Once your animation has rendered out import both the z depth and the original animation into your comp in After Effects (along with your stock footage). Once this is done, 3D track or 2D depending on your shot, stuff your tracking data inside a null object. Stick your Z pass over the stock footage, then parent the tracking data (null object) to the render, z depth, and the stock footage. Color correct your stock footage, to match the scene’s lighting. Then add an exposure effect, on the z pass duplicate it, then add some exposure (on the first one) to gain some contrast to the z pass. Then change the track matte mode on the stock footage to ‘luma matte inverted’. This will stick your stock footage in the middle of your render. If you go back to the z depth pass and play around with the first exposure effect you can adjust on to where the stock footage will be in your render.
This is an exaggerated example of a z depth pass, you can use the Video Copilot’s Plug -In Element 3D with your 3D models to add Z depth that way
When I first started with VFX I relied on action stock footage a lot, and I slowly found this to be an issue The problem I was facing then was the stock footage together didn’t really look all that great, like it didn’t feel 3D enough nor fit in the scene too well.
Action Essentials from Video Copilot is probably your best option on action stock footage.
To fix my issue I did a little research and found out it probably would be better to add some of your own 3D renders to the stock footage. For example I want to make a piece of a building fall and hit the ground, I would create a animated part of a building falling and shattering. Then I would render it two ways, One the actual textured and complete and the other with a Z-Depth Pass. To render out the z depth pass you need to go to ‘render layers’ in the properties panel and check ‘mist’, render out a frame by clicking F12, then go to your ‘node editor’ and select the render layers icon toward the bottom. Then select ‘use nodes’, ‘backdrop, and ‘auto render’. Then proceed to add ‘viewer’ and ‘invert’ nodes (and ‘render layers’ node if it didn’t appear), drag the ‘mist’ to the color on the ‘invert’ node, (click RGB if it isn’t selected already), then drag the color (on the opposite side of the node) to the viewer node (make sure use alpha is checked), then simply click on the node. Then export it as you normally would. Part two will be uploaded soon in which the after effects part will available.
When I was a bit younger I had the issue of my intros looking wonky and not smooth. I tried multiple things like messing with the dope sheet, this still didn’t fix my issue. The fix was sitting in front of me, well more of what I was looking through.
For those of you that don’t know, I own UK2 Motion Graphics as well as The Render YouTube Channels, and this is one of my bad intro templates that I made with choppy animations.
To add some time of smoothness or some flow to the next movement, it seems to be a combination between three things, extra keyframes, camera movement, and the dope sheet. All these things need to work together to get the optimal smooth feel. To start, you are gonna need to create the beginning of the animation, in which you should stop at the rotation/position/scale you intend to be the focus of attention. Then add a (around 5-8 frames away from the previous keyframe, depends on the frame rate) keyframe after in which you go a bit farther than intended, this will add a feeling of inertia. Then further down the line (around 15-8 frames away from the next planned keyframe in which you will add a still keyframe, then a keyframe in which you will add motion) add a keyframe in which you give it a little motion.
To add even more smoothness to your animation, add camera movement. If you are using an empty like I am in this picture, click on your camera and add the same style of smoothness I discussed above. Make sure you use the menu on the right side (press “n” if there isn’t a menu there). Press “i” on your keyboard while your mouse hovers above rotation/position/scale on right menu (alt + i over the rotation/position/scale to delete your keyframe, be sure to be on the frame you added the keyframe on though).
To optimize your animation movements, be sure to mess around in the dope sheet. The best way to go about this is to pull out another tab (buy clicking and dragging out the tab icon on the top left of the far right panel, click the icon on the bottom left of what you dragged out and change it to the dope sheet), and messing around with your keyframes to get the best animation possible.
Since the dawn of CC 2017 for After Effects, the ability render out videos in a .mp4 format have been taken out. By taken out I mean taken out of default render options, there is still a way to get that sweet nicely encoded mp4 format.
Adobe Media Encoder’s default layout
Now if you have the creative cloud you can download Adobe Media Encoder, this is what is gonna let you render out in .mp4. The best way to go about rendering something out in this program is to, save your After Effects file, click on the comp that you want to render, go to file – export – add to Adobe Media Encoder Que. Media Encoder will eventually open up, and if it doesn’t, go to wherever you installed it on your computer, go down to the .exe file and open it, once opened drag and drop your comp into the application. There will be blue text that appears, that’s where you can change your options where to render, and the type of file extension you want it to have.
Making a solid VFX edit depends heavily on the shots in which you edit. So if you have a shot that requires heavy VFX development and it isn’t set up right, your VFX isn’t gonna look as good as anticipated.
The Mummy Returns, Crab Monster Thing, featuring The Rock
A good starting point would to set up two shots, One with a green screen and one without. With this method you have the green screen footage in which you can play with and the other footage (in which should be the same movement and same frame, just without the green screen, and actors) you have to stick behind the chroma key. With the chroma key you can add different background and effects without having to roto out the actors. Which will bring us to the other technique, which is rotoscoping. With this you don’t have to use the green screen, you can simply select and make your actors a seperate layer without destroying the background. The only issue to this is, the fact this will take a while and is very tedious. However if you can master this technique then, this can very efficient to your set. Another technique to help your VFX scenes would be making track masks. There is a plug-in in After Effects called Mocha AE, in which you can draw and adjust track masks of your subject, This kinda acts like rotoscoping however you apply this effect to work as a mask, this mask will follow your subject around a scene in which you can work your VFX magic around. So just take one of these techniques and try them out, it will be beneficial to practice.
Animation. Many people generally think of the movie Cars, however not all animation is like this. Animation is a method in which pictures are manipulated to appear as moving images, so it doesn’t have to be a 3D based result. In After Effects you can animation or move layers through keyframes in the timeline.
Here is a video with a fun tutorial on animation
Now to make any animation smoother, you simply select the keyframes, right click, go down to keyframe assistant, and select easy-ease or simply click F9 after selecting them. Once that is done click the graph editor, highlight the square knobs and pull the yellow hands toward whichever side to achieve a smooth and cool animation effect.
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, and more. Blender is a massive program and to learn everything at once is close to impossible. So to learn as much as you can, you need to break blender down into different categories. With the main ones being Animation, Modeling, and Compositing.
Blender 2.8, use of the particle system and volumetric lighting
The first thing that a beginner should learn is animation. Animation drives everything in Blender, so this would be super helpful to learn. So the best place to learn this is YouTube. Whenever you see a intense or complex intro on a TV show or even YouTube for that matter, animation drives it, of course. So the best place to look to learn something this complex is to look no further than the people who create these. Now you aren’t gonna learn everything you need to know from making an intro or watching a tutorial on it. However you can take these base concepts of animation and transfer it to the modeling aspect, to make your very own animation.
This tutorial shows a bit of what you can do with After Effects, however the video mainly shows how to animate text to flow smoothly and simply look nice. The animation part of this video is necessary to learn to advance further into blender.
The next step to furthering your knowledge in blender would to start learning how model. This is essential to know if you want to know how put anything into a scene (video). When you learn modeling, you can build anything you want, you can even 3D print your creations. Compositing is the next step on mastering blender, compositing is where you can take multiple scenes and bring them together while adding different effects and such.
Hello folks, and inspiring VFX artists, This blog here is to explain the uses of certain VFX tactics. Tutorials will also be available on this blog as well. So stick around and enjoy.
The Render 