Complete workflow for CG and VFX inside Blender (Batman scene)

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to new In depth tutorial, where we will create this scene from start to finish inside Blender. The inspiration is the Batman movie from 2022. I think every scene in this movie is a little masterpiece, so I decided to try to make one scene to see how close I could get a few years later after the movie's release, but better now than ever. I was looking for something like large scale epic scene where we can see the whole city, but also some buildings closer to the camera and, of course, Batman on the edge of the building. CGI models of people always crash realism a little because the human eyes are specially trained to recognize even the smallest anomaly on humans. I decided to take a different approach here. Instead of a three model, I took a small part of shot from movie and build the entire scene around it. But still about 90% of the scene will be CGI at the end. So this is partly A VFX tutorial because we will try to blend live footage with CG elements. This is actually similar to how most of the scenes in the film were made. You can see in this example that the city in background is actually CG, while Batman, of course, is a real person. This approach helps us achieve realism more easily since part of the image is already real, and it gives us a perfect reference for lighting, color, and mood, but we still have a lot of artistic freedom. The story last about 6 hours and the entire process is recorded from start to finish step by step. So it is also suitable for beginners. We start from the part where we will talk about the idea and references to the VFX part all the way to the part where we will create the entire city from start to finish. Are true, we will use my editing building asset pack that I created earlier. We will not only import ready made assets, but we will also create a whole city or a simple city generator in geometry nodes from start to finish. So this is also an ideal tutorial. If you want to take your first steps in geometry nodes, VFX, modeling, texturing, post processing, and more. Of course, and cinematic lighting makes up a large part of the tutorial. In addition to the tutorial, the assets that we use to create this scene are also included. Simple city generator, as well as the working Blender file and all the resources needed to follow the Tutorial. 2. Reference: Before we start building scenes from scratch, I just want to show you my old Blender file so you can see how this look. You can note that I will just go right to you for display. You can note that this green part is actually our real footage or footage from movie. Let me take this annotation. So we have only this part. We actually take only this part from actual movie. Not even this and this part here. All this part is actually CG. So we have maybe 10% of scene from movie here. If I now take this part and if I now go I will close this if I now go to shade the editor, so we have this material. And I put this green viewport display color here. Actually, this SDF is not connected to anywhere really this. So we have here footage, but my reference one, and we have plugged this to missive and this go to surface. That's basically all for projection, we use this camera project modifier, we will talk about this later. Let's now see how this butt Mar reference one footage looks like. Here we have Batman one, and of course, I will share this with you. This is how this look, and we will just cut this more part here and this one left. This was not so easy to get. I will show you why. If I now go to Premier Pro, you can see how actually film look. This is where our scene starts, so I will cut this here. And you can see that we have maybe just 4 seconds for this 58-2. So we have 4 seconds of footage here, and this is not enough. For my final animation, I want about 10 seconds. I need to extend this to about 10 seconds. And this was not so easy. I go I duplicate this, and now I just reverse speed. If I set this minus one, I get this But then I get this very ugly šime here. And one thing I do here because I have this pro version of primer Pro or actually, I have this adopt subscription. I get this here AI tool for extend clips. And this is not so good because we get weird things. For example, in one case, Batman turn around and show his face and other weird things. But after a few tries, I get something which look more natural. So I just extend this a little. We have 4 seconds here and four here, so I just need two or 3 seconds between and I just extend this. Let's see how this works. And of course, you don't have adopt subscription for this because I will share this with you. I just want to show you how I get how I solve this problem. After one or 2 minutes, we get something. So this is how this looks now. And let's see this theme here is a little less obvious. When I'm here in Primer Pro, I will just show you how I get how I get reference for my composition. I actually take mostly from this Thomas Dubois shot, and I will now bring this here. Let's see. If I extend this, this is actually composition I like, but we can, of course, use this here and try place this here to see how this will. I need to rotate this on opposite side. So I need to flip this on X axis, and I do this here. I'm not sure how I do this last time. I think I just need play with this rotation to flip this. But this is not important. Let's now ing this from sound and let's place this here. You don't need, of course, do this. I just want to show you how I roughly get this reference. I think of this thing. So here I get a little better reference of what I want to do later. And this is how I do this. So I just place Bama here, and now we can just take mask tool and maybe just mask this part here. And we can add some feather. And now we can place this in our seal, maybe make this a little bigger. So about here will be our Batman, and now we can Let's just maybe change this temperature here. If we bring these two up, we get better blending between these two footage. And of course, we can add even more of this. I think I found this one on maybe Pinch rest. This is for sure, AIT, but maybe we can grab this edge. I think I like this edge here. Not so important, but just to know how you can get reference from a few different images, you can just make collage of this. And actually hold this composition from Thomas Dubois one big collage. I will show you now if I find this on our station. Okay, here we have Batman scene and you can see that this is actually made, I think, in Photoshop, and this is actually just collage. He just make blocks here and then later place these photos of buildings here and then just blend this better later. So this is just a part of City and then he added something in foreground, but man and then blend all these together. But this is actually collage of footage is connected in Photoshop or something similar. Now when we have a nice reference for our composition, we can start with Blender. 3. Blocking scenes and camera placement: Let's now start with Blender. I built this in Blender 0.5, but these days, vendor five just released us Beta. I'm not sure. And last night I installed Blender five, so we can open vendor five point. Oh, first thing I will do here. Let's see. I think I will split this window, so we can on left press nu zero to go to render preview, and we can use this left window for I render preview. So we need switch here to render preview. You can grab this with middle mouse button and you can move this. Now we can switch to render preview. For render engine, we will use cycles. If you are completely okay, you also need switch here to GPU to make this much faster. So if you are completely new to Blender, we have two render engines, EV and cycles. E is little less realistic, but much faster and cycles is real Pat tracer. It should be more realistic than IV. So IV is mostly used for game, graphic design and similar things. Cycles is better if you want to make scene more realistic. But nowadays, there is no so big difference between IV and cycles. If you know how to work with IV, you can also build super realistic scenes. And we have also this work bench. And I think this is not render anges for final preview or to get realistic results. This is built for work inside viewport. Asked had GPT, what is or Bench. Word Bench is fast lightweight render engine designed to preview your scene while modeling, sculpting or animation. It is not for final renders. It is for tree deglpor display to help you see and navigate your scene efficiently. I never use this, so I hope this will be useful for you. You can always go to YouTube and find the practical example for this if you want. So let's now back to cycles. Let's actually first save this. So file, save and let's see where Blender tutorial, and I will call this Batman Tia. And let's see our reference image or my final result. We can start with this building where we place Batman and here also we place also here, camera and this structure. So we can start with this. I will just take, this is my last scene. I will just take look to dimensions I use, about 20 meters by 50. So we can select this cube. So this is the fault cube we get when we open Blender and I will now select this cube and press N, and we can type here 20 meters and here 50 on the axis. First thing I will do here, so with N, you can remove this tab. Actually, let me enable this screen aas keys. Every time when I start new Blender versions, this don't work. Let's see what I can do. Edit preferences, get extensions. Let's search for screen plas keys, update. Okay, now this for. Now you can see what I'm typing here and I want to make this smaller. So I will change this font, maybe to ten. It is still visible. N is to remove this tab and let's back to item, and I want to bring this zero on X x is here because we have here 50 meters. I will type here 25 to bring this up, and let's apply scale. It's like this object Control A and apply scale. Now we back scale to one, this is always important. Next thing we can do here. We can bring camera to position, and now this camera is inside this cube. We can just select this camera here. And now we can with this, maybe this move tool, we can bring this up. It is same. You activate this when you press G to grab and now you can press G. After G, you can press Z to stick on Z axis. If you press, for example, GX, you stick on X axis, GY, to y axis. Let's see what I do next. I want place Batman in our scene or cube, which will be Batman because it will be easier to set camera after that. So I will go with Shift T click here to place cube here, and we can go with mesh cube be big to meter you can see here when you press in. I will say this to one point take. This is more similar like human height, and I will type here maybe. 0.2. This is our Batman and let's bring this to here, maybe 0.4 to make this more visible. Now we can start placing camera. I will press and to close this tab, and we have selected camera here. One thing I like to do here, I don't need to see this part here, which is out of camera. So we can select camera properties here, UPA display and this pass part out, we can bring all to one. Now we see only what is inside camera, everything else is black. And one thing we can also do we can remove this tab here by clicking here, and with we can remove this tools. Okay, and I don't need this timeline here. So for now, I will just join this down. And because we have a lot of this black area here, we can open new tab with right click and horizontal split. For now, we don't need anything here, but we can maybe open new editor for later. But we will see. Now, if you want to move this down, you can't just mouse, middle mouse button, you need back to num pe zero to camera view, you need this and bring this down. Probably there is shortcut for this option here, but I'm not sure now which one is. So I will again disable this. We bring this camera to position. And we can take a look what I do last time. I will go with Nump seven to top orthograph. I'm not sure why I rotate this building like this. Yes, I think I want. I try to get better angle here. We will see later. Okay, let's see where is our camera. Our camera is actually here. It is not visible because of this structure here, but we have here camera. Let's see position of our camera. Each of these part, these increments here is 1 meter, so we have one, two, three, maybe one, two, three, four, five, here. You don't need to follow this strictly, but I don't want to lose time finding perfect position for camera, so I will actually follow what I do last time. And here we have one, two, three, three of these and on XX is one, two, three, four, five. So somewhere here. Okay, but our Z axis is not correct. How we can get a perfect height as we get here. It is not very hard because we just need to think how things work in real world. So Batman stay on this building and probably if we want take this picture, guy with camera will be about in same position like Batman. But I think we want to go little lower than average human height. This looks like someone is maybe on neese or something and trying to take this photo. That's duplicate this cube, so she will be X. But I want go a little lower. If you press N. We are now on height, 1 meter 69, maybe 1.4 meter from ground. Okay. Now, I don't need this anymore. And I will press. Let's now see rotation. So on Y axis, we always want stick on zero. You don't want rotate camera like this. And on Z axis, it's actually very easy. We want to rotate this on 45 degrees. So you can see that this is actually 45 degrees. Angle, it is not big difference, 45 or 50 or something, but let's stick perfectly on 45. And on X axis, we stick this to 90 degrees. X axis is actually up or down. This is up and this is down. So let's take to 90 degrees. And let's see what happened here. I think something wrong here. Yes, I know what is problem. Problem is this lens here. We use much wider lens. So we cannot see anything here. Let's select camera and let's now go to render properties. By default is in Blender 50 millimeters, and last time I go with 18 millimeters. And now we can see how Batman here. You can also switch from perspective to panoramic. With panoramic, let's make this to 18. With panoramic, you get this lens distortion. Of length distortion and even more wide angle shot. Let's see perspective panoramic. But last time I use panoramic for this shot. You can see we don't have distortion, but these buildings go at this angle, we get this angle, but we don't get any distortion like this. Perspective 18 millimeters. This is what I used last time. Let's see. The edge of this building go somewhere in middle of this, but we have this part go over to here. And I think this is for this reason, I rotate this building a little to get more like this angle. And now we get similar position and camera like in this shot here. What I will do next? I think I will change lighting here because by default, we have just this gray color. For lighting, we will set lighting later. I don't want waste time for searching for HDRI. But in Blender, now we have not now. We have some time, something like procedural HDRI, which is sky texture. We can now load this, and this is only in Blender five. Oh, we get this multiple scattering. This new option use different way to calculate atmosphere and all these things, and this should be more realistic than this one we have in old Blender versions. But I don't like this bluish color. And because this is not final Blender, this is just for preview, I will back this to single scattering. And let's see what I want here. I want bring this make this more dark. And I also play with this maybe elevation to make this sunset or something like sunset. And we can also add maybe some atmosphere here. And let's play now with sun rotation. Okay, I actually want to get some shadows here. Let's see. Sun rotation. Okay, we can maybe hide behind Batman. This is not so important. We just want to letter e here. Let's see what we have next here. We have this structure here. Let's now go with D Y to move this on Y axis. So let's place this little in front of Batman. Maybe somewhere here and we can go to edit mode. We can scale this in edit mode also. Let's see how this look. Let's bring this W one, two or three, you can skip between vertex age and Phase select. So three to phase select, and now we can grab this. And let's see again what I do last time. Now I will just go with Control R. And actually, I just want to go with Ex, exclude this on X axis, this one Y. Maybe Control R here and let's now Y exclude this part on YXs. Let's maybe add M cut here and let's extrude. This maybe bring this. I will not extrude this. I will no, I want extrude this actually. Okay. This is something similar. I do last time. Let's see what I do here. This is not even visible. Maybe I just want es extrude this little Z axis. This is actually similar thing I do last time. We can bring this Batman more closer to this edge. Something like this, so we will place. But here, one thing I can also do here, I can select this and with I, we can insert this. So you can see what we do. And now I will go with E Z. Bring this down. So we get this nice edge here. Let's place Batman down. And now we have something for start. So this area should be for this reflector. We have place for Batman here. We have this structure. And we have this edge. And, of course, in the background, we will place our seat. 4. Camera projection: This is where we stop last time, and let's now import our Batman or video file in C. And let's see how we can do this. First, I want to rotate this face to our camera. This is not so important, but let's go with Z. Okay. And second thing, I don't need cube here. I just want play. So I will delete this set this face and delete vertices. Now we can project video file here. Let's make this bigger. And let's now import our file. But first, we need to create Shader. So click here and open here, Shader Editor. We can now click Plus and you can call this butmiT remove this tab. And now we can import this a file here. Okay, now just drag this inside Blender. Not sure I don't get this Blender icon here. I think I didn't start this properly, but still works. And now, if you plug these two base color, we can open here port or material preview to see what we get. Okay, you can see that we have projected. This is actually UV editor. We have projected this area on this play, which is not good. Vendor by default, use UV for projection, and you can see this if you enable Node Brangler so you need to go to edit preferences under addons or get extensions. If you install this first time, you can just type node and install Node Brangler and you will get them here. On wranglar just activate this. Now if we go with Control we can see projection views and Blender by default, use UV projection. I will delete this. I don't need this just to know. Now we can reproject these betters. If I go to Edit mode and A to select tool, I can go for something like Q projection. And when you see that these proportions doesn't match this one, in most cases, scale is problem. So we need apply scale. Control A and apply scale to back this to one, and now if I go with Q projection, this should match better. But I think still is not perfect. Not sure why. Another thing we can do in this case is we can just go with U project. Unit go to camera view. So NPA zero U project from you. And let's see. Now we can project our Batman here. But this is not solution we want. This can work in this case, when we don't have any camera move. But for example, if we now move camera, In case we move camera here, we will actually see just edge of this plane. You can see what we get. And this is not what we want. I said before, this can work in this case, when we don't have any camera move. Let's back our camera here. But we get another two or three problems. For example, if we want to extend this to this area here where we have our video projector, let me open this final result. If you want to extend to this area, you will see what we will get. So if I go with E Y, maybe Ex and Ey, we get this trash texture, and we now need to reproject this again. If I go again with you project from you, I need to adjust this every time. We can use this option. I will show you if I now go with EY. I get this stretch texture, but if I enable the correct phase attributes, this helps. Keep this UV map correct. But then we get another problem. You can see that when we move we actually stretch Batman, a little and all this texture. Reason for this is UV mop need more mesh to be correct. And if we select all this and if we go with subdivide, you can see that this correct a little this stretch texture. You can see this shoulder of but Mah. Now we correct this a little, and if we add more mashtro we will correct this even more. But this is not good now because now, for example, if we want to leave this part, we can maybe just delete this part here. We can use brush tool to delete this. But we just get more mess here and this is not what we want. For example, we can cut this with K, but this is still mess. In this case, we don't have too much geometry to slow down our scene, but in some cases, this can also slow down your scene. So this is not a good solution, and I will go with Control Z to remove this mesh. There is solution inside Blender, which fix first problem. For example, when you have animated camera, you can get rid of losing perspective problem. Solution for this side Blender is under Modifier tab. We have UV project modifier, and I will show you how this work now. First, we need to select only UV map we have, which is default one, and we now need to choose project projector is our camera. So we want project this from our camera view. And now you can see that this tragic this doesn't fit our camera. That's because we need a set resolution of this video plane, which is same as this resolution here. So I will type here by 108. Now you can see that we fix first problem. For example, if you move camera, even here, this will always face our camera. This work for animation and we fix first problem. We still need more mesh to clean this projection here. You can see if I go to Edit mode with tab, and if I go with subdivide, you can see that we need more mesh to fix this projection. So this modifier still need mesh to project this correct. I will go with Control Z. This solution here is better than project from you, but still we have problem with mesh, and there is third solution for this, which solves all three problems and the solution is called camera projection. I think I will select camera to see camera projector. This is one small addon from Ian Hubert and Nathan. I think for sure, you know, who are Ian Hubert. And I will show you how this works. This is completely free, and this is so easy to use, so you don't need afraid of this addon. I think I have somewhere this link on my computer. A project camera projection node group generator. Okay, I will share this link with you. This is so easy to install and use. I think you just need to go here to download Zip when you download this on your computer, you come back to Blender, edit preferences, and install from disc. Okay, we have camera projector and you just need install this. It will appear here and okay, I have this node here type, so I need camera projection just activate this and what you need to do now, you need select camera. When we have selected camera, you will see this camera, not this camera projector. And the only thing you need to do here is click New camera project Node group. Okay, now nothing happened because we select this plane and we go to shade the editor, and you will see where things happen. So under group, you get this camera projector. Now, instead of using UV Map for projection, we will use this node group. If you double click here, you will see a lot of things happen here. Actually not too much, but this is what happened inside this group, and we just need plug this here. Now, if I go with subdivide, you can see nothing happened because this is projected perfectly without more mesh. Now, we have perfect projection. We don't need mess with too much mesh here. We don't need to slow down our scene, and we have Batman perfectly on place. If, for example, go with G, you can see Batman is always on place. Now we can adjust position of Batman here. I will go to edit mode, maybe down to extrude this a little or more, this a little, we can move maybe round a little. But I will not do this too much. I will play with this location X or Y. You can just hold Shift. Let's see. Screencast keys. You can hold Shift on your keyboard and you can be more precise. We want to move this on YX, not Z. Actually, in this case, you can just type here maybe 0.01 or two, maybe 25. Let's see. Maybe minus -0.01. If you get this problem, you can see that every time I move my mouse, I also move camera. I accidentally enable this log camera to view. I'm not sure. Okay, I click here. So if you get this problem, just. Let's now disable this and we end. I actually maybe I didn't record. I actually extrude this part. Let me show. Delete vertices this part here. I want to fill this space, so Z extrude this. And of course, you can play with this mesh. I also extrude this, for example, if you don't like this part, you can just delete this here, you can use K or knife too. But we will mess with this later. You can see that this plane actually react with light. We can see specular part here, this angle here, and you can see that this actually actually this is material went look on left. You can clearly see that the react and depend on lighting, which we don't want. We want this plane to be perfectly same as on this reference here. And how we can get this. First thing, we don't need this principle BSDF because we have all these things here. So for example, metallic roughness, specular, and all these affect this image here. We just want to delete this and we want to plug this directly to emission. And now, when we plug this to emission, we actually take lighting from this reference. And now you can see that lighting doesn't affect this video plane here. And to make this perfectly, like in this reference image here. I think we need this color management to standard. I will not do this because I think there is no big difference, let's see, from filmic to standard. Let's see difference 1 second. If I change this to standard, there is very small difference, and I will get some problems later with this. So I don't think this is so important for us. So this is before, you can see that I mess this sky texture. So I will make this to filmic, and I will not care about very subtle change about this. But I think we should maybe use AGX here. I will for now keep filmic. You can use AGX. We will see maybe later in final result. Actually, I remember now that we also want this texture project to this ground. So we don't need a mess about this feet where this stop and where they start. We can just select this object, select this one, Control L and link materials. Okay, I need first select this one, then this one, control link materials. Okay? Now you can see this edge, and now we don't care about this transition because we project this from camera view. And even if we move camera, we will not see this edge here. 5. Matching CG with live footage: Now. We have the CG elements. We have this let's call this VFX element. So we have projected with the texture on display, and now we need to match this better. I think this is not important, but let's bring this to ground. Okay. Let's see how we can match this CG with this live footage here. I will select this object and I will click here two plus. I will call this concrete. Now I will import one concrete texture. You can use any concrete texture. This is not so important. I think I will share also this with you. Let's see how we can match these two together. If I now plug this here for this, we, of course, use the editor. Let's first check scale. Apply scale, and now we can go with Q projection. Now, you can see how this is projected. Maybe I want scale this a little until this look correct. Maybe something like this, but we can always change this later. And let's see this doesn't match. You can see. But this part also depends on lighting. For example, if we go here and if we change this, you can see how this depends on lighting. So I think in this case, we want to set our lighting, not perfectly, but maybe I just want to make this dark. Let's see our reference. Okay, this part is pretty dark. Something like this. But this still don't match this here. If we zoom here, you can see that these parts here are almost completely fade, like we have more like gray color here. And I try different thing. For example, if we go with hue saturation value and if we try bring this up, this is not what help here. And after a few tests, I found that this emission part, this look almost like glowing, this glowing a little. And if we play with this emission. If you add just a little emission to this material, you will see effect. So if I go with 0.01, this is too much, so we need to go with maybe 0.01. So this is before, this is 0.02. And you can see difference is very big. To see this better, I will go with value node. For example, I want mute, but I cannot press M over here. I can go with maybe value. And if I type here, 0.02, and if I plug this here, I can now press M. So this is before, this is after. So let's play more trees too much, maybe 0.0 25. 0.00 25. Okay, you can see that this already blend good, but we also need play with this lighting. I I get this highlight here. I want to avoid this. That's because we still use this DRI. For lighting, let's play it rotation. Okay, I still get this problem. We can play also with specular. For example, if we bring this to left, we will get less secular material. But I will not do this now. We will play with this later because we need to fix this black part. This black part is actually a problem. We don't have enough texture on this image here. We still fill this black part and I will show you later how. We can still play with this material. This blend already good, but let's add some bump. So color M standard things we will use here. We can just plug this to bump to get some bumps here. So search for bump. Plug this to height, and this to normal. Okay, now we can by default, in new Blender version, this is pretty subtle. We can play with these values here and then add some bumps here. And you can also add roughness map here. So I will duplicate this Shape D. Plug this here and plug this to roughness. So black parts will be shiny and white parts will be rough because you can see we have with concrete here. We also want maybe add more shiny parts here, something like this, but we will play with this later when we project this on these round holes. I made test render where we stopped last time, and now we miss this part here. It look big, but actually, let me open. You cannot see here, but I add this scope here black bars on top, only this small part here, we miss and to be honest with you, I will show you how I do this last time. Here is my after effects file. So this is let's see, missing part. Okay, so I just generate this very small part in AI, and I just make this patch here. Let's see. Okay, so this is thing I generate. I just make screenshot of this and I just ask AI in Photoshop to generate this very small part here. But because this is not Photoshop or AI tutorial, this is Blender tutorial. We will mess with this and we will see how we can do this properly in side Blender. And this is scope. So when we add this scope or black bars on top and down, this is what we get. I think we have some missing texture or something here because this doesn't look correct. Or later when we add scope, we will miss only this very small part here. But let's see how I will do this if I don't have Photoshop or any AI to. First thing, I think we need to project this same concrete texture down. And if you think you can just go with tab and add loop cut here. This will not match perspective. You can see this edge here. So I think go with K, and we need to follow this line here. I will go with K here. And I will try follow this line, something like this. And this part is not important. I will just tick somewhere here. Now, if we go with the, we can see this almost match. And maybe I can increase this even more. With G twice, you can slide this. Okay. Now, I will select this part here and I will assign this. First, I need to go with tab to object mode because only in object mode, we can add new material concrete. Now, tab again to go to edit mode. And I want these cremas keys make small Okay, now, when we go to Edit mode, assign this concrete material. Let's go with Q Q projection. Let's see how we can reproject this. Maybe I want to rotate this Z 90 to go to this direction. I think we need to scale this even more. Okay, not important for now, let's see how we can blend, measure these two parts together. Okay, we have this edge here, so I take a little too much. Space here. Let's go with G twice. Slide this about here. Now, this clearly doesn't match. We can see this here. And we have a few problems. Now, this concrete react with light. And I think first problem is that this part here block our right here. So let's go here under object properties and under visibility. So if we disable this from camera, this is not visible. Let's see what make a difference. Glossy TeffcT part actually affect the glossiness of this part. This is before and after this transmission, nothing volume scatter, nothing and shadow. This affect a lot. So this part actually block shadow here. Maybe this is not so visible now, but for example, we can maybe replicate this reflector here if I go here and maybe some area. N minus night to rotate this direction. And if I place this slide here, if I now select this plane, we'll see before after Okay, now we have this area lamp and let's see. This is too intense and too big. I just want a place on this area. And let's bring this maybe to five or something. Now I have this missing shadow of but mark here. Let's see if we can just create some cube. But if I place cube here, if I set this to ground. We should see shadow of this cube. Let's see. Yes, we actually see shadow of this cube. I will try match position of Batman here. And if you want, we can try shape this. For example, if I go to Xray mode. We can try. If we want to be even more accurate, we can import human model here. To represent this Batman and to create more accurate shadow, but I will not do this now. I think this will not be so visible, so it will be just losing time. Okay. We can now actually see this shadow of Batman here. And now, I don't want make this visible inside camera, I just want make this visible in shadow. Let's see this this effect. Okay, we need this glossiness. So just disable this from camera and we can call this Batman. Erotte or something. So we know that this is for shadow. Okay, this light here is too intense. I just bring this to see this shadow better. Let's bring this down maybe ten. And let's see. This part here, let's select this concrete, actually. This is two glosses, so I bring this or almost completely to To black to make this reflection intense, but this is too intense. Okay. Next thing, which is important here, we see reflection of this sky texture, which is not good, so we need play with this sky texture. But actually, I think it is not a good idea to play with these options here because we have same options here, underworld tab and with nodes, we can build we can add even more options here. I see that the sky don't match with this sky here and it will never match with this itecture we will never match this here. So what I will do, I will go with Chi D and I will set this to one. And now I will pick this sky color here. W this pickup tool, we can Okay, this w. Let's first plug this here so we can yes this work. So you can just grab this pickup tool and pick some of these colors here. I think I want this one here. This already much better. But now this also affect this part here. Let's see what we can do. If we go with Shift Control Shift and right click, we can actually mix these two textures together. So if we move this to left, we get this one and if we move this to right, we get this one. And there is one node inside Blender, which is called light p with this, we can actually split what is visible in camera and what affect our lighting. So if I plug this here, now, we don't have anymore this slider, but we know that this part is visible in camera. So this part is what we see camera and this part here affect our lighting, reflections and all this stuff. So for example, if I paint these to blue, we will see this blue color, but this part actually affect lighting. And let's see what we can do now. Now we don't want to touch this part because this almost perfectly match this part here. Let's now play only with this part which affect lighting. Let's see what we can do next. So this is only what is visible and this affect lighting. And if I maybe just make this completely black and if I just mix these two together, let's see. What we have before and after. First thing I want to fix. We have this shadow don't match. We want maybe this direction. So we need to follow this shadow of Batman, and this is the sun rotation. So if I rotate this in this direction, and one thing you need to know this CG part is only to this edge here. We miss this edge here. This is actually video projection. So we need to make this bigger.'s like this part. And let's now you will see when we move, we actually move, also this shadow. So we need to move this about here. Okay, now we need to play with this shadow. I will play with a rotation. Okay, I get this shadow here. I'm not sure what is this part. Let's now also try and match this. I think I will. Let's see, this effect. Yes. This is too intense, and this affect a lot. So I will bring this only to two, and we will see later. Actually, this light here should be somewhere here. You can see this shade of here. Now, match this part here. I think this orange color here doesn't match with this one. But let's first set this Batman silhouette to match this butman object a little better, this shade of here. Okay. This is a little better. And one thing which I also note, this is too sharp. This shadow here is too sharp. Light size always affect how soft is this transition or this shadow. So I think if we bring this if we make this bigger, this should make this light softer. Okay, you can clearly see this effect. Just a little. Okay, and maybe some rotation, even more in this direction. Okay, this helps a little. Let's extude this a little more out. Okay, we broke this part, but not so important. Let's bring this here. Okay, now this match a little better. I just want change color of this. Let's see. I will back to object mode, and this roughness affect a lot. So if you bring this Okay, I don't think I want to make this less glossy because we have a lot of glossiness here. Maybe I will just play with specular. So this is before and if I just bring this left, all these things affect this specular roughness, lighting affect a lot of this. This is all about matching right settings. So you can play with all these settings. It is just important to know what affect this thing. And I don't like this orange color. It is too intense, so I think we have something like green even pink or green tin. When you see this yellow dot, you know that this is color so this is basically color. And we can always mix color with color. So I will go with mix color. And if I plug this here, now we change this color with this one. This is before texture, this is this gray color. If I paint this, for example, to blue, this is before, this is after. And this is not so intense because we reduce this value here already. But I will not touch this. And now I don't want to just replace this. I just want paint this. And for this, we need the color blending mold. So we still get texture from this, but we just paint this or add this bluish tint. This is too intense, so I will maybe just a little. Okay. Let's see which color we want. Maybe if I pick this color here, I don't know. We can just play. This is pink, maybe something greenish blue. Again, this is all up to you. You can play with these settings and see what fits best. I will again back to this roughness map here. I think this should be important. If I go with Control Shift and click here, we can see that we don't have any contrast here. It is almost completely gray. So I will make some contrast here to get some details in reflection. Let's back this last node. I select this object, Edit more then select, I will select this part. I think I want scale this a little to get even more details. Okay. Let's see. This glossy part is still too intense. I will play with this value here, which is pretty important. So you can see before and after. Still This is too much. Let's see how all these things affect this part. When we are more this atmosphere thing, we just lose these details. I think this light doesn't have too much sense here. We have world light which come from this direction, and maybe this is still too intense, so I will back to object and this part, this glossy part here. Okay, maybe something like this. Again, world and maybe shift this color a little more. Maybe something like this. Let's bring intensity. Okay. We will never match this perfectly, but I think I have one idea how to make this gradient more soft here or how to make transition between these two objects. 6. Making the transition smooth: This is concrete texture. So we have this concrete texture. If you now just copy this and here is Batman texture, which is this part here. And let's see how we can make this transition more soft. This is let's press as to scale. I forget what is shortcut for group for fray, not group. Okay, so I will just add group here and we can place this inside this group. We can call this mineral projection. And now I will presen. So this is our video projection. And if we now go with paste and if we now paste this here, we have this emission and we have this principle BSDF. So one is do play and second one is concrete. If I now go with shift right click and mix these two things. Together, we actually choose between first input, which is this video projection. Actually, I miss this. So if we move all to left, we get this a projection. If we move all to right, we actually get this concrete texture here. What I want, I want something which will affect only this small part here, which will blend these two textures together. So you can see when we move this transition, when we are something somewhere in middle, you actually get perfect mix between these two and how we can do this. Let's see. I want control this with object. So let's create that object. This is always empty. So we will go with empty. And I think in this case, I want Q. So I will go with S Y. I will place this Z to match this edge here, something like this. And now I will select this and let's back to shade the editor. Object in, I think, or just object. Yes, I think we need this object node, and I will select this object. Now, we have this object here. And if we go with shift I click, we get This is not what we want. We want gradient. So I will search for gradient texture here and the five. Okay, this should be before I need plug this here. Let's see if I go with shift. Okay, we have something. And let's see, Linar let's see what blending mode what gradient type we want here. Spherical Okay, maybe this quadratic. I just want soft transition here. And now, when we have this black and white texture, let's see what we can do. We can actually use this factor for factor here. And now I think this should work. If I now move this I will disable this overlay so we can clearly see this. Yes, this works. So you can see this transition here, how we affect this card transition and now become soft. Okay, now we match this much better than before. But still, we need play with these options I took here, and I think maybe But I don't want to lose whole day just to try fix this very small part which we have here. I think it is important only that you know what effect this lighting here and you can play if you want whole day with all these options. Let's try match this just a little better. And I think if I make whole this more black, it will be easier to match this And we need back to this concrete and maybe play with this reflection a little more. I will not lose too much time here, but only important thing is to know what effect what effect this glossiness here. Maybe we can just invert this part. This also helps a little. And one thing which also affect a lot is this sun intensity because with this we get strong shadows here. So I think we need to increase this, maybe not to 12, maybe five. So this is zero. This is five. Okay, but now this is even more reddish, so we can Okay, I think now, it's a little better. We just need better color here. Okay, I think we don't need too much color. We want to make this more less saturated. So just make this more white. We actually now affect this saturation. We don't want maybe saturated. Okay, now I think now much better. Let's see this transition. Okay. I want to make this transition more soft and maybe move closer to Buta. Okay, now this match a little better. It is not perfect, but we can be even more precise if we continue playing with these values here. And what thing, I forget to tell you maybe this is video play. So if we select this object and we need enough frames here, I will say maybe 500 just to be sure that we have enough frame. If we said this to cycling and out or refresh, I think we should see this also in viewport preview. So if I press play, I will bring here timeline. Horizontal split, click horizontal split timeline. If I now press play, you should see that this is animated. Okay, this part here is not animated. Of course, if you have more time and if you want to improve even this, I think we can maybe just cut this part and from this animated part, make this also animated. Or you can play with clot simulation or you can do a lot to make this animated, but I think this will be just wasting time. This is not so visible. Okay, I think we can just extrude this part to match this part here. You can also enable this pod noise. Okay, I think I'm happy how progress go to now and we will see what is next. And just to know that I didn't do this last time. So this is also test for me. Before we finish this part, I don't want reflection here. Maybe we can. This is just distractive for me. Maybe we can just add cube here. Okay, because I do this in edit mode, this is still part of this object, which is actually good because these objects still have this camera disable. So we can actually add this here. And you can see, we actually block light with this cube, which I want. There is one thing we can also do to blend this better. We have this hard edge of this city here. And later when we add our city or CG City buildings, we will clearly see this edge here, and I think we can make this more soft. I do this last time in After Effects. I just put this do plane of Batman over this and I just make mask here. And there is a few ways. We can do this in Blender. We can also composite tab, add mask here. I will quickly show you maybe how we can do this. We need to render this with F 12. But you can skip this part. We are done with rendering. Let's see. I didn't use this 5.0 compositor. One thing I usually do here, I like here, just open image editor, and I like here load this viewer node. Now we have clear space here to bring our compositor here. And let's see. I need mask here. Just keep this part. I will just make one test. Under image editor, we have mask tool. So we can switch here to mask and we can create new mask and we can add circle mask here. But I want to load this viewer node here. And one thing we can do, we can just maybe add this mask here. Of course, you can shape this mask. Actually, I want to cover this Batman here. And let's see what we can do. Now we have this mask and we can bring this. Let's bring this down with mask, mask. We can select this mask here and you can preview this mask, and now I will go with Blu blue node, and let's now make this soft Okay. Now we have this and we actually need to import this image or video sequence here. This is how I do in after effects. But let's see how I can do this inside bender. So I think next step it will be to bring this Butmar reference here. Okay, we need match frame because we are in frame 74, but this is not important for now. Now we can, what I will do here, we should mix these two textures. So mix. Mix color and this will be input A, this will be input B, and now we should use this as mask here. Okay. But now, in this case, delete this geometry here. For example, I need maybe delete this and re render. And after re render is done, we get this soft edge here and we can control with this mask here. Okay, this is not even bad solution, but I will show you how we can do this also in shade the editor. Now we get this edge here. We need Okay, this is because we render this frame 74. I think if we render this on frame zero or one, this should match perfectly. But I will not do this now. We will now see how we can do this inside Shad note. And this also helps. With this, we can also bring this part here. But let's now cancel this so I don't save this. And let's see how we can do this with nodes inside shader. Okay, we can actually use same as we do before we can duplicate this or we can just create new nodes. I will place origin here and I will go with empty object, but I will now use sphere. Okay. Let's let's scale this down. Let's place this here and let's now bring this object info or just object node. And this is empty sphere. So I will rename this to be sure that I select right one. Now I need gradient after this, this should go to gradient. And for this, I think I need spherical gradient. We can now preview this here. And I think you know what we will do next. We will bring here transparent node. Let's bring this here. Let's bring here. Transparent BSDF now we can mix these two together. G to move this here and let's plug this here. Now, if you go all to right, this will be transparent. No, we invert this. This should be should be this main and this should be transparent. Let's go. If we go all to left, we get what we have before. If we go to right, we get this transparent. Now we can use this as factor. Now with this, we can blend this together. I need more hard transition here. Let's see if I go with S Y. Okay. I think we should use RAM or color ramp here. This is spherical. Let's try with different type of this gradient. No, I think we should use herical and search for ramp let's see. Okay, this help here and of course, this object is important. Position of this object, maybe also empty cube will be better than this. I'm not sure. Now, when we add CGCty, this should match a little better. 7. Buildings: Part of Tutorial, we should bring buildings assets in our scene. And I already record tutorial how I build simple city generator, and of course, you will get this part of Tutorial with this part, but I'm not sure how I will release. Maybe I release first part with buildings, and then maybe this part will be first. You can in any case, find that part. So you can see how I actually build simple city generator. These assets here are not simple. City generator. Reason is very simple. I build that asset pack later. So I build this before. But this is still my asset pack. This is from it building asset pack. So I think you will also get this asset back with this tutorial before we continue with placing buildings. I will try fix one thing. This sky here is maybe too brownish. We have more orange color here. We can just jump to tab, shade the editor, and we'll tab and we can pick this little more orange tint here. Okay, maybe it's too much. Maybe something like this. Okay, let's start with maybe simple city generator. We build this in first part of tutorial. Now I will just go with copy objects. And I will paste objects here. Okay, we get these assets here, and let's see where I place this. So we have this city generator folder, and if we just disable this, we can hide this. This is important for now because our scene should now be much slower because we have a lot of things happen here. But let's go to the assets, this modifier type here, and we selected this city generator, we can type here maybe 0.1. We don't need too much to dense here and let's see. Reason why we don't see anything here is because this is now behind. Let's now place this in position. I will go with num and one. Okay, this is perfectly on X axis. That's what I want. And let's place this here. Okay, we don't see this city now reason is very simple. First, I will press N because when we zoom out this, you can see that we lose this from our scene. We lost this from our viewport. That's because we need to bring this under view clip end to 10,000 maybe. Now we have much more space. And the second thing is we need also same for camera. Reason we still don't see this because this is Viewport preview and we are in render preview. And to be able to see this in render preview, we need to do same but with camera. I will bring this also to 10,000. And now we are able to see this city. This now become little slow, and let's for second just say this to viewport display to speed this a little. Okay, now we can scale this city, but every time you scale this city, you need go with Control A and apply scale. This is very important because you don't want scale. Each of these buildings, we just want to scale this city plane. And I explained this in the first part of tutorial. But let me also show you here. So we have all these buildings we can play with density with seed. So this is seed for small buildings, this is seed. For big buildings, I think we have too much. Of both. This is light inside buildings. So this is actually brightness, if we want. Make this more bright. We can type any value here. If we want bring brightness, maybe 2.1. This is what we get. This is how much light. So this is actually brick texture which we control how much we want these buildings or the windows glowing. This is warm color, by default is this. So we have each color here from blue, green, red. But if we bring this all to one, we will mostly get this reddish tint, maybe 0.5. And here we have this city plane, which is down. So this is brightness. If we set this to zero, we will not get any light from street. If we want more light, we can type something like 22 here. This is also brick texture. So this is how much we want of this light. Street lights here. Let's see how this look. Okay, I want maybe bring this more in distance. Or actually, we can just scale this and apply scale here to get more buildings but more in distance. This part here is not visible, so I will just stretch this as sex Let's now play with seed. I don't like this big building here. We also have this rotation seed. For example, if you like this building, but we want to rotate, maybe this building. Okay, let's keep for now, something like this. But I think we have too much of everything because we will also combine this with editing, building a set peck. Let's now just play with this maybe grease some light parts here. How much light? Let's see. This is maybe too much now, but we will cover this area later. Next assets we will import here is from editing, building Acer tech. I will disable this city generator because this is a little heavy for my computer to speed up all these things. And editing, building act tech is something different. We have here, all these things from which we can build buildings we have here 50 high detail buildings. And down, we also have these low poly city blocks. Here we have city blocks. How this work, we can just with drag this in our scene, we can import horse. Which is super low poly. If we go to Edit mode, you can see how this look. And if we go to render preview, you can see that we have also all these lights and all these textures. And now, if I want to change this light, I can play with this day and night Shader Because than one buildings we actually need go inside each of these and maybe adjust this separate. I will just check that this is on Xaxis lineup, and now we can just scatter this in background. And we can also import more of these assets. I think I will search for city to find more of these city blocks. Et's now enable city generator to see what is visible. Actually, not too much. Maybe we can bring density here. Okay, so this simple city generator is something like is good for mid range. For example, let me open this these buildings in foreground, for the I will use buildings from editing, building Asset Peck, they have more details than these buildings in the ground. And for this mid range of buildings I will use city generator, we still have let me show you. We still have a lot of details here. You can see that all these buildings are actually okay, I cannot go to edit mode. We have a lot of details here, but for Things in distance, I will use these low poly city blocks because we don't have here nothing then, just random cubes with textures. We are done with these two assets, let's now. Let's just fill a little this part, which is visible here called DY. Yes, maybe this part here. I will place this here and let's see this work? We should select this cube because everything is parent to this cube. And let's place this in foreground. Select everything and the X and Z night. If I rotate this, we should note that this is same building. If I place one here. Not sure what I do last time, but we can always maybe add a pin point to these buildings. Let's see if I scale this a lot. I don't want sharp light here. I want big so light and let's see if I bring this to here and if I bring this to maybe 10,000, what I will get, Okay, I don't like this color. Let's bring saturation. Let's see what if I go with Shift D Y and duplicate this. And now I will remove all buildings. I just need this plane to bring light here. Okay. Now, even if we delete this, we should get some lights on these buildings. Okay. But this is now a lighting part you can do here wherever you want. So let's bring this little down so we don't have any intersections. Now you can play with this. How much light. I think when we play with this slide, this doesn't work because this is file main object on which these drivers are connected. So I think we need actually play with this. We need to select this one, and this will also affect this part here. Let's go to material preview to prove this. Yes. If you get this problem, just to know. Okay, now we have this area lamp here. Which affect this building in foreground. We can maybe even place like this one. This is now all up to you. I'm not sure how I do this last time, but I just play with lighting and until I get something I like all the X to fill this empty part. But we should also place more of these high quality buildings here. Let's see what we have here, maybe this one. Okay. And we can also control lights inside these buildings in shade the editor. But let me how I will isolate this building when it's a cube inside. And now we get this night emission material. And let's see. Now I can choose this day night day shader. But I didn't do this I want because with this, we turn on or turn off lights on each of these window. I want to have control with brick texture, how much lights, how much these windows I want on or off. And maybe I will before I share this editing building as a tech, maybe I will build some brick shader here from which you will be able to control how much of these lights we want turn on and turn off. Same as I do in this simple city generator. This is mostly all for buildings, I will not lose too much time. I'm not trying to make better version than this one because it needs a lot of time for tweaking settings, and I don't have too much time. This is tutorial. I just want to show you techniques I use and I don't want to lose too much time tweaking settings and finding better buildings and similar things. Only thing I can do here, I can show you the tos and some of these from industrial decoration, we have big structures here. We can also import something from here, which are not buildings. Maybe this structure here. You can actually see how this look to get some random details. Maybe this one here. This is now not important to know what I do last time. I have this grain here, which can also be nice detail. Especially if we get this silhouette of grain. 8. Lighting: Now talk about lighting. If you take my last Blender file, I will close this simplicity generator. Let's see what I have here. I have this big volumetric cube. Let's see which settings I use. So just orange color, density 0.002 liter asotrophy and little emission strength. So we have here 40 and four. Let's try replicate this to see what effect we will get. So mesh cube. We need to scale this cube a lot on X and Y axis to cover whole city. Okay, something like this and apply scale. Now, I don't want see this cube. I want to make this. I just want C bound. So this UPO displaced from texture to bounds. And now I will go here to shade the ditor new material volume matrix or something. And now we can replace this with principle volume. You can also use volume scatter. I don't have here this emission strength value, so I mostly use this principle volume. But with this volume scatter, we actually get more of this. Let's go. 0.02. We get more different types of volumetric. So I think one of these is for water. One of these is for air or something. So you can just play with this zero point. Zero, three maybe or something. Okay, I think actually, I like this. We can maybe. So we have here a index of reflection we have here, of this option. This is now all to you. You can play with all these options and you can see what you like. I think I like this highlight here. We get this around area where we have more lights, but this now doesn't match in this part. Let's see if I maybe duplicate this light with hit Y. You can also get nice reaction with light in this area. Maybe I will bring this to white ARX hundred this light comes from city streets or something. This may be too much white. Okay, I like actually this part. This volumetric effect heap. I just want to avoid this part. Let's see how we can do this. If we just rotate. We can actually even maybe shape this. For example, if I grab this edge, let's see what I do. Maybe even extrude this. Something like this. So we have this effect in this part of city. I want to avoid these buildings here foreground because I want to put them in focus. But if I just move something like this. But I think in this part, we should use maybe gradient texture. And let's see how we can use this. We do this before. If I go to material preview here, let's disable this. Now this is not visible, but let's go with gradient texture. But if I plug this here, we have gradient from this part here to this. If you go with control, T, you can change this maybe from this part or from Z axis, I will not do this because I get what I want, but just to know how you can change this. And let's now go maybe RAM, call RAM. And let's see I want even more soft transition. So for this, I will use B s ply should be more soft transition. Okay. And what we can do now, we can actually go with transparent and mix these two. But let's see. This is not plug to surface. This is plug to volume. If I go with transparent, I'm not sure if this will work because let's see if I plug this here, I think actually work. So we just need invert this we color. I think this actually work. We have transparent par here which doesn't affect this city. We can now just play with this slider. We can clearly see how we get this. But if you increase this at 10 more, to see this better, you can clearly see how we make this gradient here. Okay, I will take 10 here. And now we have volumetric effect. Also here. And this part of it is too dark. Maybe we can just add some lights here or maybe this one. So shift the X. Let's try. But actually, I have assets for this. I talk about these assets in the first part where we build this simple city generator. These are let's see here, volume tubes. So if I grab this, I think this is what I look for. Let's copy this object and let's paste this to C. Yes, this is emissive. Another emissive cube which Let's go to shade the editor. So this is, this is almost this is nothing. This is just emissive cube. With this value here, let's increase this even more to see this effect. I think this also should have some gradient which go on the axis to fade this effect a little. But if we bring this all to this value, we can maybe just place this in parts of city which are not so visible. For example, this part here. To bring more lights here. Not sure about this building why? This is so dark. But we can play with this 0.8 maybe. Maybe we can say this very intense when 15. And we can paint this more to redish in. You can see this effect. But actually, I want to bring some of these lights or Y. Let's see if I point this light here or if I just bring this here and increase this brightness. Okay. These two are connected, actually. But I'm not sure why this one is not. Okay, we have these slides here. I want bring this down. Okay, I think I just want maybe scale to this part of city to bring some of these street lights here. Let's also increase some of these values. Maybe if I go with 100? This is too intense, maybe 30 and maybe just a little more of these street lights. And I want to bring saturation down to put some of these buildings in focus. I think in this point, if I continue mess with lighting, I will lose all day to get something I like. I just want to show you what affect lighting. So we have let's first start with world shader. So we have here this itecturet affect lighting. For example, if we increase the 200, you can see what we get. All the actually affect lighting you can play with all these settings, lights on buildings, affect lighting a lot. We have this volumetric cube so you can also play with these values here. Let's see. This affect lighting a lot. So when we go down with this value, we will actually get more light. I think, 0.1, no. You can also play with principal volume. So if we instead of this plug this principle volume to volume, we get this emission strength here, which can affect lighting, but when we bring this density down 0.02. Now with this emission strength, we want more zeros. Here, we can actually affect lighting a lot. 0.002. This is effect we get with this principle volume. But one thing you can also do, you can plug noise texture to this density. I will go with noise texture and if I now go with RAM for colorRamp, if I plug this here, let's see how this actually look. Now we can get some randomness here if I maybe move this to here, And if I play this ca, maybe something like three. And now I can let's disable. Now I can plug these two dens it here. And we should get something like clouds. But these values are very intense. So we should keep values similar like we keep before. So now I will paste here. Let's see here. Under value, I paste this value and maybe just make some offset. So from a 0.006 to 0.001, and we should get something like clouds, but we control this with these colors here. So maybe 0.01, two, and here we can make even bigger offset. 0.0, maybe if we go with some crazy value of it, we should get something like clouds in this case. And we can also maybe try plug this to emission strength here. Let's see what we will get now. Okay, one of the value is too bright. So this is too intense. One thing which also affect lighting a lot is the street lights here, which we isolate here. And if I go to shade the Editor, you can see that we have this reddish, we multiply with this reddish can see that with this saturate coal city. Let's now make test render. And this transition here is not good, so we need to play more with this gradient texture, but I will not lose too much time here. This is what we have for now. Obviously, this same here is problem, so we should play with this gradient texture. And with this emission, this here is too bright. I'm not sure in which point I change lighting on this now doesn't match as good as before. But I think we will continue with lighting in post processing part because I also do a lot of things in post processing. Let's take a look on my final result. And I will show you how I get this bluish sky here. And before we finish with this Blender part, I just want to show you some things I added here. We have this Misive do planes here. You can see how this look. I will not talk about this. This is just do play plug to emission like we do with this part here, and I have some of these things in asset browser, and I think this is important to bring some life to our scene. You can also know that we have smoke here and also on a lot of these roofs, you can see the smoke. Let's see, where I have this asset browser. I think I also played this in this Hubert collection. I have this window plain. Let's see how this look in Shade the editor. I have three different version and all these three versions react different with lighting. I just test some of these versions to see which one is best. And in my computer, I have a lot of these steam missed elements. For example, I can just one. This is a little stretch now. And if I now, let's see, we should switch to material preview. And now we can just place this video play on roof. I use this a lot in this scene here. You can see all this miss going here and also in background, and all this is actually animated mist. You can watch Tutorial on my YouTube channel about this scene if you want. Okay, that's mostly all. Let's open this Blender five. I have a lot of things here actually. So all these are actually these missed planes. All these red, red planes are actually missed and haze or something. Okay, I think this is all for this part. I next part, we will talk a little about post processing, and we are almost done with this torial. But 9. Post-processing part 1: This is where we stop last time in Blender and now I will do post processing or I think I will make breakdown, deep breakdown of what I do last time in post processing. And the last time I use after effects for this. I will not make another Blender compositor tutorial because I do few of them in the last few months. And I talk a lot about Blender compositor. I think I use maybe in this tutorial in this one for sure. So it to maybe 1 hour about Blender compositor. I think also in this one, maybe here, I'm not sure. For now, maybe in this one also. I made a lot of Blender compost tutorials, and let's now switch to after effects. But most of these things I do in after effects are very simple and you can very easily recreate this maybe in the winch resolve or Blender compositor. And hopefully in future, I will record compositing tutorial in Blender five point. Because I see that there are few interesting things. But for now, let's switch to after effects and let's see what I do last time here. So let's see what I do last time here. I have some missing texture here. I think this is maybe fog or smoke overlay or something. And I will show you how I create these blue parts here. But let's start from beginning. We have precomposition five, so let's open this here. So I start from here. This is what I get directly from Blender. So this is actually something similar where we stop here. And I have this hard edge here, so that means that I fix this in after effects. This is actually start and let's see next thing what I create here. Let's zoom this here. So this part is actually when I render whole animation from Blender, I forget to add this vignetting objects in foreground. This is here. I render this one frame, and then I just cut this part. And place here foreground to get this netting effect. Or I think I forget maybe enable depth and field or something. So this is before and after. Next thing here is ambient occlusion or AO, let's see how this look. And you can render this out if you enable this in a here under layer, you can enable ambient occlusion. I also use maybe glossy direction and missed pass. When you enable this missed pass, you get these settings here. So this go 5-25. This is not enough for this thing because we have more depth here. But let's see how we can review this here. If I said this to miss, we get only this small range, so we maybe need here maybe 500 or something. To get a range of whole city, maybe even 1,000. And then how you can explore this, you can just go to compositor, and next time when you render this, I will say this only maybe 250 to make this fast render image. And now, when you enable this render compositor, you have all these passes here. So we have here Miss closing direction, ambient occlusion. And if you want to save each of these in one time, you can go with file output. You can plug, let's say, this will be when you go with tab, let's see. This is image you can add here, AO for ambient Ocluson, then you can plug ambient to cluson here, you can add mist and you can plug miss here, glossing direction and so on. Then you can, for example, on your desktop new folder. Renders. And next time when you click Render render image or render animation, all these passes should be saved in this folder on your computer. This renders folder. So I render all these passes, which I think it will be useful here. So ambient ocusion and Mission gloss and M. And let's now back to this ambient occlusion. What I do last time. Usually, when you use this ambient oclusion you want to use soft soft light bending mode. So you want this to soft light. With this, we actually emphasize effect of these holes greases gaps, and this is before and after. I think you know what is ambient occlusion. And this also brighten up all these parts. And what I used last time, I want only put in focus, maybe these buildings in foreground. But because this is hard to select, you can do this manually. You can press, for example, MM and we can increase this feather. And so this is before and after. I will open my final result. You can see in this final result, I may use this only in foreground for these three buildings to put more focus and sharpen all these details with this ambient occlusion. And just to know that this is not something realistic. So usually usually all buildings all these buildings should have same ambient oclusion. But this is artistic style. With this, I just put focus on these buildings here. And let's see what I do last time. So you don't want manually select all these buildings you want, use miss pass for this. So we have here miss pass. Let's see which one I used last time, 49. Okay? This one. You can see that with this let's see here, these levels, I isolate only the few of these buildings in foreground. And now I can tell Blender after effects, I can tell after effects. Okay, put ambient oclusion only on these black parts here, ignore everything which is white. For example, ignore this building here. So this is layer 49, and now I can select this and I can tell, okay, use layer 49 to ask factor where you want, place this effect. Now I can go back to the 49 and I can play this slider. And you can see how we increase or decrease this effect. Okay, but this is obviously too much. I want maybe reduce this opacity, maybe. Just 30 or 40%. Okay, now we know what is senate Occlusion and what we can do with this. Let's see what is next same with emission. Okay, we have emission pass here. This is not so visible. Okay, with emission pass, we can just set this to screen blending mode. Let's see this is normal blending mode and we screen blending mode. And now we actually we just increase these slides here. Let me show from the beginning. So if I place this here, I get this is how emission pass look and I can set this to screen. Now, this ignore blacks and we keep only these bright parts. And for example, you can maybe go with blue, maybe fast fast box blur and we can maybe blue only this miss pass. And let's see. We get this blue refect but only on these lights here. Okay, let's see what is next. This is steam. You can see how this look and I place one here and if I now play this, you can see how this look. This is just to the card of steam, and let's see if I set this to increase this also set to screen bedding mode. I can duplicate one more and maybe I can place one here. And for this, I also use Miss pass. With miss pass here, we actually can place this in three D space. For example, let's see, 50 I used last time 15. Now, if we place this in foreground, this is not visible. But when we place this here, we can place this behind this building because we use this mask for this. Let's see. Okay, it will be visible only in white area. And because this building is mostly black, we can place this fog behind this building here. Okay, now when we press play, this is animated, then we have smoke behind this. Let's say this is chimney, we can place this smoke or fog behind this chimney. Okay. And I duplicate this three times. One is here, another one here, and we can play with opacity here. Let's see what is this? This is missing part. I talked about this before. I generate this with AI, this small thing here, and also this small thing here because this reference don't have we have missing part on this area and also on this area here. Okay, this is ButmaRference one. So this is main texture. We use main video texture here. We fix this in Blender. So we use we use this empty object and transparency to merge this or to blend this better. And we also use this empty cube to blend this part here together. But last time I do this in after effects. So what I do, I just place this overlay and I use this mask here with big feather to smooth this out. Let's see what is next glossy direction. We talk about this. But I also duplicate this one more time, and I increase this. I just put this over this area to highlight more these details on these buildings. Let's see next is halation. So with this, we actually add red glow effect over highlights. You can see this effect here. So this is before and after. And let's see how I do this. I think in DaVinci Resolve, you have this option by default. You can just drag node then you get this option. But in after effects, we don't have free version of this. Of course, you can download some plugins, but that is how I do this. Okay, what I do last time, first I the first I said this fine edges effect, which we have free here. So with this, we just find these edges. Then I think the edges to red. So instead of white color, I just think this edge is red. And then with levels, I don't want a lot of these edges. I just want on highlights. So this is before, we have all these edges with these levels, this is something like color ramp in Blender, we just remove. From all these areas and just keep these bright highlights here, even more. And now, this is sharp. You can see this is pretty sharp. Just add fast box blur to solve this. So this is before and after. And then I said this to screen blending mode to ignore blacks and keep only these highlights or these red parts. And this is before and after. But I reduce this a lot, maybe maybe just 20. This is now barely visible. So this is before, maybe 50. We get this red glow effect with this. Okay, let's see what is next. Another steam, which is this one. I duplicate this few times. Let's see what is this. Okay, this is something like bugs, mods and something. You can see how this look and you can see this here. These flying things here. I just said these to lighten or screen mode. They are very similar. And you can see them here. But they're very subtle. So this is maybe 12%. I put also few of them here these highlights. I just use mask to cut this very simple. So I just place this overlay here and I scale this a lot to just 20%. Then we can just make mask like this. And now they are visible only in this area. And we want add feather to this mask fog. Let's see. Another fog overlay. I think this is static image plane. This is just image. This is not with the overlay. This is how this look, and this is also free. I think I will share this link with you so you can download all this for free, mostly four k resolution image textures, and you can download this from this link here. I think I will share these links with you. Okay, and then I place this in foreground. And for this, I use another miss pass just to put on this area here. This is before and this is after. Another way to put these buildings in foreground in focus. This is another smoke overlay. We talked about this before. Another image overlay, I place one here. Let's see if I increase this. And I paint this to reddish color. I think we can also paint this one to show you how this works. Just tint. So tint effect. And now, if we select some different color, we can also paint. Okay, not this one. This one. I do this before. Without this is mostly white. If I set this thin here and if I grab some of this orange color, you can see effect we get, I will increase maybe brightness and saturation if you want. Make this more orange, I don't want something like this. Now, it is not completely white. It is mostly orange. 10. Post-processing part 2: Let's see what is next. Gradient. This is disabled. With this, I tried to add gradient effect to put focus more on this area down, but I was not happy with this effect. So this is before and after, I disabled this and next is this will convert. This is actually paid addon, which cost about 100, dollars when it's sale and maybe 150 is not sale. And because this is one time purchase. So when you buy this one time, you get lifetime updates, and you can use this in any project. With this, you get something like film overlays. So you can see how this effect, I will go with this. See this effect better. You get all this film grain, camera lens effect or camera lenses or something. So if I change few of this, you will see. You can see difference. I chose few of these, but you can see that this is very subtle. So I just said this 5% this one. Then let's bring this down. Blue edge. This is effect which anamorphic lens have. We have these edges on this we have this blue effect on the edges here. So for this, I use this mask. So we have effect only on this area here, this one here, and this is before and after. For this, I just set blue with horizontal. So this is vertical go up down horizontal go left, right. Let's increase this a lot to see this effect. Vertical, horizontal. And this is too intense. Of course, we have this mask feather here. We can shove this or blow this. And last time I just go with Val 50. Let's see what is next little chromatic aberration, nothing too much. Let's see, on the edges here. This is before. This is after maybe just a little of this. But I think we have this effect also in Blender compositor five. Oh. And I didn't test this effect, but I think we get this in new Blender compositor. Lens distortion. I disable this. This effect we get if we Blender choose panoramic camera. We choose perspective camera. But if you choose panoramic, you get this lens distortion. Let's see how this look. We get the distortion on these edges. And for this, you need by default is 100 and then you get this empty area. You need fill, so you need transform to scale this up to hide this effect. Okay. But I disable this because now this overlays doesn't match. We should do this before. Okay? Uh this is only some color correction on this area. I'm not sure what I do this. Let's now talk about this precomposition here which look like this. And I talk in first part of tutorial about this, and I will talk again about this now. If we go inside, we have same texture here, which is screenshot 13. Let's now back here and let's see what is this. Okay, here we have. What I do. This is one Batman. Actually, this is our Batman reference which we use as with the overlay and what I do last time. I just place this here and let's say, I like the lights here and I can just go here. Now I get this. What I do I want to make these black parts transparent. I just want these highlights. I can go with levers. Here, if I place this here, I can just isolate. I want sent this to screen vending mode to remove these black parts to make them transparent. Now we get only these highlights and now what I can do, I can just place this maybe here. And I want scale this has to scale this to make this smaller. I just paint over this composition with these overlays. For example, place if I want more lights here, I can just place this here. I can play with this mask to place only on this building. Let's scale this down. And then I maybe duplicate this one more time and place another one here. And later I just precompose this to set all the inside one folder. And you can see before and after. I paint a lot of these lives over this composition. And if I disable let's say, all these are same. If I disable all these, you can see, we don't have enough lights. I can enable all these slides inside Blender, but I think these slides are a little more high quality than one from Blender. Because they are shot with high quality camera, and I just want combined. And they match perfectly with this one because they are shot from same camera. And with this, we actually blend better together this area with this. And I think some of them are animated. Yes, you can see this one are animated because I don't just use one steel frame. I also use do file here and you can see that some of them are animated. I think the brink line are animated. If you go inside, you can see that we use this do file here. Okay? So all of them are same technique. Let's see what is this. Okay, I paint also this part here with same technique to get some very tiny highlights here. Let's see. Okay, we have something here. Again, few lights, nothing special. Let's see, sky. I have some ugly them here, which is maybe not so visible, but it was here. With this, I just blur this part to hind the scene. Also, nothing important. And let's see this blur what I do last time. I think this image was a little too sharp. I want more atmosphere here and what I do. I just place Gasianblu here. Let's do this now. And if you increase this, for example, to 300, we need to bring opacity to see this. And let's set this to normal blending mode. So this is what we get. Now, if we just decrease this down, we get something like fake volumetric effect. But if we set this to screen blending mode, this will actually lighten up, hold this composition because it will affect more these bright areas than dark areas. Okay. And this is before and after. But I said this last time to 20. Not too intense. Last thing here is this scope. This is just a image texture with black parts up and down. And if you put this on top, we get this cinematic scope. This also help us to hide these ugly parts down. But this is not all because I also put everything inside one composition, and let's see where it's made composition is here. Okay. Then I was still not happy with this. Let's talk about this lens flare. Here, this is actually from Blender. Let me open Blender. I have one add on here, which is called Okay, this one. So we just need light source here. And if I place, for example, light point lamp here, I can now select this lamp. I can select this lamp here and I can on this place add some of these lens. For example, this one. Not sure why this is not visible in Blender 5.2, but I add one light here. And if I press plus, I can choose any of these lenses, and I can select this one. Okay. Now I have all these settings which I can control this scale intensity. Okay, this is how I create this last time. And what I do last time, I actually don't want to re render everything here. So I actually delete everything except this slide here. Let's see how I can Mm. Select this point lamp here. Okay. What I do, I delete everything and I just re render this as one frame, and then I actually get this overlay, and then I can just go in after effects, and I can set this as overlay. And if I send this to screen blending mode to ignore blacks and keep only, this is what I get. Now it's over this so we see this double, but you can see what I get because I render this from Blender, this perfectly match position. Of course, we can play with mask. For example, if I don't like this part, I can just mascud this area. This is before and after. Blue sky. Okay, this part is important. What I do to get this blue sky, I actually duplicate this scene, and then I delete whole this world setup. For example, I I will delete also this volumetric because they slow down my scene, I delete everything here, and then I delete everything here and I just go with HDRI or environment texture. Then I plug this here, and I choose something like night sky with clouds visible. Not sure. Maybe something like this. It seems like this now start working, which I don't want. Okay, and let's now go with background. And now I play with this. I go again with mixed color or something. But first, I duplicate this file because I don't want to mess this file playing with something in which I'm not sure. And now I paint this maybe even more to bluish. We can send this to color blending mode. I don't like this texture at all. So I want to get these guys here, these clouds, Control I can play with not this one. Z rotation. And of course, I don't see the trees, so this he is not good. Let's see, maybe this one. Maybe we can rotate this just a little on the axis to avoid this city, something like this. Okay. Then of course, then I paint these two blue because I want to get this bluish tin. And I render this image here, image save, and I will save this on my desktop. Okay, I get this here, then I bring this inside after effects. Let's disable this. Now, what I do, I just cut this part here. And WN twice, I get this mask feather here. And then I play with blending modes. For example, let's disable this. I don't I don't use normal blending mode, maybe screen to see how this affect. But of course, this now doesn't match our scene because this is completely new scene. But I just want to show you how I get this result. Now you can play with all these blending modes, and of course, you can then reduce opacity. This is before, after. This is how I get this part is bluish and this orange. And I think this helps a lot to make this scene feel more cinematic because let me show you my final result without this Okay, this was without this blue part. I feel that something just missed. It is not enough cinematic, and even I follow reference, but my reference we can find here maybe which is this one. Here is everything orange, but I just don't feel that this is right. This look good on film because they have very expensive cameras and all these things. But in my opinion, the just don't feel right. Maybe somewhere like this completely orange version, but I think something miss in my opinion, and I try with different HGRI on this side. Of course, we are limited with this part here because we have this video play. And when I play, um more. I just get this bluish orange version, which I get same way I explained before. So this is orange version, and this is with bluish sky here and with these clouds here. And let's see what is next. Okay, now we come to this part with this reflectors here. This is actually Window plane, which I found free on this website. You can search for these spotlights or something. You can just go to Google and search for the spotlights window or something. And okay, I search for Window O. I don't mean just steel image, but you can find a lot of similar things. And I found one for free, which is this one, maybe you can just go to Google and search this name. You can see that this is actually Window Overlay. Okay, that's what this light rays does. And I also get idea. For this from let's see. I get ideas for this from this composition from Thomas Dubois. So I like this part and I decided to create this here. So this is without. Okay, we have more of this somewhere here, but this is not important. And we get this effect here. They are animated. This is not so visible, but they are animated. I think we are done actually with everything. So this is all I do in after effects. Maybe I forget something from Blender, but I think we talk about 99% of all things I do in Blender and after effects. So thank you for watching this tutorial and to be here to end and see you in next one. I