Transcripts
1. Introduction: So much of all of
our day to day, we are abiding by rules that
we have no control over, but especially when
you're working within the sci-fi genre, you're able to reimagine
the world around you. Hello, I'm Alden Peters. I'm an independent
filmmaker and VFX artist. You may have seen my work
on TikTok, on YouTube, or some of my films on Amazon
Prime, YouTube, or Revry. Experiencing
people's reaction to your own work is the best part
of the filmmaking process. When you do VFX in Blender, it feels like putting on a
magic show for everyone. In today's class, we are
going to take 3D objects, add them into our
production footage and have everything levitate. We are going to go
through the process of downloading 3D models, adding them to our
scene, animating them, adjusting materials so that they look more photo realistic. Rendering out of Blender, and then compositing everything
in After Effects to make sure that our 3D models and our production
footage look cohesive. This is a class for
filmmakers who want to bring 3D objects into their
production footage. 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'm really excited to have you follow along. Let's get started.
2. Getting Started: In this class, we are
going to add 3D objects to our scene and have them
all floating and levitating. Things you're going to
need are Blender and after effects you're also going to
need a camera on a tripod. I also encourage some type of
RGB lighting in this shot, I have a blue light turning on, something to have
the scene change as the objects levitate so we can recreate that
lighting and Blender, have that lighting reflecting
on our 3D objects, and just tie the two elements
together really nicely. In this shot, it's going to
be me standing in a kitchen, and I'm going to
have 3D elements on the counter and
shelving in front of me. I had the shot framed where all of those elements are just separate
enough from me, so I'm not going to have to
do too much rotoscoping. Make sure you have your
shot relatively clean so we can add all of
those 3D elements. Go get your shot this can be done anywhere in your
house or apartment, and then meet me in the next
lesson where we're going to go over our project
setup in Blender.
3. Project Setup: To get started, we're
going to follow a similar process to
Class 1 using fSpy. To go over that process in more detail, check
out that class. But as a reminder, here's
what those steps are. Use a still from your shot, bring it into fSpy, line up your x, y, and z-axis, and
your origin point. In Blender, open up that fSpy project and create
some reference geometry. Add an image sequence
of your footage to a texture on that
reference geometry. Then use the UV
project modifier. Once you've followed
those steps, here's where we end up, which is some geometry
of our kitchen with our footage projected
onto that geometry. To start with, I'm going to add a couple of reference
shapes here. I'm going to add an icosphere
and set it on the counter. Add a new material. In this dropdown,
choose "Emission". Make it a blue color and
crank this up to 50. Nothing is happening because
right now we are in EV. If you want to see some
light reflections in EV, you have to turn on
screen space reflections. Now, if we move this around, we can see that any light in our scene is reflecting
onto our geometry. Now, let's add another shape. Let's add a cylinder, set it on the counter. Let's also give this
some new material. Shiny material. Then let's bring the
roughness all the way down to zero so it's
completely reflective. If we look in our rendered view, you see that it's reflecting
the light, but nothing else. If we hit "Shade Smooth", that'll smooth out the
edges a little bit. Part of the reason is
because if you scroll out, the world in Blender is
just set to a neutral gray. We need to add what's
called an HDRI, which is going to be
a 360 degree image that surrounds our scene, which will then be seen in the reflection of
the objects we add. I used an app called HDRI, which prompts you to
take photos 360 degrees. I did that in the
kitchen and it generates a 360 degree image of the room. That stitches together into
this 360 degree image. Obviously, it's not perfect. But because this is
just going to be seen in some reflections,
this is going to work fine. In the World tab, right now, our surface is set to color. Choose this dot and change it from color to
environment texture. Right now it's pink because
there's no texture applied. Choose "Open" and
then navigate to your 360 degree HDRI image. Now, if we rotate around, we can see that this kitchen
is surrounding our object. However, the rotation
is a little bit off. In our shader editor window, if we changes dropdown
from object to world, we can use shader nodes with
the environment texture. In preferences, make sure you have node wrangler activated. Then here in the shader editor, if we choose our image texture
here and hit Control T, we get some mapping nodes added. From here, we can
rotate the background. If we rotate this
along the z-axis, we can just make sure we have our perspective correct so that this angle from the
kitchen is reflected now in our shiny objects. Now, any 3D models that we add of various kitchen objects, if they are reflective,
they're going to reflect the entire area, not just the little section
that we have in our footage. The next thing we
want to look at is when we're in rendered mode, we can still see some of the corners from our
geometry in our footage. The reason for that, if we
toggle back to object mode, is because this is a
principled BSDF shader. It's accepting light from the scene itself and
casting shadow on itself. If we toggle down the
emission option here, bring our color into emission
and set the strength to 1, that starts to brighten it up. But we can also shift
at an emission node, drag our color into color there, and that color into the surface. Then now this entire
texture will be emissive, meaning it's emitting light, it's not accepting anything. Our footage looks
completely normal. One thing we'll notice, though, is now it no longer
accepts light from something like
this object over here. We're going to have to
make duplicate versions of our material with slightly
different settings and apply them to different
surfaces in our room. For example, the counter
is going to be a lot more reflective
than the cupboards. In our Materials tab, if we choose our kitchen, in this dropdown, choose "Copy Material",
hit ''Plus'', add a new material,
and then in that dropdown again, choose
"Paste Material". We'll call this
kitchen reflective. With the kitchen geometry
selected tab and to edit mode, let's choose our
counter surfaces. With those surfaces selected, choose the second material
and hit "Assign". Now, if we make the
second material, switch it back to
this principled BSDF, it is now accepting lights
from objects in the scene, including any light that
we add to the scene, such as an area
light from overhead, from the lighting in
the kitchen itself, and over here this
blue light that turns on throughout our shot. Let me add another area light, place it on the ceiling. Give this a white, maybe slightly warm texture
and set this to 150 so that any objects we add will be
receiving that light as well. With our reflective
material selected, in here, let's bring the roughness
down and you can see that that's getting
some reflection there on the countertop. One of the biggest
differences between the EV renderer and
the cycles renderer, cycles uses ray tracing. It's calculating
the light bounces off of an object to the camera for every pixel of the frame, and EV is a bit of
an approximation. When you see that come into
play is in the reflections. If I made this counter
material zero roughness, I take this object
and lift it up, the reflections are
a lot less accurate than if I change
this over to cycles. The reason for
that is because EV has no idea what's actually
behind the object. All EV knows is what it
sees and what's facing it. Whereas cycles, the light can actually bounce around
the scene and it can reflect accurately what's
invisible to the camera. This countertop is
going to reflect any of the three objects
we add to our scene, but some of the
reflections are baked into it because of
the footage itself. Specifically, the
reflection here of the faucet and
the dish soap here. We can use our UV
editor to get rid of those reflections
so we only have reflections of
what's being added. Tab into edit mode and open the UV editor and
isolate the area of the counter that has
this baked in reflection. Hit ''Shift D'' to
duplicate it and Escape. If you duplicate anything and immediately hit ''Escape'', it'll stay locked in its same
position. Then hit ''P''. Separate by selection,
and now we have this piece of counter
as its own object. We'll rename this counter, and in our modifiers, apply our UV project modifier. Now we have the surface of this part of the counter
mapped on to our counter here. What we're going to do
is basically flip it 180 degrees so it's a mirror image of the counter
space closer to the camera. To do that, we want to leave these points locked
where they are, and let's just highlight
these ones up here and hit ''G'' to move them back
in this direction. Then we just need to get
that perspective right until that line
looks fairly normal. So now, when we look at
this part of the counter, we no longer have that
baked-in reflection. But from the camera's
point of view, we still see that reflection, but it's because
it's actually being reflected from the footage
onto that counter space. Now if we added an object, all the reflections will look normal when we add
our 3D objects. When I'm building
a scene like this, I usually stay in
EV until the end, then I switch over to cycles, make any small
adjustments I need, and get set up for the render. That just keeps Blender
working a lot smoother. Now we have our scene
built in Blender. In the next lesson,
we're going to add and animate 3D elements
into our scene.
4. Building 3D Scene: Now we're going to add some
3D objects into our scene. To do that, we're going
to use BlenderKit, which is a free add on
where you can download 3(3D) models from
within Blender. Hit N to open up your side menu and choose
the BlenderKit tab. Now we're just going to
look for kitchen items. Choose Free first. We're just going to
go through and try to find anything that would
make sense on a counter. Now, I'm going to
start animating all of these objects in the kitchen levitating throughout the shot. We're going to key frame
their position and rotation. There's two ways to do that. One is to choose the
object in the properties, hover and hit I over the
location and rotation, and move down the timeline. Adjust them both. Then animate them again. Or you can choose an object, just hit I and choose location and rotation
insert a key frame. We just want to make
sure the key frames after the end of our shot just so that the motion is continuous
throughout the shot, and the objects don't start
to hover and then freeze. Then as we rotate, though, I think it might be strange if everything off the
counter starts moving, and we have all of
this glassware up on the shelves just sitting steady. I'm also going to add some 3D cups on those
shelves as well. But first, I need to extrude
that back a little bit. Just add some loop cuts that
line up with the shelving, select the faces and hit E
to extrude them backwards. Then we have some
geometry of the shelves, and when we place a
3D cup on the shelf, we'll have it obscured by
the bottom of the shelf. From here, keep adding 3D objects to fill out
your scene and then animate the location
and rotation to have all of them start to
levitate throughout your shot. Now I have all of
these 3D objects floating off the counter and
the shelves in the shot, but I also turn and look
to the right of the frame. I want to add
something over here to motivate that action. There's pretty much only
a fridge there but if I bring in a 3D
model of a fridge, I can cover this one up and then do some animation
there as well. Using BlenderKit, I found
this model of a fridge, which has a similar stainless
steel material to it, and I'm just going to animate
the fridge door opening. But right now, it's
one singular model, so we're going to
split up the model a little bit and animate
just the door. If you tap an edit
mode, and on this door, if you hit L while you're
hovering over a part of a mesh, it'll select everything
connected to that mesh. We just want to keep doing that. You don't have to hold
shift or anything. You just keep hitting
L, and it'll keep selecting everything attached to wherever your
cursor is hovering. We're going to choose all
of the pieces of this door, including all the details
here on the front. With this particular model, it's a little bit
tedious because there's each letter is its own
separate piece of geometry. Now we have all the mesh
detail of this door selected. If we hit P and then
separate by selection. Now, this fridge door here is
a completely separate mesh. We want to animate the rotation
of the door to hinge it. If we hit R right now
because the origin point of this door is down
here in the center of the fridge. The
rotation is wrong. So we need to change the origin point over here
to the side of the door, so the rotation will hinge
from the right side there. To do so, if you tab
an edit mode again, choose one edge on the side
of the door and hit Shift S, cursor to selected, that'll
bring the cursor at your world origin to the edge or the face
that you have selected. Then if you Right
Click the door, set origin to 3D cursor, suddenly, our origin
will pop up right there. When we animate our rotation,
it opens correctly. Along with everything
levitating up in the air, let's also animate the rotation of this door by
adding a keyframe, moving forward, hit R
and then Z to rotate along the Z axis and have the fridge open and
set another keyframe. You'll notice that this
model doesn't have any detail inside of the fridge. It's just the same metal
material repeated. We can add the fridge interior by just
having into edit mode. Here on the main
section of the fridge, if you hit E to
extrude and then S, we can scale down until
we're within this frame, then hit E again, and we can push the inside
of the fridge back. Same thing with this door
if we go into edit mode, the interior of the door
has a lot of subdivision, so just select all of those
surfaces together and hit E and extrude that inward. While we have this
surface selected, let's go into our materials tab, add a new material. Let's call this fridge interior, and we'll just leave it
at the default white for now and click Assign. Same with the faces on the
inside of this fridge as well. Click Plus to add
a new material. We had added this
material to the door, it's not here on the fridge. But if we choose
this drop down here, we can find any
material we have in our project and add it to whatever object we want,
and then click a sign. For shelving, we can take
a few of these rows. Just Hit Extrude again
to extrude them forward. For the inside of the fridge, we can just add a new cube mesh. Just scale and position. Then in the modifiers tab,
choose Generate Array. It Y-0 and bring the Z value down to add a couple shelves
here in the fridge. The other part of the fridge
we want to add is a light. Every time you open the fridge, the light turns on. Let's add an area light. Rotate it on the Y-axis. Spin around, scale it up, and then place it back here
in the back of the fridge. If we look in rendered view, turn this up to 500. We have a light coming
from inside of the fridge. I'm going to find more 3D
models using BlenderKit for condiment bottles and
other food elements that I can put
inside the fridge, so it's not completely empty. But if you do have something
in the fridge door, make sure you parent
it to the door, so it also has the
same rotation. To do so, select the empty that is controlling the object you downloaded from BlenderKit. Hold down Shift. Select the door and hit
Command P. Click object, and now it will be parented, so it will move with the
rotation of the door. Keep filling out your
kitchen scene with various 3D models that you have floating or anything
else that you need, and then meet me
in the next lesson where we're going
to edit some of the materials to make everything look more
photorealistic.
5. Add Imperfections: Now we're going to
work on editing our materials to make our
3D objects look more real. One of the ways we do that is by adding surface imperfections. So objects, especially in a real-life kitchen environment. Anything that's glossy will have some type of smudge on it, whether it's a fingerprint, whether it's dust, or smears from cleaning. Even this computer
screen around the edges, you can see fingerprints on it. Some models like
this pot right here already has surface
imperfection textures on it, but others like this
electric kettle, don't. Same goes with the fridge, which is a similar metal
material is the pot, but it is just a
clean metal surface, which will be one of
the things that gives away which elements in the
shot are added afterward. You can download surface
imperfection materials online. In the class resources, there's a link for a free
pack that has fingerprints, smudges, and other things
like that that you can add. Another thing we can do
if some of the models we download already have
surface imperfections, we can use those
image textures and apply them to other models
in our scene as well. Let's go into our
fridge model here and our stainless steel
texture is fairly clean. If I add a diffuse shader, click and drag the node here, and it'll open up
the search menu. We want to add Mick Shader, plug our stainless
steel material into the second node here, and then drag that
over to the surface. Right now, this is a slider
all the way from 100% here on the first shader
to 100% the second shader. But we can also plug an image
texture into this factor. If I add an image texture, and then in this drop-down, this will pull up all
the image textures that are already in the project. All of the image
textures that came with any model that we
downloaded and right here, we have a fingerprints texture. If we drag this
color into factor, we're going to see
that image texture affecting the material here. It looks like they're inverted, so the fingerprints themselves are the stainless
steel material. To do that, we can click
this first input here, hold down option,
and drag it down, and then the two will switch. Now we can see some fingerprints that are this diffused
material here and we can adjust the color and
intensity of this as well. If we hit ''Shift A''
and add a color ramp, and drag this, and
drop it between the fingerprint texture
and the mix shader here. We can also affect how intense this texture is
affecting those two materials. Hit ''Control Shift click''
to preview this single node. Then we can drag
these sliders to make the fingerprints a
little less intense. Control Shift click
again over here. Now we have some surface
imperfections on the door. We can rename this
one perfections. Then if we go to
this other model here with this stainless
steel material selected, go to the drop-down,
choose this other one, and it'll apply to
this fridge as well. But this material is
repeated again and again. It looks like just a bunch of random fingerprints just
applied to a fridge. But really, we'd probably have
them a lot more clustered along the doorway edge where you're going to
grab and open the fridge. We're going to
repeat this process again with another image texture to add more fingerprints and imperfections on just
the edges of the door. These are the free surface
imperfections that are linked in the class resources and
I'm going to choose this one. It's not fingerprints per se, but I feel like it
has the right shape of a cluster of fingerprints
along the door. I'm just going to drag this down here into our shader editor. We're going to duplicate
this setup of nodes. Select them hit ''Shift D.'' Drag this material
into our shader here. This mix shader into
our first position, and this one into our output. Now we're going to edit where this new image material
lays on the mesh itself. If you tap into edit mode and
then go to your UV editor, you can see your mesh
and image texture here. Sometimes an image won't be
showing up automatically, so you have to go find your image material in
this dropdown menu here. But if we hit A to select
everything and scale it, we can see it moving
on the mesh over here. If we control shift-click, so we just see this
image material, we can see this a
little more pronounced. But a couple of
things are happening. One, it's repeating, and two, if we go look at the
fingerprint model or the fingerprint texture. It also got gigantic
as well because the UV map of both of these image textures
are currently the same. But we can apply
different UV maps to each of these image textures, and I'll show you
how to do that. But first, let's get the default set so the
fingerprints look right. If we scale this up a bit. We'll get the fingerprints
a little bit smaller. Now we can see
this edge material is repeated again and again, but the fingerprints
should be fine here. Then in our object properties
tab here, under UV maps. We just have one single UV
map for the whole 3D model. If you click Plus, you can add a second one. We can call this edge. Here in our shader editor, hit ''Control T,'' which, when you have node
wrangler turned on, adds a texture
coordinate and mapping node and texture coordinate, right now, it's just
pulling from this UV, but if we hit x delete that, then shift A search UV map. We have a new UV map node here. Drag this over to the vector
input on the mapping node, and then in this dropdown, choose the edge UV map
that we've just created. Now, if we go into our UV
editor and scroll over here, we can make sure we have
our edge UV selected. Now we select
everything in scale, we are affecting only. It's tough to see here, but maybe in this view, it'll be a little clearer. We will be only affecting
the single image texture. The fingerprints
stay where they are. We're just using
this edge thing. If we don't want to repeat, turn repeat off here
and just choose clip, so we only have this
image material once. I'm going to control shift, click this image, just so I
can see it a bit clearer. Then another thing I can
do is in the UV editor, you can unwrap your UV. You can do that a
few different ways. Here, we're going to
do project from view. If we get an angle that we
think kind of looks right, something here along the edge, hit U, project from view. Then right now here
in our UV editor, we can see all of this
wireframe view of our geometry is all aligned to this view from
this viewport here. We can scale this, rotate it. Until we get this material on the edge of the fridge
door, where we'd like it. I'm also going to
control shift click on the color ramp
and adjust this. It's just a touch
more pronounced the control shift-click in
our last shader editor. Now we have a lot
more irregularity on the surface of the
fringe door, which, when it interacts with the
light is going to give it a much more
photo-realistic look. You can continue this
process with all of the 3D models you've
added to your scene. Adding these surface
imperfections will give you a lot more photo realism
to the three-D models.
6. Glitching Effect: As everything in the
kitchen starts to elevate, I also want to
incorporate the glitch texture from Class 3, the 3D holograms so, the glitch texture that showed up on the surface of the book I want to apply that to
the walls in the kitchen. Selecting your kitchen
geometry tab into edit mode, and select the walls you
want to add the glitch to in your materials tab hit "Plus" to
add a new material. Go to your kitchen first, let's copy this
material, add a new one, paste material we call this kitchen glitch
and then assign it. Nothing's going to
change because it's just a duplicate of
the material for now but let's go into
the shader editor here. We're going to add a mix shader and add an
emission shader node. For right now, let's connect this and give it
let's say a red color. Take our kitchen material
and place it into the second socket there and then drag that into
the material output. We're going to keyframe
the factor between our kitchen material to an emission material that
has that glitch texture. At the start of this animation, I'm going to add a keyframe just have over factor in the
mix shader and hit I. You might notice
that that keyframe is not showing up
in your timeline, and that's because
you have to select this node to see it so
if you're ever adding keyframes to your
materials and you're not seeing them in your timeline and you're confused about
where they are, just navigate to that node
where you have the keyframes, click it, and then it'll
show up in the timeline. Let's scrub forward, bring the factor down and hit
I to set another keyframe. Hit Shift A, we are going to bring
in an image sequence. I converted the
glitch footage into a PNG image sequence because Blender prefers image
sequences to footage, hit "A" to select everything and import image sequence and here we have our image
sequence in a node. Drag the color into the
color of the emission. Now this emission texture will use the glitch texture
instead of red, which we are using just as a placeholder to see
what we were doing. Similar to the surface
imperfections, we're going to add a second
UV map so we can align the glitch texture where we
want it to be so in UV maps, click "Plus" call
this one glitch, hit "Control T" on
the glitch texture, add a UV map node, choose glitch and drag
UV over to vector, and then we can just hit "X" to delete this
texture coordinate. Go to our UV editor, we see here that the decal
is still showing up but if we choose our
glitch material. There we go let's
just quickly drag to a frame where we can
actually see that glitch. Hit "U" can unwrap it, and it'll sort of normalize the faces you have selected
then we can rotate this 90 degrees and scale it however we'd like
so that we can keep the glitch material a little
smaller or larger as needed , something like this. Then if we go into render view, we can see that this
glitch material is shining onto our 3D objects in the
scene and also the counter, because we see this
in the render view, the darker areas of the
glitch material just make the wall dark but
what we want instead is all of the brighter parts of the glitch material to be additive to the kitchen
material so we're going to repeat this
mix shader process again with some
subtle differences. If we add another
mix shader again, bring our regular
kitchen material into the second node here and have the factor as this
glitch material here, hit Shift A and add
a color ramp between there and we can make
some adjustments here. Let's hold option and
shift those around. With this color ramp, we're selecting only
the bright parts of our glitch texture for the glitch to add on top of the kitchen
material here. Where the glitch
material is dark, we're still going
to have the regular kitchen wall behind it. Keep working on all of the materials in your
scene and then meet me in the next lesson where
we're going to go over render settings and
compositing and aftereffects.
7. Rendering from Blender and Compositing in After Effects: Now, we're going to cover
rendering out of blender and compositing everything together
inside of after effects. Similar to our first class, we're going to render out
an EXR image sequence with our combined misted emission and ambient inclusion render
layers activated. But another thing we might
need for this one is an Alpha pass of just the
3D models that we've added. The question is,
how do we do that? If we just turn off
our kitchen geometry, we're going to see the
entirety of these bowls, for example, and we're
not going to have the data of this
obstruction from the shelf, but there is a way around that. To do your Alpha pass first under Film, choose Transparent. Another thing that does, if you look in the rendered view, if transparent isn't on, our HDRI is visible. With transparent, it disappears, but it is still there in the
reflection on our models. Then for our kitchen layer, instead of turning it off in the object properties
tab under visibility, when you choose holdout,
it becomes transparent, including all of the parts where it obstructs
something behind it. This way, we have
an Alpha channel of our 3D model only where it's
visible within the shot. We have some extra
little details here so we can turn
them off as well. Now you can render
out this Alpha pass as a PNG image sequence
with an Alpha channel. You can even switch
to EV to render out a bit faster because all
we need is the Alpha data. Keep in mind when you do your
renders that sometimes you might need to increase your sample count if
you're using cycles. You might notice errors and have to re-render
a couple of times. That's a normal part
of the process, so just be patient and keep iterating until you're
happy with your shot. I already rendered the shot out. I'm going to jump into
After Effects to show you another compositing trick and the reason we exported
that Alpha channel. A lot of the times when
you add your 3D models, or even sometimes when you're keying and you add a background, one of the biggest giveaways that something is
disconnected from your production footage
and whatever you've added is the digital noise
in the footage itself. All cameras, including the
one that you're watching now has some element
of digital noise, and you want that noise to match across the board
and be consistent. In After Effects, we can
do that fairly simply by duplicating our
combined render here. We'll call this one noise. Then go to the match
grain effect. Apply it. Down here on the
bottom of the stack, I have just the footage itself. It looks like I had
it a little large. Let me pre-compose it. It is the same aspect ratio. This is just the footage plate before anything was added to it. I'm going to reference that. In this noise layer, change this noise source to our footage and change
preview to final output. Then if we parent this to the Alpha channel
of our Alpha layer, it'll only apply to where the
3D model was in our shot. That digital noise is going to then match
between the two. Any additional
compositing we do on top of it should be
cohesive across the board. I'm adding a little bit of film glow and film grain on top. Just because I personally
like that look, you can do whatever you choose. I'm using Boris
effects plug ins, and there is a 15%
discount link in the class resources if you're interested in these same
compositing effects. Here's our final shot.
8. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on
making it this far. We've covered how
to incorporate and composite 3D models into
your production footage. This is a technique
you can carry into a ton of projects
going forward. If you have any
questions along the way, put them in the
discussion board, and I'm really excited to see your final renders or works in progress in the
project gallery. I'll see you in the next class.
Alden Peters, Filmmaker, VFX Artist
