How to Make VFX My Step by Step Process #vfx #digital #digitaleffect

It's time. If you're moving the camera it's important to keep it as smooth as possible. I shot these shots on a gimbal because if you're planning to put 3D assets in your footage you need to be able to track it and it's really hard to track footage that is shaky. If you're planning to interact with 3D characters it's good to have a placeholder where that character would be. That could either be a person or a tennis ball like we always see or in my case I just tried my best to mime. If you shot your footage on a green screen this is when you do a rough key of it just so you can start working with the footage. If you didn't use a green screen then mask it. Nowadays there's so many different ways that you can mask out your footage. What I like to do because I find it to be the most accurate is Photoshop. There's a YouTube channel called the Creative Twins and what they've done is made a script for Photoshop which automates the remove background tool. So all you got to do is put in an image sequence of your footage, hit go and then it just goes frame by frame masking out your footage and it doesn't take that long either but it is really accurate. If you've got a camera that moves through 3D space you've got a camera solve that footage so you can have a virtual camera inside your 3D program and start placing your 3D assets where they would be in the real location. To further explain this I need to sit down. The budget has increased for this shot. I now have lighting. So what I can do in After Effects is simply add the 3D camera tracker effect to my footage and yeah it pretty much tracks it. Then what I can do is select some points make that the ground plane and origin and then I'll add a new solid. Hey look it tracks. Nice. The awesome YouTube channel NPS3D has kindly sent me their new blend add-on AE Blink and it is one of the most helpful add-ons I have seen. With AE Blink downloaded what I can do is run its script. And export the camera tracking data. Then inside of Blender. What? Blender? No! I do not mean a normal blender like like a NutriBullet. No I mean the 3D software. Yes the 3D software. I can navigate over to the AE Blink add-on. I can import in my tracking data and here we go. Here is my tracked camera. You can see it's matching the exact same camera movement of my real camera. Then what I can do is also bring in the footage. Load footage. Enable background. And here we go. Here is my footage in the 3D space. Now there's just one problem. What I've done here is imported in a human scale reference 3D model. When you look at it through the camera it's so tiny. The scale is all messed up. What's great about the add-on is that there's this world scale. Look at that. Tracks perfectly and the scale is correct. It's really hard to fix the scale without the add-on. There's so much like manual tweaking you have to do. It's really great to have the add-on where you can simply. It's just a simple slider. You can just change the world scale. It's such a handy add-on and I'm going to be using it every time I 3D camera track. Check out the AE Blink on Tubehive. Formerly known as the Blender Marketplace and Gumroad. Now that we've got all the tedious stuff out the way. The masking, the tracking and whatever else I just talked about for the past however long it's been. We get to the fun stuff which is putting everything together in Blender. This is where I also go and get all of my 3D models that I need for the video. I like to get models from Sketchfab. There's productioncrate.com. That is good. It's normally Sketchfab and CGTrader which is where I get free ones. There is a free website online called Mixamo where you can upload 3D characters. Rig them up and get animations for free. In my Blender project I can put their models where I need them to be. I can adjust camera settings like focal length and depth of field to get realistic blur. If I'm replacing everything in my footage except myself then I've also got to make the new landscape. For this one here I got a Jetty 3D model online and what I did in Blender was use a array modifier to make it a big boardwalk for all the characters to stand on. I can make massive terrains using the default Blender Ant landscape add-on and then I can use free textures from polyhaven.com to add grass and dirt and rocks and whatever I want really. Once I'm happy with the textures, the animations and the way all the models are set up I move on to... When you're adding 3D models into real footage like I've done here you're supposed to capture your own HDRI on set. A HDRI is basically a 360 image that lights 3D models. However, I rarely do this because I just don't feel like it. So what I normally do is go to polyhaven.com once again. They also have free HDRIs there and then what I can do is just pick one that matches the same lighting, the location, you know what the color of the ground is. The one that matches my footage and I can bring that into Blender and generally it lights my models pretty realistically. When I'm adding 3D characters into real footage what I like to do is add a plane on the ground and I go into the object properties and I tick shadow catcher and then yeah now there's a shadow on the ground. When I finished up in Blender what I like to do is render everything out as a PNG sequence. What I like to do is render everything out as a EXR sequence. Now I do not composite in Blender. I like to do it in After Effects because I just find it easier. So this is where I make everything actually look decent. I can add lens flares to add more impact, lens dirt to make it look like we actually filmed that asset on a real camera. I can have little bits of extra camera shake or jitter just to make the effects punch a bit more. I hope this video helped you. Now subscribe or I will eat your dog. If you don't have a dog, your cat. If you don't have a cat, your wife! If you don't have a wife, which is most likely, I'll eat you. Thanks for watching.