Blender for Filmmakers: 3D Set Extension with Camera Tracking | Alden Peters | Skillshare
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Blender for Filmmakers: 3D Set Extension with Camera Tracking

teacher avatar Alden Peters, Filmmaker, VFX Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:47

    • 2.

      Getting Started

      2:01

    • 3.

      3D Camera Tracking Using Blender

      11:49

    • 4.

      3D Camera Tracking Using Syntheyes

      9:56

    • 5.

      Building the Scene

      7:12

    • 6.

      Adding Detail to the Scene

      10:26

    • 7.

      Compositing in After Effects

      10:42

    • 8.

      Final Thoughts

      2:13

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About This Class

Unlock the power of worldbuilding within Blender by creating a 3D set expansion. 

When Alden Peters first started exploring the world of 3D animation and VFX, he saw it as a way to combine his love for 3D and sci-fi films filled with aliens and robots. Since then, Alden has gone on to work full-time as an independent filmmaker, motion graphics, and VFX artist and created award-winning projects like Friends of Sophia, Femme, and Coming Out. Now, Alden wants to show other filmmakers how to use 3D animation to boost the production value of any feature film, short, or show.  

In this class, Alden will share how you can transport your audience to other times and places by building out 3D set extensions. You’ll learn how to expand your footage by using camera tracking and movement tools to move out of your scene and then into a detailed 3D set. 

With Alden by your side, you’ll:

  • Create high-quality 3D camera tracking in both Blender and Syntheyes
  • Build out your set extension 
  • Add realistic details to your new scene
  • Composite the final product in After Effects

Whether you’re a filmmaker working on an independent budget who wants to add a ton of production value to your projects or you want to use 3D set extensions in your projects, you’ll leave this class knowing how to take any film to the next level through an intricate 3D set. You can also take what you’ve learned today to create a one-minute film by watching all five of Alden’s 3D animation classes. 

Plus, you can find more details about add-ons, additional software, and exclusive discounts in the class resources.

General knowledge about Blender and Adobe After Effects and how to navigate the software are required to take this class. You’ll also need a computer, Blender, Adobe After Effects, fSpy, a camera, and a tripod. Alden uses After Effects 2023/2024. If you’re using a prior version the Alpha Matte and Luma Matte functionality changes slightly. To learn more about 3D animation for filmmakers, check out Alden’s full learning path.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Alden Peters

Filmmaker, VFX Artist

Teacher

Alden Peters is an award-winning independent filmmaker whose films have played at film festivals around the world. In 2024, his queer sci-fi film FRIENDS OF SOPHIA starring Nana Visitor (STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE) premiered at BFI Flare: London LGBTQIA Film Festival in London. FRIENDS OF SOPHIA is an expansion of his 2021 proof-of-concept short film which won directing, acting, and production design awards during its film festival run. In 2018, Alden directed FEMME, a heartfelt short comedy about navigating dating apps as an effeminate gay man. FEMME took the world by storm at over 40 film festivals worldwide, picking up awards along the way. FEMME stars Corey Camperchioli and Stephanie Hsu (EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE), and is executive produced by Emmy and Golden Globe winner R... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Blender unlocks a ton for world building by adding all the little details in your film that you might not necessarily have been able to do during production. Those details help tell a story about the world where your characters are living. My name is Alden Peters. I'm a film director, editor, and VFX service. You may have seen my VFX tutorials on YouTube or TikTok or my films on Amazon Prime or Revere. I like working within the Sci-Fi genre because it's a lot of fun to transport audiences to other times and other places. I'm excited to teach this class, because 3D set extensions are a really awesome way to add incredible production value to your films. By the end of this class, you'll have taken a shot that you can film in your apartment and have it appear as if the camera is moving out of a window been looking up at a flying saucer over an apartment building. We're going to take production footage. We're going to motion track it using blenders built in camera tracking tools. We're also going to go over 3D tracking using Synthize. In Blender, we're going to extend our set and add some detail, and then in after effects, we're going to composite everything together. This is a class for filmmakers working on independent budgets, who want to add a ton of production value to their projects. Ideally, you do have some experience using blenders, so brush up on the basics like how to navigate the software. There are going to be five classes total, each one using different techniques in Blender. When you do all of these classes, you're going to end up with your own Sci-Fi short film. I hope you leave this class with the confidence to think beyond your limitations when you're making an independent film. I'm excited to have you follow along, so let's get started. 2. Getting Started: If you followed along on the other classes in this learning path. This class serves as a culmination of a lot of those techniques plus some new ones. We're going to use FSP and UV projection to recreate our scene in three DD. We're going to be extruding image textures to create building. We're going to be adding and animating three D models. But this time, we're also going to include some three D camera tracking. We're going to do that within Blender using blenders built in tools, but I'm also going to show you how to do three D tracking using Synthz which is a third party piece of software by Boris effects. There's a 15% discount code in the class resources. To get started, you're going to want to film yourself or a subject. Just an irregular environment indoors in an apartment. Instead of shooting on a tripod, you're going to want to add some camera movement. In this time, it's pulling the camera backwards and tilting up. We're going to motion track that movement add a wall, so the camera appears as if it's moving outside of a window and then add a whole environment outside. If you're working on a shot like this where you're going to be adding a three D set extension or there's part of your shot that you know you're not going to see, add as many trackable objects as possible in that area. This is the raw footage that I shot in my kitchen. So on the table here, I added a bunch of elements that are good candidates for some tracking points. We're going to add a three D set extension, so this camera move looks like it's coming out of a window, and we see the exterior of a building. Each of the shots that we've put together in this entire learning path are meant to edit together into one, 1 minute short film. So whatever lighting you used in the kitchen shot where everything was floating, mimic that in this shot as well. So go record your production footage and then convert it to a PNG image sequence, which Blender prefers. And then let's get started in our first lesson, which is three D tracking using Blenders built in tools. 3. 3D Camera Tracking Using Blender: O. We're going to start in Blender using Blenders built in tools for three D camera tracking. A lot of the steps of this process are similar to Class three when we did some three D object tracking. But this time, we want to make sure we're tracking that camera movement. When you're in Blender, up on the top, click the plus VFX motion tracking, and this will open up the motion tracking window. Choose open and navigate to your footage. Choose set key frames. Blender will then trim the in and out points to match your footage and prefetch to cache your shot. Double check that your frame rate matches the frame rate of your footage. In this case, we're using 23 98 instead of 24. Similar to three D object tracking, you're going to need eight points on screen at all times throughout your shot for the track to work. There are two main techniques for tracking. You can go in and choose precise points that you want to track throughout your shot or for as much as the shot as possible. Or you can choose auto detect, try to get as many points as possible tracked, and then refine from there. Depending on your shot, one technique might work better than the other. So if one isn't working, try the other and vice versa. In object tracking over here in the track tab and objects. We added an object before. We don't need to do that in this case. Down in camera, if you know the sensor width of your camera or the focal length or the pixel aspect ratio, you can put all of those settings in here. Blender will automatically try to detect them as it's doing the camera solve as well. But if you know them, it'll go much faster if you input all of that information here. Over on the left for our tracker settings, we're going to choose a fine. That's because we don't have the same perspective motion that we did when we are tracking the book in class three. We're going to choose normalize. And then control click to set your markers. You want to find high contrast points in your shot and ideally a point in your footage that's on screen for as long as possible. Control click to add your track mark. You want to find high contrast points. So places where shadow and light meat are good candidates for track points. We're going to start with these hit A and then track forward through our shot. That got us to about frame two 50. So starting here, let's add some new track marks. There's this picture frame on the wall. So let's select those new tracking points that we just added and continue to track forward. Let's also go back to the frame where they start and track backwards as well. Now let's go to the middle of the shot here. If you're working on a shot like this where you're going to be adding a three D set extension or there's part of your shot that you know you're not going to see. Add as many trackable objects as possible in that area. So on the table here, I added a bunch of elements that are good candidates for some tracking points. Well, let's choose these and do the same thing, track forwards and then track backward. Up here in this view, you can see which part of your shots have enough current tracking marks. Yellow is fine. Gray is better, but red means there are fewer than eight tracker markers at that point in the frame. So let's go to the end and find some more points we can track. This could be a good time to show you the detect features option. If you click detect features and then down here, if you toggle the drop down, you can set the distance to something smaller. Let's say 40, bring the margin down 15. This is going to add just even more track marks and then track backward from there. Try it again in another part of your shot. And we can see up here, we have enough track marks for the duration. Now let's go to our self tab to solve camera motion. And we have a solve error of 10.5 pixels. We want that solve error ideally to be under one pixel. So let's start deleting trackers that are affecting that error. To start with, let's delete all of the trackers that are on the subject or the book motion that has nothing to do with the camera itself. Select them and just hit X. And it solve again. Now we're down to an 8.98 error. And from here, we're going to go to clean up and clean tracks. Let's choose a projection error of something like 20. Let's go even less. Maybe ten. Delete those solve camera again. That brings our error down to four. Repeat this process. Let's see tracks that are let's say seven pixels off. Delete them, solve again. We've got an error now of 2.5, so we're getting closer. Clean again. Okay. Another thing to look out for when you are doing some camera tracking is this graph down here. So this is x and y motion, and this blue line is the camera track. You want that blue line to be as smooth as possible. So depending on the wave of that blue line, you can see which part of your shots are the most inaccurate. You can also see, for example, this track mark here seems way off compared to the graph of the other ones. So you can visually just choose a track mark that seems like it's off and delete it from this view as well. And then try solving again. Now we're down to 2.3. 2.2. Success is just around the corner. 1.8. You can continue to refine this in your shot to get as close as possible to something beneath one. 1.8 actually isn't too bad of a track in general, especially for a shot like this. So in class three, we did some object tracking with a hologram. And a higher error was fine because the hologram was going to hover above the book. And similar to this, our camera will be moving out of a window. So the wall and window is what we're going to need for the camera track. We're not placing something directly into the scene, like on top of the counter or something, so that super super accurate track isn't quite as crucial here. I think this one will work fine. When you're ready to set up your scene with your camera tracking data, scroll down in the soft tab and choose setup tracking scene. This is going to put a camera in your scene that has your footage as a background image, and all of your tracker markers are going to be empties within that scene as well. Let's go to our layout view. In the overlays drop down, choose motion tracking so we can see all our tracking points. We can also split the window here, turn on our camera view. And all of this tracking data is connected to our camera, so we can move our camera freely. The location and rotation of the camera isn't being animated. Instead, all of that is coming from a constraint, a camera solver restraint. So we can freely rotate and move our camera so we can adjust the floor plane to be more accurate this way. Now we can rescale this cube and use it as reference geometry for the wall. I'm going to choose this track mark this tracker that's on this light. That's about where I want the wall to be so I can line up the cube to that tracker mark delete that plane. And our wall and window will be somewhere around here. Tracking and blender can be very finicky. A lot of the times you'll have to try it again and again to get a super accurate solve. But there are other pieces of software you can use to get an accurate camera track, such as Synthes. And in the next lesson, we're going to go over how to do a three D camera track and synthze and then bring that data into Blender. 4. 3D Camera Tracking Using Syntheyes: Now we're going to cover three D camera tracking using Synthiz which is a third party piece of software. You have to pay for Synthiz either a one time license or a monthly subscription fee. But there's a 15% discount link in the class resources. I find that because Synthiz is dedicated only to three D camera tracking, the process is a lot smoother, a lot more efficient, and a lot more accurate. So when you open Synthiz, this is what the interface looks like. First, we are going to want to import our shot. So click Import. Choose shot, and then navigate to where you have your shot. Click open and a window will pop up confirming your frame rate and the dimensions of the shot itself. I shot this in four K, so I'm going to do the motion tracking in four K, bring it into Blender in that way, but then we'll be working in ten 80 after that. I do need to change this 24-23976 frames per second. Click Okay. It's automatically going to pre fletch your shot and cash it down here. Okay. And the first thing we're going to do is just click Auto. Choose, yes. And it's going to analyze and do an initial track of your shot. So here we have an initial track with all of our tracker markers, and we have an error of 7.3 pixels similar to blender. We want that error as small as possible, something around 0.5 ideally, 0.3 for something really good. From here, we're going to change automatic to refine and choose slow but Sure. So as we refine the track, it might take a little bit more time, but it'll be more accurate. Similar to blender. We just want to get rid of the track marks that have the most error. Before we go and refine all of our tracker marks, let's delete anything that's on your subject, something that's not helpful to the camera move and anything that is tracking a reflection. So anything here in the mirror, we can delete. And then also anything here on the book and on my sweater. With those markers deleted, click Go again. Now we have an error of 1.08 pixels. So this is already a pretty good track. But we can refine it a little bit more. So if we go into track cleanup trackers, the shortcut for this is Shift C, and we might return to this menu a few more times. Down here in high error trackers, looks like we have four with an error of 30 or more. If you click fix, it'll delete those. Hit go again. And now our solve error is 0.95. A Shift C to bring that menu up again. Let's reduce this to something like 25. Only one, so let's try 2015. Okay, three with 15. Click fix. Go 0.91. And keep repeating this process. Sometimes when you go back into this menu, it's still set to ten, and now there are four with an error of ten or more, and that's because with the new refined track, it found that ten of them actually do have a little bit more error. Let's see if we drop that even down to five. Now we're at 0.6. 0.50 0.289. So this is a super accurate track here. If we change this view now to three D, Quad, change it to quad perspective, and then choose lockdown on this bottom one, we can see our camera track from a bunch of different angles from above from the side and the camera view, so we can see all of this camera movement. From here, we can also rotate everything so we can get our ground plane accurate. Over on the left, we have navigation tools, movement, rotation, and scale. If we choose hole here, this will move the camera and all the track marks. So we can rotate and move the perspective from above and from the side until we get something that has a floor plane that feels. Correct. Something like that is already kind of close. But this is looking pretty good. The other thing we can do here if we unchecked hole here and use this wand set to box, but we can create some reference geometry right here in Synthes. So if we just click and drag, we can make a cube here, and then we can rotate it 90 degrees and then move it kind of where we would like a wall to be. And just check our track here. So this would be where, you know, the wall where the camera would come through the wall. Let's add a second one. Thing like this. So this was done much more accurately and much faster than using Blenders built in camera tracking tools. I highly recommend using Synthiz if you need to do three D camera tracking. But now, let's get all of this tracking data and camera from Synthi into Blender. To do so, we're just going to export. There is a blender Python option. Every time I've used that, Blender has crashed. So instead, we're going to use Alembic. So this is going to create an Alembic file that we can then open in Blender and have all of our camera and tracking data. Navigate to where you want to save this and click Okay. And then let's open blender. In a new project, we can delete everything and go to file import Alembic ABC and then navigate to where we saved our synthz project. Okay. And this is going to bring in our camera, all of our tracker points and our reference geometry. Everything enters blender massive. So we're going to make some adjustments and then scale everything down. The first thing you'll notice is there's kind of this far away plane, and that's sort of like if you look in the camera view, it's set in the background, but we can just hit X and delete that. For our camera at a background image. Navigate to your footage, so our footage is a background image for our camera. And then we see in our camera view here, our tracker marks and our reference geometry. You might notice, though, that there is just a touch of sliding if you go frame by frame. And that is because blender starts at frame one, and Synthz and all editing software starts at frame zero. So there's going to be a one frame discrepancy. But we can change that in our constraint tab under time frame offset, select one, and then all of these tracker marks will be locked onto our footage. Another difference between Synthes and Blenders built in camera tracker is that all of your tracker markers in Blender are empties, but here they're actual objects. That will show up in your render. So select all of your trackers here. Hit M. New collection. All this trackers. And then make sure we turn it off so they don't render. Now, let's scale everything down. So if we shift A at an empty a sphere, let's scale it up a bit, and let's parent the camera. These two pieces of reference geometry, and the empty that holds all these camera trackers. Command P, parent it to this empty, and then we can just scale it down. So the scale of our scene is a little more accurate. Our camera also might appear super small. So in the camera tab under viewport display, we can increase the scale there just so we can see the camera a little bit better. Now that we have our footage track and all of that information in blender, join me in the next lesson where we start building out our scene. 5. Building the Scene: Now that we have all of our tracking data in Blender, now we're going to build out our scene, including the exterior of the building, some parked cars, and a UFO hovering overhead. We're also going to adjust the camera move once it exits the building out the window. First model the exterior facade until we have the placement of the exterior of the building that's somewhere we're happy with. Then we can also add a cylinder, scale it down along the Z-axis, and that'll be the UFO hovering overhead. Animate the location and rotation, so it's approaching the building as the camera pulls out. Now we're going to use fSpy to help us build kitchen geometry. We're going to follow the same process we used in Class 2, so if you want a step-by-step breakdown, go revisit that class. As a reminder that step includes bringing in a single frame from your footage, aligning your X, Y, and Z axis in fSpy, and setting your origin point to a corner in the shot. Back in Blender, import your fSpy project, add a new plane, and set up some reference geometry. Tap into edit mode and move the edges of this plane and extrude along the X, Y, and Z axis. Continue adding geometry for all of the cabinetry and counters and fridge. Selecting both your fSpy camera and the geometry you created, align everything as best you can with the perspective from your main tracked camera. Add a material using the image sequence of your footage onto this geometry of your kitchen. In the modifiers, add a subdivision surface modifier, set to simple, increase the resolution, and then add a UV project modifier. Choose UV map and this time, instead of choosing the fSpy camera, choose the camera that is motion tracked. Be sure to set the aspect ratio to the dimensions of the footage. You might need to readjust the positioning of some of your geometry. Because the camera is going to be moving, it's a little less forgiving than a still camera projecting a texture onto some reference geometry. Because we used our motion-tracked camera in our UV project modifier, the camera tracking motion and the projection will cancel each other out, so everything in your shot will stay projected in its proper place on your geometry. If you look closely, you're going to see some warping just because of the change of perspective but if you're looking through the camera view, everything should look normal but you can watch as the texture sweeps across the geometry you've made. Next, we're going to add an HDRI image to our scene. You can download free HDRI images from Poly Haven. I'm using this one, which is a nighttime street. In your shader editor in the object dropdown, you switch it to World. You can add some curve nodes to adjust the brightness and color of your HDRI so that it matches your scene better. Now let's build our apartment exterior facade. I'm using this image. In addition to websites like Pixels, you can find imagery on Flicker, for example. You can search by commercial use, no copyright, or various Creative Commons licenses. Just triple-check what kind of permissions you have before you use an image, especially if you're using it for a commercial project. Import it as images as planes, and then an edit mode, similar to the technique we used in Class 1, we're going to add loop cuts, choose areas of the facade that have different depths, and extrude them forward and backwards bringing the windows in, for example, and bringing ledges out. When the camera moves outside of the apartment building, I'm also going to add some reference geometry here for some cars parked outside the side of the apartment, and I'm going to add a plane as the ground. I'm going to select the edges of the ground plane and hit E to extrude Z to extrude them up to have a wall around the driveway. Our camera movement is being guided by a camera constraint, so we can use that to our advantage to add some extra movement to our camera once it's outside of the apartment. To do so, you want to duplicate your main camera because the first instance of your camera is necessary to project the texture properly on the geometry of the interior of the kitchen but once we have a second one, we can name it something like ADL. Then once it's outside of the apartment building, if you go into this Constraints tab, the influence is how strongly it is being tied to the tracking. If I keyframe that influence, once it passes through the window, at the end of the shot, I can move the camera to a new position, and as that animates, the camera will continue to pull back even farther and drop to the ground in a much more extreme way than our initial shot, which just tilted up a little bit when we were inside the apartment. Here's what that looks like once we're all finished. Continue blocking out your scene with any additional objects you want whether it's cars or anything in the exterior and then in the next lesson, we're going to add more detail. 6. Adding Detail to the Scene: Now let's add more detail into our scene. First, I'm going to take this image that I was using as the apartment facade, and in Photoshop, I'm just going to remove the fence and also cut it out so it has transparency. Then I'm going to import it into Blender using images as planes. In edit mode, add loop cuts. Then we're going to select all of those faces and hit E to extrude them forward or backwards. Once you do that extrusion, you might notice that some of the sides are stretched. If you open the UV editor, select those faces and hit U, unwrap, you can then scale and move that section of the model to project the texture more normally. Some areas we're going to model separately like these drainage pipes. Add a cylinder, rotate it, and scale it down. In Edit mode, select the face, E to extrude and S to scale it, and then E again to extrude it back. Add the same apartment material to the cylinder. In the UV editor, select U, project from view, and then align it with the texture. Then add an array modifier to the cylinder and line everything up. Because it's an array, this is repeating the same pattern over and over again. But if we apply this array modifier, tap into Edit mode, select U, project from view, and just line everything up again. Now we can get some variation between each of those drainage pipes. Another detail we're going to add is the molding up here on the roof. To do that, we are going to use a curve. Shift A, add a curve. Let's do a path. This appears here at our world origin. If you scale it up, you might be able to see it a little better. Let's first get it align to this building. Something like that. Tab in to Edit mode and making sure that we're locked in this facing the z-axis so that we are only moving it along the z and x-axis. Hit G, and place all of your points along this curve, and then E to extrude. The path will naturally add a curve between points. If you need more curvature, you can select two points like this right here, right click and choose subdivide, and then move the one in between. Then keep hitting E to extrude along path here on the roof. Right now, the path is similar to an empty in the sense that there's nothing there. But if we go into the path properties under geometry, if you increase the depth, it'll become a cylinder and if you extrude it, decrease the depth a little bit, it'll have a little bit more of a flat extrusion, similar to what that molding on the roof of the apartment would be. Now that we also have some geometry here to reference, we can also adjust all of the points along the path. I'm going to use the Blender kit add-on to look for a new front door and just replace the one that we have in the image. Because I was using Photoshop to remove the fence of the apartment facade, the door doesn't look super great, but if we just drop in a 3D one, it should work nicely. I'm also going to add a lower section to the building. Just using cubes and resizing them, add another cube, scale it to the size of a stair and add an array modifier and set both the z and x-axis to negative one so it cascades down, and then let's add a ground plane. Now let's add some lighting to our scene. To start with, we're going to add a sun, but we want it to match the light that's baked into this apartment texture, which is coming from above and to the right. We want to match the shadows that are already on this texture. So adjust the rotation in our object properties of the sun until they look about even with the shadows that are already on that building. Then in the light properties, if we change the color to a blue hue, it'll feel more like moonlight. I also am importing some 3D models of cars. I found these on Sketchfab. I was looking for car models that were made with photogrammetry, which is when you take multiple photos of an object and create a 3D model from that. Because they were created with photographs, there's already a lot of details like those surface imperfections and irregularities that you're not going to get with a super clean model that you might otherwise find. Import your 3D models, and place them. Sometimes when you import your models, the textures won't be connected. If you have Node wrangler installed, and if the textures are labeled a certain way depending on wherever you downloaded them from, if you add a Principled BSDF shader, select it and hit Control Shift T, then select all of your materials, Blender will automatically place them and have them plugged into the correct nodes, so your base color normal, roughness, etc. Some materials like the materials for this truck were not labeled properly, so Blender doesn't know how to automatically assign them. If that's the case for something you downloaded, you just have to bring in the materials one by one and then plug them into their corresponding sockets in the shader editor. I downloaded this UFO model from Sketchfab. I'm going to have it hovering over this building to continue this sci-fi theme that we're going with. I'm also going to add an area light and parent it to this model so the emission texture from the model isn't doing all of the work shining light down onto the scene. I'm going to give it a cyan color. That's going to sweep across the whole scene. Next, I'm going to add the HDRI image I downloaded. I want to add the fence back into our scene from our initial image of the apartment, so I'm going to import it again using images as planes and then cut out the fence. Scale it and have it all aligned to our scene. Then tab into Edit mode and use loop cuts to isolate one of the pillars in the fence. When we're in Edit mode, if you choose this icon, you can select the knife tool. We can create some more edges. We can cut out the rounded section of this fence pillar, tap to Edit mode and hit E to extrude it back. Then in our material settings, set it to opaque so we're not seeing through different parts of the material. Do the same thing for the other section of the fence, then add array modifiers to each one to build our fence. Then it'll look something like this. If you put all of the fence into a single collection, hit Shift A, you can add a collection instance. Then we have all of these objects as one piece, so we can duplicate it, rotate it at 90 degrees and have the fence continue down the side of the building. I'm also going to use Blender kit to add additional apartment buildings outside of this one and depend all of the floating kitchen items that we used in Class 4. Then adjust all of their position and rotation keyframes so that we can see them through the window as our camera moves. Keep adding as much detail as you want to your scene. This is a part of the process that can take as long as you'd like. When you're ready, export an EXR image sequence. To go over all of those render settings in more detail, refer back to Class 1. In the next lesson, we'll composite everything together in after effects. 7. Compositing in After Effects: Now we're going to do some compositing tricks in after effects to help make your render really come alive. Bring your EXR sequence into after effects a extractor and a color profile converter, so everything shows up normally. Duplicate your combined layer, set one to mist and another two emission. Set your emission layer to screen and add a fasplur so the emission layer glows. Add an adjustment layer with lmentary color to bring some contrast back into the image. Now, on a black solid, add a boris effects lens flare and set it to screen. If you click FX editor, you can customize the look of your lens flare. However, you'd like if you want a horizontal an amorphic lens lens flare or something else. Another thing I'd like to add if I have anything super bright in a render is a solid layer of a certain color set to light, the opacity down to something like ten and a mask that's extremely feathered. Basically, it's kind of like a kind of like a haze as if you were shining a bright light at an actual lens. Turn the feather up to something like 2,500. I'm going to bring in the film glow and film grain layers that I've been using for the other shots as well. Here's a before and after of what the render look like outside of Blender and then with some of these compositing layers on top. I'm going to add another lens flare for this light in the background as well, which we see down in the corner of the shot. The next thing we're going to work on is the transition from inside the kitchen to outside of the building of the camera passing through the window. So we're going to add some distortion and blurring as if the camera is moving through a pane of glass. First, let's start with a distortion that's going to cross the frame. Hit Command Y to add a solid. Let's make it white. And then let's add a mask on half of the frame, hit M. Turn on the stopwatch to add a key frame. And around here when the transition ends, double click the mask and slide it over. And then we have this white bar passing in front of the screen. Command Shift C to precompose. Move all attributes to a new composition, and let's call this transition map. In this pre comp, let's also add a black solid as well and place it underneath the white one. Hit F and turn up the feather here, so it's more of a gradient. We can move this transition map down below all of our visible layers, so we don't see it. And instead, add an adjustment layer, a transition distortion. Add a displacement map. And then under the displacement map layer, choose that pre comp we just made. Transition map. For vertical, set it to zero. For horizontal, we're going to choose mints. Okay. Is to something like 20 add a key frame. So this has some distortion as the camera is moving. And then we're going to stack a couple more adjustment layers on top of this. Let's add another adjustment layer. Call it blur. Add a camera lens blur. And let's keep frame this transitioning on and off as well, We probably want the blur to end around here. Add chromatic aberration. So that as if the camera is moving through a lens and kind of splitting light a little bit. We'll drop this below our distortion. And then we can edit the distortion and the center of either our red green magenta or blue yellow colors. We can animate these distortion amounts. And the last adjustment layer. It's the lens distortion effect. If we turn this down to something like 15 and key frame this as well. Just adding a little more distortion as the passing through a pane of glass. And when stacked on top of each other, we have an effect that looks like this. You can use your miss pass to add some additional blurring using a camera lens blur. And you can increase or decrease that amount by adding something like Lumetri to the missed pass itself. It kind of changes a little bit as the camera moves. So I'm going to keyframe the color wheels of. So that it's not causing too much blurring when the camera to the building. Can also add a slight haze or volumetric effect by adding a tint effect to the mist pass and setting it to screen, then turning the opacity down. Some other final compositing touches are adding a slight blur to the window once we're outside of it, also adding a reflection over the surface of the window material, and then some final looks like a film glow and a film grain. You can adjust all these settings or apply any other effects to get the desired result you're going for. If you want to use any of these boris effects that I've used, there's a 15% discount code in the class resources. So now let's take a look at the whole finished piece. 8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on completing this class. We've covered 3D camera tracking in Blender and Synthesize, and on a full 3D set extension. If you've followed all five classes, you can now put all of your shots together into a single film. One of the great things about having a 3D scene built in blender, is that, you can just move your camera around and get additional coverage. Following these same techniques throughout these five classes, you can also get additional establishing shots. Now let's take a look at the finished film. Whenever you're making any shots using Blender or doing other kind of visual effects, sound effects is a whole second half to selling the effect, so be sure to include sound effects to whatever you're doing. If any questions come up during this class, put them in the Discussion board, and I'm super excited to see your final renders from this class or your entire finished films in the project gallery. Thank you for watching. Bye.