Transcripts
1. Introduction: how everyone my name is making more. I'm a three D generous filmmaker and visual effects artists work with companies such as Wal Mart and Netflix and have collaborated on many passion projects, short films and music videos. Back in school, there really wasn't anyone that did the kind of stuff Ideo. There wasn't anyone that knew three packages. No one knew how to composite that. No one had to do really any of that stuff. So because there was such a needed for that and there really wasn't anyone that could do it , I decided that I wanted to step up and attempt to be someone that could do that. And eventually, after many years and stuff of practice and working on it kind of grew into what was no nose as a visual effects artists, one that knew how to do all that learning on my own two. Now, currently working with an amazing team, I'm very excited to get to share with you my knowledge of visual effects in this class. We will go over fundamentals of bringing three objects into live action footage that this class we're gonna learn how to three camera track and aftereffects important, animate three objects and then composited altogether to look authentic and realistic. Because is the fundamentals class. All the concepts and processes can be utilized across various software's and multiple areas of visual effects. Join me as we dive into the world of visual effects.
2. Final Deliveries: here is the final product of this class. We will have the live action footage with the three D umbrella composited into the scene. The final deliveries. I'm going to be asking for something similar to this just a short 12 to 32nd clip of whatever live action footage you want to take and your choice of 30 objects placed into the scene. You just send a H 264 and before or in movie file, keep the quality to around the same bit rate you recorded and just send it over. I'm incredibly excited to see what everyone is created.
3. What will we need?: Let's talk about everything you need for this class because of so many amazing advancements in technology. There are programs that dedicated to each level of this project there plenty of free software that will easily allow you to do any part of this class. I don't think that because you can't afford a $500 software doesn't mean that you can't do any part of this. First off is compositing. Well, after effects is the program I'm using in this class you are able to follow along in free compositing software like fusion or hit film. These programs are amazing, will absolutely be able to handle the shots that we will be creating. The next thing you need is a three d package. I will be using Cinema 40. In this class, you're more than welcome to use whichever one you prefer, whether that's my A three DS max or even free programs like Blender for three D camera Track. And you can even use the built in one and blunder to achieve a very accurate track in the final thing, you will need it. This footage that you want to add some three d into you're more than welcome to go out and grab footage on your own, whether that is with your own DSLR or even your phone. There's so many different cameras that are used in film that it really doesn't matter which one you use for this class to go out and film it yourself or find some voters that you want to work with on your own. Just make sure that the shot will be 30 trackable.
4. 3D Camera Tracking: the first step in bringing three D objects into live action footage, is doing a three D camera track in order to make sense of the footage that we shot. Our three D modeling and animation program needs a digital version of our scenes that I could accurately read the scene that we want to bring footage in their fundamentals class we will be using after Effects three D camera tracker for major productions. The camera tracking is typically done in a separate program that has more features to bring a higher level of accuracy to the tracking for many kinds of shots. The AFTEREFFECTS tracker will be just fine. This section We learned how to set the parameters for an aftereffects camera tracker and how to boost its accuracy. Right now, we're going to start in after effects is gonna be our primary compositing program. And so the first thing we're gonna do is obviously import our footage, So I'm just dragging and dropping from File Explorer. It's gonna take a second toe load in, but here we go. Now there's a couple things that we need to do before we make a new competition. The first is we're gonna want to go into this area right here. That talks about how many, uh, the bit depth of color. We're gonna want to go to 16 for working with live action footage. We typically go to 16. We don't stay in eight bits. If I'm gonna be working at an all three d workflow, I'll go to 32. But since we're working with live action footage and three D objects, 16 is gonna be just fine. So we have that. Now we're going to do is we're going to create a new composition. Drag that over. I'm gonna set this down to quarter just because this is four K footage and a little bit taxing on the computer to be running around with that. So drop it down while we're getting everything set up. So this shot is fairly simple. It's ah, handheld staying in place, recording down this little alleyway. What's great about it is that you have very easily define herbal shadows right here on the ground and very nice straight walls right here that you're able to kind of Minnick and three D fairly easily. And so it's a very simple tilt up shot. So because it's a bit too long. We're gonna go in here. I don't want this guy in the background so going to cut him off. I'm gonna hit, being to start the beginning of our composition, that starts the endpoint. And then as we tilt up, I'm gonna have a hold for a second, and then I'm a hit in, and that's the end of it. And then we trim the comp torque area so we don't have to work with such large files. The next thing we're gonna want to do is you can see right here the time code is very, very long. And in order to bring that down to much more easily remember, Herbal timecode is we're gonna hit control K. That's gonna bring up our composition settings. You can access that. Actually, over here it says composition, composition, settings. And then we're gonna set, start frame 20 I like working Aziz, the first frame being zero, and the reason why we do that we can only really do it on this kind of shot because it's a single shot and not one that's in a sequence for some sort of company where the time code is incredibly important. We're just working on a single shot right now, so it's just a lot easier to be working. Are defined time code, a couple things we need to do. Remember that the shot is in 24 frames per second. That's very important to remember. Think we're gonna be good to get? Let's just go ahead and quickly organize this area right here. The way I do it is I have a folder for assets. I have a folder for camps. And then whenever we create our solids, it will create its own folder for that. So our footage goes into assets and because this is gonna be the shot that rendering out, we keep it at the root of the file structure just to not get confused. I'm actually gonna go in here and change the name of it, too. Side street one
5. Cleaning Up Trackers: Okay, now that we have the project set up, we're going to go into our effects and presets panel. Go ahead and type in three D camera tracker, and we're just gonna drag that onto our footage. Now, there are a couple things that we're gonna want to do right off the bat. The three d camera tracker is not the most advanced three D camera tracker at all. For some very high end production stuff, you'd probably use synthesizer PF tracker or something that is dedicated to tracking. But the one inside of after effects with little bit of tweaking can actually end up working out super well immediately. What I'm gonna want to dio is once again specified that this is a fixed angle of view. There is no change in focused distance at all. And then go drop down the advanced menu because our scene just has the camera position still and then tilting up. We're just gonna change. It's over to the mostly flat scene and then hit detailed analysis and let that go for a bit way. Have this camera shot tracked. Next thing we're gonna need to do is clean up some of these trackers. There are a couple of things to keep in mind whenever you clean up the trackers. One is reflections are a very bad thing to track because they move in. So ah, whole lot Whenever the camera moves, they're not very reliable for tracking. So all the puddles right here, I need to get rid of that. And the windows right here need to get rid of that. And over here. And then another thing is far off trackers. So if I keep scrolling, you can see that there are trackers appear in the sky, and that is just gonna mess up with the camera already because, you know, fit in physical space that is hundreds of miles away from us, and we need to just cancel that out. We just need to focus on having the trackers in this scene and not floating above or anywhere. So I'm gonna go ahead and start cleaning these up, and hopefully we can get this down to under one the air downturned one. And if we do that, I think we're gonna have a pretty good track
6. Export to Cinema4D: we were able to clean up these trackers pretty well. I think the next step that we're gonna need to do is create the three D camera and a couple of Knowles and solids that will help us understand the three D space whenever we move it into our three d package of choice. So I'm gonna go ahead and select the camera tracker first thing. We do select this whole ground plane right here, miss. Like that. Right click create knoll and camera. This knoll seems a little small to cover the whole thing that we can address that later. The next thing we're gonna want to do is create a no for this thing right here. Create a solid. And then over here, we're gonna go ahead the guys at the base and create a solid. So it's gonna help us understand our geometry a bit. And then I'm just gonna go up here and I think going to grab this guy right here, create that in all. All right, so we have our whole scene pretty much ready to roll. So what we're gonna want to do next? It's scaled down or seen if we were to take this into cinema 40 right now that seem to be just a bit too big. Uh, and that's super manageable. So we're going to create a new knoll. I'm gonna make it three d and take all of these layers right here and attach it to him, and then I'm going to scale it down to probably, I think, 1% and delete. So that will scale down our whole scene. And if I were to go to these guys, bring him 100% 0 look at that. That's pretty big. We're gonna need to skill these guys down just a bit. But look, we have a whole bunch of space to work with now. Is there gonna be a lot easier to work on? All right, so the scene looks like it's scaled up pretty good. I'm probably just going to go in here and rearing it them a little bit, Okay? It looks like the scene is ready to move moved into cinema 40. The way that we're gonna do that is extremely simple. We're just gonna go up to file Export Cinema 40 Export. Okay. Where you wanted to g o and Boom. There you go. All right. I will see you guys now in cinema 40
7. Import 3D Objects: for our next section. We learned to import, animate and render out our 30 objects so that we can bring it on top of our live action footage. It's important to be familiar with three D package that you wish using. We're going to be learning how to animate using dynamics and force objects. Finally, we will dive into important render passes toe have for compositing. Welcome to Cinema four D. If everything had exported correctly, you should have a scene that looks a little something like this. I went ahead back into after effects and added one little, uh, plane right here to just match the height of that left building. But everything else is just about the same. Everything here looks good. We have our camera right here that is animated and looks fantastic, actually. So I think the next thing we're gonna need to do is import our three d object that we're gonna be animating already have mind pulled up a content browser. But I chose to go with an umbrella, so I'm just gonna merge it into this scene right here and boom. There it is. It is a little awkwardly tilted, but that's okay. I'm probably skill it up just a little bit And get this thing ready to be dynamically animated. I think the first thing I'm going to do is probably go in here and correct its orientation and try and get it to be standing straight up income and hit. L pull up this thing. We're here, the Axis editor or location editor. And go ahead and going to the top view here. You can enable this four up view by just hitting the middle mouse button. And then if you put your mouths into any of these windows, it will go ahead and solo that view port or that specific window. I'm gonna put it at the top of this umbrella thing. So just about right there looks good, right? I'm going to hit l to disable that. Now we can go ahead and start rotating it to make it, uh, be just about straight up. This isn't have to be perfect. I can pretty much eyeball it and be good. That looks just about good right there. Go back, hit E and everything looks great.
8. Animate 3D Objects: I'm a move this thing off of our camera view, and I'm gonna talk to you about what I envisioned for this shot. Essentially, what I'm going to do is take this umbrella, have it float into the frame and then float off into space as the camera tilts up. And there's a couple of super easy ways we can do that without really Ah, whole lot of key frames. I think we should probably go ahead and get started. Go ahead, scale this guy up just a little bit, move him up into this corner here and get going on our dynamics. So what we're gonna need to first do In order to get this umbrella into the dynamics, we're going to want to take this large group of parented cylinders and planes and all this stuff we're gonna want Teoh have it Cinnamon 40. Recognize it as a single object in the best way to do that is to make it a part of a connect object. So I'm gonna go ahead and select the main No, right here. The umbrella knoll. I'm gonna hold Ault, go over to this money right here and release on the Connect and that goes ahead and makes our umbrella parent Knoll a child of the Connect object. And now Cinema four D recognizes it as a single object, which is great. And now to add the dynamics. So the easiest way to do that is probably Teoh, right click on the object here, going to simulation hit rigid body and now are connected object drops to the floor. That's great. That's exactly what we want. Kind of. We can tell why this that everything is acting perfectly. As faras dynamics go, this is being dynamically acted upon by our gravity. And for this shot right here, what we're actually gonna want to do is have kind of a negative gravity. Want the umbrella to start floating upwards. And the best way to do that is to hit controlled D to bring up the project settings. I'm a go over to the dynamics tag, and I'm going to go ahead and hit negative 75 and that starts having the umbrella floating up, and that's exactly what we want. Perfect. Now the next thing we want to do is have the umbrella get pushed towards our down the alleyway, and there's an easy module for that. And that is in the simulation tag. Our simulation tab up here. Go to particles and hit wind. We want when to push this object down the alleyway and then we're gonna have gravity pull it up into the air. All right, So what we can do with this wind speed is actually kick it a little bit into Let's go ahead and give that 75. You can hit, play and see it gets pushed down the alleyway and gravity starts doing its thing fantastic . And here is the beauty of dynamics. Once you have things set and you start changing parameters and everything, you're going to need to go back and start adjusting what you have set just to kind of art direct the animation that you have going, you know, a lot of ways it's easier than key frame animation. A lot of ways it's more time consuming. It all depends on kind of what's happening. But I feel like dynamics is gonna work out a lot more in our favour here. So we're gonna stick to dynamics and animation. So this thing gets pushed really, really far down the alleyway, and it goes a little too quick towards the end there. We just wanted to give kind of an initial kick and then kind of back down on the power so that a couple of easy ways to do that I think we're gonna want to do is go ahead and hit this key frame on the wind speed. And if we move down in our timeline probably to around 47 seconds, we're gonna want to decrease this guy down to about 25. Let's go ahead and keep that there. It gives a good kick and then slows down. Oh, that's perfect. Looks great. I think we can add another adjustment for the gravity. Pretty much do the same thing, but add a couple more. I'm going to get kicked off with. 75 are negative. 75. I'm gonna go down the time here to about 47 frames. I gave it a new initial kick of about 500 centimeters. Go ahead and tagged that and thinking to do one last one just to bring it down. And I'm gonna go ahead and change that to negative 1 50 and then lock in that key frame. Let's go and take a look at that boom. It starts going up, floating up, floating up and away. That looks great. The only other issue that it is very, very, very far away from our scene. Um, and there's a very simple way to fixing that. And that is just by adding one more win defector, I'm gonna actually rotate it 180 degrees boom. And then we're gonna move it down to this in the alleyway. All right? And then I think what I'm gonna do is go ahead and have the We want the initial dynamics to kick it forward and then have gravity take it up. And then towards the end, we're gonna want this wind to start kicking into gear and slowing it down, moving in Z space. We're gonna want to slow that down. So I'm gonna actually changes to zero, cause we don't want that to affect it immediately. And I'm gonna go all the way probably to about here and give it probably a bit of 30 30 centimeters power. I don't really know the conversion of centimeters, Teoh wind speed, but we're just going to kind of keep it to that All right, let's go ahead and see how this looks. Pushes up, Floats up. Oh, wow. That looks great. And it looks like it sticks. Ah, lot better into our scenes. I'm gonna go ahead and actually go into here, view it and boom. And the camera should follow it. Camera follows it, and it keeps it in frame. That looks perfect. Fantastic. And I think a final touch that I'm going to do as go to our connect object here. I kind of want to give it a little bit of a slight rotation just on its y axis. So I'm gonna go and get this coordinate right here just to check where we want the rotation to be. Oh, rotate here. The area. We want that one. So I'm going to hit record that key frame. I'm gonna go all the way to the end. I'm just going to increase this probably too, Um, about right there, we're gonna try that. See how that looks. So I'm gonna go ahead and baked the dynamics. This is a really important step. If you plan on having a large set of dynamics acting upon it, we only have a gravity in two different wind instances. It's not really that big, but I never want to go in and kind of art direct exactly what's going on in frame. It's very useful to go and bake some of the dynamics. All right, that looks good. Looks good.
9. Prep and Rendering: So these next couple steps I'm going to address more specifically an octane. You can use this pretty basically in any other endeavor forcing a 40 whether that be Arnold or Red Shift or even the render inside of cinema 40. I think it's called the Physical Render. You could do this for any of that. You could do it in Blender. I know cycles is a really great render engine, but my favorite is octane. So I'm just gonna be doing this in here. But what's great is that the idea applies to just about everything. So I think what we're gonna want to do is go ahead and here I'm gonna pull up my octane Vieux port, see how everything looks. It looks not super great in here. There's a couple things we're gonna want to add. I'm gonna go ahead and add a daylight and try and match it to the original look of the scene. The pretty big shadow right there. And I'm gonna go ahead even further and add a on HDR I that should match the seem pretty good. So I just added the object. I think I'm going to go ahead and kind of rotate the sun to kind of match the angle and bring it Probably around over there. Look, inside of our camera. Looks pretty good. I'm even gonna go in here and ag a octane camera tag that will come into play later. Okay? We're gonna need to address a couple of things for compositing. One we want these walls were here to be shadow catchers, and it's pretty simple to do. I'm just gonna go ahead and create a diffuse material. Gonna rename it shadow catcher. I'm even gonna go into octane and remove all the unused materials on a rename this one too . Handle this one too metal. And we're gonna have our shadow catcher right there. So I think the next thing we're gonna want to do is go ahead, drop these guys onto here, and I've been going to a little further and grab it onto their I'm actually gonna extend this wall up till we hit that. Let's see, delete off that. Okay? And I think I just need to have this guy just match the height angle. Not super important. I could just smash the heightened. Be okay. All right. So now in the shadow catcher. We're gonna need to double click to open this, going to common and go ahead and click Shadow catcher. And so if we scroll back into our timeline weaken, See a There's our shadow right there, right on the ground. It's exactly what we want. Perfect. And then the scary here also gonna show of Shadow catcher. And now we have our whole scene ready to catch some shadows. Perfect. It looks great. Let's go ahead and do a couple more things. I think in our octane render settings, you go ahead and look here. I always use path tracing and an octane. I'm going to drop these samples down actually, quite a bit, because I'm gonna be using an AI de noise. Er diffused and speculate. Depth done. A lot of testing don't need to be any higher than eight g. I clamp needs to be set toe one. You can even get away with getting under one, but it doesn't need to be over. I also always turn on adaptive sampling. I think that looks pretty good. I'm actually gonna go ahead and set that to I think maybe 25. I think we're gonna be just fine. With 25 okay in here. I'm gonna go ahead and hit Alfa Channel and I don't want Yeah, Alfa Channel. And that will begin. We can keep the environment because that's going to go ahead and influence the look of our shadows here is gonna catch the sky HR that we used. I'm even going here and go to my camera imager. Go to a I D noise. Er, I'm going to enable that, you know, for going to a main comp. Yeah, I can see you're probably gonna want to increase that up, probably to maybe let's try 50 at any better. It's try 100. How's that look? Starting to look a lot better. Just go ahead and try 200. I think that's gonna be just fine. We're going to keep it at 200. Okay, the scene right now is pretty much ready to g o. I'm gonna go ahead and get into the render settings that is needed an octane and pretty much any other render. There is a bunch of render settings that you're gonna want to our render passes that you're gonna want tohave and our team specifically there just the steps to get to that point. You go ahead and hit, enable passes. I'm gonna drop that down to 32 bit, save the beauty and change the tone map to tone map. They don't really work in linear all that much, although things air kind of moving in a way to and a need to be in a linear workflow. But we'll get to that and another course, go ahead and save my beauty. I don't have any Post, but I can go ahead and actually add just a little bit into their enable that probably bring it up to 30. And I can always bring that down if needed. Actually gonna go to 20 because you can always increase it. You can always add more. I think that looks good there and then into our info passes. Always gonna want to do is eat up the past and and octane what you can do. You can fire the scene up, go into the Z depth and increase the max, increase it to about there and then you can see that our walls are in this map, our shadow catchers. And there's a great way to fix that in compositing, But I think what we're gonna do now is go ahead and change. I think I'm gonna Slevin octane tag onto here and I'm going to change the object color to red and in our octane settings. This is almost like a soup crypto Matt in our render settings, I'm gonna go and click on object layer color and that is going to give us a beautiful red outline on our umbrella. And we're gonna be able to use that to kind of mad out or specifically a mask, that area, and then we can hide all the shadows or the Z depth from anything else. So that's gonna be great. Let's go ahead. And I was at a shading normal just in case. And it's good to have a render layer mask. So in you have a d noisier go ahead and have that checked on. A lot of people like to do defuse direct diffuse and director fuse filter, reflections, all of that stuff I don't necessarily use that. I try and get everything as well done inside of cinema four D just so it's less work and the composite er but I know there are a lot of people out there that really enjoyed having Theo extra flexibility with all of these direct and indirect reflections and diffuse passes . But because we're just shoving an umbrella into an already done to t seen, there really isn't much need for that. If we're gonna be doing a full CG scene and throwing in a keyed out person or object into their, then you would definitely want to get more specific in your composition by adding all of these different passes. But because we are just matching this little bit of CG into a already into a two D and to tooty footage, that's not super needed. Okay, so I think what we're gonna want to do next is basically set up the file to render in Cinema four D. I'm gonna go ahead and locate where I'm going to render this. Of course, render. I'm gonna go change the file name too umbrella and in the output in the save settings. I'm gonna go ahead and change this umbrella and umbrella. Okay? Everything looks great. We have our Alfred Channel set. We have our shadow catchers set and we have the umbrella ready to G O and we have all of our different layer Maths are our different render passes ready to basically move. I think we're just about ready to hit render now. It could take a long time. We could take a short time. It honestly really depends on what you have in the scene, because mine is I'm shooting rendering and four k it can take a little bit. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit. Go and I will see you guys back in after effects.
10. Setting up Render Passes: In our final lesson, we will be learning how to set up the render passes and our composite er matching color to our seen adding green back into the render and final color grading when compositing three D footage, There is nothing that will ruin the believability Mawr than to not have colors match with the original footage. We'll go over some great and helpful tips and tricks around how to match colors to the scene accurately. The next step is learning how to bring Green back on top of the three D footage to match. The scene finally, will get into coloring the entire shot to look nice. Way are right back into aftereffects, and I think it's about time we go ahead and import our shots. I have it right here, something that even mind sometimes after effects. When importing image sequences, it defaults to a certain frame rate. Mine always defaults to 30 and our comp is you can see right here is 24. So I'm just gonna need to change that frame rate right to 24 we're good, you know, as soon as we drag our footage in, everything is black and that's because we exported in an X are format and which is a pretty easy thing to fix All we need to go all we need to do is go into effects and presets search for extractor the big are. And now all we way conduced click inside of this boxer here and select which passes we want tohave. So I'm gonna go ahead and select D noise Beauty. I'm actually going to hit control de duplicate. I'm gonna get just a regular beauty pass. I'm gonna go ahead and also rename these guys to what they are t beauty and essentially going in here duplicating. Selecting which layer and renaming this one is color I d doesn't look like anything is in here, but if we scroll to where the umbrella is gonna be in view, it should be all completely red. That is, if you set it up. Yep, just like how I did it. And then I'm going to We need the rendered layer mask. These are all of our I d ones, your mask, and it duplicates. Grab our she normal Z depth. I think the last one I'm gonna grab is Thebe post processing. Go in here. Post. All right, so we have all the renders right here. Ready to g o. There's a couple. We have the d noise Beauty for going here. I'm actually gonna turn this down to 1/4. Just because it's a little PLO is our four k 32 bit exports. So it's gonna be a little taxing on the frame, but these look fantastic, is that we can see right here we have the frame in, and it looks great. There's a little bit of alias ing problems without not that's not anything we can't fix. Okay, so we have all of our beauty passes, all of our info passes all set up and ready to go. So let's go ahead and get into the next subject.
11. Matching Colors to Scene: There are a couple of these guys that we're gonna want to kind of hide first. I'm gonna hide everything except for our e noise. Beauty esque Avery here looks pretty good. You can see there is a little bit of, ah, edge to this, and that's really easy to fix. What we're gonna need to do is actually pre compose this comp right here. I was gonna call it denies beauty comp. That looks just fine, all right. And now we can add a simple choker and just choke it just a little bit. Just until we get rid of that harsh edge are right, That looks good. Now you can notice there are a couple of things here. The darkest part of this image or this render needs to match the darkest part of our scene . So right here, if we pull up our info panel, we can see that we're hovering in the Red, Green and Blue Channel around 1000 and we're gonna want to be matched up with this guy, which is in the 3000 on all three channels. So has a couple of really great ways to do that. I like to use the curves adjustment. That way, we're able to kind of lift up the blacks a little bit to be a little brighter. You can do it just a little bit more. We just need this to match the this right here and keep it going just a little bit until it matches. It's starting to look pretty good. Who just kicked it over just a little bit. This info panel right here is gonna be extremely useful when you want to look at very accurate numbers when matching your footage. I think that looks pretty good right there. All right, that matches that. Okay. Now, the only issue we have is that in the process of doing that, it lifted our shadows to we're gonna want to control our shadows separately. And that is what the color I D pass is. Four. So let's go ahead and pre compose this too. Umbrella, Matt. Okay. What we need to do is turn this read right here into a fully white matt. Now, there's a couple of ways we can easily do it. I think probably my favorite is to go ahead and go to the tent effect and go to the levels . I'm just gonna clip this guy white and boom. Okay, so we can use this white so we can use that to drive this meant right here. We can use that to drive, Let's say an adjustment layer with our curves effect. I'm just gonna rename this black levels. I mean, a copy, this effect, but it under here. And we can set this dio just be the loom Amat. And look at that. We have our black levels that are matching the scene. It's perfect. All right, So the next thing that we're gonna want to dio is to go ahead and set up kind of a rough focus pass so we can see in here. All of this stuff is just a hint out of focus. You can even see a little bit of chromatic aberration. But we can get to that in a second. But we can see you how this stuff is just a bit out of focus. So we're gonna go ahead and drop in a kind of a focus that is entirely dependent on the Z depth. Okay, so we bring the umbrella in right there. I'm gonna go ahead, take our umbrella Matt, Because we're gonna want to use that. We're gonna take our Z depth right here. I'm gonna go ahead and pre compose this guy Z depth, Okay? And then I'm gonna combine these guys into an umbrella depth pass So we can do is take this umbrella. That and we can use that to drive. Just the depth of that is affecting the umbrella. So if we go ahead and take that into the loo minutes, we can go ahead and see that the farther the umbrella goes in the scene, the lighter it gets and we can use that to drive our Our focus says another pretty simple effects. Women go in, create a new adjustment layer. I'm gonna rename it camera puller Because exactly what we're gonna be using is that the camera blurs. I'm going to my effects camera lens Blur is the effect that we're gonna want dropped that in, and I'm going to go ahead and select. I want to bring this guy under here, actually, and hide it because you don't really need to see it. We just need to have it in the scene. I'm gonna go ahead and select e umbrella depth. We can just do the source because it's looking at this top level of the umbrella depth composition. We don't have any effect in there that will really change it, because all of our effects are done inside of this composition that we can just leave it at that. We want the Luminant. I'm gonna go ahead and adjust the expected Horatio to two. That's just personal preference. And I think this needs to be a little bit lower. Maybe I can bring that up, too to and be OK and then we want to use this right here are blur focal distance to figure out where our focus ought to be, so we can see that probably around right here is the most in focus in this scene. So what I can do is actually take this, crank it up quite a bit to where it is super out of focus. Sometimes you just need to reset it a little bit where it's super out of focus and then take the focus distance. Start manipulating that until we figure out exactly where focus distance needs to be. And what's great is that we can even take this camera lens blur and have it just effect the umbrella. There's another thing that we're gonna want to do is hit repeat edge pixels. You can see up here because I have my transparency grid active. If I remove the edge pixels, the more we blur the shots, the more the edge gets faded into transparency. We just want to repeat those edge pixels and that'll fix that right up. Go and take that back down to 80. We want this fact just to affect our umbrella and so we can take this umbrella, Matt that we made Take stick it above and go ahead and do the Luna Matt. And it should just affect our umbrella. I take that back down a bit. Yeah, there, we can see the bowler effect it, and we can even go into the umbrella, Matt at a little bit of a fast blur. Just a blur out these edges so that it's not such a harsh fade right there. I think I can even take that up, too, to maybe Let's see, How does this affect look? Yeah, probably do something like that and be just fine. Okay, So I think what we're gonna want to Dio is go ahead. And some of these layers aren't really gonna be used anymore. As far as like, we're not going to be seeing them anymore. We have no use for them in the cops on the composition. They're still very useful toe have. But we don't need Teoh constantly. Have them pulled up in our layers face right here. So we can go ahead and select the ones that you don't need, Which is the camera that solids right there. And we also don't need this depth map to be viewable. We can hit this shy toggle. And if we hit this button right here, it hides all of those layers. It still has them in the composition, but we just can't see them in the layers stack, which is very useful for some of these layers. Okay, so now we have the blur that has been applied, which is great. I think what we need to do now is get a little bit of a background, uh, glow on these edges right here. So you can see that this background right here is pretty harsh. As faras luminous goes, we can't even go up here and see, You know, these air in the very high number range. What typically happens with live action footage is that you get a little bit of edge bleed from the Scott. You can see right here a little bit. So we need the background to bleed a little bit onto our umbrella. And there's a couple of great ways to do that. I think my favorite way is to use the set map method. So here's how to do it. You take the footage right here, the base footage, I'm gonna duplicate it. Turn off the camera tracker and we can even turn off the camera. Trucker for that, I'm gonna place it above everything. Okay? Now, what we need to do is to find the We're gonna blur the scene a little bit, so I'm gonna hit fast box Blur. I'm going to repeat edge pixels. We're gonna take that probably to about 12 looking good. Now we're gonna need the set, Matt effect. We want to take the mat layer from our original beauty cop. Okay, so we can see it right here. How? It's just using the the beauty camp of our umbrella to blow out the area. Now we're gonna want a channel blur so that we can channel blur so that we can blur the Alfa. We're gonna crank this up quite a bit now. We can see the edges right here, starting to bleed a little. That's exactly what we want. And then I'm gonna actually take this set, Matt. Effect duplicated. Bring it under the channel Blur, and then invert this, Matt. And now, if you look, we have slight edge glow. Now we can control how much is being blurred onto our foreground footage So I can take this . I can shrink it down a little bit. Doesn't need to be too harsh. I could even take this move down. We just want kind of a slight blur, something that is definitely noticeable, but not too harsh. And in your face. I think that looks pretty good. And we can go ahead and call this e g blur effect in Spell it right, BG Blur. All right, so now we got a couple of things happening right now we have our beauty comp that has been set up and choked a little bit. We have our black levels adjusted to match the scene. We have a camera blur to match the scene as well. And we have our background blur too affect the edges of our composition, which is great. I think the next thing we're gonna need to do is go ahead and actually add grain back into the footage. You might be thinking Manning, why are you doing that? Well, in every single shot on a real camera, there is film. There is certain bit of noise. Okay, we can zoom into here. I can hide everything else. Zoom in. I'm about my quality up and we can see that there is noise. This is not a flat colored spot right here. There's noise that is moving around the image. And in order to make our footage match that, or in order to make our footage blend in with the shot that we have, we need to add grain back into our render. So it's a cycle of in three D getting as clean oven images you can and then back in compositing, adding grain back into the footage to make it blend in with the original footage So I can even go back in here and turn on these layers again, and we're gonna want to match the grain. Oh, where is he? Up. I need to be able farther into the shot. Okay? Israel is that blurs a bit too much for my even be able to drop that down to, like, three and be OK. And this guy, we can even change the opacity. Bring him down. Something like that. That's not too pressing, OK?
12. Adding and Matching Grain: to me, the ag grain back into the shots. And so great way to do that is by adding an adjustment layer. I got a call. It footage grain, place it on top of everything. I'm gonna grab our umbrella, Matt, and have this guy gets set to be just where umbrella is, and I'm gonna go ahead and add grain Change that the final output and who that does not look like it matches. That's OK, because we're we match this top area of this black umbrella to this shot. We're gonna need Teoh ad match the grain to that as well. So it's ah, fairly simple process of looking over here and matching that. So actually, what I can do just to make it easier on a duplicate this image, I'm going to a mask. It kind of like that and then I'm going to move it up. Just that we can see. You can see side by side, the grain and how it needs to match that update. We're gonna need to work at full resolution here just because when matching green and you have it set to lower quality, you're not going to get the full look of the grain. So it's important to make sure that this is set to full so we can see all the grain in this beauty. All right, so I'm gonna go ahead and what are green later ago? Here it is. Add grain. So the couple things that we need Teoh A just outright. The intensity is just a bit high. I think we can bring that down quite a bit. 0.3 is looking good. Our grain here. It looks a little bit bigger than the grain there, so we can even decrease the size. I think that's probably gonna be 0.5 is gonna be okay. Let's go ahead and do 0.75 All right, that's looking better. We can go ahead, take the intensity down just a little bit more is very much a change of parameter. Let it update and then apply the way to reiterate on the process. It's kind of a slow one, but it's very important to matching footage to our matching three D footage, too. Live TV footage. I think our softness is just a bit. I think we can take that down. Maybe toe eight. That goes. There's a little bit too much. 0.9. You can even take the size down a little bit more. If we do that, we might need to increase this up. 2.1. It's very It is a kind of give and take process here, like I said. So the next thing and kind of the really more important step is to go through each of your channels and make sure that all of your channels match each other. So weigh in after effects to do that. Is this right here? It will show you all of your channels. Go ahead, go to read first. Looks like our red channels a bit on the too intense side. So I'm gonna go ahead and increase the science here to one point 35 That should soften it a little bit, actually, just a bit too much. I think that works. We can even turn the intensity down just a bit. See how that goes. Okay, it's looking good. Nose moved to Green Channel. Green Channel is just a bit too active, and it looks like it needs to be quite a bit smaller, so let's go 0.75 and weaken. Take down the intensity to partly that and see how that looks. Yeah, that's looking a lot better. Maybe 55 Yeah. Okay, that's matching pretty good. Last one is the Blue Channel, and see, it doesn't match quite as much. I think the intensity needs to kind of go down who that's looking just about right. All right, that is looking great. So now we can go ahead and go back to our full RGB. Our grain now matches the scene. I can delete this, and that looks fantastic. OK, I think the last thing we're gonna dio with the basin without adding post is going in and adding a slight amount of chromatic aberration. Now, there's a couple of great ways to do that. I'm gonna go ahead and duplicate that layer real quick. My favorite way is to go ahead and pre compose the whole adjustment that we have here. Which is this guy gonna pre compose it? You should see. I'm gonna call this one umbrella match. All right. Looks good. Now, what we're gonna want to do is add this effect called shift channels. To be added into here is a couple of things that we can see, it allows us to change our Alfa our red, green and blue channels. So we're gonna want to do is go ahead and isolate each one excluding the Alfa. So for the red, we're gonna want to take the red from the Red Channel and then turn off the green and the blue, and then I will duplicate that layer. I'm going to turn off the rip and then turn on the green duplicate, turn off the green, turned on the Blue Channel. And now what we're gonna need to do is go ahead and grab all these guys and said it to set the screen. But the mode to screen transformative screen. Now you can see he gets a little transparent. We can fix that in a second. But if we were to go ahead and shift this bottom layer, we can see we have just a bit of chromatic aberration that happens on the edges. That's a bit too much. We want it to be very, very slight. We can see some of the footage here. Any kind of aberration that's gonna happen is very slightly into the red and the blue right there. We want to be justice light change. I think that probably be good. Okay, that looks great. Alright. And the way to fix this ghosting effect happen is to just grab all of these guys pre composed them. And I'm gonna call it umbrella chroma for chromatic aberration. And boom, it is fixed. I think the next thing we're gonna want to address and this might as well just be our last thing is our shadow on the ground. Let this thing update real quick, and yeah, our shadow right here is ah is just a bit intense. And there's a great way to fix that. And I will show you exactly how so to fix this shadow right here. It's pretty simple way to do it. We're gonna go ahead and copy this umbrella, Matt, we're gonna go inside of our chroma. Have you can see right here is the base of where the ah of where the shadow is. So I'm gonna go ahead and paste the mat into here. I'm gonna go ahead and loom at it. I'm gonna do it two more times. Drop him on top of our other passes Loom amat, blue mat. And that will get rid of that. So now what we can do is isolate our shadow. So I'm gonna go ahead, and I'm actually gonna take all these cops drop have been to our camps full the right there . Perfect. I'm gonna take the umbrella, their base on brother layer. Drop it in. Add the extractor plug in. It's not a plug. And I think it comes with aftereffects at the beauty. There's our guy right there. And then we're gonna want to take our umbrella. Matt, we're gonna want to Louima and vert so that we just have our shadow being affected right here. So we look boom shadow. And this doesn't matter. This isn't effect the umbrella. Okay, so there's a couple things we can do with this guy. I'm gonna go hemp, recompose him, call it shadow and perfect. Now, we're also gonna want to We're gonna take that Kurds thing that we did. And we're gonna want to match this guy too. This right here, This this shadow so we can increase it a bit. It looks a little blue. Someone go ahead and drop the blue. Looks like there's too much green creen a little. All right, we can even add a bit of ah, blur so that we can have him match that just a bit more Still. Looks pretty. Ah. Looks pretty blue. Go ahead and adjust it. I'm right. Okay. It's looking good. I can even go ahead and kind of drop the opacity down just a bit. And I think that's gonna look great. All right, We have that layer affected. That looks great. And I think the very last thing we're gonna want to do is combine all of these guys again and do and do a bit of a pixel motion blur. So I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna call it umbrella. Come, and I'm going to add the pixel motion blur effect. We let that update for a second, okay? And it looks like the last thing we're gonna want to do is to go ahead and add some motion blur to our composition there. I didn't do it inside of cinema 40. I figured we could probably just go ahead and get away with it, doing it inside of after effects. So me being the smart person I am, I did not set it up earlier just because pics of motion blur kind of takes a hefty amount of CPU usage, and you can see with this competition that we have right here, it already takes quite a bit of time. So we're gonna go ahead, really need to instances of motion blur in order to get this to work. Really well. So 1st 1 is to g o inside of the right here in the beauty comp, there is going to go ahead and add the simple, not simple choker. The pixel motion blur. Perfect is going to give us some motion blur right there. And then the last one is inside of the umbrella. Matt. Um and so we're gonna go into here going to go ahead and call it Matt Motion Blur. And on this outside layer, we're just gonna go ahead and add that other instance of pixel motion blur. And if we go into our main combat here and wait for about a second, it should give us an updated, blurred image just like that, Okay. And then I think the last thing we're gonna want to do is in the shadows and let me move a little farther forward and ah, throw it into our shadow, right? I believe that. Is it all right? The next thing we're gonna do, I'm just gonna clean up some of this. The next thing we're going to do is talk about color. So let's go ahead and head to that.
13. Final Color Grading: our fuller, the entire rest of the image. So the best way to do that? I like using this plug in called film Convert. It allows me to as long as you know the camera information. It allows me to match the camera information that I have from the original footage to this plug in. And it gives me really great color Lutz. So I think we're going to do is go ahead. And I shot this on a Panasonic GH four. I used the center like D and then we're going here and cycle bit to some of these presets and choose which one I like the most. I think I like this one and I'm even gonna go ahead and add another another Lut. I'm gonna go ahead and choose. I think this one right here, Captain America, Civil War. I can even go ahead and add another color. Lut, delete that one. And then I could just choose how much this affects the image. Bring that down a bit. I like how it affects the shadows, OK? And I think that's about it. If you weren't going to be using that any of your plug ins, you can always go ahead and just kind of adjust the colors on your own. What's great in premier or in photo? What after effects is that you get the limit tree color. You get the limit tree color effect. You can go in here and cycle through Ah, whole bunch of different lutz and color dial in your shot to however you like kind of like this one. I can even go in here and bump up the Let's see I can just a touch Aiken bump up the shadows. Let's see those the be curves I want the color wheels group up the shadows a little bit, Yeah, I get that nice, uh, faded film vibe going So there's really kind of however you want, but you're going to want to make sure that you match your, uh, your three D footage to the raw background footage before you applying in color effects to it. That is very important. And then I think what I'm gonna do is go ahead and create a crop. Make this black just to show that, and then I'm going to take this and do that turn on my title action safe. I'm gonna line this up to the center. Then what you could dio is subtract the Mac and you can even have it cut out everything below it. So I could do silhouette, Alfa. And now everything below it has been cut off. And now you have perfectly black letterbox bars. There you go. All right. Simple Is that that is Ah, that is the project. I'm a go ahead and let it preview, and then we will go from there.
14. Conclusion: and that's about eight guys. This is a fundamental scores, like I said earlier. So just about everything you learn and here can be applied to many different areas of visual effects or could be applied to other Softwares. I want to thank you so much for joining me in this course. I have a really great time putting it together and figuring out all the steps in the process and no taking what I know. I'm putting it into a A course that you can hopefully fairly easily follow along. I think the next step is to probably just go and learn something. Go learn after effects. Animation going expressions. Go to another three D applications. Text. Oring are modeling. Learn more three D compositing. You know it's anything you do that is a step towards understanding visual tech. S'more is something that's gonna help you a lot farther in the long run. You know you can take what you learn your next project and use that for another project or use to help your self get another job. I know there's there really isn't a bad way Teoh get creative and to do something, so I really encourage you to do that. And again, I want to thank you so much for following me along in this process. And I'm very excited to see you in the next course.
Manning Moore, VFX | Filmmaking | 3D
