Today's tutorial we're going to see something super exciting super advanced Dragon VFX in After Effects and Cinema 4D. So the first thing I've done is I shot this footage off a bridge on a highway like and I thought like the dragon vfx shoot to fly under the bridge and pass on the other side film something.
In today's video we're only going to take a look at how to do the first part where he flies under the bridge but you have to kind of keep in mind what movement of camera you're going to use in order for your dragon vfx or whatever to put it in your shop realistically.
First thing that I want to do is key how to mask out everything that moves in my shot as you can see right here the cars are passing all the time so I'm going to mask out my highway and I'm also going to keyframe it and manually do this but I will set my mask to none.
So I can actually see what I'm doing here. So once you're done with all of your masks set them to subtract you don't see what is actually moving and now it's very important to pre compose the shot and then it will look like there are no pixels to be tracked there.
So that's what we want we're going to pre-compose this move all the attributes and then we are going to track the camera I'm going to click the advanced analysis here and let it analyze in the background so once the shot is tracked we kind of have to look at the shop and see if it's tracked properly if not try to do it again or try different method.
But you will see all these tracking points all over your scene to see if it's well tracked you can always select a few points at a certain time and add a text element for example just as a reference if the text is sticking to that location or not.
So and as you can see the text is tracked properly to my scene now we can uncheck all these masks we can set them back to none so we actually see our footage again and then we can go to file and we can go to export and export to max and cinema4d exporter click OK and ok again.
Then in cinema 4d we will open up this file you will see that we have our track shot right here with the text integrated we can actually delete the text later on but for now let's just take it as reference of the positioning of where those trees were because I kind of understand the length of the scene true putting that text into my shot so I'm just going to leave it as it is there.
- Animate and Tracking
- Use Octane Render Cinema 4D
- Add HDR Eye
- Dragon VFX Animation
- Animation Smoother Setup
Step 1. Animate and Tracking
Then I'm going to create a new background element just so I can see my footage and in the color tab I'm going to load my video as a texture I'm going to right click on the material set to animate.
And then in the editor also check animate preview and then drag this material on the background and now we can see our video playing in cinema 4d we can see the tracking and it's okay probably the tracking isn't perfect.
Because we're not using an advanced tracker but for this case the text was staying in position it also looks a little bit different in cinema 4d because cinema 4d has a little bit of issues with playing 23.976 fps instead of 24 it's going to run it up to 24 frames per second that's not a problem.
Because afterwards in Pro and After Effects we're going to fix all that anyway I just want to tell you that it doesn't look perfectly tracked in cinema 4d while it does in Adobe After Effects so it doesn't matter that much.
Then I'm going to import my 3d model and I actually got a dragon 3d model from turbosquid comm I found this dragon here and it already had the animation done I'm not an animator so that's a great plus and it also looks really really dope.
So they have this FBX model that you can open up in Adobe After Effects and this contains all the information such as textures such as animation and all these different things that are dumb maybe in an other software.
So this allows me to open up a model in cinema 4d wildest dragon was actually made in a different software like 3ds max anyway I got to open this file it's animated amazingly what I'm going to do.
Now is group my dragon vfx call it dragon vfx and then I'm going to copy this and I'm just going to paste it in my outer scene so we can work on there further so currently we still have to relink the texture.
Step 2. Use Octane Render Cinema 4D
So we're going to do that first I'm going to be using octane render engine for cinema 4d I prefer that render engine by eight-ton because it's so fast it's GPU accelerated and also interacts realistically with lighting conditions and it's just extremely fast.
So I'm going to search for my texture skier and I'm going to import my color here for my color in and diffuse for my octane the roughness I'm going to set it to a glossy material.
And I'm going to also import my normals my bump my roughness my specular just by importing them as an image texture in my material then I'm going to open up my dragon vfx and I'm going to right click and fold all just so I can see everything that's in that group.
And I'm going to apply this material to the dragon body so it already has a material I'm just going to hover that on top of that material that's going to replace that material that was there before and there we go I'm going to create a new octane material.
And this is going to be for the ice I'm going to go to the emission tab here and I'm going to actually import the ice as an emission texture emission is just like a texture that illuminates a light and it's going to make it look like the eyes are a little bit glowy.
And I kind of like the effect. I'm just going to import these as the lights also here I'm going to copy that image into the diffuse layer then I'm going to jump into the node editor of octane so then in the live view monitor for octane and the displacement here is a little bit too much.
Step 3. Add HDR Eye
I'm going to set it to 1 or 2 and also play with the level of detail with the resolution in there and we already have a sick looking dragon vfx then I'm going to add an HDR eye environment this is where you can import a 360 degrees map of any kind of sky.
That's going to give you accurate colors towards your scene so if you're filming at a certain location you should also make a 360 image of that location in HDR and that will allow you to use it lighting in your scene realistically with a 3d integrated object.
I didn't have that on the location so I just searched for a cloudy day as my footage is cloudy then it comes down to playing with all these settings a little bit you can rotate the hgri environment if you want this guy to come from the top or the bottom or the side.
And just play with the lighting conditions a little bit and just try to match the lighting of your entire scene to match the dragon vfx as well try to match the course and that's basically what you want to do look at reference from Game of Thrones or just productions.
That already proved that they can make a realistic looking dragon because dragon vfx aren't real or look at like crocodiles as a reference because they have some kind of similar skin and and just try to match it as good as possible.
That's where 3d artists shine if they are using a lot of reference because it's quite hard to imagine something that doesn't exist or it does it who knows maybe dragon vfx exist somewhere we're just not being told also in the octane settings.
Step 4. Dragon VFX Animation
I'm going to check off a channel and uncheck keep environment that way we have a transparent background when we import it in Adobe After Effects and we can use it on top of our footage then for the effects I'm going to be using this as a reference.
So I'm first going to move my dragon vfx towards the text and then I'm going to scale it based on the distance of where the text was in my shot so I'm going to kind of imagine how big my dragon vfx would be there we go and that looks all right.
And then I'm going to click again on my dragon vfx and I'm going to group it again I'm going to put it in a null object so I'm going to be animating that entire note object as my dragon vfx but as my dragon vfx is already animated.
Idon't want to animate double on that so I just want to create a new null object animate that new object to go from left to right for example while my dragon vfx here is animating and it's just going to follow that kind of no object.
But if I would do this on my dragon and all the keyframes would get kind of crazy so this is just an easy trick if you want to work with already animated objects and you just want to quickly animate.
Them on top of that just group them and animate the group so then put it in the far distance I'm going to create keyframes for all x y&z and rotation keyframes at the beginning of my timeline.
Step 5. Animation Smoother Setup
Then at the end or towards the end which is going to move the dragon vfx closer to the camera and even pass the camera and bring it down and rotate a little bit for a variation I'm also going to dive into the graph editor here is where I can tweak.
All the little details about animation make it comment smoother and come to a slow stop or just ramp up very quickly and just making everything just match together so if you make a movement from left to right if it is going to be a linear movement or is it going to speed up go fast.
And then go slow again these are things you want to think about how is a dragon vfx going to interact when it's coming from all the way above it's going to stay rather high and then once it decides to go under that bridge it's going to ram down quickly.
And then pass it great reference for dragon vfx is actually just looking at birds and how do they interact with their wings okay so once you're done with the graph editor and you're satisfied with your entire animation.
We can now look at exporting this entire scene into Adobe After Effects to finalize it so I'm going to set my renderer to obtain renderer and I'm going to save it to a specific location in a tiff file format.
And I'm also going to change my bits to 16 bits per channel also check alpha channel so we definitely don't have a background and then full HD all frames and then just hit render let the entire dragon vfx render.
So once it's done rendering we're going to jump back into Adobe After Effects so you export it as an image sequence we're going to click on the first one make sure that you check on import as image sequence.
And then it's going to import right here straight and Matt click OK and then right click very important go to interpret footage and we're going to see right here that it's assumed this framerate 30fps which I know for effect is not true assume this framerate.
And change that to the frame rate you are using in your scene and then import your footage into your shot so it's it's literally that easy okay a lot f people hate me probably right now it's not that easy so we have the our SMB plugin that.
I'm going to be adding to my dragon vfx thi is a fake motion blur provider it's a really strong and powerful plugin that just fakes the motion blur as your hand for example moves the camera it's not super sharp so this is on plugin for that.
And then I'm also going to add a noise and drain effect and I'm going to add match grain so this is a very important step if you want to make 3d look realistic. We want to kind of crap eyes our 3d model that.
I'm also going to add the curves the exposure to tint effect play around with all these settings to kind of match my course with the background so once you're satisfied with your course and all of your settings this is what we have an awesome dragon vfx flying in a real bridge so that's it.
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