here. And then I'm going to move it on the y's. So GY, move it backwards. You can hold Shift to do some fine adjustments. Click there. Let's just scrub through. And remember, you don't want to move this up and down. You only want to move it y and x on the y and x-axis because they're already on the floor. So that's why we don't want to move them up and down because that will just break it. So now you can see that we have these three planes in our scene. And now I want to render this just from the viewport so we have something to look at in real time. So I'm gonna go to my output properties here on the side, the little printer icon. And then we want to set a output folder. So I'm going to click on this folder and just browse to a location where I want to place this. So I'm going to place this inside the course folder, and I'm just going to create a folder here and call it viewport render. Let's go in there. And I'm just going to call this test or test one. Click on Accept. And now we just need to set up the what type of file we want to render. So I want to render a FFmpeg video, which is just gonna be an MP4. If you scroll down to encoding, you can change the container. Change this to impact for, because we want to create an MP4 file and the quality can leave it on medium quality, but I'm going to put mine on high-quality for now. And I think that should be good enough. Now simply go to View above the viewport. And then we're going to click on viewport render animation. So click on that. And it's going to quickly just run through all those files because it's just rendering from the viewport. And once that's done, press Escape. And now we can go to that folder where we exported that clip, open it up, and just look at it in real time. And now we can see exactly that our track is all the planes are actually sticking to our footage. You can scrub through it as well and just make sure everything is striking. And as you can see, these planes are being tracked into the scene quite well. They're not sliding around. You can see them, they matching with the perspective. Everything is looking perfect. Now, obviously, if you've got some bad results here, then you know your track is not good. So then I will suggest that you go back, add more trackers, or maybe delete some of the bad trackers, resolve your track and just try and get a better tracking score basically. Alright, so once you are happy with your track, go ahead and save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Lesson 10: Adding 3D Objects from Quixel to the Scene: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to start adding some 3D objects into our scene. Now, you can decide you want to model these objects yourself, or do you want to download them from one of the many available websites like turbo squid or all the others, we can find 3D models or you can use something like quick soul or Quicksilver bridge to download mega scans from Epic Games. So I really like to use Bridge, which is basically an application that you can download that connect to your Quicksilver account. And then you can simply just import these models into Blender using an add-on. So you can go to the website quicksort.com, forward slash bridge to download this application, which will just make things a little bit easier. They've got a lot of information of how to configure it and also the plug-in if you need to or if you want to download the plugin or the add-on for Blender, so you can easily just import those models. So basically what I'm gonna do is inside of bridge, I've selected some models that might work for the scene. So here you can see we've got some just some palettes and we've got some electrical boxes, some sand bags, more electrical stuff, and then we've got this well E as well that might work. And just some other random objects that we can place into our scene. So let's have a look at our scene quickly. We've got these planes setup that we're going to delete. These were just for testing purposes. So let's start by importing our first object. So let's start by downloading these wooden pallets. I'm simply just going to download some of these because I know I'm going to use these electrical boxes as well. And maybe some of these barrels I can download as well, the sand barrier or the sand bags. Maybe some of these anvils, maybe this plastic drum, maybe some more of these rusty metal barrels. We can download all of them. And then we can just maybe see where we're going to place them. Not sure if this well is going to work. But let's download and see what's going to download all of these. So as I mentioned, you can go in and you can find models from any other websites you want, or you can simply just model your own models. We can 3D scan your own models by using something like polycomb that you can just download on your phone and do your own 3D scans, which is great. Input those ones. So I'm just using Bridge and quicksort for that once it's downloaded. And because I've got the Add-on installed already, I can simply click on this little plus and that will add it to my blenders seen automatically. Now you can see we've got this palette right here. I can zoom in here and you can see this is our first object that I brought in an hour, just simply, we need to position them in our scene. Now, what you can do is in this drop-down, the viewport overlays. If you click on the drop-down and all the way at the bottom, you'll see motion tracking. Now if I enable this, now we can see our tracking markers basically in our 3D scene, as you can see. So if we look through the camera, so if I click this little camera icon, you can see we've got all these tracking markers now in the scene. And that's just an easy way to position our objects in the 3D space. So you can see if I track through the footage, you can see that these tracking markers are sticking to their locations where they've been tracked. So the only thing to remember now is that our floor plane, our grid, our objects, if they are sitting on the floor, they must sit on this grid. If we look at our scene from the site, if you click on one of these axes, let's say we click on the x-axis and we look at our scene from the side. And I'll zoom in year two, this palette that we brought in, you can see that it's kinda sitting on the floor. It's slightly through the floor so we can maybe just move this up a bit. Maybe just rotate it slightly by pressing R just to make sure that it's sitting on the floor like that. Alright, so now what we can do is let's scale it up. And obviously when you scale something, you need to make sure that it's still on the floor after you've done the scaling. So the pivot point for this object is at the bottom, which is great so you can scale it and it kinda should stay on the floor. So now let's look through our camera and now we can position this and scale it way we want to place it. So I'm going to scale it down a bit. It's a bit big. And now we can either move it on the y-axis, on the x-axis. So I can praise Gx to move around the x-axis and g, y to move around the y-axis. So maybe, let's place this, maybe around here somewhere. You can also press G and then Shift Z. And then it will move freely in the x and the y axes without going up and down. So I'm going to maybe place it around here and I'm going to rotate it, but I want to rotate it on the z-axis. So I'm going to press R and Z and that's just going to rotate it like that. Maybe place it like that. Now if we play through our scene, you'll see that it will actually sitting on the floor and it's being tracked perfectly through our scene. So maybe it's still a little big. So I'm going to zoom in here, selected and just scale it down slightly. So it's kinda matching the scale. A little better. You can also bring up the menu here on the side. And with that object selected, you can look at the dimensions. So I can see the x dimension of this object is 1.75 m. And you can obviously scale it, but that's not going to scale it proportionally. So just be a little bit careful. Or I can just simply scale it and look at those numbers and make sure I'm happy with the dimensions. So I'm going to set it to about 2 m on the x-axis. So then I know it's probably real-world scale. I'm not sure if these pellets or 1 m pellets or two meter pallets. But let's leave it as that. And you can just hide this menu by pressing N. Again. We've got our first object in our scene. So let's go back to Bridge and let's see what else we want to bring in. So maybe let's bring in some of these barrels. So I'm going to click on the plus. And that's going to export it for me into my scene. And you can see the barrel is in the corner because it's going to create it at the center point. And now I want to move that barrel some way on the ground. So I'm going to press G and then Shift Z to limit on the X and Y allele. And I can move it around and see where you want to place this one. So maybe let's place it right here next to this wall. So I'm going to zoom in here again. First of all, let's make sure it's on the floor. So I'm gonna go out of the camera, look at this from the side or from this side, and just make sure that your barrel or the object is on the floor plane and you can see it's perfectly on the floor right there on the grid. So let's look through our camera again. And now we can move it and position it exactly where we want to. Just make sure you don't move it up and down because we wanted on that floor plan. So G Shift Z and then you can move it freely. So I'm going to place this one right here by the wall, and I'm going to duplicate it, Shift Z to keep it on that plane. Maybe let's place one kinda in front of it and then rotate it on the Z. So Z and just rotate it so it's not exactly the same as the other one. You can obviously go out of the camera and can I reposition them like this as well? So now if we look through our camera again and we play this back, you'll see that those barrels will sit on the floor and it looks like it's kinda in the scene. Obviously these are we still in solid view. So if we click on Render View yet the top, you will be able to see the materials, but it's obviously very dark store because we have not added any lighting. We're gonna do that a little bit later. But just so you know that these models, they do have textures. So let's go back to Solid View. Alright, let's go back to Bridge and let's see what else we can bring in. I want to bring in this plastic drum as well. So click on the Plus to import that model. And this one, I'm going to place maybe on the side of the building right here. So make sure it's on the floor. So I'm just going to zoom in and that's perfectly sitting on the floor grid. Don't worry about these planes. We are going to delete them soon. So I just want to place that barrels that's kinda looking at it's next to the Bolding year, maybe like that. So now if we play through this again, you'll see that our barrel is sticking to the camera move. Now, let's go ahead and delete these planes. So I'm going to delete this one, delete this plane yx, delete this plane x Delete. So later on we will add some planes for the floor as well that will catch our shadows. Don't worry about that yet. For now, we're just dropping in these objects that we want to place in our scene. Okay, let's go ahead and save our project. And let's go back to Bridge. And let's see what else we can bring in. Now, I want to bring in this sand bag barrier as well. So let's import that one, going to blend and maybe let's move this to the front. So g and y. And I definitely want to scale this up a little bigger. And I want to place it here in Canada, in front of the building, maybe something like that. And always try and rotate these objects slightly on the z-axis. So just r and z. So they're not perfectly 100% 90 degrees aligned because nothing in the real-world is perfectly aligned. So you kinda wanna mess them up a little, right? We've got something like that. If I play that three can see our sand bags. Maybe we can go to the last frame and maybe just move them a little bit forward. Maybe it's like a barrier that's kinda in front of the building. I want to duplicate and go on the x, move it on the x-axis, and then just rotate Z and rotate it all the way around so we can see the other side. And maybe just position a bit closer to that one. Can go out of the camera and kinda just make them kinda natural. Maybe. Rotate this one on the z-axis slightly. Maybe move it backward slightly and closer, something like that. So let's go to our camera view again, and let's press Space to view that. You can see they sticking nicely to the camera move, everything is looking great. Alright, let's see what other objects we can bring in. Some going to save my project, just make sure to save every now and then. And let's see what we can bring in. So maybe let's bring in this little wooden table. We're going to import that. Let's see where we're going to place this one. So I'm going to press G Shift Z to keep everything nice on the floor plane. Maybe let's put it here in front of the window. And can I rotate around the z just slightly, maybe like that. Yeah, I think the scale is looking okay. So let's play that back. You can see the scale is fine and it's matching our camera move. Alright, let's go back and see what else we can bring in these electrical boxes. So I want to bring one of them in and place them on this wall so we can either cover one of these objects or we can maybe place a new one next to it. Let's see what works or what looks the best. So let's go into bridge. Let's import this electrical box model. And back in blender, you can see we've got it here by the origin. Now how do we get it onto the wall? Because obviously, at this moment we only have objects that's sitting on the floor plane, on the ground. But now we want to play something against the wall. So the easiest way to do that is let's move it on the y-axis first so we get it right to this wall yet the bottom or to the corner of this wall. So if we go out of the camera, you can see this is now sitting perfectly on the floor. You can see the pivot points there. If we look at this object from the side, you can see it's sitting on the floor. So go back into camera view. So now you know the pivot point is kinda on the corner of that wall with an object on this corner. I want to rotate it now, so it's kinda flat against the wall. So I'm going to press R and X and just rotate this 90 degrees. So you can just type in 90 on your keyboard. Press Enter, and now we know that electrical box has been rotated 90 degrees. You can see there. So remember, the pivot point is now sitting on the floor, not the bottom of this object. Just keep that in mind. So go back to camera view. And now we can move this on the x-axis. The side of this thing is aligned with this wall. So G and X just align it like that. And now we can move it upwards. So I'm going to move it on the z-axis. So G and then Z, move it up. And now it's actually sitting against the wall. So I can press G and Z to move it higher up and then g, X to move it in. Now we can also scale it like that. And now that is actually sitting on the wall. So if we play this back, you'll see sticking to the wall. And it's perfect. Now we can just decide on the size, so it can maybe make this a little smaller. Now remember our pivot point is on the back face of this object, which means it's not going to change the position if we scale it. If that perfect point was not in the center of this object, we might have some issues where we might need to adjust the position of that box again. But for this, it's perfect. So you can just kinda play with the scale a bit. Maybe let's move it down so it's kinda closer to the ground. And yeah, let's just double-check if everything is tracking stall. I think that's looking good. Alright, so maybe, let's see what else we can add. Maybe let's add this wheelbarrow thing. So I'm just going to click on the little plastic, import that. And let's move that out from this g, y, g, x. And I maybe want to place it here in front as well. So maybe you rotate on the Z, maybe somewhere around close to the table. So maybe I can scale it up a bit bigger. And we want to make sure it's on the floor. So I'm going to look at this from the side and you can see that it's perfectly on the floor. Can see there. That's pretty good. Let's go back to our camera view. And I'm just going to move it on the floor. So G Shift Z to limit it to the x and y only. So maybe let's place it, maybe kinda behind the sand bags. So now if we play this back, you'll see our wheelbarrow is tracking nicely. Everything is looking good. Okay, Let's see what else we can add to our scene. So let's go back to Bridge and let's see what we have. Maybe some more barrels, some old wooden barrels. Let's add those to the scene. So let's get them out of this. Moving them. G Shift Z and maybe let's place them. Might be against this wall right here. I'm going to scale them up to make them a bit bigger. And then let's just see, maybe if we move them forward a bit, maybe a little smaller, like that, and maybe let's duplicate it. So Shift D to duplicate and then we want to move them on the x-axis and suppress x. And then click, and then we want to rotate them so our Z to rotate on the z-axis and maybe just kinda show a different angle of this barrel. Something like that. Alright. Let's press Space and see how that looks. Okay, let's maybe add one more thing. Let's go to our bridge and maybe let's try this. Well, I'm going to try and import this and see how this works. Because you can obviously see the flow around it looks a bit strange, but we can fix that in the compositing stage. So you can see there's our, well, I'm going to move it G Shift Z. And maybe we can place this may be next to the building at the back. So if we scrub through, maybe go to the last frame, zoom in here, maybe we can place it around on this barren area. Yeah, So g, h of z and maybe just place it somewhere around here. Maybe scale it up a bit. Make sure it's on the ground plane. So I got out of the camera, look at this from the side. You can see it's on the floor plane, slightly under the plane, but that's actually fine because we want to, later on in compositing, we're going to blend this edge with our floor so it should actually go under the plane slightly, which is good. Alright, so we've got our well in, let's play this back from the first frame. So you can see the weld will only into the frame at the end, right there. Okay, I think that's looking pretty cool. You can obviously go and you can add some trees, you can add some plants, you can add anything you want. You can kinda rebuilt some parts of the buildings. You can maybe extend the side of the building. Anything you want you can add into your scene. Let's quickly go back to Bridge and let's see this. Any final things that we want to bring in, maybe this anvil is pretty cool, so I'm going to bring that in as well. And let's just get that out of the corner. So G Shift Z and maybe let's place we can either place it on top of the table. Yeah, maybe that's a good idea. So I'm gonna go out of the camera. I'm simply just going to place this on top of this table. So I'm just going to G Shift Z, move it to under the table and then z, g, z, sorry to just move that up and set it on top of the table. Make sure it's on the table, not inside the table. So maybe just like that. Let's maybe move it to this part right here. I don't think it will be on a table in real life, but let's just do that and see how it looks like. So if we play this back, you'll see we've got our envelope on the table, we've got all our other objects, and I think that should be enough for now. You can obviously go ahead and you can add more objects if you feel like it, you can add some objects in the distance as well. Maybe you can add some mountains. You can add some cliffs, anything you'd like to add, you can go in and do. Once you're happy with your objects, go ahead and save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 12. Lesson 11: Adding a Mixamo Character to the Scene: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to add a character to our scene. Now, you can use your own character or you can model your own character and create a character animation and bring that in. But I'm going to use Mixamo to download a character and also some character animation. It just makes it a bit easier for this course, but you can feel free to use your own character animation if you want to do that. So, yeah, I am logged into Mixamo. This is a free service by Adobe, so you just need to create a free Adobe account. Then you can log in with your account and download some characters and also animations. So right here at the top you can click on characters and this will give you a whole list of different characters that we can use. And I want to go with something like a zombie. So let's maybe look for something. Here we go, zombie goal. And we can just say use this character. And then it's going to load that character here in this little 3D viewport. And now we can go to the animations and choose what animation we want to apply to this model. So you have all these different animations. I want to like a zombie walks. I'm going to just search for zombie. And here we go, we have some options here. So you can simply just click on one of these. And that will apply that animation to your character. So let's just zoom out here a bit so we can see our character bit better. I want something with a character is walking slowly. Maybe. Let's see how this one looks like. This is like proper zombie walk. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for. And now you're on the right hand side, you can change some of the options. I want to increase the frame numbers just so that we are hundreds. Ensure that the amount of frames are actually enough for our animation or our video duration. So you can see that's a bit longer. So we've got 242 frames, which is actually a bit too long, but it's fine. It's always better to have more frames than less frames. Now, you can also do things like in place if you want to animate the movement of the character, the character actually stays in the same position, but I'm going to untick that because we actually going to use the full motion of the walking cycle. And you can also change things here like stride, overdrive and character arms space. There's will kind change the way the character animates. But you can go ahead and play around with this. Alright, so once we are happy with our character and the animation, we want to download this as an FBX file. So simply click on Download yet the top. And this will give you some options like the format. So we're going to leave this as default if Bx binary, and then width skin. This is if you want to download the character skin as well with all the textures, or if you just want to apply this animation to a different character, then you can go ahead and just download the bones without the skin. Because we want this zombie character. I'm going to leave it on with skin and then frames per seconds. So this is the frame rate. So this doesn't really matter that much because we can readjust the frame rate of this character inside of Blender, but choose something that's kinda close to the original footage. So I know my footage was shot at 25 frames a second. So I'm going to choose 24 because it's just a bit closer to 25. And then keyframe reduction, I'm going to leave this on none because that will just export all the keyframes for us. And now I can go in and click on Download. So let's choose where we want to download it. So I'm going to create a new folder. I'm just going to call it character. And I'm going to save it inside of this folder, zombie Walk, FBX and save. That file is downloading so we can go back into Blender. And now we're going to import our character. So let's quickly look through our camera and see where we want to import our character. So the idea that I have is that the character will actually appear from behind this building. So somewhere the character will stumble out of this area here, coming out from behind the Bolding. And then we will see the character may be walking this way. So that's kinda the idea I have. Let's see if our download is complete. Yeah, it's completed so we can go to go back into Blender. And now we're going to import that FBX as our character. So go to File, go to Import and choose FBX or right. And now we're going to browse to that folder, the character folder, and we're going to select that FBX file. Now there's a few things you can change you on the right-hand side under the settings. The only thing that I really want to change this, if you go to armature, you will see there is one option that says automatic bone orientation. Simply click that and that will automatically orient the bones correctly because sometimes if you don't click that or if you don't tick that box, some of the bone orientation might be incorrect. So that's the only thing you need to check and then click on Import FBX. Now you can see our zombie woman has been brought in. She is standing right there. And if we play this back, you can see she's walking. And if we look at this from the side or from the front, you can see she is definitely on the floor, which is perfect. Scale is also not looking too bad, so that's great. Let's look at the camera view again. If you select your character, just make sure that you select the armature. In the outline, you'll see there's armature and below that you will have all the different measures of that character. So just select the armature and then you'll see all these keyframes here at the bottom. Now, you can go in and you can scale this if you want them to kind of move slower or faster. So let me just quickly demo that. So if we zoom in here, and if I select all these keyframes by pressing a and then S to scale, you can see I can scale them so they are smaller. But if I play this back now, she'll walk pretty fast. Go back to the first frame. Let's just undo that. And if you scale it the other way. So if you scale the keyframes this way, and if I play this back, you'll see she'll move more in slow motion. So let's just undo that just as the easy way to readjust the timing of a character animation. So now we want to move this character so she's on this side of the building, so I'm going to move it down on the y-axis, then move on the x-axis. So she's just on the other side of that Bolding. And maybe we want to just move it back so she starts behind the building. So maybe right around here. Now if we scrub through this, we will see that our zombie will appear Around frame 60 maybe. Let's just go to frame 40 and move forward slightly so she can appears there. Yeah, I think that's better. Let's just play that back and have a look. Now, obviously you can see in front of the building, but don't worry about that because that is something we will fix when we do the compositing. So then we will rotate out this part of the building. So this part of the Bolding is in front of the zombie. Just make sure she is in the correct position and that she's on the floor. So if we look at this from the front again, you'll see that our zombie is on the floor. And that's perfect. Alright, so look through the camera again. Let's play this back from the first frame. And let's have a look. Alright, so I think that looks pretty cool. You can obviously add more characters to the scene. Feel free to add holds of zombies or different crowds of people doing different things. But for this example, I think one character is good enough. And yeah, go ahead and save your project now. And I will see you in the next lesson. 13. Lesson 12: Shadow Catchers: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at something called a shadow catcher. Now, a shadow catcher is any object that will receive shadows from all our 3D objects. So usually we'll use them on the floor plane to catch shadows that should be on the floor, but they can also be against a wall to catch a shadow on a wall and also on yeah, just different objects in the scene. So before we do that, let's just tidy up our outliner a little because it's always good practice to keep everything in that outline and nice and tidy. So I want to select all these objects. I'm going to hold Shift select all of these objects that we placed in the scene. And then I'm going to press M to create a knee or to move them to a new collection. And I'm going to click on New Collection. And let's just call these objects like that. Now you will see all those objects will be inside of this Objects container or collection. So we can do the same with our character. So I'm going to select the armature, but here we want to select everything below the armature as well, like all the different parts of our zombie. So I'm going to right-click on armature and say select hierarchy. So that will select everything underneath it. Then press M to move to a new collection, and it's called this character. And then click Okay, and that's gonna move our character into that character collection. Now, our outliner is nice and tidy. So let's go ahead and save our project. And now we can create our first shadow catcher. So if I look at our scene, I know that we will need a shadow catcher underneath all of these objects in the scene to catch the shadow on the ground. But I also know that for this object that's against the wall, we will need a shadow catcher against the wall as well to catch those shadows on the wall. The same worth this wall behind the table year. Maybe we want to catch some shadows of that being caused against the wall as well. And maybe on this side as well, we can maybe create a shadow catcher against this wall so that we catch any shadows from these two barrels. Same with this wall. We would like to catch some shadows against this wall and the sidewall as well. For the ground shadow catcher, we can either create one big ground plane and that will be the one shadow catcher for the floor. All we can create individual shadow catches. So I think we can probably get away with one large shadow catcher in the scene for the floor. So I'm going to create a new plane. It's going to be created there in the center. And I'm going to scale this up super big. So it's covering all our objects. If you move this plane around, make sure you move it only on the X and the Y axes and not on the z-axis because it needs to be underneath all our objects. Some kinda just position it so it's covering all the objects. We can scale it even bigger. Now if we scrub through this, just makes sure that it's covering all the objects where we need shadows. Alright, something like that. And I'm going to call this a shadow catcher. So I'm just going to move it out of that collection because it dropped it into the objects collection. So there's our plane and I'm just gonna double-click and call this shadow catcher. You can really call it anything you want. Now, to change this into a shadow catcher, we need to change our render engine from EV two cycles. So make sure you're on this render options here on the side, the little camera icon, and then where it says render engine, change this from EV two cycles. And if you have a GPU, you can change your device to GPU compute. And now with this plane object selected, we can go to the object properties, this little orange square. And then we're going to scroll down all the way to visibility, expand that. And you will see shadow catcher and some other options. So if we click shadow catcher, you will see nothing will happen in our scene. But if we go over to the render view, yet the top or the viewport shading, you will start to see some thing happening. So we don't see our footage anymore, but now we can start to see shadows underneath these objects. And that's exactly what we want. So let's go back to the normal viewport shading or the solid view. And now we can add some of the other shadow catches. But I want to hide this plane for now because I can't really see the Bolding and where I need to place the other shadow catches. So let's just hide this shadow catcher for now by just pressing on this little eye in the outliner. So the second one I want to maybe create on this wall so that we can catch the shadows from this electrical box and also from this table with an envelope. So let's create a new plane. It's going to create it in the corner right there. And now we want to place this plane on this wall right here. So I'm going to move it forward. So G and Y move it forward until the pivot point of this plane is on the corner of this building. Now you can go into wireframe if you want to be exact. Just make sure that the pivot point, that little orange dot is on the corner of that bolding. Basically, the reason I'm doing that is if I rotate this plane, if I press R x to write it on the X, you can see that it's obviously going to rotate around the pivot point. So then we know it's aligning with the wall. So simply press R and then x, and then we want to rotate it 90 degrees. I'm going to type in on my keyboard 90, press Enter. And now we know that is exactly 90 degrees aligning with the wall, but obviously it's now inside the floor so we need to move it up. So I'm going to press G and Z, move it up so it's aligning with the bottom of that wall. And now we can move it sideways. So g x to align it with a wall like that. Now we can simply go into edit mode on this plane and just extend that so it's all the way to the side. So with this plane selected press Tab to go into edit mode. Press two to select this edge. To edge, select mode. Select this one edge, and we're just going to grab it and move it this way. So press G and X and then just move it all the way to this side of the building, the wall. We can maybe move this top edge up as well. So g, Z just a little higher like that. And now we have that shadow catcher on that wall. So what we need to do with this plane selected, go to the object properties and then do the same thing. So just tick shadow catcher on this plane as well like that. So now we've got these two shadow catches. We've got the floor which is set as a shadow catcher. And we've got this wall that's also set as a shadow catcher. Obviously you can play this back, you won't see anything. But if we go into the render view, you will start to see that now we have the shadows. You see them against this plane and also against the floor. Same with a table. You can start to see some shadows being cast that onto this wall as well, as well as the ground below that table. Obviously, the lighting is not set up yet, so everything is very dark. But you're gonna get the idea. Let's go back to Solid View and let's create more shadow catches. So first go ahead and save your project. Now, what I wanna do is I want to hide this big shadow catcher again because it's just not great to work with it like that. And what we can do now is we can either use this plane and extend it to be a shadow catch on this wall as well. Or we can create a new plane. But let me show you how you can actually manipulate this existing shadow catcher to catch shadows on this side as well. So first of all, let's just grab it out of our objects collection as a dropped it in there again. This just make sure we're on the scene collection. Alright, so we've got this plane which is the shadow catcher of this wall. And what I can do is I can go into edit mode, press Tab, press two to select this edge. And now we can extrude it in the y-axis. So I'm simply going to press E to extrude and then press Y to just basically extruding the y-axis. We're going to go all the way to the corner right there. Then what we can do as well, we can extrude it this way as well. To catch these shadows on this wall, I'm going to press E again and then X to extrude on the x-axis. And I can see things are not lining up great in this area. So I'm going to select this edge and this edge and move them both a little bit forward. So GY and just kinda move them forward just to match the edge of this pulling a bit better. And I'm going to select this edge, move it a little further out so g x just to match the edge of that building. And now we can extrude it that way as well. So we're catching the shadow on this side of the wall as well. So e to extrude y. And then maybe just up to there, we just want to catch that shadow from this barrel onto this wall. So now we've got all of this is a shadow catcher. It's going to catch all the shadows. And then we've got obviously this ground plane as well. Alright, so we can go out of edit mode by pressing tab. Just make sure that all the objects you create, a shadow catches are set as shadow catches at the bottom as well. Now, later on we're going to disable some of these options under a visibility. Because currently these shadow catches will still bounce light from the sun or from the HDRI that we will add later that will still bounce onto your objects. Now, don't worry too much about this now. But once we set up the lighting, I will show you and then we will disable the glossy option here on the shadow catches because currently they are reflecting that light back onto the objects and we don't really want that, we just want them to catch the shadows. It might sound a little bit confusing now, but you'll see once we do the lighting. So now if we go into render view quickly, we can just see that we are now getting shadows on the floor and we're also getting shadows on those walls as well. So you can actually see it nicely. Next to this barrel, you get that nice shadow against a wall, same with these ones also on the floor. And that's all the shadow catcher is really doing. It's just catching all those shadows that we will then later on composite onto our real footage. All right, so once you've done that, it's just rename this one as well to shadow catcher. Maybe shadow catcher wall. So we know this one is the floor, so maybe just rename this one. It's always good practice just to name your objects correctly. And if we play through this, maybe let's just switch this to wireframe so we can see our walls and floor. Now if I play this back, you'll see that it's matching nicely. You can see the walls are not sliding around, staying in the correct positions. And that's looking great. I'm just selecting all the objects by pressing a so you can kinda see them better in wireframe view. And this is sometimes just a good thing to do is switch to wireframe so you can see all the objects a little better and everything is looking great. So go ahead and save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 14. Lesson 13: Matching the lighting using an HDRI and / or Sun: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to start setting up our lighting to match our 3D lighting to the real-world lighting in our scene. So the first thing that we wanna do is we want to see our scene in the rendered view. So if we click on Render View, you can actually see this gray background. But we want to see this overlaid on top of the footage. So what we need to do is we need to go to our Render Settings here at the top, this little camera icon. Then if you scroll down all the way until you see foam, you can expand that. And then there's a box that says transparent. So if we click this transparent box and we go back to render view yet the top, you will see that our objects are now overlaid onto our footage. And you can also start to see the shadows against the walls. You can see there's some shadows being costed on the wall. But obviously the lighting is not graded or super dark or our objects are super dark, so it's not, it's not correct. So what we wanna do is we either want to add a sun or a light source, or we can add an HDRI image to our environment that will light our scene. So if you look at the lighting in the scene, you will notice that it's kinda soft lighting. It's very overcast, it's not really super direct sunlight, and that's what we want to try and match. You want to try and match the, first of all, the brightness of the light source. And second of all, you want to match the direction of sunlight so that the shadows are going in the correct direction. Basically. We can do this by adding a son or an HDRI, or we can do both. The only problem when doing both an HDRI and a son, then you will have two shadows or too shallow directions to worry about. It kinda gets a bit complicated. So we're just going to either use a son or an HDRI. I'll show you both ways. So what we can do is we can create a sun. So just press Shift a and then go to light and add a sun. It's going to add a sun in the middle of your scene. We can just move it up. So brace GZ to move it up. Now you can use this little yellow dot to change the direction of your son and he can see the shadows of my objects of following that direction. So now if we look through the camera, you can kinda adjust it like this. And you can see our shadows are being adjusted. And if we look at our scene, we can see the Sun is let me just disable the sun's. We don't see those. You can see the shadows of our building is going this way. So we can see, or we know that the sun is kinda there at the back, shining from that side to the backlighting on the back of the Bolding, if that makes sense. So let's bring in our Sun again. And if we go into the 3D scene, we can try and match this to have our shadows of the objects kind of going forward. Maybe. And you can also change how long they are if it's straight down the very short, if you pull the sun this way you can see the shadows are getting longer. So now you can see we trying to match it like that. Another way is to rotate the sun with a son selected. You can simply just go to this object and object properties and just change the z rotation to kinda do it like that. So, yeah, just rotate the sun until you are happy with the direction of your shadows. You can also start to see our zombie shadow coming through there. And next we can also adjust the brightness of the sun with the sun selected. Go to your light settings here. This is the object data properties. That little bulb, you can increase the strength of the Sun. So let's make this maybe ten. Now I can see our objects is more visible. Obviously with this shadow catcher, it's blocking a lot of the light coming from that side, which is realistic because the Bolding wool block some of that sunlight. And we can scrub through and you can kinda see how the objects in the scene. So what you wanna do is you want to try and match the intensity of the light to match the scene. So maybe this is a little bright, so we can bring this down to maybe like eight or maybe even five to kinda just match it a bit better. You want to try and match the lighting as best as possible in your 3D application. Before we go into compositing. In compositing, we can tweak it stole, we can bring it down and bring it up a little bit, but you want to try and match it as good as possible. Now the problem with using a sun is we're not getting the lighting from all the other angles as well. So we're getting a little bit of bounce lighting going from the floor back onto the object. But you can see it's kinda just getting lighting from the one side and not a lot from the other side. So I want to use an HDRI for this example. I'm going to go in and I'm going to delete the sun with the sun selected, press X and delete the sun. And now we're going to bring in an HDRI image to light our scene. So to do that, go to this little icon, the world properties, this little red earth icon. And then you'll see it says surface background. And then here's a color which is just gray. So currently it's just using this gray color to light the scene. Basically. We're going to click on this little dot next to color, and then we're going to select environment texture. And that's basically to say we're going to use an HDRI image. Now you can click on open because currently you will see it's turning pink, which means we don't have a HR I loaded yet. So press this open button and now you can browse to your folder where you have HDR eyes saved, and you can select one to match your scene. Now, HDR eyes you can download for free from websites such as HDRI Haven, just Google HDRI Haven, or free HDR eyes. And he can download many for free. So you always want to try and find something that's matching the sunlight in your scene. If it's an overcast day or if it's bright lighting or if it's maybe an interior shot. So I'm going to select something that's quite overcast looking maybe like this one. And I'm going to click on open. And that's going to bring in that HDRI image. And now you can see everything is lead. So obviously this is way too bright so we can adjust the strength. This HDRI, you're on the side. So just kinda if you bring this down to zero, everything will be black. If you bring it up to one, everything will be bright. So I'm gonna bring this down to about 0.5 for now, See how that feels. And what we can also do is we can rotate that HDRI so that the shadows or that the sun is in the correct position basically. So to do that, we're gonna go over to the shading tab right here at the top. And then in this shading tab switch over to render view this little icon at the top. And we want to look through our camera. And now here at the bottom where it says object, we're going to change this to wold so we can see our HDRI that we've loaded here. That's the strength. So this is the same perimeter that we changed here. So next what we wanna do is we want to create two new nodes here. The first one is going to be a mapping nodes. So press Shift a search and then just enter mapping, bringing that node. And then one more, press, Shift A Search and just search coordinates, texture coordinate places one year. And now we're going to connect this mapping vector to our vector input on the HDRI. Then we're going to take the generated an input there on the vector right there. With this node, we can now rotate our HDRI around. So if we go to the rotation, the z rotation, if I start dragging this around, you will see the lighting changing in the scene. And basically what we're doing is we are rotating our HDRI 360 degrees around on the z-axis to try and match our shadows. If we zoom in here and if we look at the shadow maybe of this object, we can see the shadow moving a bit. So we want to try and get the shadow to be on this side of the object like that. If you get a shadow that's too harsh, then you need to select a different HDRI with a son that's not as bright. So that's why it's important to select an HDRI that's kinda matching your scene. So let's just have a look at these objects here. Our character That's looking pretty cool. These ones, the show, you can see the shadows on this side. It's kinda falling this way. The same with our barrels. We get some nice shadows against the wall, but we're also getting shadows coming this way. And then the same with a, well, you can see there's some shadows on this side as well. They're not very strong, so maybe a little bit worried that we don't have enough shadows. But I think this might work. As I said before, you can add a sun as well. So I can now go in and I can add that son back in again. Let's move it up. And maybe this just drag it around. Now you'll see you have another shadow to worry about, but sometimes this is kinda the way to do it. So just want to match the direction of those shadows. If you look at the zombie, you can clearly see the shadow is going this way, which is great. So don't worry too much about this sharpness of the shadow. If you are using a son, we are going to look at how to soften that soon. But for now, just kinda get the brightness of your objects by changing the brightness of either the sun or changing the brightness of your HGRI. You can go into this shading option or shading tab here, go to the World settings and then just you can play with the strength of the HDRI here. And you can also play with the direction of the HDRI right here. And then once you are happy, go ahead and save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 15. Lesson 14: Matching the Shadows: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how to match the softness of our shadows to the shadows of the real-world. So currently we've got a son and then we also have an HDRI that's lighting our scene. So first of all, make sure you use an HDRI that's got a matching sun intensity. So if it's an overcast day using a share I with an overcast sudden if it's a bright sunny day, try and use an HDRI with a sunny bright day or a bright sun. Yeah, so just try and match it as close as possible. But now if we look at our shadow, maybe of the zombie can see that the shadow is quite sharp. You can see it's not like soft edges. And this is the shadow caused by the sunlight with that we added here. So if I disable the sun, you can see that now it's only leaving that soft shadow created by the HDRI. But let's say we want to use a sun in the scene, but you see the shadow is too harsh. There's an easy way to match the softness of the shadow. So simply select the sun or any light source that you've added. If you added some other types of light and then go to this light, setting yet the bottom on the right-hand side. And setting that you want to change is this angle. Currently it's on 0.5. And the bigger this number, the softer the shadow will be. So let's increase this to maybe like three. And you can see that shadows a lot softer now, if I increase it even more, you can see the shadow will go almost away. It's just completely soft. So zero will be a very harsh shadow. So I'm going to increase this to about maybe two, maybe a little bit more, maybe three, maybe more, maybe five. We just kinda want a soft looking shadow that's not too harsh. Let's look at some of our other objects. If you look at the, well, you can see that shadow is pretty good. You can see if I bring this down to zero again, we have this very hard shadow line and that's something we don't want. So I'm going to increase this to about five again, just so that we have that softness of that shadow which is looking pretty good. Just go through the settings and play with the intensity of your son or your HDRI. And then just change this angle of your son just to make the shadows a little bit softer, try and match it as best as you can. So go ahead and save your project now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 16. Lesson 15: Configure Render Passes and Cryptomattes: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at render passes as well as crypto math passes. Now, what is a render passes? Render passes are almost like layers, like different lighting layers that you can use when you are compositing your footage together. So you've got more control to add adjustments to maybe just the direct lighting or just the reflections, or just the glossiness of something, et cetera. So it will just give you more options when doing compositing. And crypto mats are also almost like a layer, but you can specify crypto match to either be an object or an material. So you can then isolate certain materials in the compositing process. And it will just make your life a lot easier when doing compositing, which we will get to a bit later. So let's look at the available render passes in Blender. To look at the render process, you'll click on this little icon that says View layer properties. You on the right-hand side, you will see a whole list of all these random parsers. So you can see we have things like combined z must position all of these ones. You have your light layers or your light parsers which will be diffused glossy and all of these ones. And then crypto mat right here at the bottom. So let's go from the top and see which of these bosses we want to render. So combined basically means it's all the layers combined. And that's also called a beauty pause. And that will have everything included already, like all the layers combined. So we want to keep that just to make sure that we have that if we need it. Now we're not gonna do a Z pause, but we're going to do a must pass. Now the midst pause is almost like a Z depth pass, and that will allow us to add some missed to the scene. So that or Mr. Hayes, because if you look at footage in real life, you can see the haziness of the objects further in the distance and then less hazy for objects closer to the camera. And that's just something that we can use in compositing to maybe add a must layer. So if we have any objects that's further away in the background, we can use this must pass to create that hazy look. So that's always a important pause to include. So we're not going to include any of these other details here. We're going to scroll down to these light pulses. So we want to include the fuse, all of these direct, indirect and color for a fuse, same with glossy. You can take all of them. Transmission, we don't really need because trans transmission is only if you have transparent objects in your scene like gloss or anything like water or liquids or stuff like that. But we can include them just so that we have them. But it's not really going to have any data in them. Because as I said, we don't have any transparent objects in the scene volume. We don't really need this if you have any thing like smoke or fire, any volume effects, so you can add them if you want to. But yeah, as I said, we don't use any of these volume effects. And then for emission, we don't need this because we don't have any emission materials in our scene, so we're going to skip that. So the only thing we want to include here is shadow, also ambient inclusion, and then also the shadow catcher. It's going to just separate all these layers for us so that we have full control in compositing to tweak them separately. Now, let's go down and we'll get to the crypto math section. Now here we've got three options, object, material and asset. So usually I only use object or material. And basically this will give you like a layer for each object in the scene. So I'm simply going to take this object and that will basically just give us a separate layer for every individual object in the scene so we can easily mosque them when doing compositing. Let's say we want to create, we want to adjust the lighting on just one object. This will allow us to do that. So let's quickly look at this list again. So from the top, you just want to include combined and must. Then if you scroll down, you want to include all the diffused bosses or the glossy parses, all transmission that we don't really use in the scene. And then shadow occlusion, shadow catcher. And then under crypto math, you want to enable the object sitting right there. So one thing to note about the must pause. We can actually specify the distance of the starting point of the most and also the endpoint or the furthest away from the camera. To do that, let's just go back into solid view for now. And then we want to, once you've activated the must pause here in the render parsers, you can go to the wolves settings, this little icon, and then you'll see the most pause right here. Now, we don't see the limits in the scene yet because we need to activate that. So to do that, click on the camera, go to the camera settings, you on the right-hand side. Then expand viewport display. Then you'll see a must tick box. So just enable the myths tick box. And now you'll see these limits in the scene right here. You can see a starting point and an end point. So these are basically the limits of the most boss. So now what we can do is we can go to this wold icon again. And now under this must pause drop-down, you've got your start. You can see I can configure or set the start position from the camera. And I can also set the depth or the end where the most part is going to end. So you can kinda match this to all the objects in your scene because we only have objects in this area. So I want my, the end of them must pass to be behind all of them. Obviously, if I set it to maybe something like this, that means the mist will go from very opaque, too. Transparent right here. So you want to just try and get the most boss to include everything in the scene. The distance, basically, the starting point can be close to the camera and the depth can be the furthest or further as the furthest object in your scene, maybe something like that. Alright, let's look through the camera again and now I can see we've got those limits. We can hide those limits again, if you want to, you can go to your camera settings and just disable this little tick box under View Display to hide it from the camera view if it gets a little bit too busy. And now let's just do a quick render view again. Because I think there's one thing we just need to be careful about. So if we look at our shadow catcher and we just kinda zoom in here, you will see this edge right at the top where our shadow catcher basically is. The reason we can see that is because this bottom shadow catcher, the floor plane shadow catcher, actually bouncing light and reflections onto the shadow catcher. So what I usually do is let's select our floor shadow catcher. And then let's go to this object properties, this little orange square. And then if you scroll down to where we enabled shadow catcher, you'll see some other options here by Ray visibility. And all you wanna do is you want to disable the diffuse and the glossy on all your shadow catches. So we've done this now for the ground shadow catcher or the floor shadow catcher, I'm going to select this wall shadow catcher as well and do the same. So under the object properties, just as able diffuse and glossy. So we don't get those balancing or the light bouncing against our shadow catches. So now you can see we still get the shadows on the wall and the shadows on the floor, but we don't get that harsh line going across our wall right there. So go ahead and save your project now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 17. Lesson 16: Rendering EXR Sequences: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to render our animation to an XOR sequence. So let's quickly go through our Render Settings. So let's start at the render properties. This little camera icon on the right-hand side. Make sure your render engine is set to cycles. And if you have a GPU, set this to GPU compute, then under sampling we're going to focus on the render section. Yeah, you can minimize the viewport and the noise threshold I usually keep on. This will increase the render time slightly. Maximum samples. I usually set this to around 256. If I do my final, final render, then I will increase this to about 512 or maybe one or 24. But I think for this example, to five-six should be enough samples. Then you can also choose if you want to de-noise your render. I'm going to keep this on. Usually I don't denoise when rendering, it will just speed up the render a little and we can always denoise it in the compositor. And I usually add grain on top of everything afterwards as well. But I think for this example, we can denoise our render, so that's fine. You can keep that on. Then if you go down slightly, you will see motion blur. I'm going to untick motion blur because first of all, our camera move is not very fast. So there's not really motion blur in this scene, but you can also add motion blur back in when doing the compositing. Now you can take motion blur out. So I think it's always safe to not render Motion Blur blender unless it's something very specific that you need that motion blur. But for now, let's just enable the motion blur. Next, if we go to our output properties, this is where you can set the resolution. So obviously we are using a 1920 by 1080 footage, so that's default. If you want to decrease the size of your render, the resolution, you can do that here, but for now, let's keep this on 100. Make sure your frame ranges are correct. We starting at frame one, ending at frame 150, which is perfect. Then for the output, we want to specify a folder where we want to render it. So I just created a folder called render one. And then we want to give our render a name as well. So I'm just going to call it render one. And then I'm going to place an underscore because it's going to add the frame number after that. So if you don't add an underscore, it might look a little bit confusing and it might not import correctly into your compositor. So always put an underscore just off to the filename, like so. And then we're going to click on Accept. Next, we want to tell blender what type of files we want to render. So we're not going to render a video, but we're going to render an open edX are multilayer. Now the reason we choose multilayer is that we have all those render passes that we selected. And then that means we need to select an XR multi-layer to include all those layers. Next we have the color depth. Now you've got two options, float off and float full. Now, 90% of the time float half is perfectly fine because we're going to do compositing in 16 bit. And if for some reason you need to do your compositing in full 32-bit, then you will select this float full. But for, as I say, for most renders, float off is more than enough, the file sizes will be a lot smaller. 16-bit is usually more than enough. So make sure your settings are set up like this. And then there's one more thing that we need to change before we can start our render. So currently, as you can see, we've got this background image. Our footage is actually set up in the scene. So if we render it right now, it's going to include this background image of the actual footage or the plate. And that's something we don't want. We just want to render our 3D objects with the shadows and all of that. Now, to disable this from our render, simply go to the compositing tab right here at the top, the compositing workspace. And then you simply untick right at the top it says Use nodes. You want to just simply untick that box. And now if you go back to Layout, it's still going to appear in this viewport, but when we render, it's not gonna be there. So let's quickly just save our project. And then one more thing I do before I render, I changed my viewport to solid view. That will just increase the render time slightly. Save your project again. And now we can click on Render and Render Animation. Now it's going to start rendering all our objects and all the pauses and everything, all the shadows, et cetera. And it's going to save it in EX, or image for each of the frames, each of the 150 frames. Now you're on the side. You can actually see all the render pauses. If you click on this drop-down here at the top where it says combined, you can see we've got combined must and all these different render passes. If I click on maybe A0, which is ambient occlusion, this will now show us the occlusion. Pause in a second. There you go. You can see this is the ambient occlusion pause, or we can maybe change this to the shadow catcher pause and you can see there we have all the shadows. These are just showing you all the different render passes. Combined is basically everything combined, all the layers, so you can see the correct colors, et cetera. So let us run through. It will take a few minutes, maybe an hour depends on the speed of your computer and your graphics card. And I will see you in the next lesson. 18. Lesson 17: After Effects: Import Plate & Render Passes & Setup the correct colour space: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to start the compositing process. So as you can see in After Effects, I'm using After Effects version 23.2, 0.1, but you can follow along in any other version of After Effects. You can also use your own compositor if you may be preferred to use something like nuclear fusion or even the bolt in compositor in blender. You can go ahead and use that as well. Most of the principles will be very similar to what I'm gonna do here in After Effects. So let's begin by importing the plate or the footage file, that MOV file, and then also the render passes that we rendered from Blender. So you're in the project area in After Effects, I'm simply going to double-click. And then I'm going to browse to the folder where I saved the footage, which is the footage underscore one underscore 1080 dot MOV. And I'm just going to simply bring that in. Now if we quickly take a look at the properties of this MOV, you will see that it's obviously 1920 by 1080, and then you'll see the frame rate of 25. So that's just something to keep in mind because that's gonna be our final frame rate for our club. Now this will obviously depend on the clip, if you're using your own clip, what you shot it at. But for this instance it's going to be 25. So I'm going to drag this into a new composition. And then we've got our in and out Frame setup and everything is the time and everything is correct. Alright, so next we can import our EX or sequence that we rendered from Blender. So I'm going to double-click to open the import window. And then I'm simply going to select the first EX are. You can see we've got all our renders are all the frames here from frame one to 150. And I'm simply going to select the first one, render one, underscore 0001. And then here at the bottom, just make sure to take open XOR sequence and then click Open. So we've got an image sequence and all we need to do now is set the frame rate of our image sequence as well. So right-click on that image sequence, go to Interpret Footage Main, and then just set this frame right here to 25, and then click on, Okay. Now, before we start compositing this one thing that we need to do inside of After Effects. And that is to set up our color management to make sure that everything is going to match and the gamma is correct. So what you need to do is right here at the bottom it says Project Settings or you can go to File and then project settings. So let's first go here and then under the Color tab, what you need to do is where it says working color space, make sure this is set to RGB. If it's set to none or anything else, usually it's, I think by default set to none. You need to go in here and set this to RGB. And that will just be so that we are working in the correct color space. If you don't do that, your footage or the render will look very dark. So just set that up and then also make sure there's linearize. Working color space is ticked. And then that compensate should be ticked as well. Alright, and that's all we need to change here. So click on okay, too, firm that. And then what you also can do is you can check that your image sequences or two is also set to that same color space. So right-click on the image sequence, Interpret Footage, and then main again. And then you'll see there's also a color tab here. And then just make sure that that is set to sRGB as well. And there where it says interpret as Linear Light. By default, this is set to only on four 32-bit comps. So by default this is set to on, but only for 32-bit comps, and we are working in a 16-bit comp. So change this to On, which means that will be on for eight bit 16.32. So with that click on, Okay, and now we are working in the correct color space. Also, you can see here that our company is set to 16 bit and this is also being set in the project settings. So you can see there at C2 16 births, there we've got our color space. And that's all you need to do. So now you're sure that your project is set up correctly. Go ahead and save this after-effects file or this after-effects project. And then in the next lesson we're going to start compositing all those random bosses together. I will see you in the next lesson. 19. Lesson 18: Setup Composition - The Comprehensive Way: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to start with the actual compositing process to extract all those render passes that we rendered from within blender and put them together again to form our beauty pause or the combined pause. Now, before we start, there are a few different, or there are actually many different ways to composite these pauses together. They are a like a more comprehensive way where we extract all the different layers are all the different parsers that will give you full access or full control to all the individual things like the specular highlights, the reflection, the indirect glossy, the direct glossy, all of those things. And then there's a more easier way that most people use. So I'm going to show you that difficult or the more comprehensive way first. But we are going to use the easier way going forward in this course. So I just want to give you guys the rundown of the more comprehensive way first so you kind of understand how to do that if you need to. But as I say, for most projects, I just use the easy way. And, um, yeah, Many big studios will use a more comprehensive way and that will give you more flexibility and more control down the pipeline where you don't have to go back and re-render some of the shots. But usually in a smallest to the environment, you can kind of go back and re-render if you really need to change, just like this specular highlights of an object. So let's jump into the more comprehensive way. So first of all, let's rename our comp so you can see it's currently called just footage clip one. So I'm going to rename this to come pre in comping. Okay? So as I say, this is the more difficult, more in depth way to do things. So we're gonna take our XR render and we're going to drag it on top of our footage in a comp. And immediately you're going to see just a black screen. Now, we need to extract those pauses individually using an effect in After Effects. Now, you can go to your Effects here at the top, and you can find all the effects that to extract these layers under this 3D channel dropdown box here. So the one that we're going to use is called extractor. And then later on we'll also use the crypto artifact from here. But for now we're going to use the extractor. Now, I'm using a plug-in from a video copilot called FX Console, where you simply select the layer and then you press a shortcut in my case control tab, and then you can simply search for an effect like I can simply type your extractor and I can choose that effect from here. I'm going to use that going forward. But as I mentioned, you can go to the Effect drop-down here at the top and choose that effect from here. You can also just Google video copilot FX Console is a free plugin and it's really helpful. It just speeds up your work a lot. So I'm going to add that extractor effect to this render layers. So let's just add that effect. Now we will see we get these drop-downs layers, red, green, blue, and then also that alpha channel. Now, if you click this layer's drop-down, you will see all the render passes that we exported. Things like ambient occlusion, your combined pause, all the different diffuse bosses, the glossy parses, the must, all of these, the shadow catches and transmission as well. So we're going to try and rebuild the combined pause, because we already have the combined pause, but we're going to use these other layers or other render passes to rebuild that pause. And that will give us access to all those different lighting random process basically. So first we're going to start with the diffuse color. So you'll see it says diffn color C 0 L. And that's gonna be our, our first layer that we are going to extract from this render. And then year where it says mode. This is where you've got all your modes like Multiply, Add, screen, etc. We're going to change this one to multiply. Alright? And then you already see something happening. We can kinda see some of the objects, but they very, very dark and some of them are just black. That's all normal for now. So at this moment, this render pause does not have an Alpha layer. So you can see it says alpha, which means it says copy. And it's just trying to use an Alpha layer from this render posts, but there is none. So we need to tell it to get the alpha layer from the combined boss, which is seeing combined, and then the Alpha layer, the dot a. So if I select that, then you can see, we can see now the rest of our image and these objects are still looking the same. So that's the diffuse color pause. So let's just rename this and call this D. If C 0 L Make sure to save your project every now and then. Now the order of your layers are also very important. So just something to note as well. Alright, so now that we have our diffuse color pause, we're going to duplicate this layer. So just simply select this layer, press Command D to duplicate that or Control D if you're on a PC. And then we're going to select diffuse direct from the drop-down. And this time we're going to change the mode to add. Alright, so now you will see things are starting to look a little different. You can see some of the objects are kinda turning black and some of them are turning white. But let's continue and see what we get once we've added all these different render passes. So I'm going to rename this layer to diffuse direct. So just the IFFT IR, just to keep track of where everything is in this composition. Alright, next I'm going to duplicate this diffuse direct layer. And this time I'm going to choose Diffuse indirect from the drop-down and then just rename this layer as well, diffuse IN D for indirect. And this time we're going to leave it on AD as well. Now what we need to do is we need to move the diffuse color layer above these two, Diffuse indirect and diffuse direct. Now you'll see we get some color in the scene. So if I zoom in here a bit, you can see the table has got some textures and electrical box against the wall, as well as these things, they all have color now. Alright, so next we need to add our glossy materials as well. So this time I'm going to duplicate the diffuse color layer. Alright? And for this one we are going to select glossy color from the layer's drop-down, and we're going to leave it on multiply. But this time we're going to move it down all the way to just above the footage. And let's just rename this to glossy color. Something like that. Alright, so as you can see, everything in the scene when black again. And this is because the same thing we did with the diffuse color layer where we used the combined Alpha. We need to do the same with this glossy color as well. So on the glossy color layer, just select Next to Alpha, we're going to select the scene combined Alpha. And that will just use the Alpha from that other combined render paths. Alright, next we need to bring in our glossy direct and also the glossy indirect parsers. For this, I'm going to duplicate the Diffuse indirect and let's just move it above everything. And for this one, I'm going to choose the glossy direct for now. Make sure it's on Add. And let's just rename this to glossy direct. Alright. And then we're going to duplicate this layer. And for this one we're going to choose glossy indirect. Also leave this one on ad, and it's just rename this. Now we can kind of see that we can basically see all the objects in the scene. So these objects that's got some glossy materials or metallic materials, we can see them now. So we can see all our objects in the scene, which is great. Alright, so next we want to bring in our shadows. So I'm going to duplicate any of these layers and then move it all the way down to just above the footage. And let's just rename this to shadow catcher. And for this one we are going to select the layers. We're going to select shadow catcher. Then we're going to change this mode to multiply. And there we have shadows. So now if I just zoom in here and I toggle this shadow catcher layer on and off. You can see we've got shadows. And these are the shadows from the shadow catcher that we added so you can see shadows against the walls, shadows against the floor. We've got some nice shadows there against that wall. So we've got our shadows in. And if we maybe just scrub through a little year, we should be able to see the shadow from our little zombie there as well. So you can see, definitely we have some shadows there. Alright, What else can we add? We can still add the ambient occlusion. So I'm going to just duplicate this top layer. And let's just rename this to a 0 for ambient occlusion. And from the layer's drop-down, I'm going to select seen dot A0, which is the occlusion. And as you can see, it looks something like this. And we need to change the mode to multiply as well. And then the same again as we did with the other multiply layers, we need to tell it which alpha to use. So I'm going to use the scene combined Alpha. And now we've got our ambient occlusion in the scene. So now if I zoom in here, you'll be able to see what it does to maybe to this object right here if I toggle it on and off. So it kinda adds that internal shadows. You can also see it on these sand bags really well. Just those shadows between some of these objects. So as I mentioned before, this is the comprehensive way of doing it. So if this seems very complicated and very confusing, don't worry, there's a much easier way to do this if you can kind of go back and re-render if you need to. So don't freak out too much if this seems way too complicated, I just wanted to show you guys how to do it. Alright, so let's quickly discuss why you would want to go this route and not the easier route. Now this will give you full access or full control over all these different render pauses like your glossy indirect lighting or your glossy director. If you have a lot of reflections, you can actually go in here and you can add some effects to that specific layer, like a tint effect change the color of a reflection may be, or you can change the opacity of that specific layer to just dial in those maybe like just your reflections or your indirect lighting. So this will give you extremely detailed control to manipulate your renders in after-effects or in any other competitor. And that means you don't have to go back to Blender to re-render. Let's say you want to change the color of a certain reflection, then you can don't have to go back and re-render it. You can actually do it all in your composite. But as I said, this is kinda just to show you that this is, this is the way to kinda rebuild it in the more comprehensive way. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you the easier way that most people probably use, especially if you are working on projects yourself or if you're working for a smaller studio, the easiest, I would recommend just go with it easier way. But this is just for you to know that you can do it this way if you want that full control. So go ahead and save your project. You can obviously go and play around with these layers and see what you can do if you add some tint effect. So maybe switch them off or change the opacity and see what they do. Kind of get familiar with this, but don't try and memorize this if you're not really going to use it like this. So in the next lesson we're going to look at the easy way, save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 20. Lesson 19: Setup Composition - The Easy Way: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at the easier way to kinda rebuild our composite urine After Effects. So let's get started. So first of all, I'm going to take my MOV or the video clip. I'm just going to drag it into a new composition and let's rename this one too easy. Camping, anything you like. So now we've got our video clip in and we can play this back. And you can see we've got our video clip right there, and our frame rate is correct, everything is fine. So what I'm gonna do, I'm going to drag in the render, place it on top of our footage. Then we're going to apply that extractor effect as well to extract some of the render parsers. So I'm just going to load in that extract effect. And now under the layer's drop-down, we simply going to select seen dot combined. And that's basically going to give us, if I just solo this one layer, you can see it's giving us all our objects and it's not including the shadows. If I look at this with alpha layer enabled here, you can see there's no shadows, but it's got the color information and it's got the highlights and it's got all that combined. So it's taking the direct and the indirect and the glossy and the transmission, all of that, combining them together. So it's basically just all those different render parsers combined into one. So let's just rename this and call the combined. Alright, next we want to bring in our shadows. So I'm simply going to duplicate this layer, move it to the bottom. And under layers, I'm going to choose shadow catcher. And you can see we've got our shadow catcher in there. And then we need to change the mode from normal to multiply on the shadows. I'm just going to rename this layer to shadow catcher. And there you can see we've got our shadows in. So if I zoom in here again, you can see if I switch it on and off, we've got those nice shadows against the walls, against the floor, everywhere where we need them. All right, so next we're going to bring in our ambient occlusion. So I'm going to duplicate one of these layers and then move them right at the top. And then under layers I'm going to choose seen dot 0. I'm going to change the mode to multiply. Let's rename this layer to A0 so we know that our ambient occlusion, and then we just need to tell it to use the alpha from the combined same as we did before. And now we've got our ambient occlusion in as well. So if I just kinda zoom in here, maybe to these sand bags again, we can switch it off and on. And you can see there's a major difference right there. There's also a must pass that we can bring in, but we're going to look at that a little bit later in this course. So for now we only want to use the amine occlusion, the combined and the shadow catcher and then our footage. Alright, so now we can scrub through our clip and you can see everything is looking pretty good. But in the next couple of lessons we're going to go in and I'm going to show you how you can tweak some of these objects to kinda fit better into the scene. And just one interesting thing to note here on the side, our little zombie coming out of this side of the building or behind the building. We don't even need to do any rotoscoping year. Because I realized we placed a shadow catcher right here. And when we rendered this, it actually masked out that part of the zombie already. But what I will do once we get to the rotoscoping lesson, I will just re-render the zombie on its own layer so that we can, so I can just show you how we will read a scope, something like that. If we didn't have a shadow catcher plane on the side that's actually blocking in which is helping us a lot now. But I'll just show you just some interesting thing that I noted now. So as you can see, this is the easier, much easier way to combine some of these pauses together. Obviously, this will not give you as much control, but as I mentioned earlier, usually you can get away with just doing the combined shadow catcher and occlusion and then we're going to use them must post later on as well. But it's just so much easier than extracting all of these layers, which will give you more control. But yeah, most of the time, this is perfectly fine. So you can go in and save your project. And in the next lesson we're going to start tweaking some of these layers to make them feel as if they are inside of this scene. I will see you in the next lesson. 21. Lesson 20: Match and Adjust Shadows, Highlights and Reflections: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how to match our shadows a little better and also the highlights on some of our objects. So let's have a look at the shadow of our zombie. I'm just going to zoom in here. We can see we've got the shadow of our zombie there. Now let's say you want to make it lighter or darker, this shadow. So I can go to the shadow catcher layer, press T to bring up the opacity. And I can simply just toggle this 0-100 and that will make the shadow lighter or a little bit darker, or just 100%. And you can see obviously this will affect all the shadows in the scene. So if we look at this table that will affect those shadows as well. You can obviously always duplicate this layer and mask out a certain shadow if you only want to control the darkness of a certain shadow. Now what you can do to make them darker is simply I can duplicate this layer. So if I duplicate it, then you can see our shadow as much darker. And now I can go in and I can change the opacity of just that one layer. And that will give me more control than just using one layer. If you want a darker, I can just bring that up to 100 as well. So that almost feels a little better. Because what you wanna do is you want to try and match your shadows to the other shadows in your scene, because shadows are usually the same darkness in one scene. So you can see I'm kinda trying to match the shadows here next to the Bolding. So I think that kind of fields, okay, so we're still going to do some masking year, but later on. But that's just to control these darkness or the opacity of your, of your shadows. Now, let's say we want to tweak the highlights of our objects. Then we're gonna go to this combined layer. So this is basically just the objects with the combined parsers. And on this one we can add a levels effect. So if I add a levels effect and if you want to find that effect, it will be under effect. And I think it's under color correction. And then you'll find levels, right? Yeah, yeah. So with the layers effect, It's really easy to make your objects a little brighter or make them a little darker, bringing more shadows. Another effect that I often use is the curves effect. So if I bring in a curves, I can adjust the shadow values like this, or I can bring up the highlights, maybe a little more on this area here. And you can do all those kind of things. You can also bring in something like exposure. And then we can adjust the brightness of these objects by just changing the exposure on that layer so you can kinda match them to your scene. Later on, I'm going to show you how you can actually change the brightness or some values of a specific object. But this is just to take this combined layer and just try and match it a little better to the scene, just the brightness and darkness. So as you can see that I can play with these values just to make them slightly brighter. Because these objects do feel a little dark in the scene. These ones are actually pretty good. I'll sand bags on, not too bad as well. Zombies also looking good. So yeah, you can just go ahead and try and match your shadows and also the brightest parts of your objects to the rest of the scene. What you can also do is change the temperature of your combined layer. So let's add a Lumetri color effect to our combined layer. And here under basic correction, you can change things like the temperature if you want to make them more warm or if you want to make them cooler, you can drag it this way. This is kinda just something you will use to match the overall feel of your scene. That's kinda a little bit of calibrating that you can do on your individual objects. You can also play with the saturation. So if I bring this down to zero, you'll see all the objects. We'll just go to black and white. And if you increase the saturation, there'll be very saturated. So you will also use this value just to match the saturation of your plate off the footage. So I'm gonna leave this on about 94 now. I think that feels pretty good. And the temperature I'm going to leave on zero for now. So go ahead and just play around with the shadows. And also the combined layer, maybe play around with exposure, See if you can get the exposure perfect. And then also play around with the color, temperature and the saturation and see if you can match it as best as possible to the overall lighting in your scene. And yeah, that's it. Go ahead and save your project now. And I will see you in the next lesson. 22. Lesson 21: Blur 3D Elements to Match Footage: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to look at one effect and that's the blur effect. Now what we want to do, if we just zoom in a little, we want to match the softness of our renders. Are the objects in our scene match the softness to our footage. Because obviously sometimes your rendered objects might look a little sharp. They might be actually sharper than the footage that you formed. So you want to try and match that blur as closely as possible. Now there are a few blur effects that we can use. So we want to blur the combined layer. Now if you look under the blur and sharpen drop-down, you'll see this quite a few different blurs. Now, I will suggest you use something like a camera lens blur, which is a bit slower. Or if you want to go with something more basic, you can just use the Gaussian blur. So let's go with a Gaussian Blur first. And you can see by default it's on zero. And I can increase this. And you can see that we are going to blur our objects. Now just remember we are not blurring the ambient occlusion. So if I disable that and if I disable the shadows, you will see we are just blurring the combined layer. We can also add that same blur to the shadows and to the occlusion as well. But obviously this is way overkill. So let's just bring this blurred down and maybe let's bring it down to like one. See if I toggle that blur on an off. We might not even see a difference because it's so subtle. Maybe let's bring it up to two. Can see that as way too much, can see it's too blurry. So maybe let's try 1.5. Does that even make a difference? Slight, slight difference. You can see that it's adding a little bit of blur on the edges. Maybe even something like 1.2. We just want a slight, slight blur so they are not as sharp. Alright, so that is basically that. So just add a blur effect and try and match the sharpness of your objects to your scene. And before I end this lesson, let's quickly add a camera lens blur and see how that differs from the normal Gaussian blur. Now, as I mentioned, the camera lens blur is a little bit slower, but it does give better results. Let's start at one. And you can see that looks a little bit too blurry. If we look at these barrels again, yeah, that's way too blurry. So let's bring this down to like 0.5, maybe, maybe point to even. So let's toggle that on and off. So you can see there's a slight difference. So let's make this 0.1. And if we zoom into 800%, Let's see. See there's a slight difference there. I think that is perfect. So I'm going to delete the Gaussian blur for now. And I'm just going to add this camera blur of a blur radius 0.1. I think that looks pretty good. Let's look at our sand bags. If we zoom in here and we toggle this on and off. Very subtle, but it's definitely there. Alright, so once you are happy with the blur on your 3D objects, you can go ahead and save your project. And I'll see you in the next lesson. 23. Lesson 22: Crytomattes and what you can do with them: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to look at crypto mats. Now, crypto markets are probably one of my favorite things when it comes to compositing. Because it's just amazing and it makes a lot of things so much easier. So let me show you what a crypto math is. So I'm going to drag in the render sequence again, and I'm going to drag it on top of our composition, so just above the amino occlusion. And now I want to add a new effect called crypto mat to this layer. So you can either go to Effects 3D channel and you'll see crypto mature and, or you can use the FX Console and just search for crypto mat and then just apply that to that layer. Then you're going to see something interesting happening here in the Viewport. You can see all of these objects with different colors. And this means we can actually extract a mosque from any of these objects and then we can manipulate them using an adjustment layer. So let me show you what I mean. So first of all, this output, I like to change this to Matt only. And this will just give us a black and white map that we can then use with a Adjustment Layer. So if you click around in the scene, you can now select different objects and it will create a mask for you or a mat. You can see I can click on one of these barrels. Why can click on the floor? Or I can click on the zombie and you can actually see the zombie has got some different parts to it. So let me just zoom in here so lightly. And you can see just zoom into 200 per cent. If I click on the zombie, me just so you can see the zombie consists of these different parts. So I can select the pants basically holding Shift, and then click to select that part as well. And if you scrub through, you can see that it's actually following the complete animation. That's a perfect map that we can use. So let's zoom out and see what we can do with these crypto mats. So let's say we want to change the color of one of these barrels. Let's say this blue barrel right here, we want to change the color of this barrel. So what we can do is let's bring this crypto matte layer back and just click on this barrel. So it only selects this one barrel. Now, if you click and nothing is happening, make sure that this crypto math effect is actually highlighted. And then you can click and that will then select that for you. So if we zoom out, make sure that's the only object that's selected. So if we scrub through, you can see that nothing else has been selected. And that's all we need. So we need that black and white mask. So I'm going to rename this to this layer to barrel mosque or barrel met. Okay, So that's our barrel mat. And now I'm going to create an adjustment layer, create a new adjustment layer, place it anywhere. And now you can, which says Track Matte. You can use one of your layers as a matte. So I'm going to use the barrel method we just created. And then right next to the Track Matte, you can specify if the mat is an alpha matte or if it's a luma matte. Now, if we look at the math that we created and we enable the alpha channel right here. You can see this math does not have an alpha channel. So there's no transparency, has just black and white. This is a luma matte. So just switch off that layer again and then on that adjustment layer, make sure to toggle this to luma matte. Alright, so now that adjustment layer is using the luma matte, this barrel luma matte. And we can add any effects now on top of this adjustment layer. So let's zoom in here, look at our barrel and I'm going to add an effect. Let's just see where to find these effects. So under color correction, I'm going to add a UN saturation. So now we can enable colorize. I can increase the saturation. And now I can just toggle through these use and I can change the color of that barrel to anything I want. If I want a green barrel, maybe bring down the saturation a bit or you can increase it if you want to. And you can see we can just change the color of that one item or that one object in our scene. If we don't want to change the color and maybe we just want to adjust the exposure. We can do that. So I'm going to add an exposure effect to the adjustment layer. And now we can just adjust the exposure of that one object in the scene. Another thing that you can do is let's add a curves. And now we can kind of control the shadows and the highlights of that one object, which is great. You can also go in, you can maybe add a blur effect. If you maybe want to blur only that one object, you can do it with us as well. So you can see, I'm kinda blurring that all objects. Obviously it looks a bit weird now because we not blurring the edges. If you want to blur the mat as well, I can copy and paste this effect onto that matter as well. So now you can see we blurring the mat, which is looking a little bit weird. Maybe if we add something like a camera lens blur and we'll get a better effect. Let's copy that onto our adjustment layer as well. And always make sure to switch off the mat. You don't want to see the mat in your composition, you just using it to control this adjustment layer. You can do things like that so we can blur it. Let me just remove this blur from the mat again. And so any effect that you can think of, you can add it on the Adjustment Layer and then use that crypto math to kinda isolate that one object in your scene. Let's try and do something with these sand bags. So I'm going to delete all of these layers. And let's just bring in our render layer again. And I'm going to add a crypto matte effect to that. Let's change this to match only. And I'm just going to click around and see where the sand bags or so I'm going to select this sand bag holding Shift, click on this one. And if you accidentally selected something else and you want to de-select the layer, just holding Control and then click, and that will then remove that from the mat. So only one out of these two sand bags like that. And now I want to just call this sand bag matt, like so then I can switch off this layer because we don't want to see that mat. Now we're going to add an adjustment layer. And I want to change the color of these sand bags to maybe like a darker brown. So I'm going to add a UN saturation on to that adjustment layer. And then we need to tell the adjustment layer to use the sand bag mat. And remember this is not an alpha matte, but it's a luma matte. So just change that to luma. Now we can go in and we can enable colorize on this UN saturation effect. And we can change the color of the sand bags. So I can maybe do saturation up a bit just to find the exact color that I want. Maybe like a brownish color like that. And then we can bring down the saturation again, and then we can bring down the lightness and darkness as well. So I want to bring it down so it's more like a darker brown, Something like that. So now I can see if I turn this adjustment layer on and off, you can see that's quite a big difference and that's using crypto mats. So now we can just rename this maybe sand bag adjustment. So you can add more effects on here as well if you maybe want to do something else with it. Let's see what else we can add. Maybe if we bring in a levels, we can control the shadows. Only that specific object in the scene. We can play with the highlights as well. All these different things that you can do just by using a crypto mat. So what I'm gonna do if I look at the scene, this well, looks a little bit too bright for me. So I want to use a crypto mat to bring the brightness a little bit down on this. Well, you're on the side. So I'm going to bring in my render again. And I'm going to add a crypto matte effect to that layer. And then I want to change this to Matt only. And we're going to click just to select our well. And then I'm just going to rename this layer to Well, Matt, so we know what that is. Switch it off. Now I'm going to create my adjustment layer. You can add an adjustment layer anywhere and make sure that this adjustment layer is now using that well mat. And let's set that to a luma matte to alpha matte. Now we can add maybe an exposure control or exposure effect to that adjustment layer. And I can just change the exposure on just the well and you can see what we're doing there, just kinda matching it with the environment around it and that's already feeling a lot better. I think the sand bags are a little bit too dark, so I'm just going to bring that up a bit. Maybe -40. Yeah, that looks better. And let's rename this top layer now too well, adjustment. Always good to rename your layers. So when you come back to it, it's always easy to see what you're doing. Alright, so that looks pretty good. I think. Go ahead and add some of these adjustment layers and create some maths using crypto mats and see what you can do with some of these objects. Maybe change the color, maybe blur them slightly more or less. Maybe just change the exposure. See what you can do by using a crypto mat. And just a really, really easy way to isolate certain objects and to change the look or values. So go ahead and save your project and play around a bit. And I will see you in the next lesson. 24. Lesson 23: Rotoscoping Foreground Elements: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is when you need to have an object that goes behind something in your scene. So let's say the zombie is going behind the building. We will have to do some rotoscoping there. But as I mentioned before, we actually got a bit lucky. And because we added a shadow catcher plane on this side of the building that's already masking out our zombie. You can see there it's not really showing up behind the building. So what I did, I just basically rendered the zombie on its own layer. And that's just what I'm going to use to show you. Let's say we had something that was in the foreground. So I'm going to load this image sequence that I rendered, just a zombie on its own, just going to set up the frame rate. Let's say we drop that on top of our footage and we just load the extractor. And then we just set this to combined so we can see our zombie. You can see now that our zombie is visible even behind the Bolding. And if you have something like that where some of the footage will have to be in front of your render, then you will have to do some rotoscoping. So let me show you how easy it is to wrote a scope, something like this. So I've got my two layers. Yeah, you can ignore all of these other layers for now, disable them. I'm just using these two layers, the footage and then also the zombie layer on its own. So what we need to do is we need to place our footage above our zombie or a copy of the footage above the zombie. So I'm going to duplicate this footage layer. And then I'm going to move this layer above the zombie. And obviously you will see that we can't see the zombie anymore because the footage is now in front of the zombie. What we need to do is we need to cut out this section of the wall. Basically placed it on top of the zombie. I'm just going to zoom in here a bit. And then I'm going to take the pen tool and then make sure you are on the layer that's just above the zombie. And I'm going to draw a mask. I'm going to click here, click there, and just draw a mosque and mask out this area of the wall. Now, if you scrub forward, you can obviously see that that mask is not moving with the footage. So we will have to add some key frames just to keep that mosque on the edge of that wall. As you can see, our zombie is kinda creeping up behind the mask there. So what do we need to do is let's open up this layer, expanded and then expand mosques. And you can see this is our mosque that we just drew on frame number one. Expand that as well, then enable this little stopwatch next to mask path. And that's going to enable us to add keyframes to that mosque. Alright, so let's just zoom out slightly so we can see this a bit better. So on frame one we can see the mosque is perfectly fine there. Then I'm going to go to like maybe 2 s. And now I'm going to double-click on this mosque. So make sure you double-click on the edge and I can move that whole Mosque around. So I'm just going to align it with a wall again. If you click on the edge, you can rotate it. It just zooming as slightly more. You can rotate it as well and you can obviously just kinda align it with that wall. Let's go to about 3 s. Let's do the same thing. Let's move that mask. You can also move the individual points. If you just click on the mask like this, you can just move these points individually. Sometimes it's a bit easier to do it like that. And let's just go through and add some keyframes. So I'm just kinda jumping 1 s ahead and kinda just masking this out, you can see our zombie already is out of the way. So these last frame doesn't really matter. We can just kinda roughly move it into place. Let's go to 1 s. Let's align that one as well. Alright, so obviously you might need to add more keyframes if you have a more complex camera move. But usually just a few frames like this. If it's something like a wall should do pretty well, Let's just go through. So add as many key frames as you need to mask that object that needs to be in front. And then what we need to do is if you look at this without looking at the mask, you can see there's a very sharp edge there. You can't really see it here because it's a bit blurry. But what we wanna do is we want to blur or feather this mosque slightly. So under the mosque settings you've got this mask feather. And if I increase this number, you can see there it's kinda blurring the edge of it. So we just want to place it on like maybe like three pixels for this shot. And if we look at it now, you can see, if we play it back. You can see that's looking pretty nice. That age is not too sharp, but it's kinda it's also not too soft. So if you look at this layer on its own, the one that we masked, that is basically that layer on its own. So it's just that mosque that's kinda moving around and replacing that on top of our zombie layers so they can basically see exactly what we are doing. If I zoom in, you can see we've got this layer in front or above, and then our zombie behind it. And then behind that we've got our footage. And then basically it's all matching up. So obviously, for our example, we didn't really have to do anything with the zombie because we had that shadow catcher in the that basically helped us out with a masking process. So I'm gonna go in and I'm going to delete these two layers again because obviously we don't need to do that. But now you know how to wrote a scope something. If you have something that needs to be in front of one of your rendered objects. So maybe you added an object that's maybe behind something else in the scene. Maybe just play around and see if we can rotate out something that's in front of a rendered object. And then you can go ahead and save your project. And I will see you in the next lesson. 25. Lesson 24: Using mist pass for adding mist / haze: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at them. Must pause. Now remember, I mentioned the most positive, but earlier. And then the spouse is actually something that will help a lot with integrating some of your 3D objects into your real-world scene. Now, most scenes in real life you can see a must or a haze almost in the distance. Like if we look at the mountains at the back, you can see they are completely behind like a haze or a must. And you can kinda see even these trees in the background. I also quite hazy. And then as we come forward or closer to the camera, you can see less of that hazy effect. Now we can use the most bars that we rendered from blender to simulate or match that must gradient or that haze gradient going from the camera and further back to the furthest point in your scene. So let me show you how we can use that. So I'm going to drag in the rendered EXOS sequence again, and I'm going to place it on top of our comp. And let's add the extract effect to that layer. And this time we're going to select must. So you'll see there's one that says scene and must. Click on that. And then you will get something that looks like this. Let's just solo this layer for a second. And I want to look at the alpha. If I toggle the transparency, you can see currently this doesn't have any alpha because the most layer again, does not have any alpha information. So we just want to use that alpha from the scene combined again, and then we get an alpha layer like this. So now you can see we've got all the objects in the scene again and they've got this little gradient on them. So what we can do to adjust this gradient, we can add a levels adjustment to that layer. Now you can use these two sliders to adjust that gradient. So we're going to use this as a met in a few minutes to kind of place that haze over our rendered objects. So all you need to know is anywhere where these objects are fully black. So if I bring this black value up, anywhere where it's black at, won't have any of that haze or most in any way where the objects are completely white. If I bring this in like that, these objects are the furthest away from the camera and they will have the most haze. So obviously most of our objects are quite not. It's not too far away from the camera. So we don't need a complete black and a complete white value, because the complete black and autocomplete black value will be closest to the camera and the complete white value will be furthest away where the mountains are in our footage. So I'm gonna leave it on default for now. We can kinda play with that and adjust it as we go along. So I'm going to un-solo this layer. Let's just rename this too. Must pause or we can call it must matter as well, because it's actually a method we're going to use. And we're just going to switch this layer off for now. So we only going to use it from in another layer. So just hide that for now. Now we're going to create a new layer and we're going to choose solid. So it's just gonna be one solid color that we basically creating now. Now this is going to be the color of the haze or the color of the Must. You can either click on the color and you can choose a color manually. But it's sometimes better just to use the color picker and choose a color basically from your scene. So maybe something in the background, like a light blue, something like that. And click Okay to confirm. Now you can see we've got that color completely over our footage. And it's just rename this to most. Now we're going to use this mat to control the density of that layer. Alright? So all we need to do is make sure you switch that off on the most layer. We're going to choose a track matte. We're going to choose them must pass, which is this one. And now we want to set this not to alpha matte, luma matte. We want to use the brightness of these Matt to control basically the amount of A's. So now if I take the opacity, if I press T to show the opacity of the most force, I can kinda play with that and see if I reduce it slightly. You can see kinda the most effector is doing, like all the objects that's closest to the camera. If I just zoom in here a bit, you can see they don't have any haze or most over them. But you can see these objects further away have a little bit of a haze over them. So obviously this is very extreme. So what we can do is we can also bring the opacity of the mat down. So I can bring that down as well. So it affects it less. You can see there. If I just kinda play with that value. Obviously in this scene we don't have a lot of Mr. Hayes very close to the camera, but this tool a little bit. So maybe if we bring this down to like maybe like even just ten per cent or 13 per cent. So if I now toggle this high as you can see, if you look at these objects here, maybe look at the, well, you can see, sorry, we need to switch on this first layer. If I toggle that on and off, you can see there is a slight difference in those objects a little further away. So play around with the most pause, see if you can add one that matches the footage quite well, because you just want that subtle, less contrast on the objects that's further away from the camera. You will see. If you look at any object in a scene that's further away, you can see they kinda behind this slight eyes and that's kinda the effect that you want to simulate using this must pause. So obviously if you have objects as further away, it's going to be more visible. But for this example, a very, very subtle most maybe we can bring this down to even ten. That might just help to integrate your 3D objects into the scene a little better. So go ahead and save your project now, and I will see you in the next lesson. 26. Lesson 25: Final Colour Grading: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at how we can calibrate our complete shot or everything together. So what we can do is we can simply add an adjustment layer. So if you go to New Adjustment layer and place that layer right at the top of your comp. Let's rename this and call it C. C for color correction, or we can call it grade or anything you want. And I'm going to add a Lumetri color effect to this Lumetri color. This is what you can do a lot of color grading, which is really nice. It gives you all the controls you need. So first of all, we can maybe change the overall temperature of the shot and this will affect everything below this adjustment layer. So maybe let's make it a little warmer like this. And you can maybe play with exposure slightly. Maybe the contrast, maybe let's add some contrast to that. And what we can do here as well, we can go to this creative tab and maybe add some of these looks. We can maybe go through this and see how they look at one looked pretty cool. And you can obviously change the intensity because that's extremely intense. So maybe just bring this up slightly like 40 per cent. Let's see how that feels. That looks pretty cool. Let's have a look at some of these Kodak looks as well. Maybe let's increase this to 100%, 100% again to see how they look. So there's quite a few, some of these are quite extreme. Some of them are quite cool. So maybe something like that. You can maybe just adjust it slightly. You can kinda see that's the maybe something a little less. Yeah, I kinda like that. So what we can also do is we can add a vignette. If you scroll down all the way to the bottom, you'll see vignette. Make sure it's active and they can bring this down to maybe like minus one. It will give you those nice dark corners. You can kinda see how intense you want this. Let's just see. So it kinda adds quite a bit. Maybe not that much, maybe like minus three should be fine. Yeah, minus three is looking pretty cool. Okay, next we can also add some crop at the bottom and top. So I'm just going to add a solid, just create a black solid like that. And then I'm going to double-click on this square or rectangle mascot the top. And it's going to automatically create this rectangle mask for us. Now we can invert this mosque just by clicking invert next to the mosque year. And now I'm simply going to select these two top points. So just click on one shift, click on the other. I'm just gonna do a shift down 12. So that's going to move it down about, I think about 20 pixels. And I'm going to do the same at the bottom. So select these two points of the mosque holding Shift and press up, up on the keyboard. Now we've got this kinda widescreen effect. That looks pretty cool. So now we've got this kind of widescreen effect that looks pretty cool, I think. So. Go ahead and save your project, and I will see you in the next lesson. 27. Lesson 26: Matching Film Grain or Digital Noise: Hi and welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at foam grain or digital noise that we can add over everything to just blend everything together nicely. Now, if we zoom in and I'm just going to solo the foot each layer, so we just see the original footage. If I play through this, you will see it's not really that noisy. There's definitely some noisier in the dark areas. You can see there's some noise going on in these areas. So we want to match our CGI objects to have the same kind of noise as our footage. So obviously if we now play this back and we'll look at some of these CGI objects. Let's look at this thing. And if we play some frames back, you'll see that it doesn't have any noise. Let me just render this section years. If I scrub over this, you'll see noise around it, but you won't see a lot of noise on the thing itself. What we'll have a little bit of a different noise and we want to try and match the noise to our footage. Now, there's a few different ways you can do this on the combined layer. If I just solo that this is where we can add our noise. So what we can do is we can add an effect that's called match noise. Let me just see where we find this. Here we go. So it's called match grain under the noise and grain. So I'm just going to add it using FX Console. So simply type matched grain. And now we can say what layer it's going to reference to get the noise information from. So it is noise source layer. Just select the footage from that drop-down. And then you can change this viewing mode to final output to not just be in that little preview box. And now, if we play this back, if I just play a few frames, you will see that we've got some noise on this as well. Now, if I toggle this on and off, you can definitely see a lot of noise on these barrels. If I maybe just zoom in here a bit more. And if I toggle that on and off, now usually this match kinda works, but you still need to tweak the, some of the settings here and it's actually under tweaking. Right here, you'll get intensity, size, and softness. Usually the intensity is the only one you need to change. Sometimes you can play around with the size of the noise or the grain as well. So what we're gonna do is we're going to un-solo this layer. And then we're going to try and match it as best to the footage. I'm just going to play a little bit of this and see if the noise is too much. You can actually see the noise is definitely too much on the 3D objects. So I'm simply going to go to the intensity. Let's bring it down to like 0.5. And if we scrub through this now, let me just render a few frames. Okay, Now if we scrub over this, you can see it's got a bird over. Zoom out slightly. Just want to try and match that intensity of the noise to the footage. I think we can maybe bring it down a little bit more. So I'm going to bring it down to about 0.30, 0.3. So play with these values. If the noise looks a little bit too big or too blotchy, you can always bring the size of the noise down as well, but I think it works well with the current setting. So let's just zoom out here. Alright, so let's have a look at this in full screen. And maybe let's just play a little section and see if there's anything that jumps out a bit. So I think we need to just bring the brightness or the highlights of our zombie down slightly. Everything else looks pretty good. So let's quickly go in here and see how we can do that. So we can use a crypto mat to bring the brightness of the zombie down slightly. So I'm going to drag in the render right at the top, but underneath the color grade and also the black bars. And then let's add a crypto matte effect to that layer. So we only want to isolate the zombie. So I'm going to change this to Matt only and just click hold shift and make sure we select all the parts of our zombie. So we've got that math that we can use. And I'm just going to rename this layer to zombie met, just like that. And then I can hide this layer because we just going to use it as a mat. And then I'm going to bring in an adjustment layer. So I'm going to create a new adjustment layer. I'm going to place this under the color grade. And this I'm going to call zombie adjust. Alright. And we want to change the mat or the Track Matte on that layer to the zombie mat. And then we want to change this from alpha to a luma matte. Alright, so now we're ready to add our effects to this layer. So I'm going to bring in a exposure control and now we can simply just adjust that zombie on its own. So if you look at our scene in full, if I make any adjustments there, it will only affect our zombie. So that's the cool thing about crypto mats. I want to bring this down slightly, so let's try minus one. That's probably too much, maybe -0.5. Now we can also just control the highlights. If I bring in an effect like levels, we can just do some. You can see they only adjusting the highlights or we can only adjust the shadow values. Maybe the normal exposure will actually work fine. So I'm going to delete this levels, but you can use the levels effect to adjust just the highlights or just the shadow parts of a specific model. So think if we bring this down, maybe I don't want to play with that number. I want to bring this down, maybe 2.7. I think I'm quite happy with exposure as this maybe let's do a -0.8, bring it down a touch. And I think that kinda works. She might be slightly too sharp as well, so we can add a blur effect to this as well. So let's add a camera lens blur. Now you can see we can blur as well. So let's bring this down to like maybe one. No, that's too much. 0.3. Yeah, I think that works. You just want to match the surrounding, maybe even slightly raised, maybe point to just to have just that little bit of blur. And let's just scrub through and see how that looks. Yeah, Another thing that we can do. Let's just zoom in there again. We can try adding a tint effect to this zombie adjust. So I'm just going to add a tint effect. And by default it's going to go black and white. And it's gonna give you the amount of blitz, bring the amount down to zero. And you can take this white value, bring it down to like a darker gray, and then increase this value as well. So now if you take it all the way up, it's going to map the white values to this gray value and the black values. You can also adjust if you want to change that. But yeah, now you can just play with this amount and that will also bring down those highlights. Slightly. Just don't want to bring down the black values too much. So maybe let's just put this on 1%, then bring this up slightly to probably like 20%. Yeah, I think that works. If I toggle this, somebody had just layer on and off. You can see that's the original before we started with this adjustment. Using that crypto math and hats off to you kinda just want to try and match the highlights to the surrounding scene and obviously to your color grade as well. I think that looks pretty pretty cool. Yeah, I think nothing jumps out at me. This electrical boxes looking pretty cool. This table is looking nice and the shadows, these items are looking pretty cool. Yeah, everything is looking nice. Zombies in cool shadows are looking nice. So play around with this and see what you can create. And I will see you in the next lesson. 28. Lesson 27: Final Render: Hey, and welcome back. In this lesson, we are going to do our final render. So that's very simple to do. We're going to simply go to composition right here at the top. And we're gonna go to Add to Render Queue. Now, you can also use the Adobe Media Encoder to send your render there. But for this, we're just going to send it to the normal internal after-effects render queue. And here we can select what codec we want to use. So you can click on this preset here, and this will take you to this settings page where you can choose the format. So let's say you want to export a QuickTime, you can select it there. Or if you want to export an H.264, which is basically MP4, you can do this year as well. So I'm not going to export a quick time. And then under the codec or the format options, you can click there. And this is where you set the video codec. So I want to use the Apple ProRes four to two HQ, which is usually very good codec for editing. Say if you want to export a VFX clip that you're going to lay to use an edit. I will usually use this Apple ProRes codecs. Click on Okay. And we're not going to export any audio, so you can switch off the audio, leave everything as default there. Click Okay, and I'm simply going to export this to a folder just to the desktop maybe. And click on save and simply click on Render to start the render. So let's wait for this to finish. So as you can see, everything is looking nice and nothing really stands out. But there is one thing I would like to fix, and I'm going to include that as a bonus lesson. So if you look at the well, you can see the edge of the well is very sharp and it's doesn't look very natural. So what I wanna do is I want to add some plants or gross or something growing around it. So just to cover up that hard edge. So go ahead and save your project now and I will see you in the bonus lesson. 29. Lesson 28: Extra Lesson: Adding grass around the well: Hey and welcome back and welcome to this bonus lesson where we're going to fix our well. So as you can see, I'm back in the blender project and what I wanna do is I want to add some plants or rocks or anything just to cover up this really, really hard edge of this well in the scene, because as you can see, it doesn't look too natural to have that very hard edge there. So I'm back in Bridge, in Quicksilver bridge to download some of these graphs elements. And let's maybe start with this one. I'm going to import this. Now you can obviously use bridge as well or quicksort, or you can download some grass elements from another website if you, yeah, there's quite a few that you can use for that. So I'm just going to change this over to solid view. And now you can see we've got this little grass element there. So let's just zoom in here and maybe let's just do something. Yes, I'm going to scale it down a bit. And let's just select hierarchy. And then I'm going to duplicate this model and Shift Z just to restricted on the z-axis, scalar down, rotated on the z. So it's not looking the same as all the other parts. And let's duplicate it one more time. Let's maybe move at the site, scale it up a bit. Let's rotate it. Let's have a look through the camera just to see what we need to cover up. So maybe if we go to the last frame, can see we are starting to cover that nicely. So let's see what else we can bring in, maybe one of these as well. Let's bring that in. And yeah, let's just go into solid view and move this one into place. Maybe something like that. Let me just select it, maybe scale it down a bit and let's duplicate it, move it to the side, rotate it so it's not the same. Maybe scale it down a bit, and maybe one more. So let's see if I bring in this one, maybe let's bring that one in. So there we go. Let's look through the camera to see exactly where we need to cover. So maybe on this side, somewhere around here, let's select everything there. Let's zoom in here. Maybe let's duplicate this one right next to it. A little smaller, rotate around. And then one year at the back. So I'm going to duplicate it as well. Maybe bigger a little further away. And let's rotate that. All right, let's see, maybe we can add one thing here as well. So I'm going to take one of these, duplicate it, move it right here, rotated around, maybe place it there. And let's see how that looks like. Alright, so what we wanna do is we want to render these grass elements and the shadow catcher on their own. So we're not going to render anything else in the scene. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to disable the character and objects collections. They will not render if you disable their collections. And let's just see what we can do here because we might need the shadow on the weld that the grass is actually causing. So what I'm gonna do, Let's go back into this objects collection and I'm going to grab this. Well, I'm going to duplicate it. And I'm just going to move it out to our scene collections. So we have that on its own layer or kinda separate object. So now we can disable this objects collection again. And this time on this, well, I'm gonna go to the object properties and we're going to set that as a shadow catcher. So now you can see that we just getting the shadow that's being costed from the plants. So another thing that you can do here is just disabled the fuse and glossy the same as we did with the other shadow catches. So now you can see we get that little bit of a shadow behind the grass and see if I can zoom in here. You can kinda see it a bit better. So we just get the shadows that the plants are costing on the floor as well as on the, well. Alright, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to frame one. So now we want to go in and we want to render this out. So let's go to our render passes again. And this time I'm going to disable all of these direct, indirect because we don't need that really. We're just going to use the combined random paths for this. I can leave ambient occlusion and shadow catcher and also the crypto math for object. If we want to select these grows, these plants individually, we can, we can use that. So the most layer I'm going to include as well, because we can apply some myths to that if we want to, and then obviously the combined layer as well. So let's go to our Output Properties, make sure that your frame ranges correct. So from frame one to frame 150, and let's just give it a folder. So I'm gonna go and just create a new folder and call this render underscore. Gross. Go in and let's just call this grows one and then put an underscore because it's going to add those frame numbers afterwards. Click on Accept. And let's just double-check our settings here at the bottom. So we're going to render an open or multi-layer and just a float which is 16 bit, which is perfectly fine. Alright, so let's save our project. And now we can kick off the grass render. Once your project is saved, you can simply go to this render menu and then Render Animation. And this will obviously take some time because it's going to run through all 150 frames one at a time. It's going to save that EX OR for us. So once this is done, I will see you in After Effects. All right, so the render for our gross finished, so I'm back in After Effects. So let's load that EXOS image sequence for the grass render around the well. So I'm simply going to double-click and I'm going to click on the first the XOR for the grass render. Make sure you have opened the XOR sequence selected here at the bottom and click on open. Now, the first thing we need to do is just check the frame rate of the sequence. So right-click, Interpret Footage Main. And then we're going to set this to the same as our footage, which is 25 frames per second. Now we can drag it into our comp. I'm going to place this below the grade layer. So the CC and also the black bars. So just drag that below that. And then we need to add that extractor effect to extract those render bosses. So let's load the extractor effect. Then I'm going to select the scene combined layer. And this will give us the gross. If I just solo this layer, you can see we have our grass in the scene. So I'm just going to rename this layer to grass. Yeah, that should be fine. So let's see how that looks. So I'm just going to scrub through and look at some of these layers. It's getting a little slow now. But you can see the growth is in the right position and it's obviously been tracked correctly. So I think that's looking great. So what I wanna do first is let's bring in the ambient occlusion of the grass. Some simply going to duplicate this layer, this cross layer. And then I'm going to select the ambient occlusion pause from this extractor effect and then you can see we've got the amine occlusion only for the grass. And remember we need to use an alpha from the combined. So let's just select that alpha layer for that one. And they can see we've got the amine occlusion. And now we need to change this from normal to multiply or right, Let's just zoom in there and see what we have. Tonight. Can see the gracias a little bit darker. So if I just toggle this amine inclusion on an off, you can see what that's doing. You can obviously change the opacity of this layer by just pressing T. And then you can kinda play with that opacity of the occlusion just to kinda tweak it how you want it to look. So I think something like that maybe works. Well. So I'm just gonna rename this to grass, a 0 for gross, I mean occlusion. And then finally we still need the shadows. So I'm simply going to duplicate this grass layer again, place it below our grass. And this time we're going to select the shadow catcher. So let's just have a look there. So that's our shadow. And this one we also need to place on Multiply. Now we can see we've got the nice shadow for the grass. So I'm just going to rename this to grass, shadow. And obviously you can also bring up the opacity and kinda play with the opacity of that shadow to match the surrounding shadows. But I think I'm percent actually it looks pretty good. Now one more thing that I want to do, the gross feels a little bit sharp if you look at the surrounding objects. So I want to add a subtle blur to our grass layer. So let's add a camera lens blur. And I'm going to set this to, let's try one. That already looks much, much better. So maybe we can even get away with 0.5. Let's have a look. So that's with no blur and that's with the blood. So you just want to match the blurriness of the surrounding objects and also the surrounding footage. Maybe we can even bring this down to like 0.3. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. So now we don't see that harsh line around our well, I think that looks pretty good. So that's just an easy way to kinda hide any harsh lines or anything like that, that you can just play some grass or some plants are some weeds over it. And that will just kind of integrate that object into the scene much better. Alright, so let's have a look at the final render. So I'm just going to save this quickly. And then I'm going to export a render and then let's have a look at it. Alright, so the render has finished and let's have a look at our final result. Yeah, I think everything looks really good. Shadows are looking good. So you can obviously go ahead and apply your own grade to this, see what you can come up with. And yeah, go ahead and save your After Effects project now. And I will see you in the conclusion video.