IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi, I am Lee Lanier, and I'd like to welcome you to
Maya Rendering for After Effect Composites.
| | 00:09 | In this course I'll show you how to
prepare Maya Renders for integration with
| | 00:13 | video footage in After Effects.
| | 00:14 | We'll learn how to set up render passes
in Maya by using the Render layer editor
| | 00:19 | and the mental ray contribution map system.
| | 00:21 | We'll explore ways to create compositions
in After Effects by combining the Maya
| | 00:25 | renders with video footage.
| | 00:27 | I'll walk you through the various forms
of Motion Tracking, including Transfer
| | 00:31 | Tracking, Stabilization, and Corner Pin tracking.
| | 00:35 | Finally, we'll explore various ways to
make the CG and video footage integration
| | 00:39 | more believable by using the Effect Filters.
| | 00:42 | Now, let's get started with Maya
Rendering for After Effects Composites.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a Premium Member of the
lynda.com online training library, or if
| | 00:04 | you're watching this tutorial on the DVD,
you have access to the exercise files
| | 00:09 | used throughout this title.
| | 00:10 | Let's take a look and
see how those are laid out.
| | 00:12 | All the files are in the exercise files
folder, within that folder are Chapter
| | 00:17 | folders, a Footage folder, Renders
folder, and Textures folder.
| | 00:21 | The Chapter folders contain Maya scene
files, and also After Effects project
| | 00:26 | files, you'll need to create the exercises.
| | 00:30 | The Footage folder contains the
live-action image sequences that need to
| | 00:34 | import into After Effects.
| | 00:35 | These feature an actress in a real location,
that we're going to combine with CG renders.
| | 00:40 | The Renders folder contains
CG renders created in Maya.
| | 00:43 | The last folder is the Textures folder.
This contains textures that Maya needs
| | 00:48 | to render out the CG.
| | 00:49 | Now you'll need to open files in the
Chapter folders, the Footage folder, and the
| | 00:54 | Renders folder to complete the exercises.
| | 00:56 | However, you don't need to access the
Textures folder, that's just there, so
| | 01:00 | Maya has the textures for the CG objects.
| | 01:02 | If you're not a Premium Subscriber to
lynda.com you don't have access to the
| | 01:07 | exercise files, but you can follow
along from scratch with your own assets,
| | 01:11 | so let's get started.
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1. Prepping a Maya SceneWorking with image sequences| 00:00 | We'll take a moment to
talk about image sequences.
| | 00:03 | Now if you have already worked with
image sequences, this might be familiar
| | 00:06 | information, if you haven't,
this will be good to know.
| | 00:09 | Now there are two ways to work with
live-action footage inside compositing
| | 00:14 | program like After Effects.
| | 00:15 | One is to bring in a movie like a
QuickTime or AVI file, and the other is to
| | 00:20 | work with the image sequence.
| | 00:22 | Now traditionally, Visual Effects work uses
image sequences, but what is an image sequence?
| | 00:27 | An image sequence is a series of still
images that are numbered in such a way
| | 00:32 | that they can be imported in the correct order.
| | 00:35 | Compared to a movie, a movie is a
single file where all the frames are stuffed
| | 00:39 | into a single file, like a QuickTime.
Well, why do we use image sequences?
| | 00:44 | Well, for instance, motion pictures
are often shot on motion picture film.
| | 00:48 | In other words features are shot on actual film.
| | 00:51 | That film has to be converted to
some digital format to do the effects,
| | 00:56 | therefore they run through a scanner.
| | 00:57 | The scanner converts individual film
frames into individual still images.
| | 01:03 | Another reason is because of quality.
| | 01:05 | Often if you need to work with
footage, and you're using a movie,
| | 01:08 | there are compression issues.
| | 01:09 | For instance, a QuickTime
or AVI will be compressed.
| | 01:13 | Another reason is the fact that
Visual Effects often involve using CG.
| | 01:17 | If you render out CG from a program like
Maya, you tend to pick image sequences.
| | 01:22 | Now it is possible to render a
QuickTime or AVI in a program like Maya.
| | 01:27 | The problem is management, let's say you
start to render, and you need to cancel a render.
| | 01:32 | If you cancel a render, while you're rendering
a movie that movie is broken, you can't use it.
| | 01:37 | However, if you break a render, and
you're rendering an image sequence, the
| | 01:40 | frames that rendered up to
that point are perfectly fine.
| | 01:43 | So let's say you render frames 1 to 100,
and you cancel a render, you can then
| | 01:48 | start the render later at frame
100 and go forward. So it's great for
| | 01:52 | management, it's much more
efficient to use an image sequence.
| | 01:55 | The problems does arise with digital
video, if you shoot digital video, digital
| | 01:59 | video cameras store that
footage as some type of movie.
| | 02:02 | It might be MPEG4, it might be a
QuickTime, it might be AVI, or some other formats.
| | 02:08 | If you want to use that to composite
with, you have to think about whether you
| | 02:13 | want to convert that into an image sequence.
| | 02:15 | Now if you do, it's really not that
hard, in fact, we'll demonstrate it right
| | 02:19 | here in After Effects.
| | 02:20 | Let's give it a try, and I have prepared
a QuickTime we can use as a test, so
| | 02:25 | File > Import > File, this is in
the Footage folder, and it is called
| | 02:31 | test.mov, for movie.
| | 02:33 | This is HD, and it happens to be 72
frames long. Let's say we want to turn this
| | 02:39 | into an image sequence, but only use
some of the frames, we can do that.
| | 02:42 | First thing I'll do is make a new
composition, Composition > New Composition,
| | 02:46 | make sure they are the
correct size, correct frame rate.
| | 02:49 | Again, let's say we only want to export
a piece of this movie, your movie might
| | 02:53 | be much longer if you shoot yourself.
| | 02:55 | Just for now though, I'm going to
enter 48 frames for the duration.
| | 02:58 | The movie is 72, but we're going
to only export 48, then I'll click OK.
| | 03:02 | I want to double-click the movie to
take a look at it, and I will come up in
| | 03:08 | the footage viewer.
| | 03:09 | What you can do is find the section
you want to export by using the time
| | 03:13 | slider, let's say I'll look through the
footage, and I want to actually start at frame 10.
| | 03:18 | I can go to frame 10 here, and click
this button which is the Set IN point
| | 03:22 | button that basically chops off the front,
it's going to start this clip right here.
| | 03:27 | Now since I want 48 frames, I'm going to
go forward to frame 58, you can see the
| | 03:33 | frame read out right here.
| | 03:34 | Once I get to frame 58, then I can
click this button, which is the Set OUT
| | 03:39 | point, so this starts as a simple editing tool.
| | 03:43 | Once I have that section selected, and
I have my composition ready, I can click
| | 03:48 | this button which, is the Overlay Edit.
| | 03:50 | That will pull this section down and
place on the timeline, and there it is,
| | 03:54 | there is that little section.
Now I can render it.
| | 03:59 | Of course, you can adjust this at
this point, I can add effects to this,
| | 04:03 | adjust the color and so on, but you can also
just export as is. That's what I'll do here.
| | 04:08 | So with this composition selected, I'm going to
go to Composition > Add to Render Queue.
| | 04:14 | Now once you see the Render Queue tab,
there are two things you need to check
| | 04:17 | before you actually render.
| | 04:18 | One is the Output Module, so
just click on the word Lossless.
| | 04:22 | This way you select the
Format you're going to render to.
| | 04:25 | Now you can't render it to a movie, in
fact, this is AVI by default, or you
| | 04:30 | can render to things like QuickTime or MPEG4.
| | 04:32 | Now any of these options that say
sequence, that's an image sequence, that will
| | 04:36 | be a series of individual frames.
| | 04:39 | So, for example, we can select Targa
Sequence and render out a series of Targa images.
| | 04:45 | Occasionally, you have to deal with the
format options, but for Targa Sequence,
| | 04:48 | you're basically done here.
I can just go ahead and click OK.
| | 04:52 | Now with the image sequence I am not
worried about sound, an image sequence does
| | 04:56 | not carry sound because it's a series of images.
| | 04:59 | Next thing you have to check here is
the Output To, so I'm going to click the
| | 05:04 | Comp 1 word right here,
this is given to you by default.
| | 05:07 | This way you pick where you're going
to write the image sequence to, and what
| | 05:11 | the name of that sequence will be.
| | 05:12 | So the image sequence is generally
good to put it in its own folder.
| | 05:16 | Now in my case, I have a folder set up already,
but you might need to make a new one yourself.
| | 05:21 | Now the browser has a new folder button,
and this will vary in location based on
| | 05:25 | Windows versus Mac, but
you can make a new folder.
| | 05:28 | Once you have the new folder, try and
go into that folder, then pick a name, so
| | 05:32 | I am going to call mine test.
| | 05:34 | It's generally a good idea to use the
same name and format, and that's name dot
| | 05:40 | bracket, these pound signs
bracket dot and the extension.
| | 05:44 | Now these brackets and the pound signs
represent the numeric placeholders, which
| | 05:49 | will turn into numbering for the
sequence. So what this means is bracket three
| | 05:52 | pounds signs bracket is I'll
have three placeholders, so it will be
| | 05:56 | test.000.tga, test.001.tga, and so on.
| | 06:02 | You can change the number of pound
signs if you want to change the number of
| | 06:05 | numeric placeholders, but in this
situation, this is perfectly fine.
| | 06:08 | So once you have the name set up, click
Save. So I have checked the Output Module
| | 06:13 | and the Output To, I'm ready to
hit the Render button at this point.
| | 06:17 | So Render, render through the sequence,
with this example it goes pretty fast,
| | 06:23 | so now I can go outside After
Effects and look at that sequence.
| | 06:25 | So here is my test folder
and here is the image sequence.
| | 06:28 | First frame is named test.000.tga, all
the way up to 47, this is the 48 frame
| | 06:34 | sequence, but I started with frame 000,
so therefore, it ends with 047.
| | 06:39 | Let's get back to After Effects.
| | 06:40 | So at any point if we want to
bring this in again, I could that.
| | 06:44 | I can go back to my composition, I can
go up to File > Import > File, go to that
| | 06:49 | folder, for me it's on my Desktop,
grab the first frame, make sure it has
| | 06:53 | Sequence down here, make sure that's checked.
| | 06:55 | And I'll bring in the entire
sequence as a single unit, and there we go,
| | 07:00 | there's our footage.
| | 07:01 | So we discussed why image sequences
are used in the Visual Effects industry,
| | 07:05 | what their advantages are, and also how
to create your own, if you have your own
| | 07:10 | piece of video footage that's stored as a movie.
| | 07:12 | After Effects is not the only program
you can do this in, pretty much any major
| | 07:16 | compositing package has this ability to
convert a movie into an image sequence.
| | 07:19 | So image sequences are good to work
with, and we will be working with them
| | 07:23 | throughout this series of videos.
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| Importing reference video as an image plane| 00:00 | One important part of Visual Effects
work is rendering out the 3D models so that
| | 00:05 | they integrate properly in the composite.
| | 00:07 | One thing that will help you do that
successfully is create an image plane as
| | 00:11 | reference inside Maya.
| | 00:12 | We'll use this scene right here to
demonstrate that, this is shot1_start.ma.
| | 00:16 | And this is actually the first step of
the first tutorial where we'll combine
| | 00:21 | this 3D model, which is a futuristic
spyglass, with a live-action piece of
| | 00:26 | footage of an actress. In fact, we are
going to make it look like this device is
| | 00:30 | held by the actress in her hand.
So how do you create image plane?
| | 00:34 | Well, first thing we need to do is
check a few settings to make sure the image
| | 00:38 | plane is used correctly.
| | 00:39 | First thing I want to do is
check the frame rate of the scene.
| | 00:41 | So I'm going to go down to the
Animation shortcut, down here, this bottom
| | 00:44 | right button, click that.
| | 00:46 | It opens up the Preferences window,
I'll go to the Settings section in the
| | 00:50 | center, and you see what the
frame rate of this scene is.
| | 00:52 | Right now, it's 24 frames per second.
| | 00:54 | Now the video is actually shot in 24
frames per second, so that's a great match,
| | 00:59 | but if you had other footage at a different
frame rate, you'd change it here first.
| | 01:03 | Second thing we need to check
is the resolution of the project.
| | 01:06 | So I'm going to close this, go to the
Render Settings window and scroll down,
| | 01:09 | check the resolution.
| | 01:10 | Right now, it's set to HD 1080, and that's
great because that's a resolution of the video.
| | 01:15 | That's high-definition video, which
is 1920x1080, so we're good there.
| | 01:19 | If you have different
resolution, you'd change it to match.
| | 01:21 | So check the frame rate, check the
resolution, so now we can bring image plane in.
| | 01:25 | Now you have a couple of options in the
Image Plane, one is you can bring in the
| | 01:30 | image sequence, or a movie.
And movie would be like a QuickTime, or AVI file.
| | 01:33 | An image sequence, which is actually
very common for Visual Effects work is a
| | 01:37 | series of numbered frames.
| | 01:38 | Each frame is a whole frame from the
video, and that can be exported from a
| | 01:42 | program like After Effects.
| | 01:44 | So let's say we are bringing an image
sequence, and we go up to the View menu
| | 01:48 | for the camera where we want to attach the
image plane, in this case, Perspective view.
| | 01:52 | Go to View > Image Plane > Import Image,
then go to the Footage folder, go to
| | 01:56 | Shot1, and click on the very first frame in
the Image Sequence, and you can see
| | 02:01 | there's a whole bunch of frames
here, in fact, there are 60 total.
| | 02:04 | We'll click on 000, open that, and
that image comes in as an Image Plane, and
| | 02:08 | that's attached to the
perspective camera, or the persp camera.
| | 02:13 | In fact, if I go to another view, like
persp1 here, and zoom out, you'll see that
| | 02:17 | that plane is attached to the persp camera.
| | 02:19 | Now it's not quite useful yet, one
problem is I only have one frame of
| | 02:23 | that entire image sequence, if I scrub the
timeline, it doesn't move, nothing changes.
| | 02:28 | What I have to do is go to the Attribute
Editor for the image plane and make a few changes.
| | 02:33 | If we go back to View and go to Image
Plane > Image Plane Attributes and pick
| | 02:37 | the one plane that I have, there are
the attributes right here.
| | 02:41 | If I scroll down a little bit there's an
attribute called Use Image Sequence.
| | 02:44 | If I click that, it tells Maya to
automatically load the frames as you go
| | 02:49 | across the timeline.
| | 02:51 | In fact, what it does is writes an
expression that relates the time to the
| | 02:55 | number of the frame.
| | 02:56 | Now in this case, it's a little bit off, I
was to scrub all the way to the end to
| | 03:01 | frame 60, the image plane disappears,
that's because the frames were numbered 0 to 59.
| | 03:06 | Luckily though, there is Frame
Offset which I can change -1, and I'll
| | 03:10 | change that relationship.
| | 03:11 | So what that means is if I am on
frame 60, actually load frame 59, 60 minus 1.
| | 03:16 | When I am on frame 1, it tells
it to load frame 0, which is 1 minus 1.
| | 03:22 | So now we have the sequence
loading up one frame at a time.
| | 03:26 | Another problem though is the fact that
the 3D model has disappeared, and that's
| | 03:29 | because the image plane
is actually in front of it.
| | 03:32 | What we can do though is go back to the
Attribute Editor for the image plane, go
| | 03:36 | a little bit further, and
there is a Depth Attribute.
| | 03:38 | If I change that Depth Attribute to a
higher number, such as 500, it pushes the
| | 03:43 | plane further from the camera, and
therefore behind the model, so now we can see that.
| | 03:48 | Now, as we look at the view, right
here we can see that the image plane might
| | 03:53 | be a little cut off.
| | 03:54 | One thing I can do to make sure I see
the edges of the image plane, is go up
| | 03:59 | to the View here, go to the Camera
Settings and turn on the Resolution Gate.
| | 04:03 | The Resolution Gate will show me the
entire frame, and the green line in this
| | 04:07 | case shows me the edge of the render.
| | 04:09 | So now I can make sure I
can see the entire thing.
| | 04:12 | So let's try a test render
and see what this looks like.
| | 04:15 | With the Perspective camera activated,
I'll go up to the Render view shortcut
| | 04:19 | and render out a frame, that's a big
resolution, so I'm going to scale the
| | 04:22 | Render view down a bit first, and take a look.
| | 04:25 | And there indeed is the 3D model in front of
the Image Plane, so it's great for reference.
| | 04:29 | Now one problem is, is it's
permanently there until I hide it.
| | 04:33 | Eventually, when we render this
out, we don't want that there.
| | 04:36 | So there's a way to turn
it off just for that view.
| | 04:39 | If I go back to the Attribute Editor
for the Image Plane, go up to the top,
| | 04:43 | there is an attribute called Alpha Gain.
| | 04:45 | If I turn that to 0, it hides
it from the Prospective view.
| | 04:48 | If I re-render it now, you will see
the Image Plane is gone and another good
| | 04:52 | thing is the Alpha Channel is correct,
I'll go up to the Alpha Channel, the
| | 04:56 | Alpha is there just for the
model, but not for the Image Plane.
| | 04:59 | Okay, so far we have set the Image Plane
based on image sequence, based on some
| | 05:03 | video footage, so we're ready to move on
to the next step, where we'll position
| | 05:07 | the camera to make sure that the perspective lines
up, so the model better matches the footage.
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| Matching the 3D camera to the video footage| 00:00 | Another important aspect of rendering
3D models for eventual integration inside
| | 00:05 | compositing program is
getting the correct perspective.
| | 00:07 | You want to make sure that your 3D
camera matches the camera that shot the
| | 00:12 | original footage, for instance the
video footage, as best as possible.
| | 00:15 | This will require positioning,
rotation, and also checking the lens.
| | 00:19 | Now this scene, here, that we worked on
from the previous movie has a perspective
| | 00:23 | camera, that's where the Image Plane is.
| | 00:25 | It's roughly positioned, it's not the
position we want to use to render out this model.
| | 00:29 | I want to make sure that we get a
perspective that makes it look like this
| | 00:33 | model's being held by this actress's hand
because eventually we'll do that in the Composite.
| | 00:37 | We'll integrate it to make that work.
| | 00:39 | There are several ways to move
the camera to achieve that goal.
| | 00:42 | One is to simply use the Alt key and
move the camera around in the actual Render
| | 00:46 | view, the Perspective view in this case.
| | 00:48 | We can scroll, dolly, everything we'd
normally do in Maya to move the camera.
| | 00:52 | Now you can do that on the first frame
or the last frame, I'm on frame1 right
| | 00:56 | now, but we can also go to the last
frame and try positioning for that because
| | 01:00 | that's where the actress is
holding that to her eye to look through.
| | 01:03 | So the first way is using the Alt key, the
second way is a little bit more precise.
| | 01:07 | What we can do is go find the camera icon
and go up to some other view, like the
| | 01:12 | Perspective1 view, dolly back
and find the icon, which is right here.
| | 01:15 | Now if icon is too small, we can
actually scale it up, it doesn't really affect
| | 01:17 | anything, it's just for your reference.
| | 01:19 | But you can then use Transform tools
like your Move, Rotate, or Scale to try to
| | 01:24 | get into a better position.
And don't forget rotation is very important.
| | 01:28 | Again scale's just for your reference,
it won't to actually affect the view.
| | 01:31 | The third way you can adjust the
camera is just to go into the Channel box
| | 01:35 | once the camera is selected, enter
numbers here by hand, if you want to be
| | 01:38 | much more precise about it.
Now there is more than one solution for this.
| | 01:42 | In fact, I experimented it myself for a
while to try to find a good position for
| | 01:46 | the camera, a good rotation for the camera,
but eventually I found that if I'm on
| | 01:50 | frame 60, I came up with some values
that worked pretty well, and you can enter
| | 01:54 | these directly into the Channel box.
| | 01:55 | I found that a position of 44, 24, 120,
works well, and then also rotation of
| | 02:01 | -12, 21, and 0 is good,
and that works pretty well.
| | 02:07 | Now we're not actually going to animate
the camera in this case, we just want to
| | 02:12 | get the position roughed in.
| | 02:13 | We're not doing a 3D tracking job or
creating animated camera, we're simply
| | 02:17 | going to position the camera to render
out of the sequence and actually add the
| | 02:21 | Motion Tracking inside After Effects.
| | 02:23 | And Motion Tracking will
make it stick to her hand.
| | 02:26 | So we're just getting the rough
position here, which is basically good for
| | 02:29 | the entire sequence.
| | 02:30 | You can see it's not
touching her hand perfectly.
| | 02:33 | The one last thing I check
on the camera is the lens.
| | 02:35 | There is a virtual lens here, so if I
go to the Camera Attribute Editor, View >
| | 02:39 | Camera Attribute Editor, one of the first
attributes is Focal Length, that's a virtual lens.
| | 02:43 | This is in millimeters.
| | 02:45 | So a real camera might have a lens of 35 mm or 50
or whatever it is, and this is the equivalent.
| | 02:50 | Now a low number is a wide lens, where you
see more, for instance, 25 is a wider lens.
| | 02:55 | And you see more of the surrounding.
| | 02:58 | A bigger number is a longer lens,
like a telephoto or zoom, like 100, here,
| | 03:03 | would mean that you're zoomed in.
| | 03:05 | In fact, the spyglasses up here at the top
of the frame now because it's so zoomed in.
| | 03:09 | Now if I had noticed from the set, I
could enter an accurate value here, but
| | 03:13 | because I don't, I don't know what the
real lens was that was used on the set, I
| | 03:18 | just have to approximate it. And actually
in this case 35 mm works pretty well.
| | 03:21 | I can just leave it at that.
| | 03:23 | And 35 mm is actually a common lens,
which is used for shots like this.
| | 03:27 | Now one quick word about the Film Back,
the Film Back is a section that's below
| | 03:31 | that where you can match a very specific camera.
| | 03:33 | And this will replicate the camera's
aperture, which is the plate where light
| | 03:36 | enters to start the film or the video.
| | 03:38 | Now if you knew the camera, you could
change it. In fact, all the cameras here are
| | 03:42 | film cameras, like motion picture cameras.
| | 03:44 | Now since we don't know our camera,
and there is no video camera listed here,
| | 03:47 | we can just leave it on user, but if
you were to work on a project with the
| | 03:50 | film camera, and you got notes from the
set, you can change this to match that
| | 03:53 | very specific camera.
| | 03:55 | And any time you change this, it
affects the view, in fact, if I just quickly
| | 03:57 | change this to one of these cameras,
you see the view instantly changes,
| | 04:01 | based on the physics involved.
But for now we can just leave that on User.
| | 04:05 | Now the User is actually set to these
numbers, but if you just leave it at User,
| | 04:08 | you'll be good to go.
Now we're back to the default User settings.
| | 04:13 | So we have roughly positioned the camera
to get the Perspective to work for us.
| | 04:16 | We're now ready to move on to next step,
where we'll create lights to try to replicate
| | 04:20 | the lighting that is
contained within the video footage.
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| Lighting the model| 00:00 | The next step to preparing the 3D
model for rendering and eventual compositing is
| | 00:04 | to match the lighting.
| | 00:05 | I want to match the Maya lights to the
lighting that's actually contained in the
| | 00:09 | video footage, in other
words, the real world lighting.
| | 00:11 | So you can look at the footage and
determine how many lights you have and what
| | 00:15 | their functions are.
| | 00:16 | And often when you discuss lighting,
you talk about lights as it being the key
| | 00:20 | light, or fill light, or a back light.
| | 00:22 | Key light is the most intense light
in the scene, it's your main light.
| | 00:26 | The fill light is a secondary source.
| | 00:28 | Often this is a weaker light and often this
light is bounced off something like a wall.
| | 00:32 | The third light, which is sometimes
there and sometimes not, is a backlight.
| | 00:35 | That's a light that will be coming from
behind the character or from behind the object.
| | 00:39 | So let's take a look at the footage.
| | 00:41 | So if I maximize this frame, here, I
can see that the light is coming over her left
| | 00:45 | shoulder. And I can tell that by the
shadow on her nose, it's coming from high
| | 00:49 | and from her left side, and that's
the sun, because it was shot outside.
| | 00:53 | So in order to create a sun, what I can
do in Maya is use a directional light,
| | 00:57 | because of the same type
of parallel beams of lights.
| | 01:00 | So I am going to create a directional
light, Create > Lights > Directional Light.
| | 01:03 | Now, the icon is very small, but I can
scale it up--and it won't affect the light
| | 01:08 | quality--just so I can see it, and
then it's just the matter of rotating it.
| | 01:12 | Position does not matter for this light either.
| | 01:14 | So I am going to rotate it so
it comes from the same direction.
| | 01:16 | Now, one thing you can do to help you
figure this out is to go back to your
| | 01:22 | Perspective view, go to Lighting
menu, and switch to Use All Lights.
| | 01:24 | You can see instantaneously that it
starts to use the lights in the scene to
| | 01:27 | give you more accurate shading.
| | 01:30 | Now, the front of my spyglass is dark,
which means I need to rotate the light
| | 01:34 | some more to get it to creep
around the front, something like this.
| | 01:37 | So at this point we can do a test
render and see what it looks like.
| | 01:41 | So I will scale down my
Render view, and there it is.
| | 01:44 | Now, I can use my Alt, or my Option, key
and mouse buttons to scroll or zoom in,
| | 01:49 | for instance, Alt to right-mouse
button zooms in, and take a look.
| | 01:52 | And there is the light in
the front of this model.
| | 01:54 | Now, the sun is creating a shadow
like on her nose, so let's also create a
| | 01:58 | shadow with this directional light.
| | 02:00 | So with the directional light selected,
I am going to go to the Attribute Editor and
| | 02:03 | turn on Use Depth Map Shadows, and
then I can re-render that and take a look,
| | 02:07 | and there is a shadow.
| | 02:09 | Now, it might take some experimentation
to find a good position for this to
| | 02:12 | match your footage, and I did try a
few different rotations, and I have some
| | 02:16 | numbers here you can plug in.
| | 02:18 | I came up with -58, 40, -26, and I'll
re-render that, and there is the shadow.
| | 02:27 | Now, one thing that's happening at
this point is the parts that are in shadow
| | 02:31 | are super dark. They are pretty much
pitch-black, and that's not the same as
| | 02:34 | the video footage where the dark area
is not particularly dark. So I am going
| | 02:38 | to lighten that up, and that's a really good
place to add a second light, as a fill light.
| | 02:43 | So you want to create a fill light,
in Maya you can use the ambient light.
| | 02:45 | So I am going to create an ambient light.
| | 02:47 | And position on this does matter because it's a
combination of directional, omni-directional rays.
| | 02:52 | So I will put it at the front side of
the spyglass and maybe to the left, in
| | 02:57 | other words, offset the directional light.
And then I am going to render a smaller region.
| | 03:01 | If you draw a region box, you can render that
region by itself by clicking the Render Region button.
| | 03:06 | You can see instantaneously that
there is more light in that area now, it's
| | 03:10 | definitely brighter.
That's probably too bright.
| | 03:12 | One thing I do have to deal with is
the intensities of light, not only this
| | 03:16 | light, but the key light also.
| | 03:17 | In fact, I should go back to the
directional light and maybe increase that to
| | 03:21 | make a little bit brighter, 1.5 in my Intensity.
| | 03:24 | And then make the fill light dimmer,
so I go back to Ambient Light and reduce that.
| | 03:28 | And the rule of thumb for a fill
light is generally you have at least half
| | 03:32 | the intensity of the key.
| | 03:34 | In fact, I can go even lower though,
go to something like 0.3 to make it a
| | 03:38 | little bit dimmer, and then I
am going to render this area.
| | 03:40 | And so we have the dark areas filled in
a little bit and the front a little bit
| | 03:43 | brighter, but not overly
blown out in terms of brightness.
| | 03:47 | At this point you notice that
the shadows are very hard-edged.
| | 03:49 | And it might be nice to get
a softer shadow because she has a soft
| | 03:52 | shadow on her, like around the nose.
| | 03:54 | So what I can do is go back to the
Directional Light, go to the Attribute Editor
| | 03:58 | then go to Depth Map section. The trick
for a soft shadow, what that type of
| | 04:02 | shadow is to have a small
resolution and large filter size.
| | 04:05 | So I can go straight to Filter Size
and make that large number such as 18,
| | 04:09 | keep the Resolution fairly small, at 512,
render that region, and then get a softer shadow.
| | 04:15 | So there is nice soft shadow.
| | 04:16 | Now we have two lights so far, you can
also place a third light as a backlight
| | 04:20 | to get some light to sneak
around the right side of the spyglass.
| | 04:24 | So what I can do for that is place a
point light in there and the point light,
| | 04:27 | the position definitely does matter.
| | 04:29 | And we will put this behind the spyglass to
the camera right side, some place like that.
| | 04:34 | I don't want it to be too bright, so
I am going to go back to that one and
| | 04:37 | turn the Intensity down to, say, 0.2, and then
render out a little region to test the right side.
| | 04:43 | You can see it instantaneously
has a little highlight right here.
| | 04:46 | Now, again you have to
experiment with the location.
| | 04:49 | Now the location for that one I wound
up with also, which is 24, 12, -13, and
| | 04:57 | And I will render this region here, so
it's giving me a little extra light in the
| | 05:02 | right side here, and you can choose
whether you want the highlight to appear or not.
| | 05:06 | Now, I do need to pay attention to
the position of the ambient light also,
| | 05:10 | because that will affect the lighting,
even if it's subtle. So I do have a
| | 05:13 | position on that too, that
worked out, which is -6, 18, 23.
| | 05:18 | Now all lights are rotated and positioned.
| | 05:20 | Render one more time, and
that's looking pretty good.
| | 05:23 | So now we have worked out the lighting to
match the video footage, we're ready to
| | 05:28 | move on to next step, where we'll set
up render passes to render out this model
| | 05:32 | in separate pieces, which will
be recombined in the composite.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating mattes and shadows in preparation for rendering| 00:00 | Each time you have to match a 3D model to a piece of
live-action footage, the challenges are slightly different.
| | 00:06 | Now you still have to place the camera,
perhaps bring in the image plane for reference, also
| | 00:11 | create lights, and adjust those lights,
but no two steps are going to be the same.
| | 00:16 | For example, this is the start of the second
project where we're going to integrate this
| | 00:19 | 3D spaceship with the footage of
this actress looking up at the sky.
| | 00:23 | So, some of the work's already been done here,
but we will use some of the steps that we have
| | 00:27 | talked about in previous movies.
| | 00:29 | Image plane has been brought in, the image
sequence is functioning, so all the frames
| | 00:33 | are viewable in the timeline, the camera has
been positioned, and the goal of camera positioning
| | 00:38 | is to create the illusion that the
spaceship is in the sky above this building.
| | 00:43 | Now, the camera is
positioned for the first frame.
| | 00:46 | There is no animation on it.
| | 00:47 | So, the concern is not replicating the
exact movement of the camera, but only to rough
| | 00:52 | in the perspective.
| | 00:54 | The actual fine motion is going to be
added in the After Effects Composite later on.
| | 00:58 | The other thing that's been done at this
point is that the lights have been added.
| | 01:02 | A similar problem-solving technique where
you look at the footage and figure out where
| | 01:06 | lights are coming from and
how you might recreate those.
| | 01:09 | In this case, the light is coming from the
sun high above on the right side of the frame.
| | 01:13 | So the key light is the directional
light placed in a similar position.
| | 01:16 | There is also a fill light coming from the
opposite direction from the ground that represents
| | 01:20 | bounced light, as if light from
the sun bounced off the concrete.
| | 01:23 | There are only two lights
in this situation though.
| | 01:26 | Now, one new thing that we do with this
particular project is deal with shadows on this building.
| | 01:31 | Also, we can figure out a way to cut the
spaceship out so it looks like it's actually behind
| | 01:37 | the building and not over the top of it.
| | 01:38 | If I go to this view and maximize it,
right now it's in the X-ray mode, but if I turn
| | 01:42 | off the X-ray mode, you can see it's solid, and
it's going to eventually appear as if it's on top.
| | 01:46 | What we can do, though, is create a piece
of primitive geometry and assign it a special
| | 01:50 | material called a Use Background to capture
the shadow, which we can use in compositing
| | 01:54 | to put it over this building, and also cut
out the spaceship so it looks like it's sitting
| | 01:58 | behind the edge of the building, like
it's high up in the air. So let's do that.
| | 02:02 | So I am going to create a primitive plane.
| | 02:04 | A primitive plane is going to fit
the front of the building quite well.
| | 02:06 | So I am going to go to Create, you can
use the NURBS Primitive or a Polygon.
| | 02:10 | One thing I am going to do, though,
is turn off the Interactive Creation.
| | 02:14 | I actually want to create this at 0, 0, 0.
| | 02:15 | So, I am going to turn this off, go back to
Create, and then grab a NURBS plane, and it
| | 02:21 | comes in right there at 0, 0, 0.
| | 02:23 | I am going to rotate it in the X direction by 90
degrees to make it stand up on its end and then scale it.
| | 02:29 | It's definitely too small at this point.
| | 02:31 | The goal here is to scale it in such a way
that it covers the front of this building,
| | 02:36 | as if it's a front wall.
| | 02:37 | So I am just going to make it
nice and skinny and long like that.
| | 02:41 | Now, in order to see through this, to see
through the image plane, I'll go back to the
| | 02:44 | X-ray mode, and here is
the X-ray button right here.
| | 02:47 | So now I can see through it.
| | 02:49 | So I want to loosely fit this plane to the
building, just under the edge, not too tight
| | 02:55 | to the edge, maybe like this, actually
underneath these little castle indentations here.
| | 03:00 | Now, the perspective is
working quite well on this.
| | 03:02 | The reality is, though, if you were to set this
shot yourself, or you had some different
| | 03:05 | footage, you might have to spend more time
working with the position rotation of this
| | 03:09 | geometry and also the
position rotation of the camera.
| | 03:12 | For instance, if I was to move the camera
to a different position, you can see that
| | 03:16 | obviously the plane does not
match perspective any longer.
| | 03:19 | The choice here would be to rotate and
position the plane to get to a fit or to go and work
| | 03:23 | on the camera some more to get into a better
position, and you might have to go back and
| | 03:27 | forth, camera to plane, camera
to plane 'til you work it out.
| | 03:30 | It's not instantaneous.
| | 03:31 | Now, since I did some work on this already, I can
just back up to my previous view and go from there.
| | 03:36 | So I did some of the hard work in advance to
get this to look like it's in the correct place.
| | 03:40 | Now, we can assign it to that special material.
| | 03:42 | So I am going to go to the Hypershade, and
inside to Use Background, which is the last
| | 03:47 | regular material right here.
| | 03:48 | So, I am going to click that Use Background,
get the new material, select the plane, and
| | 03:53 | then right-mouse marking menu, and
choose Assign Material To Selection.
| | 03:56 | It's going to turn a slight greenish
color to indicate it's using Use Background.
| | 04:00 | But the way Use Background works is it
captures the color whatever is behind it.
| | 04:05 | If you have an image plane there, it
actually uses the image plane as its color.
| | 04:09 | Now, if I was to get rid of the image plane,
it's going to use the empty background color,
| | 04:13 | and that actually works much better.
| | 04:14 | So I am going to go to the Image Plane
Attributes, Image Plane > Image Plane Attributes, and
| | 04:20 | turn the Alpha Gain to 0.
| | 04:21 | And again, that will hide
that image plane from this view.
| | 04:24 | Now, if I render this out and then take a
look at the Alpha or the RGB, you will see
| | 04:28 | how it's different from the regular material.
| | 04:30 | Now, I am looking at the Alpha right now,
and this is the Alpha button right here.
| | 04:34 | Whatever is white is opaque,
wherever is black is transparent.
| | 04:38 | You can see how the primitive plane with the
Use Background cuts a hole into that spaceship.
| | 04:43 | If I go to the RGB, you will see the same
result, spaceship is cut roughly where the
| | 04:48 | edge of the building is.
| | 04:49 | So, because there's an image plane behind this,
Use Background surface, you get this result.
| | 04:55 | Now, another thing this Use Background
material does is actually capture shadows.
| | 04:59 | If I was to move to layer frame sequence,
say, frame 90 and re-render, you will see
| | 05:04 | that the shadow cast by the key light which
is already set up is going to appear right
| | 05:09 | here in the Alpha Channel on this plane.
So I will re-render this.
| | 05:13 | Now, RGB is not very exiting.
The ship has not been cut out.
| | 05:17 | However, if I go to the Alpha channel, you will see
the shadow cast by the key directional light is right here.
| | 05:22 | Now, it's just in the Alpha
Channel while the RGB is black.
| | 05:25 | But what we can do in the composite later
on is pull this out and place it back over
| | 05:29 | the footage to make it look like a slightly
darker shadow area, which will help with the realism.
| | 05:34 | So you can use the Use Background material
as an Alpha matte, basically the color holding
| | 05:38 | something, and/or to capture shadows.
| | 05:41 | So this is a really good
trick to have realism later on.
| | 05:44 | Now, one last point about this, now again
the camera has been pre-positioned, but if
| | 05:49 | I turn back on the Image Plane,
you will see a potential issue.
| | 05:52 | I will turn it off again back to 1,
and I will maximize this once again.
| | 05:57 | If I scrub through the footage, you will see
that the building plane is not really following
| | 06:02 | the building in the footage.
| | 06:04 | That's not really a concern at this point.
| | 06:05 | Our primary concern is the
perspective is roughly the same.
| | 06:08 | However, I am not worried
if it breaks a little bit.
| | 06:10 | What we're going to do is apply motion tracking
in the After Effects to solve that fine motion.
| | 06:15 | So, I just worry about the perspective at
this point, since the camera is already set
| | 06:18 | up, we're good to go there.
| | 06:19 | Now, one last thing I can do is maybe take
into account these little notches in the building,
| | 06:23 | and you want to cut it out of the
ship to get those little notches.
| | 06:26 | So, what I can do with this big plane is
make a copy of it and scale those copies down to
| | 06:31 | fit that kind of castle-like top.
| | 06:32 | So I can do a Ctrl+D, or Command+D, to copy
this right here, that copy is right there.
| | 06:37 | I can go ahead and scale it, make it skinnier, and move
it up a little bit and create those little castle cut-outs.
| | 06:43 | I will go ahead and do Ctrl+D
again, make a few more of those.
| | 06:47 | I don't want it to be too tight.
| | 06:48 | It's a little bit loose, so I want to hit
the edge too perfectly, because we're going
| | 06:51 | to fine-tune that later on in the composite.
| | 06:54 | So I made four copies of that main plane to
make those castle-like protrusions, because
| | 06:59 | our copies are still using these backgrounds.
| | 07:01 | So since we have our camera, our lights, and
also our special plane to capture our shadows
| | 07:06 | and do the Alpha matte, we're ready to go
on to the next step where we'll create render
| | 07:09 | passes to render out that spaceship in different
layers so we can recombine those in the composite.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Introduction to the Render Layer EditorUsing the Render Layer Editor| 00:00 | When rendering CG you have the
option to render in render passes.
| | 00:04 | Render passes split up a render
into different shading components.
| | 00:08 | For example, you can render the
diffused color separate from specular
| | 00:11 | highlights, separate from a shadow, for instance.
| | 00:13 | Now normally when you render in Maya,
you get a beauty pass, and that's all the
| | 00:17 | shading components combined,
that's what you are used to seeing.
| | 00:20 | But you do have the option to render as
render passes, and these are great for
| | 00:24 | compositing, it gives you a lot of
flexibility because each component is on a
| | 00:27 | different render, which
you can affect separately.
| | 00:29 | There are several ways to
create render passes in Maya.
| | 00:32 | There is a simple way, which is through
the Render layer Editor, and there is
| | 00:35 | a more advanced way, where you go through
mental ray and use the Contribution Map System.
| | 00:39 | We are going to start
with a Render layer Editor.
| | 00:42 | Now we are not going to use the
result of this for the final project, but
| | 00:46 | this is very good to know, and I'll show you
a quick way to create some very simple passes.
| | 00:51 | I am going to start with where we left
off on project 1, this is shot1_step3.
| | 00:55 | We're going to have the spyglass and the
lights set up, and it's basically ready to
| | 00:58 | render in some form.
So, how do you use a Render layer Editor?
| | 01:01 | Well, it's in the channel box, so if
you bring up the channel box, you'll see
| | 01:03 | it's right beside the Display layer
Editor, which you normally use to just hide
| | 01:07 | or show objects in different layers.
| | 01:10 | So we click on the Render tab,
there's the Render layer Editor.
| | 01:13 | In this case you always get a
master layer for free, and the master layer contains
| | 01:17 | all of the objects in the scene,
everything, all the services and lights.
| | 01:20 | Now you can make a new layer at any point.
| | 01:22 | What you can do is select an object,
for example, I am going to select that spyglass.
| | 01:26 | I'm going to go to the Hierarchy mode,
I want to pick it as a Group, click on
| | 01:30 | it, go over here to the Render layer
Editor. I can use one of these shortcut
| | 01:34 | buttons, in fact, the rightmost button
is Create new layer and assign selected
| | 01:38 | objects, so I can click that,
and there is a new layer.
| | 01:41 | If I click on layer1, which is brand new,
so it turns blue, we'll see that the
| | 01:45 | spyglass is on that layer by itself.
| | 01:47 | So it's similar to Display layer Editor,
however, this is ultimately going to
| | 01:51 | affect the way things render.
| | 01:53 | Now if I render this at this point, the
spyglass itself is going to be just pure
| | 01:57 | black, because there are no lights.
| | 01:59 | You have to consider what lights
are on your layer also for rendering.
| | 02:03 | What I can do though is go back to
the master layer--and again, here is
| | 02:06 | everything--and pick my lights.
| | 02:08 | Now I am going to use a shortcut, I am
going to go up to the Hypergraph, you can
| | 02:11 | also use the Outliner.
| | 02:12 | I am going to select those lights by
just selecting the nodes there just by
| | 02:16 | drawing a marquee over it and go back
to the Render layer Editor then, click
| | 02:20 | layer1, so it's blue, right mouse-click
and Add Selected Objects.
| | 02:25 | So you can add objects to a layer at
any point, and you'll see that the shading
| | 02:30 | becomes bright again, it's not black,
and then I could test render it.
| | 02:33 | Now there is one thing you have to
consider, and that's the Image Plane that
| | 02:36 | I have attached to my
perspective camera is still there.
| | 02:40 | So I think I'm going to actually hide
that, so it doesn't show up in the render.
| | 02:44 | So what I can do is go up to View here
for the perspective camera, go to Image
| | 02:48 | Plane > Image Plane Attributes,
select that one Image Plane, that I had
| | 02:51 | previously loaded--you'll see it right
there in the sample--but then turn Alpha
| | 02:55 | Gain to 0 and again that's
the trick for hiding it from that view.
| | 02:58 | Now if you do a test render, there's a
spyglass by itself, and I'll shrink that
| | 03:02 | render down so I can see it. So that's it.
| | 03:05 | Now this is not very exciting because
I have the spyglass and the lights, and
| | 03:09 | there's not really anything else in the
scene, but let's test the fact that you
| | 03:12 | can have different objects on
different layers, in this case. So I am going to
| | 03:16 | hide this, and then create a
brand-new piece of geometry.
| | 03:19 | For instance a Sphere, just so we have something
in there we can see. I am going to scale
| | 03:23 | it up and then go back to the Channel Box
by clicking the Channel Box tab right here.
| | 03:27 | Now if you go back to the master layer,
it's on the master layer automatically.
| | 03:30 | Now because it created on layer1 while
that was selected, it's also on layer1.
| | 03:34 | So it matters where you create it,
what layer you're currently on.
| | 03:38 | But what I can do now is delete that,
so it goes away, go back to master layer,
| | 03:43 | again, there's everything, then create it
while I'm on master layer. So let's create a
| | 03:47 | new Sphere, scale up so you can see it.
| | 03:50 | All right, that sphere again is on the
master layer by default, everything goes there.
| | 03:53 | But if I then go to layer1, it's not there.
| | 03:56 | So you can create objects to always be
on the master layer, but you can choose
| | 04:00 | what layer they are on.
| | 04:01 | Now I can add that sphere to that
layer later, but if I never created on that
| | 04:06 | layer in the first place, it's not
there until I say Add Selected Objects.
| | 04:09 | So master layer everything, layer1 just
the things that I added and nothing else.
| | 04:13 | So now I am ready to create some
additional layers and then use the render pass
| | 04:18 | options to create some actual render passes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Splitting a scene into multiple render passes| 00:00 | Once you start using the Render
layer Editor, you have the opportunity to
| | 00:03 | create multiple layers.
| | 00:05 | Once you have multiple layers, you can
turn those into special render passes.
| | 00:10 | There is a simple way to do it through the
Render layer Editor, which we'll talk about.
| | 00:14 | So we're picking up from the last movie
where we have the spyglass set up on its
| | 00:19 | own special layer called layer1,
and of course, we saw the master layer.
| | 00:22 | Now one thing you can do is rename a
layer, and this will be good because we
| | 00:27 | need to create multiple layers, to
create some additional render passes.
| | 00:30 | So if you just double-click, you can rename a
layer. I'm going to call this monolayer,
| | 00:34 | named after the monocular. And you can
duplicate layers just right here through the
| | 00:39 | Render layer Editor by right mouse
keying and choosing Copy layer, that will
| | 00:44 | copy the entire layer, you'll get all the
same objects assigned to it on that layer.
| | 00:48 | So I can go to that new layer,
and it looks just the same.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to do that one more time, we
need a total of three in this case, and
| | 00:55 | there are three layers.
| | 00:56 | Now the reason I'm doing that is I want
to have three layers for three different
| | 00:59 | render passes, each layer can have its own pass.
| | 01:03 | Now, how do you create a pass? What we
can do is go through a layer, right mouse
| | 01:07 | key, and pick Attributes.
| | 01:08 | This brings up the Attribute Editor,
and if you scroll down near the bottom,
| | 01:11 | you'll see there is a
Render Pass Options section.
| | 01:13 | Now by default this is set to Beauty.
| | 01:16 | That's what you normally see when you
render, it's a Beauty pass, always showing
| | 01:19 | components put together
as what you would expect.
| | 01:22 | What we can do is turn off the Beauty
and pick some other Render Pass and they
| | 01:26 | come with several here in this case.
| | 01:28 | Now this is an older system in Maya,
it's not as advanced as mental ray, but
| | 01:32 | it's a quick way to make
these few render passes.
| | 01:34 | The first one is Diffuse.
That's just the color.
| | 01:37 | So I'm going to turn on
Diffuse for that with Beauty off.
| | 01:40 | Now I go back to Channel Box.
| | 01:41 | I can go to next layer and pick
a different Render Pass for that.
| | 01:45 | So I can right mouse key there, go to
Attributes, and once again that layer is set to Beauty.
| | 01:49 | I can check that off and pick
something else, for example, Specular.
| | 01:53 | Click on Specular, I am going
to go back to the Channel Box.
| | 01:56 | Now since this second layer is going to
be a Specular render pass, I'm going to
| | 02:00 | rename that just so I
know what's going on there.
| | 02:03 | We call it speclayer.
| | 02:04 | I can go to third layer now and
then change the Render Pass for that.
| | 02:08 | Right mouse key, Attributes,
once again, set to Beauty.
| | 02:10 | We can turn off Beauty and turn on
another pass, for example, Shadow.
| | 02:14 | This is going to be the Shadow pass.
We'll go back to the Channel Box.
| | 02:17 | I'm going to rename this so I know where
it is, and I'm going to call it shadlayer.
| | 02:22 | You can use any names you want
as long as it make sense to you.
| | 02:24 | So what'll happen is these three layers
will render with these different render
| | 02:29 | passes, the Diffuse Pass,
Specular Pass, and then the Shadow Pass.
| | 02:32 | I know they will render, because
this leftmost icon indicates whether a
| | 02:35 | layer will render or not.
| | 02:36 | They have that little
green checkboxes, or checkmarks.
| | 02:39 | Now the one that has a red X means
it's not going to render, so you can turn
| | 02:44 | these on or off, but I
want to render these three.
| | 02:47 | Now you can actually render all these
three layers right in the Render view.
| | 02:50 | We have to set up some extra options
so to make sure it's working correctly.
| | 02:52 | I'm going to go to Options on the Render layer
Editor, and normally when you go here,
| | 02:56 | this is the way it looks by default.
| | 02:57 | You'll see the Render All layers is not
checked, we actually want to check that on.
| | 03:02 | If you check that on just by selecting
that one time, then all those layers will
| | 03:06 | render when you go to the Render view.
| | 03:08 | Now how they render is up to the
Option box, so I'm going to go to the Option
| | 03:11 | box, there are a couple different variations.
Now by default, it just says, Composite layers.
| | 03:17 | That means it's going to render all
three layers, in this case individually, and
| | 03:20 | show me the Composite result.
| | 03:22 | And actually the Render layer Editor
serves as a very simple compositing tool.
| | 03:26 | We're going to start with that.
| | 03:28 | Now, because these are composite, it's
going to work pretty much like Photoshop.
| | 03:32 | It's going to stack these layers,
giving preference to the top except where
| | 03:35 | there is transparency.
| | 03:36 | Now you can choose how the
compositing occurs through the blending mode.
| | 03:40 | There are actually
simple blending modes up here.
| | 03:42 | Each layer has a menu right here.
| | 03:44 | Now when set to Normal that means we
have the Normal style compositing, pretty
| | 03:48 | much like Photoshop in default.
You can change this.
| | 03:51 | So, for example, if we go down to
the monolayer, I'll leave that Normal.
| | 03:54 | But then go to speclayer, and change
that to something that's going to work with
| | 03:58 | the Specular render.
| | 03:59 | Specular render is just the highlights,
so I can actually set that to Screen.
| | 04:02 | And we're going to talk more about
blending modes when we get to After Effects,
| | 04:06 | but blending mode determines how the
layers are combined mathematically.
| | 04:09 | So in this case, Screen works well for Specular.
| | 04:12 | Now I'll go to the Shadow layer and switch
that to Darken, that also works well for shadows.
| | 04:18 | So Darken, Screen, and Normal.
| | 04:21 | Now I'm going to the Render view,
in Render, we'll see what happens.
| | 04:25 | It's going to render each layer
individually, and you'll see a pop on the screen
| | 04:28 | for a second, then it starts
showing me the Composite result.
| | 04:31 | That's the composite result of
all these three separate layers.
| | 04:34 | Now we can see them individually, if we
choose another setting, but the first
| | 04:37 | thing you need to do is clear out the
buffer, because what happens is Render
| | 04:39 | view stores a buffer of all the past renders.
| | 04:42 | So what I can do is go to File > Remove
All Images from Render View, this will
| | 04:48 | clear out the Buffer.
| | 04:49 | Now I'm ready to render again, but I need
the check the Options on the Render All layers.
| | 04:53 | I can switch it from Composite
layers to Composite and keep layers.
| | 04:57 | If I switch this to Composite and keep
layers, all layers will be stored in the buffer.
| | 05:01 | Now remember, you can't just close
this window, you do have to apply it.
| | 05:05 | So, Apply it, and then you can Close.
| | 05:07 | So, now if I render this, you'll see
the layers pop up one at a time, and then
| | 05:11 | you'll see the final result.
| | 05:13 | Now, even though I cleared out the
buffer in the Render view, I still have this slider
| | 05:14 | down here, and this slider allows
me to scroll through the layers.
| | 05:18 | So the first thing you will see is
the Composite result, second thing is
| | 05:20 | actually also Composite Result,
the third thing looks black.
| | 05:24 | It's actually the shadow layer, the top layer.
It's in the Alpha Channel.
| | 05:29 | We go to RGB again, then the
next section is the Specular layer.
| | 05:32 | This includes reflectivity.
| | 05:34 | If I go to last one, that's the Diffuse
or the monolayer, basically this layer
| | 05:39 | at the bottom. So if all your layers
here are stored in the Buffer, and then the
| | 05:43 | simple Composite results.
| | 05:44 | Now this is not an advanced
compositor, but it's good enough to test how
| | 05:47 | different layers might be combined
later on in a program like After Effects.
| | 05:51 | So in this movie, we set up additional
layers by copying the first layer, we have
| | 05:56 | assigned render passes through the
Render Pass Options section to create
| | 05:59 | Diffuse, Specular, and Shadow Renders,
and we learned how to render out those
| | 06:03 | passes within the Render view.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding flexibility by assigning material and render overrides| 00:00 | Once you start using the Render layer
Editor in creating custom layers, you can
| | 00:05 | do a lot with just the render
pass options to create render passes.
| | 00:08 | However, there are a limited number of
options there in terms of Diffuse, Shadow,
| | 00:12 | Specular, and so on.
| | 00:13 | You can create more complex render
passes if you use some Material Overrides.
| | 00:17 | Material Overrides is the option to the
Render layer Editor to assign material
| | 00:22 | to entire layer temporarily.
| | 00:23 | Beyond that you can also use Render
Overrides. Render Overrides give you the
| | 00:28 | option to render out a particular layer
with very specific render settings that
| | 00:33 | are unique to that layer.
So let's give that a try.
| | 00:36 | So I have gone back to shot 1_layers2
and here we have our three custom layers,
| | 00:40 | and they are all set to different render passes,
one's Diffuse, one's Specular, and one's Shadow.
| | 00:46 | In this case, Specular is on the top,
Shadow is in the center, and Diffuse is on
| | 00:50 | the bottom above the master layer.
All of those layers are turned on the render.
| | 00:54 | Now we can create a brand-new layer
and assign a custom Material Override.
| | 00:57 | So what I will do is I am going to
copy just this monolayer here, the Diffuse
| | 01:01 | layer, right mouse key, Copy layer.
There is a brand-new layer.
| | 01:04 | I am going to turn off all my layers in
terms of rendering except for that new layer.
| | 01:09 | For the Material Override, I can right
mouse key, and there is an Overrides menu.
| | 01:13 | If I go further, there is Create New
Material Override, and then you get a long
| | 01:17 | list of all the materials inside Maya.
| | 01:20 | The first few are Maya materials, and you
have a long list of mental ray materials.
| | 01:24 | You can pick anyone's of those materials.
| | 01:26 | For example, if we want to create a
special layer that renders all the mattes
| | 01:30 | --and matte being a solid black and white
renderer you can use in compositing to
| | 01:33 | cut something out--what I can do is go
up to Surface Shader and select that.
| | 01:38 | Once I select that material, that
material is assigned to everything on that layer.
| | 01:42 | In fact, the color changes instantaneously.
| | 01:44 | Now it's pure black right now, but if I
change the color of the surface shader,
| | 01:49 | we will be able to see it.
| | 01:51 | So I am going to go to the Hypershade,
and that material I assign is the
| | 01:53 | last one on the list.
| | 01:54 | So I can double-click that, open its
attribute editor, and then change its color.
| | 02:00 | Now the surface shader of the
color is set by the Out Color.
| | 02:03 | So I can change that to White,
and that's more useful in this case.
| | 02:06 | Then close the Hypershade and do a test render.
| | 02:09 | I am going to go back to the Channel
Box though, because I want to double-check
| | 02:11 | my options on my render layer.
| | 02:13 | I am going to go to Options >
Render All layers, look at the option box.
| | 02:16 | Right now, I am set to
Composite and keep layers.
| | 02:18 | Now I only have one layer
that's going to render here.
| | 02:20 | So I can actually just go to composite layers.
That's fine. Hit Apply, and then hit Close.
| | 02:25 | So I am going to render out
this window here, and there it is.
| | 02:28 | This is your custom matte pass.
| | 02:30 | What you have is a solid white object
over a black field, and that's all in RGB.
| | 02:35 | You can use that in the composite
later on to cut something out, and
| | 02:39 | actually for this particular
project, this becomes very useful.
| | 02:41 | So when it comes to assigning Material
Overrides, you can pick any material that
| | 02:45 | you might find useful, again, to
assign to all of the surfaces on that layer,
| | 02:49 | it's only temporary--or I should say
it's nonpermanent--because if I go down to
| | 02:53 | the master layer, all original
materials are still there and unaffected.
| | 02:56 | I also mentioned it's possible to
create custom render passes by altering the
| | 03:02 | render settings for a particular layer.
There is a different way of doing that.
| | 03:06 | For example, if I turn off this layer
and go back down to my original monolayer,
| | 03:10 | turn that back on, what I do is click
this third icon button, which is a Render
| | 03:14 | Settings Override button, and click that.
| | 03:16 | That actually brings up
the Render Settings window.
| | 03:19 | However, in a special layer mode. In
fact, you can tell that by going up here
| | 03:23 | and looking at the title bar.
It says Render Settings (monolayer).
| | 03:26 | That means that these are the
render settings just for this layer.
| | 03:30 | You can create an override for any
of the attributes that appear here.
| | 03:34 | So for example, I can switch the
Render Using to a different rendering engine
| | 03:38 | just for this layer.
How do you do that?
| | 03:40 | Well, you right mouse key over an
attribute name, like this, Render Using right
| | 03:45 | mouse key, and choose Create layer Override.
| | 03:48 | As soon as you choose that option,
that particular name turns orange.
| | 03:53 | Once it's orange, I can pick a
different option like mental ray.
| | 03:56 | It switches to mental ray.
| | 03:58 | That means that just this layer is using
mental ray, because this is an override.
| | 04:04 | Now to remove that override you can
right mouse key again over the name and
| | 04:07 | remove it, but as long as it's orange
that's a unique override for that layer.
| | 04:11 | Every layer can have a
different set of overrides.
| | 04:13 | You simply click one of these buttons
right here with a little clapboard and
| | 04:17 | then choose an attribute right
mouse key and then Create the Override.
| | 04:21 | So now if I was to render out all these
various layers, even if they are all on,
| | 04:25 | only this one is going to use mental ray.
| | 04:27 | The other ones use Maya software by
default, because we go back to the
| | 04:31 | master layer, the
master layer has a default setting.
| | 04:33 | So any layer that does not have an
override uses the master layer as reference.
| | 04:37 | In fact, the master layer has a tab
for every single rendering engine on it.
| | 04:42 | So it serves as the master.
| | 04:44 | Note that using the Render layer
Editor to create render passes and to use
| | 04:48 | Material Overrides and/or Render
Settings is just one solution for breaking up
| | 04:52 | the render into different passes where
you have different shading components.
| | 04:55 | We also have the mental ray
contribution map system, which we are going to talk
| | 05:00 | about in the next chapter.
| | 05:01 | So using the Render layer Editor
is really just for your knowledge.
| | 05:04 | It's very good to know
that, understand how it works.
| | 05:07 | We are going to use a mental ray
system for project 1 and project 2.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Creating Render Passes with mental rayCreating render passes using mental ray| 00:00 | So far we have set up render passes
through the Render layer Editor.
| | 00:04 | Now we are going to move on and use a mental
ray Contribution Map System to set up render passes.
| | 00:09 | This is a more advanced method,
and it will give us more control.
| | 00:12 | So back to project 1. This version of
the file, which is shot one step three only
| | 00:17 | has a master layer, which is fine.
| | 00:19 | We don't need any other custom layers
through the layer editor at this point.
| | 00:22 | What we can do is go straight to mental
ray and set it up through the mental ray
| | 00:25 | settings in the render settings window.
| | 00:27 | Before we do that though, there are a
couple of good things to do just to make
| | 00:31 | sure that when we do render,
everything is going to be nice.
| | 00:33 | One is we need to hide the image plane.
| | 00:35 | So this will show up in the Batch
Renders, and that's not a good thing to have
| | 00:38 | it in the background.
| | 00:39 | So I am going to go into View >
Image Plane > Image Plane Attributes.
| | 00:43 | I am going to turn Alpha Gain back down
to 0, and that hides it from that view.
| | 00:49 | Now we can go into the render settings
window, and if it's not already switched,
| | 00:52 | switch to mental ray.
| | 00:54 | Once on mental ray you have all
the different mental ray tabs.
| | 00:56 | Now since we are here let's check the quality.
We are going to make sure we have high quality.
| | 01:01 | So in order to change the Min Sample
Level and Max Sample Level, we can change
| | 01:04 | the Custom Sampling and switch from 0 to 2.
Now low quality would be -2, 0.
| | 01:10 | High-quality will be 0, 2.
So 0, 2 is good in this case.
| | 01:15 | So now we can set up some passes.
| | 01:16 | And this happens to the
passes tabs in this window.
| | 01:19 | Now initially there are no passes
here, but you can create them through
| | 01:23 | this Create render pass button, right here, and
here is a long list of mental ray render passes.
| | 01:28 | Now we don't need all of these, but
there are actually five, in this case.
| | 01:32 | So it will be good for this project
where we need to integrate this spyglass
| | 01:35 | with the footage of the actress.
| | 01:37 | What we can do is click one of these--or
select more than one by Ctrl-clicking, or
| | 01:41 | Command-clicking, the names.
So let's start picking a few.
| | 01:45 | The first one we want is
called Diffuse Material Color.
| | 01:48 | I am going to describe these in the second.
Let's go further down.
| | 01:52 | The next one we need is Matte.
So I am going to Ctrl-click that.
| | 01:56 | The next one after that is
Reflection. Control click.
| | 01:59 | The next one is something called Raw Shadow.
Now it's easy to get these mixed up.
| | 02:04 | There are multiple shadow
variations, there's a shadow here.
| | 02:07 | We actually want Raw Shadow.
That will produce a slightly different result.
| | 02:10 | So Raw Shadow, and then last one is Specular.
Let's talk about what these are going to do.
| | 02:16 | Diffuse Material Color will render
the diffuse color, but without shadows,
| | 02:20 | and without shading.
| | 02:21 | The next one Matte, we talked about
this a little bit before, but a Matte will
| | 02:26 | render a white and black version of the image
you can use to cut out something in the composite.
| | 02:31 | Raw Shadow will produce a shadow, and
this will be a white and black render of
| | 02:35 | the shadow just in the RGB.
| | 02:37 | Reflection is just the reflective component, and
Specular is a just a specular component.
| | 02:41 | So we have these picked now. Let's go
ahead and Create and Close, and they're listed in the
| | 02:45 | scene passes section.
| | 02:46 | We can now pass these down to the next
section, which is the Associated Passes
| | 02:50 | section by using this Associate
button. And those are brought down.
| | 02:54 | At this point, if we go further down I
can make a contribution map, and this is
| | 02:59 | something necessary to associate the
passes with the render, in that particular
| | 03:02 | layer, which is the master layer.
| | 03:03 | So to make a new contribution map,
I can use this button right here.
| | 03:07 | Now if I have to go back to the
Render layer Editor, I will do Ctrl+A here.
| | 03:12 | You will see there is a master layer.
There is nothing underneath it.
| | 03:15 | If I click this Creates button, it
gives me a little dropdown arrow.
| | 03:18 | If I expand that, you'll see that
it makes a new contribution map.
| | 03:21 | It must be numbered based on
what was in the scene previously.
| | 03:24 | Numbers don't really matter, but
I will say pass contribution map.
| | 03:27 | It's also listed right here in the menu.
| | 03:29 | So now we can go back to these passes,
Shift-select them, and then use this
| | 03:34 | Associate button to draw from down and
associating with that map, and now they
| | 03:38 | are associated with that map.
So we switch to mental ray.
| | 03:41 | We have created five render passes that
will be useful for composite, and now we
| | 03:45 | are ready to set up the
scene to start batch rendering.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Batch rendering render passes: Project one| 00:00 | At this point we have set up five render
passes through mental ray's contribution
| | 00:04 | map system for project 1.
| | 00:05 | We have the five passes listed here
inside the Render Settings window and those
| | 00:10 | are associated with passContributionMap2.
And that contribution map appears in
| | 00:14 | the Render layer Editor under the master layer.
We're now ready to try Batch Render.
| | 00:19 | There are a couple of other things
we need to check to make sure that the
| | 00:21 | render goes as expected.
| | 00:23 | One is, we want to make sure
that we set the project so that renders
| | 00:26 | go where we expect.
| | 00:28 | So File > Set Project, in my case, I want
to select the exercise files folder.
| | 00:32 | And what will happen during the render is
the rendered images will be placed in the
| | 00:36 | Images folder underneath this folder.
| | 00:38 | So now I'll click the Set button, and
everything I want to check is a Common tab
| | 00:42 | in the Render Settings window to
make sure I set all of the common render
| | 00:46 | attributes, including the name.
I'm going to call mine Shot1Monocular.
| | 00:50 | Then the Image format.
| | 00:52 | Now what's interesting is, if you set it
to PSD Layered, mental ray will take all
| | 00:57 | those render passes and place each one
on a separate layer of a Photoshop file.
| | 01:02 | So you'll have one Photoshop file per
frame, in that single file we have all the
| | 01:07 | different render passes arranged as layers.
| | 01:08 | This is really convenient for
bringing the render into After Effects.
| | 01:12 | Next I want to check my
Frame/Animation extension.
| | 01:14 | In this case, we are going to
start by testing a single frame.
| | 01:17 | So this is good, name.ext.
| | 01:19 | Then I want to check my render resolution, and
we have been working in HD 1080, so this is good.
| | 01:24 | And it couldn't hurt to double-check
also, the Quality tab, to make sure
| | 01:28 | Anti-Aliasing settings are good.
| | 01:30 | Now we set this to 0, 2, earlier on, and
that's good because that's high-quality.
| | 01:34 | So we have our Common tab set, and
then we know where we're going to render.
| | 01:38 | So we're good to try Batch Render.
I am going to close this window.
| | 01:42 | Go to the Rendering main menu and
then go to Render > Batch Render.
| | 01:45 | If you want to see the progress
you can open up the Script Editor.
| | 01:49 | There is a button down here
at the bottom-right for that.
| | 01:51 | This will show you the progress.
| | 01:53 | It's rendering the single frame now,
and that will show you the percentage.
| | 01:56 | Right there it is 100%.
| | 01:57 | So I can get out of Maya now, go to my folder,
go into the Images folder where I put the images.
| | 02:03 | The way it works as a layered PSD
is you will have each layer rendered
| | 02:07 | separately, and placed in a separate
folder, and these folders will be named after
| | 02:11 | the layer, such as matte.
| | 02:13 | Those are initially Maya IFF files,
which is Maya's native image format.
| | 02:17 | Once it finishes all of the layers for
that particular frame, it combines all
| | 02:21 | those layers, places them into the
layered PSD file, which is right here, then
| | 02:25 | the original IFFs are destroyed.
So you have empty folders, like right here.
| | 02:30 | But everything's stuffed within this PSD file.
So I can open that.
| | 02:34 | So now we have all the layers in this
PSD file, and they appear on a layer
| | 02:39 | Editor at the right here.
| | 02:40 | So I can turn these various layers off
and take a look at them one at a time.
| | 02:45 | Now the first thing you get is a background.
| | 02:47 | The background is a solid color of empty
space in Maya, that's given to you for free.
| | 02:51 | You don't actually have to use it,
but it's always on the lowest layer.
| | 02:55 | Now in our case next layer is Matte.
This is a matte pass white on black.
| | 02:59 | Next one is diffuseMaterialColor, which
is the color of the render, but there's
| | 03:02 | no actual shading, or shadows, just the color.
The next pass is the shadowRaw pass.
| | 03:07 | This is what you get when you pick Raw Shadow.
It's a white shadow against black.
| | 03:12 | Now there's a way to make this work in
After Effects, which we'll talk about later.
| | 03:16 | The next is a reflection component,
next is a specular, which specular
| | 03:19 | component without the reflection, and the last
one that mental ray gives you is MasterBeauty.
| | 03:24 | This is actually a beauty render, which you
would normally get if you did not render passes.
| | 03:28 | It gives you that for free also.
You don't have to use it.
| | 03:31 | It's just there for reference.
| | 03:33 | So we have rendered one frame
successfully through the Batch Render.
| | 03:36 | Now we can go back to Maya, and I can
show you how to batch render the entire
| | 03:40 | sequence, because we do need all of the
frames so we can go into After Effects
| | 03:44 | for the entire sequence.
| | 03:45 | So going back to the Render Settings
window instead of rendering a single frame
| | 03:49 | I need to switch to name.#.ext.
| | 03:52 | This is very important in terms of having the
files be read in the correct order by After Effects.
| | 03:58 | You always want to use name.#.ext.
| | 03:59 | There are other options down below
that, this is the one you want to use.
| | 04:04 | Another important thing is often skipped is
the Frame Padding, which is right below that.
| | 04:09 | Frame Padding determines the number
of numeric places between the dots.
| | 04:13 | So you can see it up here
where it says .1.psd, .10.psd.
| | 04:18 | If Frame Padding is on 1 you
don't get any extra numeric places.
| | 04:22 | What we want is to have consistent
number of numeric places though, so the After
| | 04:25 | Effects tell them how to
read them in the correct order.
| | 04:28 | You'll get confuse with this numbering system.
| | 04:30 | So what I can do is let's go up to
a higher number, for instance 3, and
| | 04:35 | therefore it goes .001 and then .010.
| | 04:39 | So in Frame Padding, the 3
actually works from frame 1 up to 999.
| | 04:44 | So if you set to 3 you're safe there.
| | 04:46 | It's an important step otherwise the
files might come in the incorrect order
| | 04:50 | inside After Effects.
| | 04:51 | So once you set the Frame/Animation
extension to name.#.ext, set the Frame
| | 04:56 | Padding to non-one number, you are
ready to batch render the entire sequence.
| | 05:00 | What will happen is it'll render the
entire range set by the Frame Range section.
| | 05:04 | So in our case, we want to set this to 16,
that's a duration of this premade animation.
| | 05:10 | So at this point you are ready
to batch render the entire thing.
| | 05:13 | You'll launch it the same way, you'll go
to Render > Batch Render, and go to the
| | 05:17 | Script Editor, and it will show you
the progress, and when all 60 frames are
| | 05:21 | finished you'll have 60 layered PSDs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Batch rendering render passes: Project two| 00:00 | We're now going to move on to the
Project 2 and prepare that for rendering.
| | 00:04 | We're also going to use mental ray
contribution maps and render passes for this render.
| | 00:09 | We want to split this spaceship
up into multiple render passes.
| | 00:12 | Now in order to do that, we have to go through some
of the steps we have already discussed in Project 1.
| | 00:16 | It's not a bad idea to get some practice,
and in fact some of the render passes we will
| | 00:21 | choose for this particular project
will be slightly different from Project 1.
| | 00:25 | So let's get started setting this up
for the render passes and the render.
| | 00:29 | The first thing I want to do is
once again hide the image plane.
| | 00:31 | So I want to turn Alpha Gain to 0.
| | 00:33 | Then we want to go right to the Render
Settings window, and if I am not already there, make
| | 00:38 | sure I have set up mental ray.
| | 00:39 | Then I want to go to the Quality tab and
make sure my Anti-Aliasing is good enough.
| | 00:43 | Right now, it's set to a lower quality, so I'm
going to switch to Custom Sampling and set to 0, 2.
| | 00:49 | That's high quality.
Now we can set up some passes.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to go back to Passes
tab, and right now it's empty.
| | 00:55 | Click the Create Render
Passes button and pick some passes.
| | 00:58 | Now this one is going to use a slightly different list
as compared to Project 1, and I'll discuss how it varies.
| | 01:05 | The first one we want is
Diffuse Without Shadows.
| | 01:08 | Next, we want Incandescence.
| | 01:10 | I'm going to Ctrl-click or
Command-click that. Next is Matte.
| | 01:14 | After that we have Reflection,
and then comes Raw Shadow.
| | 01:18 | Again, pick Raw Shadow, and now just Shadow.
| | 01:20 | So Raw Shadow, and then there's the Specular
that's also a little bit different, and that's
| | 01:24 | Specular Without Shadows.
| | 01:26 | So the new ones here in this
case are Diffuse Without Shadows.
| | 01:30 | So that's actually the color of the
surface with the shading but no shadows.
| | 01:35 | And I say shading in terms of
the dark versus light areas.
| | 01:39 | Incandescence is also new.
| | 01:40 | That's because this particular spaceship
model has incandescent logos, and we also have
| | 01:45 | Specular Without Shadows which is
just a specular pass but no cast shadows.
| | 01:49 | So now we have picked render passes
now we can click Create and Close.
| | 01:52 | That makes them list in
the Scene Passes section.
| | 01:54 | So then we can click this Associate button
and pass them down to the next section which
| | 01:58 | is in the Associated Passes section, and now we can
make a Contribution Map, because right now we have none.
| | 02:03 | I'm going to click this
Create new pass button here.
| | 02:06 | If we go to our Render Layer editor and go back
to the Channel Box, you'll see that ContributionMap
| | 02:12 | is listed here underneath the master layer.
| | 02:14 | Now we have a contribution map, I can go back
to my passes, Shift-select them and associate
| | 02:20 | them with our ContributionMap,
and there they are.
| | 02:23 | Now we can go on to our Common tab and
set up all our common rendering attributes.
| | 02:27 | For instance, the name, I
will call mine Shot2Ship.
| | 02:31 | Once again, we want to use the PSD layered
so we can stuff all those rendered passes
| | 02:35 | into single Photoshop files.
| | 02:37 | We'll test one frame first
and name.ext is fine here.
| | 02:41 | We'll double check our resolution,
and we still have HD, which is good.
| | 02:45 | So these are all set here, and I can
double-check my project settings, File > Set Project.
| | 02:51 | I want to pick my Exercise Files folder, so all the
images are rendering to the Images folder below that.
| | 02:56 | Click Set, and now we're
ready to test the frame.
| | 02:59 | Let me close this window,
go to Render > Batch Render.
| | 03:03 | I go to Script Editor and take a peek.
| | 03:05 | Now this renderer is going to be
slower than the render for Project 1.
| | 03:08 | There is lot of reflectivity and special
maps like Incandescence which slows it down.
| | 03:13 | All right, there it's finished.
| | 03:14 | Now we can go out of Maya and go to our
Exercise Files folder, and right below exercise files--
| | 03:19 | in my case if I go to the Images
folder--this is where it's going to render.
| | 03:23 | Now much like the spyglass render, it's going
to place those render passes in separate folders
| | 03:28 | initially, then combine them into a single PSD,
and then get rid of the original IFF renders.
| | 03:34 | So these folders up here, some of these are
from the spyglass render and some are from
| | 03:38 | this render, but all
these folders are now empty.
| | 03:40 | The final render for the ship is right here
Shot2Ship, so I can open up that in Photoshop,
| | 03:45 | and here it is, and here is layers.
So let's take a look at the layers.
| | 03:49 | Once again, we have the background, which
you get for free, and that's just solid black.
| | 03:53 | Next is Incandescence.
That is the Incandescence logo.
| | 03:56 | Next is diffuseNoShadow.
| | 03:57 | So this is diffuse color
quality, but there is shading.
| | 04:01 | In other words, the bottom is a little
bit darker, but there's no cast shadow.
| | 04:04 | Next is Matte, once again,
a white on black render.
| | 04:07 | Next is ShadowRaw where you get to cast
shadow as a white render over the black.
| | 04:12 | Next is the Reflection, and the here below
MasterBeauty is specularNoShadow. That's just
| | 04:18 | specular with no cast shadows.
| | 04:20 | And you'll also get the
MasterBeauty pass for free. So that's working.
| | 04:24 | So let's go set it up for a batch
render where we can render all the frames.
| | 04:28 | We'll need all the frames so we can composite.
| | 04:30 | We go back to Maya, go back to Render Settings window,
and there is really only two things that change here.
| | 04:36 | One is you need to change the frame
animation extension to name.#.ext.
| | 04:39 | Again, this is very important to make sure
After Effects selects the files in the correct order.
| | 04:44 | Also, we need to adjust your Frame Padding
to a higher number such as 3 to make sure
| | 04:49 | we have the correct number of numeric places--or
at least that they are equal for all the numbers.
| | 04:54 | In other words, frame 1 has the same number
of places as frame 10 or frame 100, et cetera.
| | 04:59 | Right now, we set these two things.
| | 05:01 | We're ready to batch
render the entire sequences.
| | 05:03 | We do need to check our frame range.
It's set to 1 to 10 by default.
| | 05:06 | We actually want to render frame 1 to 90, because
that's the duration of this pre-animated sequence.
| | 05:11 | So I'll set this to 90, and
now we're ready to batch render.
| | 05:16 | So same approach, Render > Batch Render.
Now I'm not going to launch it now.
| | 05:19 | It's going to take a long time, but once
this is launched you'll see all 90 frames we have
| | 05:24 | rendered out, and you'll have
90 separate layered PSD files.
| | 05:28 | Now the images have been pre-rendered for
you, and they're included in the exercise
| | 05:32 | files if you don't want to wait
to render this entire sequence.
| | 05:35 | The final version of this particular file
where you have all of the different render
| | 05:38 | passes is already set up for you and all
the render settings set for you is saved out.
| | 05:43 | I'd like to take a look at
that's called shot2_render.ma.
| | 05:48 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Recombining Render Passes in After EffectsImporting render passes into After Effects| 00:00 | We now are ready to move onto After Effects.
| | 00:02 | So in project 1 we set the lights
and camera to render out the spyglass.
| | 00:07 | We also set up mental ray render passes to
split out that render into multiple render
| | 00:12 | pass layers within a layered PSD image sequence.
| | 00:15 | So we are going to bring those renders into
After Effects and also bring in the original
| | 00:20 | footage that was shot with the actress.
| | 00:22 | Before you do that in After Effects,
though, I want to check a few things.
| | 00:25 | One we want to make sure we
are working in new project.
| | 00:27 | So I am going to go to File > New > New Project.
| | 00:30 | I am not going to save the old one, and then
also I want to check to see where the settings
| | 00:34 | are in terms of how the
timeline is going to work.
| | 00:36 | Now since we are working with Image
Sequences, it's often useful to not work in Time code,
| | 00:41 | but to work in Frames.
I'll show you where that is.
| | 00:43 | If you go up to File > Project Settings,
under Time Display Style, the option of Time code--
| | 00:49 | which is default--and also Frames.
| | 00:51 | Frames are much easier to
work with in this situation.
| | 00:53 | So I'll click on Frames and click OK.
Now we're ready to try to bring in some footage.
| | 00:58 | Let's start with the live action.
I am going to go to File > Import > File.
| | 01:04 | The original footage is under
the Footage folder under Shot1.
| | 01:09 | Now this is--once again--an image sequence, which
means I have a folder full of 60 different frames.
| | 01:15 | However, if I pick the first one, and if
this option down here, Targa Sequence, is checked,
| | 01:21 | which it is this by default, After Effects will
actually bring in this series of images as a single unit.
| | 01:26 | Now this does depend on numbering, and this is why
it's important to choose a correct option in Maya.
| | 01:30 | In the scene it says shot1.000.tga and so on.
| | 01:34 | You have to make sure you have the
same number numeric places for the number.
| | 01:39 | Three here for 000 and then
three here for 001 and so on.
| | 01:43 | If you follow that order, then After
Effects will bring them in correctly.
| | 01:46 | That's actually a frame padding
option within the Render Settings of Maya.
| | 01:50 | But so long as you render it correctly so
the frames are in the correct order, After
| | 01:54 | Effects will know what to do with them.
| | 01:56 | So if I click Open, they'll
come in as a single unit.
| | 02:00 | You'll see right here shot1 from frame 0 to frame 59,
you'll see up here all the various settings for that.
| | 02:06 | It's 1920x1080. That's resolution.
60 frames in duration and 24 frame per second.
| | 02:12 | Now it's actually important
to check the frames per second.
| | 02:15 | Now in this case the video
footage was shot at 24 frames.
| | 02:18 | So that's great, it does match.
| | 02:20 | But sometimes you might work
in other frame rate like 30.
| | 02:22 | So you want to double-check that at the start.
| | 02:24 | Now it's possible to interpret each piece
of footage to pick a different frame rate.
| | 02:29 | If I go down to shot1, right mouse key and go
to Interpret Footage and go to Main, there's
| | 02:33 | a place to change the Frame Rate right
here where it says Assume this frame rate.
| | 02:37 | You can put in whatever frame rate makes sense.
| | 02:39 | Now 24 works for us here, but you could put
in 30 frame for instance, but that would be
| | 02:43 | from the other project.
| | 02:45 | So 24 is good for us.
I'm just going to get out of this window here.
| | 02:48 | It's also possible to set the Global Preference, so it
interprets all of the footage at the same frame rate.
| | 02:53 | This is great for saving time.
| | 02:55 | So this is actually up under
Edit > Preferences > Imports.
| | 03:00 | So if we go to Imports, there is a place
where you can tell it to interpret a certain frame
| | 03:05 | rate every single time we
import. This is set to 24.
| | 03:09 | Normally, it's set to 30, but you can
change that at anytime. Again, we want 24.
| | 03:12 | So if I leave it at 24 everything it will bring will
be interpreted 24, which is perfect for project one.
| | 03:19 | So now we have shot1
which has the actress in it.
| | 03:22 | Let's take a look at that. Now look at it.
We need to set up a Composition.
| | 03:25 | We have nothing right here
in our Composition window.
| | 03:27 | Now a quick way to set the Composition to
make sure it's set correctly is to click-drag
| | 03:32 | your footage and pull it down to
where you have your layer stacked.
| | 03:36 | When you let go, it creates a new composition, in
this case shot1 which is the correct resolution,
| | 03:43 | the correct duration, and
also the correct frame rate.
| | 03:45 | You can see that up here when that
Composition is selected, it says the size right here or
| | 03:50 | the resolution, the
duration, and the frame rate.
| | 03:53 | Now you notice because we set the Time
Option to Frames as opposed to Time code there's a
| | 03:58 | frames read out right here on the timeline.
So just count up from 0 all the up to 60.
| | 04:04 | This is much easier for
working with image sequences.
| | 04:06 | Time code is really designed for video and
doesn't make as much sense in this case.
| | 04:10 | So there's a shot, and we can play it
back this time or just scrub through it.
| | 04:15 | Now since it's fairly large resolution it's
going to look a little blocky as we're holding
| | 04:19 | the Time slider through, but we can
see that there's some motion there.
| | 04:23 | We'll talk more about
playing back in later videos.
| | 04:26 | So for right now let's go back
and get the render of the spyglass.
| | 04:29 | I'm going to go to the same
place and go to File > Import > File.
| | 04:33 | In this case the render is in the Renders
folder under Shot1Monoculars in--it's the same deal.
| | 04:39 | You pick the first frame of the image
sequence, make sure the Sequence option is checked on,
| | 04:43 | which it is in this case, and click Open.
| | 04:45 | That's little bit different from layered
PSD files, because they have multiple layers,
| | 04:49 | you can either choose to merge all those layers
or pick one layer and bring that in by itself.
| | 04:54 | We actually want to click the Choose
layer button and then pick a layer.
| | 04:59 | Here's all the render passes
that have been converted to layers.
| | 05:02 | Now we don't really want to
MasterBeauty or Background.
| | 05:04 | We want all the in-between ones.
| | 05:06 | So I'm going to start with Shadow,
pick that, click OK, and bring it in.
| | 05:10 | It comes in as image
sequence, but just that layer.
| | 05:13 | You will see a layer name here and then the
name of the file and of course the resolution,
| | 05:18 | duration, frame rate up here.
So let's go get additional ones.
| | 05:22 | So there we have all the layers brought in,
and because we did this in Maya in terms of
| | 05:27 | the original render, each one of
those layers creates a render pass.
| | 05:30 | Of course, we also have our original live
action footage all brought in as the image sequences.
| | 05:34 | We are sure that the compositions set correctly with the
correct frame rates, correct resolution, correct duration.
| | 05:41 | There's a second way to make a composition
which is worth knowing, and that is to go
| | 05:45 | up to Composition > New Composition.
| | 05:48 | Underneath the composition here you have
to make sure to pick the correct Resolution,
| | 05:52 | the correct Frame Rate, and
correct Duration yourself.
| | 05:55 | Now for the resolution there are Presets, and
we happen to have a preset here that matches,
| | 05:59 | which is HDTV 1080 24.
| | 06:02 | But you might have other projects that use other
resolutions and other frame rates and other durations.
| | 06:07 | Now Duration is manually entered into this cell.
| | 06:09 | I'm not going to create a composition now,
because we are good to go, but this shows
| | 06:13 | you can make one manually as opposed to
dragging the footage down to the timeline.
| | 06:16 | All right, so we have our footage
brought in, both the render and live action.
| | 06:20 | So we're ready to move onto the next step where
we'll start to construct a more complex composite.
| | 06:25 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Recombining render passes in a composition| 00:00 | At this stage of project 1 inside After
Effects, we have imported the live action footage of
| | 00:05 | actress and also all the render passes.
| | 00:08 | The footage with the actress is shot1, and
then we have all of the separate render passes
| | 00:12 | brought in separately
from the layered PSD files.
| | 00:15 | We're in the same composition
now, also called shot1.
| | 00:18 | Now one great thing about all these separate
render passes is we can turn those into separate
| | 00:23 | layers and then adjust them individually--just
transform them individually or apply separate effects.
| | 00:28 | Each one could be adjusted
different from the other.
| | 00:32 | Now one disadvantage of that is
all these render passes are separate.
| | 00:35 | So we do have all the separate layers, how
are you going to move them together as a single unit?
| | 00:38 | So one thing that often happens is you
have to recombine the render passes and the
| | 00:42 | composite, and the way you
recombine them will affect the end result.
| | 00:46 | So we need to do that with this project before
we can move on to other steps, such as motion tracking.
| | 00:50 | Now I'm not going to recombine these
render passes in the shot1 composite.
| | 00:54 | I'm going to make a brand-new composition.
| | 00:56 | It will be easier to deal with them
separately from the actual live action footage.
| | 01:00 | So I am going to go to Composition > New
Composition, and make a new composition that's identical
| | 01:06 | to the first one.
| | 01:07 | Now what's interesting is After Effects will
remember your previous settings and set these
| | 01:11 | options for you.
So as it happens, these are correct.
| | 01:15 | I do want to HDTV 1080 with 24
frames per second, which is 1920x1080.
| | 01:19 | I do want to 24 frames per second, once
again, and the duration of 60 frames is correct.
| | 01:25 | So in this case, the only thing that I might
want to change is the name of the Composition,
| | 01:29 | and I am going to call mine Render just so
I can remember what that composition is for,
| | 01:33 | and I'll click OK.
So the new composition pops up as a new tab.
| | 01:37 | So now I can start to arrange my render
passes in his composition to try to rebuild them.
| | 01:42 | And the end goal here is to build them in such a way
that they start to look like the Beauty render in Maya.
| | 01:48 | So which ones do we pull in? The order does matter.
I'm going to start with the diffuseMaterialColor.
| | 01:53 | It's a common place to start.
| | 01:55 | I'll pull that down to the composition, and
there we have the diffuse render without any
| | 02:00 | kind of shading or without any kind of shadows.
| | 02:03 | Next one I want to grab
is actually the Specular.
| | 02:06 | I'll pull that down and place it on top.
That's a specular component.
| | 02:11 | Now here you see our first essential problem.
| | 02:13 | If I use the scroll wheel to zoom in and then
middle mouse button to move around, I can see
| | 02:19 | that the specular takes out the composition.
In other words, it blocks the composition.
| | 02:23 | I cannot see my diffuse thing any longer.
| | 02:25 | In fact, if I click the eye I right here besides
specular and turn that off, there's my diffuse.
| | 02:31 | I turn the Specular back on,
the Diffuse is missing.
| | 02:35 | That's because the Specular render
pass does not create a proper Alpha channel.
| | 02:38 | Now I can take a look at that by double-
clicking the Specular render right here in the Project
| | 02:43 | panel and taking a look
at it in a Footage Viewer.
| | 02:46 | I need to move my view around.
| | 02:49 | There it is in RGB, but if switch the Show
Channel menu right here from RGB to Alpha,
| | 02:55 | I can take a look at that Alpha Channel, and
it's completely solid white which means it's 100% opaque.
| | 03:01 | Again, Alpha determines transparency, and in this
case there is no indication where the object is.
| | 03:05 | That's not going to work for us if
we just simply place on top as is.
| | 03:09 | So I'm going to go back to the Show
Channel and change it back to RGB, and I am going
| | 03:13 | to go back to the Composition
view, and we'll deal with this.
| | 03:17 | So one current way to deal with this
problem is to change the blending mode.
| | 03:21 | Now each layer has a blending mode, and
this similar to what you have in Photoshop and
| | 03:25 | also what you have in the
Render Layer editor inside Maya.
| | 03:28 | In terms of the blending mode, it helps the
program figure out what the color values of
| | 03:32 | the pixels are, and you can buy
in one layer with what's below it.
| | 03:36 | So there's a Blending mode
menu beside each layer here.
| | 03:38 | Now if you don't see that under mode, what you
can do is click this toggle switches button.
| | 03:43 | So if you had this view where you don't
see it, click that button again, and there is
| | 03:47 | each of the Blending mode menus right here.
| | 03:49 | So for Specular, a common
blending mode is called Screen.
| | 03:52 | So if I click this menu and switch
the screen that's going to work for us.
| | 03:56 | So what does Screen do? Screen takes the
brightest values between that layer and what's below
| | 04:00 | it and places it on top.
| | 04:02 | In other words it gives advantage to whatever
pixels brightest regardless what's layer it's on.
| | 04:07 | So if I pick Screen all the bright
pixels when out from both layers.
| | 04:11 | So what you have is a specular highlight,
| | 04:12 | for instance, this hotspot
right here on top of the diffuse color.
| | 04:17 | So again, I'll go back to Normal here which
you will get by default, and here's a specular by itself.
| | 04:22 | If I go back to Screen,
here's the combined result.
| | 04:26 | So blending modes are often very important.
So now we have Specular working for us.
| | 04:30 | Let's go to the next render pass.
| | 04:32 | Next one we are going to
pull down is Reflection.
| | 04:35 | I'll place that on top.
| | 04:36 | This is a similar problem to
the specularity or specular layer.
| | 04:40 | It takes over the composition,
and I can't see what's below it.
| | 04:43 | So in this case I can use a similar technique
I'll go to that blending mode for that layer
| | 04:48 | and switch that to Screen.
| | 04:49 | So we now have a combination of the
Reflection and the Specular on top of the Diffuse, and
| | 04:54 | I have all three combined together and
they're starting to build towards that beauty pass.
| | 04:59 | We're going to work with one more
render pass right now, and that's the Shadow.
| | 05:04 | I'll pull those shadowRaw down and place on top.
| | 05:07 | Now shadowRaw produces a
white shadow over a black field.
| | 05:11 | Obviously, this is not
going to work for us as is.
| | 05:13 | Not only there is a block that's below it,
but the shadow is white and not black.
| | 05:17 | So in this case the first thing I need to
do is invert this, flip the colors around.
| | 05:22 | We're going to have to place of our
first effect because of that to make this work.
| | 05:26 | So with the shadowRaw layer selected, I'm
going to go up to Effect > Channel > Invert and
| | 05:32 | in Inverts affects the colors where
black becomes white and vice-versa.
| | 05:36 | So if apply that the shadow becomes black, the field
become white, and I potentially can use this.
| | 05:41 | Obviously, this is not functional yet
because it's blocking out everything below it, so
| | 05:45 | I had to pick in another blending mode for this.
| | 05:48 | Now because I want the dark areas to
survive and get rather bright areas, what I can do
| | 05:52 | is go to the blending mode and select Multiply.
| | 05:55 | What Multiply does is it multiplies all
values together, so what was dark is my top layer
| | 06:00 | darkens everything below it, and
anything that's white, it has no effect.
| | 06:04 | So if I apply Multiply it places that darker
shadow over what's basically a brighter spyglass.
| | 06:10 | So now we have arranged four of the
render passes in this composition.
| | 06:13 | I want to save the fifth one for later.
| | 06:16 | But we have built this towards
the Beauty render within Maya.
| | 06:19 | It's going to look very similar at this point.
| | 06:21 | Now we're ready to move on and use this
composition, combine it with live action footage, and
| | 06:28 | add motion tracking to get
to follow the actress' hand.
| | 06:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Transforming multiple render passes as a single unit| 00:00 | We successfully imported the
render passes into After Effects.
| | 00:03 | We took four of those passes and arranged
them in the composition called Render to build
| | 00:07 | up the renders so it looks
similar to the original beauty pass.
| | 00:11 | The order and the blending modes we
use are very important to do that.
| | 00:14 | Now the fact that these render passes are
on separate layers is both good and bad.
| | 00:18 | The good part is you have a lot of flexibility, you
can apply effects to anyone of these individually,
| | 00:24 | so every layer can be adjusted
separately from the other layers.
| | 00:27 | For example, the shadow layer already has the
invert effect on it but none of the other ones do.
| | 00:32 | I can go to any of these other
ones and apply different effects.
| | 00:35 | For example, just as a task, I can go up to Effect and
apply a Blur, like a Gaussian Blur to the reflection.
| | 00:43 | Once I apply effects, that effect is once
again listed under Effects for that layer
| | 00:47 | and also the Effect options show
up in the Effect Controls panel.
| | 00:52 | So if increasing blurriness here,
I can blur out just the reflection.
| | 00:55 | Now this might not be the best solution for
this type of project but does show you that
| | 01:00 | all these layers can have
a different set of effects.
| | 01:03 | So for now I want to get rid of this--we
don't this at this point--I'll delete that.
| | 01:06 | Now that's the good part. The bad part is if I
want to move something around, these are all separate.
| | 01:12 | So if I grab the diffuse layer and
interactively click-drag it in viewer, it splits out from
| | 01:18 | the other layers. Its transforms are different.
| | 01:21 | So what you do about that? Well, you could move
all of these together so all the transforms update.
| | 01:27 | You could do that by, for example, Shift-selecting
them all and then trying to move them, and that works.
| | 01:32 | That gets a little tedious sometimes,
and it's not really good for animation.
| | 01:36 | So I'm going to click Undo here, Ctrl+Z to go
back, and we'll talk about some other solutions.
| | 01:40 | Okay! Now our layers are
back at the start point.
| | 01:43 | Another way to reset the transforms, by the way, is
just to click the Reset button beside that layer.
| | 01:48 | Reset will set that set of
Transforms back to their initial stage.
| | 01:51 | In any case, what do we do about the fact that
they are separate, and I want to move them together?
| | 01:56 | One solution is Parenting, Parenting
allows you to parent one layer to another and in
| | 02:01 | fact there's a Parent menu right beside the
each layer, so for example, if I go to Specular
| | 02:05 | layer, go to its Parent menu, and switch that
to the Diffuse layer, then the specular becomes
| | 02:11 | parented to the diffuse.
| | 02:13 | So then when I move the diffuse, the
specular travels with it, so at least now I have two
| | 02:18 | layers moving together as a unit.
| | 02:19 | If I want to move these all together,
I had to Parent all the top layers.
| | 02:24 | So for now, I am going to reset the Diffuse,
get it back to the Start, and I'll go up to the
| | 02:28 | top two layers and change
those Parent menus to diffuse also.
| | 02:31 | So now the top three will follow bottom one.
| | 02:34 | So now if we move the bottom
one, that moves there as a unit.
| | 02:37 | So that's one solution.
I am going to reset this for now.
| | 02:41 | The other solution is to
do something called Nesting.
| | 02:44 | Nesting allows you to place one composition
into a second one and have that nested composition
| | 02:49 | be flattened as a single layer.
It's actually very common technique.
| | 02:53 | So for now, I'm going to under the Parents,
I am going to make sure to reset first on
| | 02:57 | this bottom one then switch
all these other menus to None.
| | 03:00 | Now for nesting, I need to go back to my
shot1 composition, then back to my Project tab.
| | 03:06 | So I can do to nest is grab one composition--
for example, the Render composition--and pull
| | 03:11 | that into the open
composition, in this case shot1.
| | 03:14 | So that nested composition comes in as a single layer,
it's flattened out. It has a signal set of Transforms.
| | 03:20 | Now what's cool about this is I can go back
to my original Render composition, and it's
| | 03:24 | still there, it's still intact.
| | 03:26 | I have all four of my layers here
with all their own unique settings.
| | 03:29 | I could update these all at once.
| | 03:31 | I can add New Effects, I can change order
of the layers, remove layers, add new layers,
| | 03:37 | and what will happen is that will be updated so
that the nested composition and shot1 reflects
| | 03:43 | whatever I change in that original composition.
| | 03:45 | So the flexibility of changing all these things
for the Render composition and having it reflected
| | 03:51 | here where it's nested.
| | 03:53 | So now it's nested and has a single set of
Transforms, I can move that around as a single unit.
| | 03:58 | Let's click-drag.
| | 03:59 | Now one thing that's bad about this, which
we will have to solve, is a fact that that
| | 04:04 | there's no transparency. The black field of
this nested composition covers up the background.
| | 04:09 | I have to deal with that.
| | 04:10 | But luckily, since we have nested
composition it's easier to solve.
| | 04:13 | So I'm going to reset the Transforms here.
| | 04:16 | What we do about the fact that
there is no transparency here.
| | 04:19 | But we can steal a
transparency from different layer.
| | 04:22 | In fact, if you wonder why we did the matte render pass
this is why we did it to solve this particular problem.
| | 04:28 | Because even before we nested there is an issue,
there's not proper Alpha here in the Render composition.
| | 04:34 | So let's go back to shot1.
| | 04:35 | So I'm going to grab the Matte Render
Pass and pull it down and drop it on top.
| | 04:39 | We're going to steal the Alpha information
from this or then steal the value information
| | 04:44 | and give it out to Alpha.
So here's the Matt Render.
| | 04:47 | It's White over Black.
| | 04:48 | We don't need to see that, we just
need to borrow information from it.
| | 04:52 | So can go to the video eye
beside it and turn it off.
| | 04:55 | What we will do next is go to the Render layer and
use this feature called TrkMat, it's spelled T-R-K-M-A-T.
| | 05:03 | What that does is it steals information
from layer above it and give that to the Alpha.
| | 05:06 | So in this situation what I can do is change this menu
here to Luna Matte. Luma Matte stands for Luminance Matte.
| | 05:14 | We'll look at the layer above, in this case the
matte layer, look at the luminance information,
| | 05:20 | convert that to the Alpha
and give that the Render layer.
| | 05:22 | So I'm going to select Luma Matte and
therefore that objects cut out properly.
| | 05:28 | Again the TrkMat goes one layer up, takes a
look at the information, converts that to
| | 05:33 | the Alpha, and in this case I chose Luma Matte option,
so it's looking at Luminance information, in other words Brightness.
| | 05:38 | Brightness is converted into Alpha for this nested
render layer, and therefore it's cut out properly.
| | 05:44 | So we have seen the advantages and disadvantages
of working with render passes on separate layers.
| | 05:50 | The advantage is you can
adjust each layer individually.
| | 05:53 | Disadvantage is it's difficult to move
those layers together as a single unit.
| | 05:56 | Luckily you can either parent the
layers together or you can nest.
| | 06:01 | In this case nesting worked out great for
us because it helped us to solve the problem
| | 06:04 | of the Alpha Channel for this spyglass render.
| | 06:09 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Transforming Motion Tracking in After EffectsSetting up a motion tracker| 00:00 | We have recombined our render passes within a single
composition called Render. We then nested that
| | 00:05 | composition within the shot1 composition.
Therefore that spyglass is a single layer.
| | 00:10 | However, it doesn't have
the motion of the scene.
| | 00:13 | If I was to play this back to the RAM preview,
you'll see that the spyglass did not really
| | 00:18 | follow her hand, so this is where
motion tracking comes into play.
| | 00:22 | Motion tracking will allow us to determine
what the motion is in the original footage
| | 00:27 | in terms of camera movements and the movement of
her hand and apply that to the spyglass render.
| | 00:32 | If I zoom in here through the middle mouse
key and then scroll, we can see that there
| | 00:37 | is a little stick with an X on it, and
that's actually intended for the motion tracking.
| | 00:42 | So the goal here is to cover up this stick,
and this piece of tape where the spyglass
| | 00:47 | make look like the spyglass is actually
in her hand and therefore as a same motion.
| | 00:52 | Now there is a little bit of
animation on the spyglass itself.
| | 00:54 | If I play it back again, you can see that
the spyglass just tilts backwards, but that's
| | 00:59 | all it does, it doesn't move any further in the scene,
so again that's where motion tracking comes into play.
| | 01:04 | So motion tracking works by applying the
motion tracking tool, identifying the feature and
| | 01:09 | tracking over time to create a motion path.
| | 01:12 | The motion path is eventually applied to a layer such
as a spyglass layer, so let's get started with that.
| | 01:18 | Now in this case, I want to apply the
motion tracking tool to the original footage, so
| | 01:22 | I'm going to select shot1, go up to
Animation and select Track Motion.
| | 01:27 | That's the tool you want.
| | 01:28 | Now if you're using a slightly older
version of After Effects, this area of the menu is
| | 01:32 | going to look a different; however, this menu item
track motion is consistent, so I want to select that.
| | 01:38 | When you select it, a couple of things happen.
| | 01:40 | The first thing is the view jumps from
the composition view into the layer viewer.
| | 01:45 | Motion tracking has to occur at
least initially in the layer viewer.
| | 01:48 | Another thing that happens is there's a track
point that's positive in the center of frame
| | 01:53 | in that view. We're going to use this to
identify the feature that we want to track over time.
| | 01:58 | The third thing that happens is the
Tracker panel opens up at the bottom right.
| | 02:02 | Now again, if you're using slightly older
version of After Effects, this will look a
| | 02:06 | little bit different. But fortunately, the
menus we're going to change and the buttons
| | 02:10 | we're going to press are
going to be exactly the same.
| | 02:12 | So in terms of this panel
here, let's talk about a few things.
| | 02:16 | The first thing is a motion source.
That is the footage we are tracking.
| | 02:19 | In this case, we're tracking shot1.
| | 02:21 | You can also multiple trackers in
any given layer, so they are numbered.
| | 02:25 | We're just going with Tracker 1 which you're given
for free, so we're just going to stay with that for now.
| | 02:30 | There is also Track Type.
| | 02:31 | There is actually different
styles of motion tracking.
| | 02:34 | For this particular project, we're
just concerned with Transform Tracking.
| | 02:38 | Transform Tracking means we're going to track
the left-right, down-up motion of the feature.
| | 02:43 | In another words, track the X and the
Y direction of the feature over time.
| | 02:48 | That's commonly called Transform Tracking, so
if you ever hear of transform tracking, that's
| | 02:51 | motion tracking that just
tracks those in two directions.
| | 02:55 | Below that you have some
various transform option.
| | 02:57 | Position, Rotation and Scale, I am going to talk about
these further. We're going to start with just Position.
| | 03:03 | Below that there are some options we'll get to
little bit later on and also some Analyzation buttons.
| | 03:08 | Use these buttons to go through the
footage and allow the tracker to try to determine
| | 03:12 | where the feature moves.
| | 03:14 | In terms of track point, again, that's
placed over the feature you want to track.
| | 03:17 | So what's the feature? The feature is
something that's high contrast that's easily visible,
| | 03:23 | relatively small, that stays in frame the
entire duration of the timeline and what the
| | 03:28 | tracker does, it identifies that pattern within
that track point and tries to follow it as it moves.
| | 03:34 | So in terms of this footage, if I pull
back here, we're given a great place to track.
| | 03:39 | If I go to frame 10 or so, you can see
there is a little excellent piece of tape.
| | 03:44 | That was put there to track, and that's great,
because it's relatively high contrast, relatively
| | 03:48 | small and stays in the frame, plus it
replicates the motion of her hand, because again, the
| | 03:53 | original goal of this project is to place
that spyglass in her hands, so we want to
| | 03:57 | figure out where her hand is moving over time.
So that's one variation of Transform Tracking.
| | 04:01 | You are tracking an object
like her hand moving through the frame.
| | 04:05 | Now there is a little bit camera motion in
the scene also. It's going to detect that,
| | 04:09 | too, because we want that spyglass to pickup
also the virtual camera motion, so the motion
| | 04:14 | of her hand and the motion of the camera, so
those both will be detected by the tracker tool.
| | 04:18 | So what we want to do is place
this track point over that X.
| | 04:22 | So how do you move this around? If I zoom
back in, you can simply click-drag any empty
| | 04:27 | part of that track point like in the center,
for instance right here, click-drag.
| | 04:32 | As you drag, it magnifies what's below it just so
you can see that a little better. When we let
| | 04:37 | go, it returns to its original state.
| | 04:38 | So what I can do is click-drag it and
scroll until I get this up to that X mark.
| | 04:43 | I'm going to do this on frame 10, because
frame 10 is relatively free of motion blur.
| | 04:48 | The motion blur can interfere with the
tracking, so 10 is the good place to start.
| | 04:52 | So I'm going to place this up here at the
center of this X as close I can.
| | 04:56 | There we go, and let go.
| | 04:58 | There are ways to adjust this track point
further, but we're going to save that for later step.
| | 05:02 | So we applied the tracker to the live
action footage, we have placed the track point over
| | 05:06 | a trackable feature, and now we're ready to
analyze in order to find out what the motion is.
| | 05:11 | The analyzation is relatively complex, so what
we're going to do is save that for the next video.
| | 05:16 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using a tracker to analyze motion in footage| 00:00 | At this stage of Project 1, we have
applied a tracker to the shot1 footage.
| | 00:04 | Now if you open up the scene file, and you
see that the tracker is missing, or at least
| | 00:08 | it's grayed out, there
is a way to get that back.
| | 00:10 | We can just go Motion Source and change it
from None, which sometimes it gets set to,
| | 00:16 | to the name of footage that actually carries the
tracker, in this case shot1, and it often comes back.
| | 00:21 | Now if you still don't see it, it's possible the
tracker is also set to None, in terms of Current Track.
| | 00:26 | So just pick the tracker you are working with, like
Tracker1 in this case, and then all these features come back.
| | 00:32 | Also once this comes back, the Track
Points should be visible on the layer view.
| | 00:36 | Again, you have to do this in the layer
view and not the Composition view.
| | 00:39 | So if you are on the Composition
view, switch over to layer view.
| | 00:42 | In any case, we have the tracker, we have
the TrackPoint positioned over the feature
| | 00:45 | on that piece of tape which is the X.
Now we are ready to analyze.
| | 00:50 | So you can use the analyzation buttons
down here at the bottom of the tracker.
| | 00:53 | There is a Analyze forward
it and also Analyze backward.
| | 00:56 | This is based on what frame you're currently on.
| | 00:59 | Now we set the Time slider on frame 10
because the X part was nice and clear at that frame.
| | 01:04 | So what we can do is choose to
go one direction to the other.
| | 01:06 | I am going to start by going forward.
I will click the Analyze forward button.
| | 01:10 | What happens is it's going to go
through the footage one frame at a time.
| | 01:12 | When it reaches the end in this case, it stops and
what you're left with as a result is a motion path.
| | 01:19 | If I zoom in closer, you can see the motion path
is composed of both segments between keyframe boxes.
| | 01:26 | These little hollow boxes are keyframes
that are placed on the tracker's properties.
| | 01:33 | The former path that represents where the X is going
over time, or where that feature is going over time.
| | 01:38 | Now once the tracker stops, you can
interactively play it back to see how well it's doing.
| | 01:42 | You can just crab the time indicator and
move it across, and we'd see how well that
| | 01:48 | motion path is sticking to the center of the X.
| | 01:50 | So, so far, the center of the X is pretty
much lined up with those keyframe boxes.
| | 01:55 | So we're doing pretty good at this stage.
| | 01:57 | Now, we have only analyzed for frame 10 to the
end, we start to do with Frame 0 through 9.
| | 02:03 | So what I can do is go back to frame 10, then
and use Analyze backward button, let's click
| | 02:08 | that and see how that does.
| | 02:09 | Once it's done, it finished the motion path, and
I can playback timeline and see how well it does.
| | 02:15 | So here it's doing well, so go towards zero,
pretty good, and now it some has an problems.
| | 02:21 | See how it drifts off?
| | 02:22 | So when I am on Frame 0, the center of that
TrackPoint does not match some of the X. That's a problem.
| | 02:28 | Why'd that happened? Well,
there's lots of motion blur.
| | 02:31 | Motion blur tends to confuse the motion
tracker because pattern becomes too soft and blurry.
| | 02:36 | Some really here the first two frames
are a problem, after that it's doing okay.
| | 02:41 | So what do you do in that situation? Now
this arises a lot because often the footage is
| | 02:46 | so varied that you never get a
perfect motion path at the start.
| | 02:50 | There are several solutions. The easiest one in
this case is to manually adjust the motion
| | 02:54 | path to fix it, because we are only really dealing
with two frames that are a problem in this case.
| | 02:58 | What you can do is go to the problem frame
like frame 0, zoom in and then interactively
| | 03:03 | click-drag the box.
| | 03:05 | Now I'm just going to drag it by its empty
center to where you think it should be for
| | 03:09 | that frame, say, about right here.
| | 03:11 | Once you let go, the motion path is
Updated, plus a little keyframe box is updated.
| | 03:16 | So Frame 0 is actually correct now.
| | 03:18 | I can go to the next frame, frame 1 and
again that one is off a little bit, so then
| | 03:22 | I can click-drag the
TrackPoint until it lines up.
| | 03:27 | Again you are lying at the center so that
little tiny center X needs to line up with
| | 03:30 | the center of my big X on my tape.
| | 03:32 | And you can adjust this as many
times as you want to. All right.
| | 03:35 | So frame 0 and 1 are now correct,
and everything else looks pretty good.
| | 03:39 | So we have been able to analyze the footage
with the Analyze buttons, both forward and
| | 03:43 | backwards, we've looked at how good
that motion path wound up, and then we figured
| | 03:47 | out a way to fix the first two frames which
had drifted off. And the quick solution in that
| | 03:52 | case is to manually
adjust the TrackPoint position.
| | 03:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting tracker options for better results| 00:00 | So far with project 1 in After Effects, we have
applied the Tracker and created a successful motion path.
| | 00:07 | Now, remember that the first few frames were
giving us problems because of the heavy motion blur.
| | 00:12 | To fix that, we manually adjusted the
position of the Track Points to improve that location
| | 00:17 | of the Track Point where it is compared to
that feature we're tracking, which is the X
| | 00:21 | on the piece of tape.
Now, there are some options you can apply.
| | 00:25 | There's Options button on the
Tracker itself that you can adjust.
| | 00:27 | Also the option to interactively
change the shape of the Track Point, and we
| | 00:33 | haven't talk about this yet, but
there are two boxes on the Track Point.
| | 00:36 | The inner box is the feature box.
| | 00:38 | That represents the region that contains the
pattern that it's trying to track over time.
| | 00:44 | And generally, you leave that about
the size of that pattern like the X.
| | 00:48 | The outer box is a search region, and that's
a region that it goes into if it has a hard
| | 00:53 | time finding the pattern.
| | 00:55 | The pattern might be obscure because of
motion blur, like it is here, or because there is
| | 00:59 | erratic motion, and all of a
sudden it loses where the feature is.
| | 01:03 | So it will go into the search
region to try to find it again.
| | 01:06 | So one thing you can try to improve the
motion path is just to resize these boxes.
| | 01:10 | You can click on the corners, interactively
drag them to scale them in the left, right,
| | 01:14 | or up, down, or both directions, and
also do that with the search box too.
| | 01:19 | So, what we can do is try to go to frame 10,
where it's a pretty good track, and then experiment
| | 01:24 | by resizing these boxes.
So let's say I make the boxes really big.
| | 01:28 | Now sometimes a really large set of boxes, on
the Track Point, will help you track something
| | 01:33 | that's a little too blurry, or too erratic.
| | 01:36 | And in general, a larger set of boxes will mean
that the tracking tool works a little bit more slowly.
| | 01:42 | Let's give it a try and see if it helps us.
I'm going to analyze backwards from frame 10.
| | 01:47 | In that case, my boxes were so large,
it got completely confused, and slipped off.
| | 01:53 | So, for this particular project,
that's probably not a good solution.
| | 01:56 | But keep in mind that sometimes
it is necessary to adjust these.
| | 02:00 | Again, in general, you want to make the
feature box just slightly larger than that thing you
| | 02:05 | are trying to track, like this X.
| | 02:08 | The search box can be just made a little bit
bigger, something like this is generally fine.
| | 02:12 | So let's try it again.
| | 02:14 | Looking pretty good, it's still going
to slip off in the first two frames.
| | 02:17 | Let's talk about some of the other options
though that come with the Tracker tool itself.
| | 02:20 | If I click the Options
button, this window comes up.
| | 02:23 | It's divided into several regions.
| | 02:25 | You have your Channel section, you have
your Process Before Match, and then your Adapt
| | 02:30 | Feature menu along with the Confidence amount.
| | 02:33 | What the Channel does is allows you
to track different channel elements.
| | 02:38 | It sets a luminance, by default, which means it
looks at the pixels in terms of their brightness,
| | 02:42 | not their color just the
brightness, and often this is very good.
| | 02:45 | There is also RGB where you can track based on red
and green and blue values, and that's it, no brightness.
| | 02:50 | There is also Saturation where you track
simply by the amount of any of the primary colors.
| | 02:56 | In this particular case, these channel
themes will not make a huge difference, but it's
| | 03:00 | good to be aware that they're there.
Now, there is also Process Before Match.
| | 03:04 | This will put a pre-process on your footage to
help the Tracker figure out where the pattern is.
| | 03:09 | I'm going to turn this on.
| | 03:11 | There's Blur, and that's going to blur the
image in advance, and this is good for any
| | 03:14 | kind of footage that's very grainy where you
have a grain pattern interfering with your tracking.
| | 03:19 | Let's give that a try, and see if that helps.
| | 03:21 | I'm going to click OK and then go to frame 10
again and analyze backwards. Slightly different
| | 03:26 | result, often you get a very slight
difference in the motion path.
| | 03:30 | Now, in this case, it didn't help us a lot
because we don't really need to blur this.
| | 03:34 | Let's go back to the Options.
| | 03:36 | The opposite is Enhance,
which sharpens beforehand.
| | 03:39 | It's looking pretty good until the very
last frame where it goes off of the tangent.
| | 03:43 | So, in this case, I think turning Process
Before Match off is going to be just fine.
| | 03:47 | Now, in terms of this lower menu Adapt
Feature and the Confidence, that allows Tracker to
| | 03:53 | go into different modes where it reacts
differently based on how successful it is.
| | 03:57 | Now Adapt Feature, what that does is instead
of looking at the pattern on frame 1, it actually
| | 04:03 | looks at the pattern at the prior frame.
| | 04:05 | So, if you're on frame 10,
it double-checks frame 9.
| | 04:07 | It assumes that the pattern is going to
shift a little bit over time, it's going to try
| | 04:11 | adapt its knowledge based on that.
| | 04:13 | So, if the X on this piece of tape is
changing perspective, or its motion blur, try to take
| | 04:19 | that into account and continue to
track that feature, or that pattern.
| | 04:23 | It's actually a pretty
good option to leave as is.
| | 04:26 | There is also Confidence, and what the
Confidence means is when the program's confidence drops
| | 04:31 | too low, it does something.
| | 04:33 | For example, if you set it to Stop Tracking
and set to a very high confidence, what that
| | 04:38 | means is it's going to stop tracking
if its confidence drops below 100%.
| | 04:43 | And 100% means that it's absolutely
sure it knows where the pattern is.
| | 04:47 | So odds are, if I do Stop Tracking at
100%, it's going to stop really quickly.
| | 04:52 | Okay, frame 10, analyze backwards, and
it did indeed stop at the next frame.
| | 04:58 | What happened was it was a little unsure
of that next frame where the pattern was, it
| | 05:01 | was it's only 98% because
it's below 100%, it just stopped.
| | 05:06 | Now you can have other values too like 50%.
| | 05:08 | If I was to use that, it would probably go much
further because it's going to go as long as
| | 05:13 | conference is above 50%.
So it goes much further.
| | 05:17 | So you don't have to use these other options,
but they're good to know that they're there.
| | 05:21 | Again, the Adapt Feature is
quite useful in most cases.
| | 05:24 | I'm going to turn this to 80% also.
I think we're good with our defaults here.
| | 05:31 | We'll return to these in later projects, but I
just wanted to let you know where these were.
| | 05:36 | So, based on the original settings here,
I'm going to click OK, and then re-analyze
| | 05:40 | one more time backwards.
| | 05:42 | And I'm afraid for this particular project, the
first two frames we're going to have to manually adjust.
| | 05:47 | So I'm going to adjust the frame 0
and then go to frame 1 and adjust that.
| | 05:51 | Now we're back to having
a pretty good motion path.
| | 05:53 | Now, before I move on, there's one other
thing I want to talk about, and that's where the
| | 05:57 | Tracker stores the information.
| | 05:58 | If I go down to shot 1, and expand this dropdown arrow
here, you will see there is a Motion Tracker section.
| | 06:05 | You get that as soon as
you apply Motion Tracker.
| | 06:07 | If I expand further, you'll see
Tracker 1, which we're working on.
| | 06:10 | Even further, you'll see all of the things
that are keyframed automatically, includes
| | 06:15 | Feature Center, Confidence, and Attach Point.
We talked about Confidence.
| | 06:18 | Basically After Effects
stores the values for each frame.
| | 06:22 | The Feature Center is the center of the
feature it's tracking where it is in screen space,
| | 06:26 | and the Attach Point is actually that tiny
little x in the center of the Track Point.
| | 06:31 | Now, if you haven't adjusted the motion path
manually, the Feature Center and the Attach
| | 06:36 | Point are identical.
| | 06:36 | As soon as you start to move things around
though, you can have slightly different values
| | 06:41 | between the too, and that's fine.
| | 06:43 | Now, we're going to return to some of this
information later, but this is where the keyframes
| | 06:47 | are actually stored on that layer, and the
positions are represented on the screen by
| | 06:52 | these little keyframe boxes.
| | 06:53 | So, now we have a decent motion path, we can move on
and learn ways to apply that motion path to other layers.
| | 07:03 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Matching layer motion by applying tracker data| 00:00 | We have come up with a good motion path
by applying the Tracker to the footage.
| | 00:04 | We have tracked that X on the piece of
tape as it travels through the scene.
| | 00:07 | As soon as you feel that you have created a
good motion path, and it's accurate, you can
| | 00:11 | apply that data to a different layer, and
therefore activate the actual motion tracking.
| | 00:15 | In this project, we're going to apply the
data to the Render layer, which is the nested
| | 00:20 | version of that spyglass all combined.
| | 00:23 | Before we apply the data however, we have to do one
additional step in this composition to make this work.
| | 00:28 | I need to go to the Matte layer, go to
the Parent menu, and change it to Render.
| | 00:33 | I want the Matte layer to
follow the Render automatically.
| | 00:35 | The Render layer is
going to get the motion data.
| | 00:38 | However, I don't want to apply the
data second time to the Matte layer.
| | 00:41 | So what I can do to save time is simply change its
Parent menu to follow the Render layer automatically.
| | 00:46 | So now we're ready to try to apply the data.
| | 00:49 | I am going to go back to the Tracker, and the
first thing I need to check is the Edit Target button.
| | 00:55 | I need to tell it what
layer to apply the data to.
| | 00:58 | So I need to switch this
menu beside layer to Render.
| | 01:01 | I can only apply data to one layer at a time.
So I have to pick the one I want to apply it to.
| | 01:05 | So, I'm going to click OK.
| | 01:06 | And now I can go down to the
Apply button, and apply that data.
| | 01:10 | It's going to ask me if I want to apply it
in the X and Y? And I do, I want to apply
| | 01:13 | the left- right and up-down
movement, so OK, and there it's applied.
| | 01:18 | A couple of things happened.
| | 01:19 | One, if I check out the Render layer and
look at the Transforms, the Position property is
| | 01:24 | animated for every single keyframe,
that's where the motion tracking data winds up.
| | 01:28 | Another thing that happens is the thing
you applied the data to is going to move.
| | 01:33 | In fact, our spyglass moved way up in the air.
Let's play it back to see how it's working.
| | 01:38 | So Tracking is working, however the
spyglasses is hovering up in the air, it's following
| | 01:42 | the stick, at least it's relative to
it, but it's not in a good position.
| | 01:47 | Why'd that happened? Well, what happens is
when you apply the tracking data, the position
| | 01:51 | is animated, but basically wherever the
anchor point was for the layer you applied it to
| | 01:57 | is moved to where the motion path was.
| | 01:59 | Now, because the anchor point for the
spyglass is in the center of frame, the entire frame
| | 02:05 | was moved upwards so that anchor point was
stuck to where the motion path was, and that's
| | 02:09 | where that little X was moving.
So therefore it's too high.
| | 02:11 | Well, how do you solve that? What you can do
is adjust the anchor point before you apply
| | 02:17 | the Motion Tracker.
| | 02:18 | So, what I'm going to do is
destroy the position animation.
| | 02:21 | I'm going to turn off the Time icon.
That gets rid of it.
| | 02:25 | Then reset the spyglass, or Render layer,
and then do some preparation work by altering
| | 02:30 | where the anchor point is.
| | 02:32 | You can see the anchor point in the viewer,
it's actually a little circle with four little
| | 02:37 | lines coming out from it.
| | 02:38 | It can be a little hard to
see, there it is right there.
| | 02:40 | It's a little circle with four little
lines, that's where the Anchor Point is.
| | 02:43 | Now, by default, that is placed in the
exact center of frame when you make a new layer.
| | 02:47 | I want it to be up here behind the spyglass,
because I want that X on the tape to be basically
| | 02:54 | behind the spyglass, or where you see it in
an opposite fashion, the spyglass seems to
| | 02:58 | be in front of this pole, and this X.
| | 02:59 | So, I need to place the
anchor point where the X would be.
| | 03:03 | So I'm going to grab the Pan Behind tool,
which is this little square with the four arrows.
| | 03:07 | I can use that to interactively move
the anchor point, click-drag up to here.
| | 03:12 | So, you can imagine that when this is in
place, the pole is here, tape is here, and the X
| | 03:18 | is somewhere in this area.
So, it looks like a pretty good position.
| | 03:21 | So I'm going to go back to the arrow to get
out of that tool, and now we can try to reapply.
| | 03:26 | I'm going to go back to my Tracker, make sure it's
visible, and then reapply, and say yes to X and Y.
| | 03:32 | So instantaneously, it jumps over to left,
because I have the anchor point in a different position.
| | 03:38 | Also it's not nearly as high up in the sky.
So let's play it back now.
| | 03:41 | So now it's definitely tracking, and it
starts off in a better position, still not exact.
| | 03:46 | At frame 0, it's not covering up the pole
completely, and then when I play forward, you can see
| | 03:50 | it's starting to slip off to the right.
| | 03:53 | Why is it slipping? Well, in Maya, we do
not animate the camera, and there is animation
| | 03:57 | on the spyglass, but that's
just a very simple tilt backwards.
| | 04:02 | It doesn't really emulate the complex
motion of the actions of hand or the camera, the
| | 04:06 | camera in terms of the real camera.
| | 04:07 | Now, what you do with a slide like this?
The motion path is actually working for us.
| | 04:11 | The problem is the relative position of that
3D object compared to where the 3D camera was.
| | 04:16 | What you can do though inside After Effects
is place the animation on the anchor point,
| | 04:21 | you can change the anchor point by
interactively moving it, and also keyframe it, so it has
| | 04:25 | slightly different positions over time.
| | 04:26 | And that will help solve these kind of
sliding issues you might come up with.
| | 04:30 | Well, how you do that? Well, you want to
figure out where the object is sliding first.
| | 04:34 | For instance, I can just start with frame 0,
it's not quite in the right place at frame
| | 04:38 | 0, so I can go to the anchor point,
click the Time icon to turn that on.
| | 04:43 | And then instead of interactively moving it
in the frame, what I can do is go to the values
| | 04:46 | for X and Y, put my mouse
over top of that number cell.
| | 04:50 | When I do that, I get a special icon with
a little hand with a finger and two arrows.
| | 04:54 | When I have that, I can click-drag left or
right, and change the values through this
| | 04:59 | part of the layer editor,
as opposed to the viewer.
| | 05:01 | So, I am going to slide this
around till it lines up with that pole.
| | 05:04 | I can also do this up and down.
So that's the first keyframe.
| | 05:07 | Then I can move forward and figure
out where it really started to slip off.
| | 05:11 | Some maybe around frame 6 would be
a good place for me to keyframe.
| | 05:14 | It's definitely not in
the correct position here.
| | 05:16 | So I'm going to slide this over, and
maybe a little bit of up and down too.
| | 05:20 | Looking for a gap between the black handle
and the fingers, it's fairly consistent, also
| | 05:25 | when I see it at the same
distance from the edge of the finger.
| | 05:27 | Now, to continue to keyframe this is going
to be difficult to do in real time during this
| | 05:32 | video, so you're going to
have do additional work on this.
| | 05:35 | Now I did probably with this in advance, so
I do know additional keyframes are needed.
| | 05:39 | In fact, a good place to keyframe is frame
0, frame 6, frame 8, frame 18, 24, and 28.
| | 05:47 | I'm not going to be able to do that
right now, it's going to take too much time.
| | 05:50 | But the general idea is to go to the next
keyframe, move the anchor point by sliding
| | 05:56 | through the cell values, and
going on to next one and next one.
| | 06:00 | So, the next video I'll have this
keyframed for you, and it will be solved.
| | 06:05 | At this point, you have to do a little
additional work by setting your own keyframes.
| | 06:09 | That's the general idea though.
| | 06:10 | So we have applied the motion tracking data
to the Render layer, we made sure the Parent,
| | 06:16 | the Matte, the Render
layers, or the Alpha was working.
| | 06:18 | We did a little fine adjustment by first
interactively changing the anchor point position and then
| | 06:24 | also setting some additional keyframes.
| | 06:29 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Refining a layer's transparency with rotoscoping| 00:00 | We have applied the motion tracking data to
the render layer, and now the motion tracking
| | 00:04 | is working where the spyglass
follows the hand of the actress.
| | 00:07 | One thing we had to do though is spend a
little bit more time working with the anchor points.
| | 00:11 | Because there is a little bit of slide based
in the way the spyglass is rendered in terms
| | 00:16 | of it's sliding left, right, up, or down
compared to her hand, we had to keyframe the anchor
| | 00:21 | point, and it took me a total of six
additional keyframes to make the motion look better.
| | 00:26 | Let's play it back there
and see what it looks like.
| | 00:28 | So the spyglass is
following her hand fairly well.
| | 00:30 | It looks like it's right
there where her fingertips are.
| | 00:33 | Now, one problem of course is the fact
that the spyglass handle covers up her hand.
| | 00:37 | This should be really in between her fingers.
| | 00:39 | This is a common problem
with visual effects compositing.
| | 00:42 | You have a CG Render, you have to put it
behind something that was shot in the real world.
| | 00:47 | So, how do you do that? Well, the best way
to fix that is through rotoscoping, which is
| | 00:52 | a very common task.
| | 00:53 | With rotoscoping, you can create a mask,
and that mask will affect the Alpha channel of
| | 00:58 | the layer you apply it to.
| | 01:00 | Therefore, we can draw a mask to
cut out the bottom of this handle.
| | 01:04 | So, let's give that a try.
I'll go to frame 1, or frame 0, zoom in.
| | 01:09 | What I can do is select the render layer, and
then draw a mask with the Pen tool up at the top.
| | 01:15 | With the Pen tool selected, I can click in the
Viewer, and each time I click, I get a mask point.
| | 01:20 | So, I'm going to outline the top of the
fingers here, because this is where it's going to
| | 01:24 | cut, and then drop down, and
just make it extra big down here.
| | 01:28 | Now, I do need to make sure it's
a closed path all the way around.
| | 01:31 | So, if I click on the very first point, I get
that little circle icon, and I can close that path.
| | 01:37 | As soon as it's closed, that
mask is going to start working.
| | 01:40 | Now, in this case, it saved the
lower handle, and cut out the rest.
| | 01:44 | What happens is whatever is inside that closed
path becomes solid Alpha, in other words, it's kept.
| | 01:52 | Anything beyond the mask becomes
transparent Alpha and is tossed away.
| | 01:56 | So we want the opposite result.
We want to keep the top to get rid of bottom.
| | 01:59 | You can do that by going to the Mask options.
| | 02:02 | Once you draw a mask, and go to the Masks
section on that layer, and there is Mask 1,
| | 02:08 | expand that, and you have a few options here.
| | 02:10 | In this case, you want to check on the
Inverted Checkbox to get the opposite result.
| | 02:14 | So now it's starting to work.
| | 02:16 | Now I'm going to have to keyframe this
mask's changing shape over time because her hand
| | 02:21 | is in different position, therefore this
rotoscoping has to change over time too.
| | 02:26 | Before we get to that though, I want
to adjust the mask a little bit further.
| | 02:30 | Now, one thing you can do to see what the
quality is, is hide this from the Viewer.
| | 02:35 | So I can go to the Toggle Mask button,
click that, and that yellow line goes away.
| | 02:39 | However, the result is still there,
I can still see what's happening.
| | 02:43 | So it looks pretty good.
| | 02:44 | However, there's a really hard
edge there in terms of the transition.
| | 02:47 | So another thing you can do is go to the
Feather on the mask, and increase that, and go from
| | 02:53 | 0 to 3, and that gives me a softer transition.
| | 02:56 | That actually looks better,
and is a better match.
| | 02:59 | I will zoom out again and then turn on the Mask.
| | 03:02 | Now, right now the mask
has some very hard corners.
| | 03:04 | There are different ways to make
softer transitions between the points.
| | 03:09 | One I like to use is called RotoBezier.
| | 03:11 | So, what I'll do is pick the entire mask,
and then go to the Selection tool, double-click
| | 03:16 | at the mask lines until
the entire mask is selected.
| | 03:19 | I can tell it's selected because all the
points are solid, which means they're selected, and
| | 03:24 | also there is a big Transform Box around it,
but I just want to pick the entire thing.
| | 03:28 | I then go up to layer, go to Mask
and Shape Path and go to RotoBezier.
| | 03:33 | This converts the mask into a special version,
where it's a little bit easier to get smoother,
| | 03:38 | or harder, transitions interactively.
| | 03:41 | Once I have converted it, I can click off this
to pick nothing, and then for instance pick
| | 03:45 | one point by clicking on it so it becomes
solid and then change that to become
| | 03:50 | smoother, or harder, and
there's a special tool for that.
| | 03:52 | I'll go up to the Pen tool, click and hold down.
There's something called Convert Vertex tool.
| | 03:58 | When I pick that, I get the special arrow up here,
and I can then place it over at that selected point.
| | 04:04 | I'll see that arrow there in the Viewer also.
Then I can click-drag left or right.
| | 04:09 | It interactively makes it harder
to the left, or smoother to the right.
| | 04:14 | Once it's converted to RotoBezier, it becomes
really easy to convert these points, and interactively
| | 04:19 | change whether you have a
hard corner, or a soft corner.
| | 04:22 | So I can click on one at a time with this
tool, click-drag left or right, and affect
| | 04:27 | the way that point is transitioning.
| | 04:29 | So, this is actually a better shape, it's
smoother, and it matches the fingers better here.
| | 04:33 | So I'm going to go back to my Selection tool.
| | 04:35 | Now again, I am going to have to keyframe
this, but I think we're ready to do that now.
| | 04:38 | So, while I'm on the first frame, frame 0, I'm
going to click the Time icon beside Mask Path.
| | 04:44 | That gives me a keyframe right there.
| | 04:45 | Now, the keyframe stores
the entire shape of that mask.
| | 04:48 | So now I can go to additional frame, or a later frame,
and change the shape, and get additional keyframes.
| | 04:54 | So, I'm going to go to frame
10, and then change the shape.
| | 04:57 | In order to change the shape, what I can
do is click off of the mask to pick nothing,
| | 05:01 | and with my Selection tool selected, click
on one point at a time and interactively move
| | 05:06 | it to reshape that path.
| | 05:08 | As soon as I reshape the path by
moving points, I get a new keyframe.
| | 05:12 | So, I want to do this for the entire timeline.
| | 05:14 | Now, I don't need to do
it for every single frame.
| | 05:16 | In fact, there are several ways to approach it,
one is to simply jump ahead every 10 frames,
| | 05:22 | maybe another would be to
bisect where you go to the end frame.
| | 05:26 | Next, you shape it, and
then go to a center frame.
| | 05:29 | You bisect what you already have.
| | 05:30 | Go to some center position, change the shape,
and then go to another position that's in
| | 05:35 | the center of your old
keyframe, so you bisect old ones.
| | 05:38 | Again, reshape your mask,
and then continue to bisect.
| | 05:42 | In this case, because the motion is not that big,
it's relatively subtle, this works fairly well.
| | 05:48 | I'm doing it fairly quick though, you
defiantly want to spend some time to make sure that
| | 05:51 | the mask is following the fingers
accurately for the entire duration.
| | 05:55 | So, it might take a few more keyframes.
| | 05:57 | Another thing you can do when you adjust
the mask is move the entire thing as one unit,
| | 06:02 | and we have already seen that when we select the
mask by double-clicking, get the Transform Box.
| | 06:06 | If you see the Transform Box, you can click-drag in
the center, and move the entire thing as a single piece.
| | 06:12 | This is often very useful.
| | 06:13 | Again, if I were to do that, I get a new
keyframe, or it overwrites old keyframe.
| | 06:18 | So, let's turn off the mask so we can't see
it here, and let's play it back, fingers,
| | 06:24 | and the rotoscoping is left in, so it's okay.
| | 06:25 | Now, you will probably want to spend more
time on yours, but that's a general idea in
| | 06:28 | terms of how to apply it, and
how to make it cut out the handle.
| | 06:32 | rotoscoping has allowed us to place the
spyglass behind her hand, or at least make it look
| | 06:37 | like it's behind her fingers.
| | 06:39 | We're now ready to move on to other steps
where we further integrate the spyglass, so
| | 06:43 | it better matches the footage.
| | 06:48 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Improving layer movement with the Smoother tool| 00:00 | We have applied that motion tracking data to
the Spyglass Render layer and also rotoscoped
| | 00:05 | that layer so that the handle does
not cover up the front of her fingers.
| | 00:09 | Now the rotoscoping took a
few additional keyframes.
| | 00:11 | If I look at the mask, this is the number
of keyframes I wound up with, and that's to
| | 00:15 | ensure that the shape changes to
always fit the front of her fingers.
| | 00:19 | Let's play it back and take a look.
| | 00:20 | So at this point, it's looking pretty
good, it looks like it's in her fingers.
| | 00:23 | Now there is still a little bit of tiny motion
where it appears like the spyglass is sliding
| | 00:28 | a tiny bit, bobbling or jittering.
| | 00:30 | Now there are several things you can
do to try to get rid of that.
| | 00:33 | Now one problem when you apply the tracking
data is the fact that it applies a keyframe
| | 00:39 | for every frame of the timeline, so if you
look at the Transform section you can see
| | 00:42 | that the position has a keyframe for every frame.
| | 00:45 | Now that many keyframes packed closely
together, often leads to really tiny motion
| | 00:50 | that might not be good for this
particular scene or some other project.
| | 00:53 | In fact, if I click on Position,
here, you'll see the motion path.
| | 00:57 | If I zoom in, you will see there is a lot
of keyframes really tight along this area.
| | 01:01 | If you look closely enough, you can see
how there might be tiny jittering going on as
| | 01:05 | it moves back and forth.
| | 01:06 | So, one way to deal with that is to
apply a special tool called the Smoother.
| | 01:11 | Now the Smoother is hidden by default, but I
can go up to Window and show that, just click Smoother.
| | 01:16 | It comes up in its own tab
over here by the Tracker.
| | 01:19 | Now the idea of the Smoother is you can
pick a property such as Position, it's going to
| | 01:24 | look at the curve, and basically the motion
path which is associated with that and decimate
| | 01:30 | it so that there's fewer keyframes,
while trying to maintain the shape.
| | 01:32 | So tend to get rid of keyframes that are
very closely packed together like up here.
| | 01:37 | Now there is only one setting in this case, which
is Tolerance, so Tolerance is how aggressive it is.
| | 01:42 | So if I apply it now, it's really aggressive,
it really clears out a lot of keyframes.
| | 01:46 | Not only on the motion path up here, but
also you can see down on the Timeline.
| | 01:50 | Now it's probably too aggressive for us,
it's going to make it even more inaccurate, I am
| | 01:53 | going to backup with the Undo.
| | 01:55 | Let's try a lower number
like 0.2 and reapply it.
| | 01:59 | So it's not as aggressive, it's definitely
killed some of the keyframes, and the idea
| | 02:03 | with that is you potentially get a
smoother result, so let's play it back now.
| | 02:08 | Not too bad.
| | 02:09 | Now you can try to do different values in
terms of the Tolerance, you just have to undo
| | 02:13 | each time and reapply it.
| | 02:15 | If you apply it multiple times it
will be more and more decimated.
| | 02:17 | Now that's one solution, and
that's okay in this situation.
| | 02:20 | Another way to approach any kind of unwanted small
motion is to deal with the keyframes directly.
| | 02:27 | For example, you can scrub through the
Timeline and try and identify any place where maybe
| | 02:32 | the spyglass is slipping, let's find a spot.
| | 02:35 | Looks like right here if I scrub back and
forth, there's a little bit of slippage, where
| | 02:39 | it kind of jumps a little bit.
| | 02:41 | Now one problem is the mask is also a little
bit off there, so before we edit the keyframes
| | 02:46 | and the position, I think I'll
go ahead and go back to the mask.
| | 02:49 | Now you can edit this as much
as you want, whenever you want.
| | 02:51 | I am going to show the mask again, click on
that layer to see it, double-click it to pick
| | 02:57 | the entire thing, and move it
up and down with my arrow keys.
| | 03:00 | That's actually a shortcut, you can move
it interactively like this in the viewer, or
| | 03:04 | once the entire mask is selected use your arrow
keys on your keyboard to move it up and down.
| | 03:09 | That's great for really small fine tuning.
Let me hide the mask again.
| | 03:13 | Now I can still adjust even though it's hidden
because it's selected, that looks a little bit better.
| | 03:18 | In any case though, aside from the mask, it
feels like there's a little bit of a jump
| | 03:22 | here where it's just sliding maybe
too far to the left all of a sudden.
| | 03:27 | Now it looks like these keyframes
right in this area are a problem.
| | 03:30 | So one solution, in this
case, is to get rid of those.
| | 03:34 | To do your own manual smoothing, I could
pick these two keyframes and delete them.
| | 03:39 | Now the motion path is
unbroken, it's still there.
| | 03:41 | I just have fewer keyframes, and it has to
make a bigger jump between them in terms of
| | 03:45 | the motion path.
| | 03:46 | But sometimes that will solve any kind of
really small jittering, so let's see if we
| | 03:50 | can play that back.
So I think that little area looks better.
| | 03:52 | Now there's probably other areas to deal with, and
this is not going to be a super fast solution,
| | 03:57 | you might have to spend a little bit of time
editing these keyframes down here to determine
| | 04:01 | what might be causing any
kind of unwanted jitter.
| | 04:04 | Now associated with deleting the keyframes, if
you want to you can also update the positions.
| | 04:08 | For example, let's say that you felt
that certain frame had the spyglass too low.
| | 04:13 | Well, you can go to that frame and then put
your mouse over the X, or the Y, and then click
| | 04:19 | left-mouse drag to increase, or reduce, the value.
| | 04:24 | Now note the mask will slide along with
it, so you have to be careful with that.
| | 04:28 | That's one solution to
update the position manually.
| | 04:30 | So I am going to undo that for now.
| | 04:33 | Just keep that in mind for possible
way to fine-tune that position curve.
| | 04:38 | So we have applied the smoother to try to
simplify that motion path to have fewer keyframes to
| | 04:43 | move some of the jitter and slide.
| | 04:44 | We have also manually deleted a few keyframes,
and then we talked about how two update a
| | 04:50 | keyframe for the position.
| | 04:52 | Once you feel that you have sufficiently
adjusted the position, curve, and the motion path, and
| | 04:57 | have the motion tracking looking well, you
can move onto the final phase of this project.
| | 05:01 | Where we're going to adjust the color, and other qualities
of the render, to better match the original footage.
| | 05:06 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Improving the CG by adding blur and effects| 00:00 | We are now moving on to the final stages of
project 1. We have the motion tracking working
| | 00:04 | well on the spyglass so that it follows her hand,
along with the rotoscoping that cuts it out,
| | 00:09 | so it doesn't overlap the fingers.
| | 00:11 | Now we have to worry about the CG in terms
of how well it matches the live-action in
| | 00:16 | terms of its color, its sharpness,
and whether it's blurred or not.
| | 00:20 | So first thing, we could
do is activate Motion Blur.
| | 00:22 | After Effects offers the ability to blur
any layer that's in motion, and because the Render
| | 00:27 | layer has a motion path, I can activate
motion blur for that and get some blur to
| | 00:31 | match the blur of actress's hand.
| | 00:33 | So I am going to zoom in here, and you can
turn on Motion Blur in two places, the first
| | 00:37 | place is right beside the layer.
| | 00:39 | I can't see the switch now, but if I go
down to Toggle Switches, I will be able to see
| | 00:43 | the button for that and each
layer can support Motion Blur.
| | 00:48 | So here is the Render layer and here is the
switch for Motion Blur, I will turn that on,
| | 00:52 | it looks like three tiny circles.
| | 00:54 | That's on for the layer but I also have to
turn it on for the entire composition, there
| | 00:58 | is big button here that looks the same that
enables Motion Blur for any other layer that
| | 01:02 | has it activated.
So I am going to click that on.
| | 01:04 | As soon as I do that, you will see that there
is definitely additional blur on the spyglass.
| | 01:09 | There is more of Motion Blur for the first
few frames where that spyglass is moving the
| | 01:14 | fastest and little less for later frames.
| | 01:18 | So now we have Motion
Blur to help for the realism.
| | 01:20 | Now one thing you might notice on the first
frame is when I do that, it really exaggerates
| | 01:25 | the dark edge here.
| | 01:27 | I probably want to get rid of that because it looks
very dark and heavy compared to the brightly
| | 01:31 | lit scene behind it. So there we can tap
into some of our effects and adjust the matte.
| | 01:36 | Remember the Matte layer is what's
providing the Alpha for the render.
| | 01:39 | If I double-click that and look at it in the
layer viewer, once again it's just that white
| | 01:43 | render over black.
| | 01:45 | But the transition from white to black is pretty
harsh, it's pretty quick, it's not very soft.
| | 01:49 | What we can do though is add effects to the Matte layer,
so let me go back to the Composition view.
| | 01:54 | I am going to look at the layer by turning on the
eye for it right now, and then apply a couple of effects.
| | 02:00 | The first effect is going to be a blur, so
Effect--with that layer selected--Blur & Sharpen,
| | 02:06 | and Gaussian Blur.
| | 02:07 | Also I want to adjust the contrast, I am going
to go to Effects > Color Correction > Curves.
| | 02:13 | If I increase the
Blurriness, then it gets blurrier.
| | 02:15 | Now one disadvantage of that is, that it's
going to expand the matte edge, giving more
| | 02:20 | black, so the trick is to blur it, and then to
adjust the contrast. And the Curves effect
| | 02:24 | is great for that. The way it works is a straight
line by default, the line is perfectly straight
| | 02:30 | nothing has changed.
| | 02:31 | But you can click on this Curve, you get tiny
little points which you can then move around.
| | 02:36 | You move around, you ultimately adjust the
contrast, so if I click on the point in center
| | 02:41 | and drag that downwards like this at a angle, it
erodes the matte inwards to keep some of the softness.
| | 02:48 | So let's say that our Blur is about 3 and
pull this down a bit, and then we will check,
| | 02:54 | how this is going to
look by turning off the eye.
| | 02:57 | And so now we can also see it interactively,
if I increase the Blur it gets even softer,
| | 03:01 | if I pull this curve around I get
different results, bigger edge or smaller edge.
| | 03:07 | Let's take a look on another frame now to see what
the quality is when there's not that much Motion Blur.
| | 03:11 | Okay here it's been eroded too
far, so I have too much blur.
| | 03:14 | Let's try 3 again, and we will continue to
play around with this curve here and see different
| | 03:18 | results, so you can erode it
quite far or erode it just tiny bit.
| | 03:23 | So I think I am just going to do a tiny bit
just to soften that little bit, okay about
| | 03:27 | there looks pretty good.
All right, next thing to deal with is the color.
| | 03:32 | Now the Render has very specific colors,
we want to make sure they match the colors
| | 03:36 | contained in the live-action footage.
| | 03:37 | One of the first things to look at,
along those lines, is the blacks and whites.
| | 03:41 | When I say that I mean how dark are the
blacks on the Render versus the blacks within the
| | 03:46 | live action footage, let me go back to frame 0.
| | 03:50 | Now one way to test that is to place your
mouse over different parts of the frame and
| | 03:53 | look at the Info panel.
| | 03:55 | This reads out the RGB values, so let's say
put my mouse over the hair here where it's
| | 04:00 | relatively dark, I can look over at that panel
and see the values, those are in the low 40s for RGB.
| | 04:06 | I do the same over the spyglass they are
darker, around the 20s, all the way down to around
| | 04:12 | 6 or so, so it will be good to raise up the
blacks, the blacks have a brighter value and
| | 04:16 | they are more equivalent to the live-action.
| | 04:18 | Great way to do that is go to the Render
layer, select that, and apply a Curves effect once
| | 04:23 | again, so Curves.
| | 04:25 | Now in this case, I want to raise up the
dark area and the darks really are on the left
| | 04:30 | side of this graph and the
brights are on the right side.
| | 04:33 | So I am going to click twice here, and I am
going to put a new point in center just to
| | 04:37 | control the center, a new point
down here towards the left bottom.
| | 04:42 | Now if I raise this second point up, you
see how it makes the blacks much brighter, you
| | 04:46 | can go really far and make it
super bright but that's too far.
| | 04:49 | So we just bump up this little bit, then go
back and read what the values are, so right
| | 04:53 | now my blacks are more on 30s so that's
definitely closer, now I have to be careful not to get
| | 04:59 | too bright because I will
wash out the entire render.
| | 05:02 | The only thing I can do is pull a center one
down towards the end here, so my bump is smaller.
| | 05:07 | So I would say maybe in the mid 30s is pretty
good so that's where I am in the darkest part
| | 05:12 | right here, let me load in at 30s, and we
bump it up a bit more, it's pretty good.
| | 05:17 | I don't want the top to bend down too much
or darken the bright so I can also put a new
| | 05:20 | point here to straighten this out.
| | 05:22 | Now I am going to zoom out and take a look
so that's looks better in terms of the blacks
| | 05:26 | are better match, you can also do that with
the whites, you want to match the whites you
| | 05:30 | would see what the brightest areas are of
the live action footage and for instance,
| | 05:34 | the teeth are in the mid in 130s and 120s,
and compare that to the brightest parts of the spyglass,
| | 05:40 | and that's definitely much brighter in the
reflection in similar and some other parts,
| | 05:44 | but you would continue to adjust the
Curves effect to try to match the bright areas.
| | 05:50 | Again the upper part of the graph is bright
part, so it would affect the points up here.
| | 05:54 | You can see if I lower down this top point,
the brights get darker so that's one way you
| | 06:00 | deal with that.
| | 06:00 | I am going to leave this right, pretty
much in center though, that looks pretty good.
| | 06:04 | I'm not too worried if the reflections are
little bit brighter because that matches her eye.
| | 06:08 | Okay that solves the blacks and whites.
The color in general is also good to match.
| | 06:12 | You notice the live action footage is pretty
red, if I put my mouse over this background wall
| | 06:18 | and look at Info panel, you will see that
the Reds are more around the 210 range, the
| | 06:23 | Greens are in the low 200s, but the blues
are way down on 185, so definitely skewed
| | 06:29 | towards red, little bit more green than blue.
| | 06:32 | We can try and get the same balance on the spyglass
by applying a color balance effect to the Render layer.
| | 06:39 | So Effect > Color Correction > Color Balance.
| | 06:43 | So it gives you is sliders for the shadow
area, the midtone, area and the highlight area
| | 06:48 | of the layer. The shadow area being the dark
area and the highlight area being the brightest area.
| | 06:53 | You can change the balance between red, green, blue.
| | 06:56 | So, for example, I can expand the Highlight
sliders by clicking these arrows, and if I
| | 07:01 | just move one, you will see
it will change instantaneously.
| | 07:04 | So now I have reduced the red really far down,
and now I have a lot more green and blue.
| | 07:08 | Now it's too extreme in this case.
I am going to reset this to 0.
| | 07:12 | What I want is little more red, a tiny
bit more green, and a little bit less blue.
| | 07:17 | So good values in this situation would be +5
for the red, +3 for the green, and -3 for the blue.
| | 07:25 | And what that does, again it's going to give
you a little bit more red, a tiny bit more
| | 07:30 | green, and definitely subtract the blue, and now
I will start to skew it to more of a reddish hue.
| | 07:35 | I can go farther but in this case,
very subtle numbers work well.
| | 07:40 | So we adjusted the matte to try to get rid
of the black edge, we have also activated Motion
| | 07:45 | Blur to make it blurry when
the spyglass is moving fast.
| | 07:49 | Then we adjusted the overall Brightness and
Contrast, which affected the blacks and the
| | 07:54 | whites, try to matching
better to live-action footage.
| | 07:56 | There is final step, we did a little bit of color
grading by adjusting the colors to the color balance.
| | 08:02 | Those are all important steps.
| | 08:03 | There's few additional steps to
take to get even better integration.
| | 08:08 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding shadow to make the composite believable| 00:00 | We spent some time adjusting the spyglass
render in terms of the color and the motion
| | 00:05 | blur and the matte edge to
try to improve the integration.
| | 00:08 | There are a few more steps we
can take to sell that even further.
| | 00:12 | First one is to put a slight
blur on the entire render layer.
| | 00:15 | Now CG Sharpe in general compared to the background
the live-action footage in this case, which is slightly soft.
| | 00:20 | If I zoom in there, you can
see it a little bit better.
| | 00:22 | So what I can do is go to the Render layer,
go to Effects, and apply a Gaussian Blur.
| | 00:28 | Now I don't want the blur to be too big.
| | 00:30 | So a small number below 1
will probably be sufficient.
| | 00:33 | So I'm going to enter .2.
That just softens it a little bit.
| | 00:37 | So here is with the Blur applied. If we
turn off the Effect button right beside Gaussian
| | 00:42 | Blur, here is before, and once again
here is after, very subtle but very useful.
| | 00:47 | Now while I am looking at the blur, I
should probably reconsider the matte edge.
| | 00:51 | I have additional blur to the blurred edge,
and I want to see if that edge is still holding out.
| | 00:55 | I think it's too blurry at this point.
| | 00:57 | If I look really close I can see that some of the
flesh color from the cheek is creeping into the gold.
| | 01:02 | I think too much.
| | 01:03 | So I'm going to go back to the effects we
applied to the matte layer to try to adjust that.
| | 01:08 | In this case, there was a blur of 3 and the
curve is bent down this much, so I think the Blur
| | 01:13 | is too heavy. If we go back to 1,
you can see it definitely gets sharper.
| | 01:17 | So I can also adjust this curve here to see whether
it looks better with a more routed edge or more expanded.
| | 01:24 | So let's say that this
looks pretty good right here.
| | 01:27 | Now that color is bleeding in,
it's still a little bit soft.
| | 01:30 | All right, so there's one final thing you
can do to sell integration, and that's actually
| | 01:34 | a big component of the scene.
| | 01:36 | That's a fact that there's no shadow on her
cheek. If she is really holding this device
| | 01:41 | as she held her close to her face that
would block the light, therefore there would be
| | 01:45 | a shadow somewhere to her nose
shadow right here on the cheek.
| | 01:47 | So we don't have any kind of render pass for
that, but we can fabricate that in the composite,
| | 01:52 | and it's a great trick to do in After Effects.
| | 01:55 | To do that what I will do is create another
layer of the background footage or live-action
| | 01:59 | footage, rotoscope that,
and make it darker for fake shadow.
| | 02:03 | So I am going to go down to shot1, select
that, then go to Edit > Duplicate, and I will
| | 02:09 | Copy the entire layer. It will be
absolutely identical to the original.
| | 02:13 | Once have that copied, I can darken that. So I am
going to go back to Effect > Color Correction
| | 02:18 | and apply the curves one more time.
| | 02:20 | In this case I want to darken that copied
layer so I'm just click in the center and
| | 02:24 | pull it straight down to darken it, well
that's really dark right now, much too dark.
| | 02:28 | So little bit darker is good,
we can adjust that in a minute.
| | 02:32 | Now I need to rotoscope out of patch of
this so it looks like the shadow on her cheek,
| | 02:36 | I am going to go to frame 0, grab the Pen tool again
and draw a shape that's going to represent that shadow.
| | 02:43 | In this case and went to loosely draw a
shape around her eye and down into her cheek and
| | 02:49 | then now to be sure to close that.
| | 02:51 | So it's like closer you see that
there is definitely a darker patch now.
| | 02:54 | Now it's really dark
someone to adjust curve again.
| | 02:57 | That's why a little bit darker.
| | 02:59 | Now if click off of it so it's not longer
selected, you can see it has a super-sharp
| | 03:04 | edge to it. That's not really good for a shadow.
| | 03:06 | What I want is a softer transition, so I'm
going to go to the copy shot1 layer expand
| | 03:12 | the Masks section and
increase the Feather. Let's try 50.
| | 03:16 | If I hide the Mask you see that it's definitely
a softer transition. In fact, it's hard to tell where
| | 03:20 | it starts, and that's actually great.
| | 03:22 | So at this point I need to--as does the spyglass
so the shadow location is going to change.
| | 03:28 | So I'm click on Mask path to get the animation
for that frame and then skip ahead and change
| | 03:34 | the shape of that Mask.
I'm going to turn on the Mask again.
| | 03:37 | And one click way to do with this is double-
click on the Mask edge, or on the Mask line, and then move
| | 03:43 | it as a single giant unit.
| | 03:44 | So I am going to skip ahead 10 frames at a
time, each time double-click to select the
| | 03:49 | entire Mask and then move it so it's
consistently over her eye and cheek.
| | 03:53 | And there is more motion at the beginning,
so I am going to add a few more keyframes
| | 03:57 | here to close to start.
| | 03:59 | That's a general idea, though. You want the Mask to be
in the correct position to emulate that cheek shadow.
| | 04:03 | Now if you want to get out of this transform
handle, you can hit the Escape key and that will
| | 04:08 | put you back into your normal selection mode.
| | 04:10 | At this stage, the shadow is dark the entire
time, but the reality is the spyglass has
| | 04:16 | been tipped towards her eye, so it would be
great to change the darkness over time.
| | 04:20 | One way to do that would be to the transform section
on that layer and animate the opacity over time.
| | 04:26 | So I'm going to the frame where it should be
the darkest, and she brings a spyglass close
| | 04:31 | to her eye around frame 20.
| | 04:33 | So by frame 20 it should be the maximum darkness, so I am going
to click on the time icon beside opacity and leave it at 100%.
| | 04:39 | Now I will go back down the frame 0
where the spyglass is far away, enter 0.
| | 04:44 | So now if I play through it,
it's going to get slowly darker.
| | 04:48 | Let's go to frame 20 again to
make sure that shadow is dark enough.
| | 04:51 | I am going to hide the mask, and then we
could play around with the curves again.
| | 04:55 | So there's definitely darker, and there is
little bit lighter, some place in between like that.
| | 04:59 | So this is the last step of the integration.
Let's play it back.
| | 05:03 | So you can see the shadow fading in slowly as
she brings that closer, and we have motion tracked
| | 05:08 | the spyglass and adjusted its various
qualities like its color and softness to try so sell
| | 05:13 | the fact that's incorporated
into that video footage.
| | 05:15 | So that wraps up project 1.
| | 05:18 | We're going to move onto other projects in
this course to learn other aspects of the
| | 05:22 | Maya preparation and how to deal
with the renders in After Effects.
| | 05:27 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Transforming Motion Tracking to a Moving CameraRecombining render passes for project two| 00:00 | We're now ready to move project 2 into
After Effects, so the first thing we'll do is bring
| | 00:04 | in the spaceship render from Maya.
| | 00:06 | Now before I do that I want to check a few things
and make sure the footage is interpreted correctly.
| | 00:11 | First thing I'll do is go to Edit >
Preferences > Imports and make sure the Sequence Footage
| | 00:17 | is set 24 frames per second that the speed
that the original live-action was shot at,
| | 00:21 | so we want to match that.
| | 00:23 | I also want to check the Project Settings
and make sure I'm set to frames, it's a easier
| | 00:28 | way to work with image sequences.
| | 00:30 | All right! Let's bring the footage in, File >
Import > File and have a spaceship render
| | 00:35 | saved out in the Renders folder under Shot2Ship.
| | 00:38 | I want to just pick the first frame of the
image sequence, make sure that Photoshop Sequence
| | 00:43 | is checked--which it is--and Open that.
| | 00:45 | Now just like project 1, because a render
passes are stuffed into layered PSDs, what
| | 00:50 | I can do is choose individual layers and
bring them in one at a time, so I'm going to click
| | 00:54 | Choose layer and here are all of
the different layers in that file.
| | 00:58 | Now I don't need the background, I don't need the
MasterBeauty, but I do need all of the other passes.
| | 01:03 | So I am going to start with the bottom one
and working the way out, and so matte first,
| | 01:06 | now I am going to go
back and repeat the process.
| | 01:08 | So here are all our render passes from Maya.
| | 01:11 | Now I also want to get the
original live-action footage too.
| | 01:15 | So File > Import > File, and this is
saved under the Footage folder under Shot2.
| | 01:21 | So first frame, make sure it's
clicked to Sequence, and Open.
| | 01:25 | Now because we checked our preferences, we
know that these are all interpreted 24 frames
| | 01:29 | per second, which is correct.
| | 01:31 | So now that we have the footage imported, we
can assemble a spaceship into its own composition,
| | 01:36 | so there is no competition yet,
in fact, it says None right here.
| | 01:39 | What I can do is pull down the first render
pass and have the program automatically create
| | 01:44 | a composition that has the correct resolution,
duration, and frame rate. So let's start with
| | 01:49 | the Diffuse layer, diffuseNoShadow, we'll
pull that down, drop it in, and there it is.
| | 01:54 | So let's assemble it, let's
pull some more render passes down.
| | 01:57 | Next thing I'll grab is shadowRaw,
pull that down put it on top.
| | 02:00 | Now again the shadowRaw pass creates a white
shadow over a black field, and because there's
| | 02:06 | no proper Alpha, it includes what's below it.
| | 02:09 | So what we have to do is invert this first, so
I'm going to apply Effect > Channel > Inverts,
| | 02:15 | so now we have black over white,
then I need to change the blending mode.
| | 02:19 | In this case for a shadow,
it's great to use Multiply.
| | 02:22 | Here's the blending mode menu. Now if you don't
see it, you can always click Toggle Switches.
| | 02:27 | There, it goes away, and here it is again, so I'm
going to change the shadow layer to Multiply,
| | 02:33 | and that multiplies the shadow over the
spaceship, diffuse in this case and darkens a little
| | 02:38 | bit, particularly around the fin.
| | 02:39 | Next thing I will do is grab the reflection,
so I'm going to back to my list of footage
| | 02:44 | here, we can use this little scroll bar to
find it, there is the Project tab, grab the
| | 02:49 | reflection, pull that down. And reflection
needs a blending mode like screen, again,
| | 02:54 | not proper Alpha, you want
to just keep the bright areas.
| | 02:57 | So I'm going to go back to the blending mode,
change that to Screen, and then I want to
| | 03:01 | grab the specular, same situation, pull that,
put it on top, that needs a Screen also, I
| | 03:06 | just want to save the bright areas. And last,
incandescence, hold that down, put that on
| | 03:11 | top, and these are just bright logos over a black
field, so Screen works great for that also.
| | 03:17 | So there's a reassembled ship.
| | 03:18 | There is one more render pass, we're going
to use that later, which is the matte pass.
| | 03:22 | Now all the passes are stacked together in
their own composition, we can nest the composition
| | 03:26 | later to move that as a single unit, but
since I have all these render passes in separate
| | 03:31 | layers, I can adjust them individually.
| | 03:33 | For example, I can increase the intensity
of the reflection in the specular highlight,
| | 03:38 | so I can go to the reflection layer
and apply an effect to adjust that.
| | 03:42 | In this case the curves effect is great
for adjusting the contrast and brightness.
| | 03:45 | So I am going to go up to Effect > Color
Correction > Curves, and if we want to brighten that
| | 03:51 | reflection I can click to put a point here
and pull this up, and there it becomes brighter.
| | 03:56 | I can do the same with the specular
pass, Effect > Color Correction > Curves.
| | 04:01 | You can also click to add single point there,
pull that up, to brighten the specular component.
| | 04:06 | You can see along the edge of the wing there.
| | 04:09 | So you can adjust these layers if they're
too dim or too bright. And another thing you
| | 04:13 | can do is go to incandescence
layer, which is just a logo.
| | 04:16 | Now I could brighten that or darken it.
| | 04:19 | In another option for any of
these layers is to adjust the color.
| | 04:22 | Let's say I want a totally different color
for the logo. I have the opportunity to that
| | 04:25 | because this is rendered separately.
| | 04:26 | So, for example, I can pick the incandescent
layer, go up to Effect, go to Color Correction
| | 04:33 | and go to Color Balance, and because these are
all bright colors, I can go to the Highlights
| | 04:37 | sliders Red, Green, and Blue, and
change the values to shift the color.
| | 04:42 | For example, if I put in -75 for Red, 100 for Green,
and -75 for Blue, I have shifted the colors to a neon green.
| | 04:54 | Of course, you can pick any color you
want just by moving the sliders around.
| | 04:57 | I'll shift the balance of colors, so there's
a reddish logo, let me go back to green one though.
| | 05:02 | So it gives you a lot power in
terms of adjusting your render.
| | 05:06 | So now we have reassembled the spaceship
through all the render passes, and we adjust a few
| | 05:11 | of those layers to effects, so now we're ready
to add the spaceship to the live-action footage.
| | 05:16 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Removing unwanted elements with a garbage mask| 00:00 | We have assembled the spaceship render
passes inside our composition in After Effects, we
| | 00:05 | also adjusted the various layers to improve
the quality of the specularity in the reflection
| | 00:10 | and also changed the color of
the incandescence on the logo.
| | 00:13 | We are now ready to take this composition
and nest it into another one, so we can add
| | 00:17 | the live-action background footage.
| | 00:19 | So let me go straight to Composition > New
Composition. I want to create new composition
| | 00:25 | that matches the first one.
| | 00:26 | In this case I need HD 1080, 24 frames
per second, and a duration of 90 frames.
| | 00:33 | So this is all correct. I can click OK now,
and there is a new composition called Comp 1.
| | 00:38 | Let me go ahead and grab the Shot2Ship
composition and drop it in this one and therefore nest it.
| | 00:44 | Now I want to see this in front of the live-
action, so I'm going to go to Shot2 and pull that
| | 00:49 | down and place it underneath.
| | 00:50 | Now even though that's in the composition, I
cannot see it in the viewer. That's because
| | 00:54 | the Alpha around the spaceship is not correct, I do
not have the transparency information to make that work.
| | 01:00 | So what I can do though is use the matte trick
or use the matte render pass as Alpha information
| | 01:05 | and apply that to the ship.
| | 01:06 | So I'm going to drag this matte render
pass down and place it on top. And once again,
| | 01:12 | as a matte, it's whites or a black, so I can use
this as Alpha information for the track matte feature.
| | 01:18 | Now there is one issue with this. If I zoom
back and play this back, you'll see that this
| | 01:23 | render pass also traps
the shadow on the building.
| | 01:27 | Now we're going to be able to use that later,
but I don't want it for this particular iteration
| | 01:30 | of the matte layer, I want to cut this
out and just use the matte on the ship.
| | 01:34 | Well, how we do that? Well, a great way to get rid
of something you don't want for a layer is to rotoscope.
| | 01:39 | In fact, when you rotoscope in order to get
rid of something, it's often called creating
| | 01:44 | a garbage mask or a garbage matte.
| | 01:47 | So in order to create a garbage matte, what I
can do is go back to the Pen tool in rotoscope
| | 01:52 | and then change some settings on
that mask to get rid of that section.
| | 01:55 | Let's give that a try.
| | 01:56 | I'll go to Pen tool and draw a
loose mask around that shadow area.
| | 02:00 | I just want to encompass it.
| | 02:03 | I want to close the masked path, it's going
to keep that area, now that's not good for
| | 02:08 | our purpose of using a track matte, but
just for now, I'm going to leave it set to that
| | 02:12 | option so that we can see where it is.
| | 02:14 | What I do need to do though is animate this
mask changing shape over time, because the
| | 02:19 | shadow moves, and so does the ship.
| | 02:21 | So let me go to the matte layer, expand it,
expand the Mask section, and then beside Mask 1,
| | 02:27 | expand that and then click on Mask Path to
activate the keyframing, so there is the first keyframe.
| | 02:34 | Now I can go to the timeline and adjust the
shape of the mask so it continues to encompass
| | 02:39 | the shadow, but I don't want
it to touch the ship itself.
| | 02:42 | So in order to change the mask shape, I can
use Selection tool and click on or off the
| | 02:47 | various mask points, and then
move them to change the shape.
| | 02:50 | It's going to be a tight fit between the
shadow and ship, there should be just enough room,
| | 02:55 | so you don't cut into the ship.
| | 02:56 | So I'm just scrolling through and try to
find the palm areas, it looks pretty good.
| | 03:01 | Again, I don't want to touch the ship itself, I
just want to make sure I always encompass the shadow.
| | 03:06 | Now that I have the shadow isolated with this
mask, I need to invert the way it's operating.
| | 03:11 | I want to give the rid of the
shadow, but keep the ship matte.
| | 03:14 | A quick way to do that is to go back
down to Mask 1 and change its functionality.
| | 03:19 | There is a mode menu right here that
determines how that mask is going to operate.
| | 03:23 | If it's set to Add, which is the default,
it's going to keep whatever is inside the mask.
| | 03:27 | If I switch this over to Subtract, it's
going to invert that, now the matte is kept.
| | 03:32 | So now we can use this as a source of
Alpha, so I'm going to collapse this.
| | 03:37 | I want to hide that layer, I don't need to
see it, go down to the ship layer, go to the
| | 03:42 | track matte menu and switch this to Luma Matte.
| | 03:44 | Luma Matte is going to take the luminance
information or the brightness information
| | 03:48 | from the layer above, in this case the matte
layer and convert that the Alpha for the ship layer.
| | 03:53 | So there we go, the ship is now cut out, and
I'm not going to see a shadow, we will return
| | 03:58 | to the shadow later on.
| | 03:59 | It will be a good time to play this back and
see what the ship looks like over the background.
| | 04:04 | As we play it back, we can see that the
ship doesn't quite match the building, remember
| | 04:08 | we created some planes inside
Maya to cut the edge of the ship out.
| | 04:12 | However, as the footage moves forward, I'll just
zoom in here, you can see that that's edge drifts.
| | 04:18 | That's where Motion Tracking comes into play.
| | 04:21 | What we can do is motion track the ship so
that that edge lines up with the building edge.
| | 04:26 | And the problem arises because the camera's zoomed
quite a bit, not only in terms of left-right,
| | 04:31 | up-down motion, but also some rotation on
there where the camera tilts left and right.
| | 04:36 | Now you may know ship also looks a little bit
jaggy right now, that's just because we're zoomed out.
| | 04:40 | If we zoom all the way in to 100%,
you can see the edges are clean.
| | 04:44 | So we have successfully cut out the ship with the
track matte trick using the matte render paths.
| | 04:49 | We have also placed it over the background,
now we're ready to tackle the problem of the
| | 04:52 | motion, a figure a way to motion track the
ship to the original camera movement.
| | 04:57 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying motion tracking data to a null layer| 00:00 | We placed the spaceship layer over the background
footage. Now we're ready to try to motion track the
| | 00:05 | ship so it matches the
camera movement of that footage.
| | 00:08 | Let's take a look at it.
| | 00:10 | One thing you'll notice is that there is more
chaotic motion, particularly at the beginning,
| | 00:14 | also the fact of the camera's
rotating or tilting left and right.
| | 00:18 | If you watch the top of the building, you can
see how that perspective changes quite a bit.
| | 00:22 | That tells us two things.
| | 00:23 | One, we need to have the tracker
figure out the rotation of the camera.
| | 00:27 | Two, the fact that there is lot of chaotic
motion at the beginning of the footage, means
| | 00:31 | that you probably want to do the tracking from
the end of the timeline towards the beginning,
| | 00:35 | in terms of analyzation.
| | 00:37 | When we go to the last
frame, let's apply a tracker.
| | 00:40 | I'm going to pick shot2, go to
Animation, and apply Track Motion.
| | 00:45 | Now in order to have it to figure out the
rotation, I need to select the Rotation check
| | 00:50 | box right here, Position is turned on
automatically, in this case I need Rotation also.
| | 00:56 | When you click on Rotation, you get a second
track point, that's necessary to figure out
| | 01:01 | how the camera is tilting,
so track point 1 and 2.
| | 01:05 | The idea is you place these over two
separate features. Let's take a look, I'll zoom back.
| | 01:09 | We are fortunate in the fact that there are
two lights in the side of the building that are
| | 01:13 | good candidates for this.
| | 01:14 | I'll place track point 1 on the left
one and track point 2 on the right one.
| | 01:19 | So I'll zoom in and just click-drag these by
the empty portion of the center to reposition
| | 01:24 | them, so track point 2
will go over this light here.
| | 01:27 | Now the track point boxes are smaller then
the light feature, so I am going to expand
| | 01:31 | this box--just want them to
encompass that feature loosely.
| | 01:35 | So here is track point 2,
now track point 1, there we go.
| | 01:39 | Let's try to analyze this from
the end of the timeline backwards.
| | 01:42 | All right, let's take a look at track point 2,
that's looking pretty good, now track point 1.
| | 01:48 | It's here already on frame 0, it slipped off,
and however, the rest of the motion path looks
| | 01:52 | pretty solid, so you could go in and
adjust the track points to continue to reanalyze
| | 01:57 | or check the options in the tracker.
| | 01:58 | In this case, though, because I only have maybe
two frames that are incorrect, I think I'll
| | 02:03 | manually place the track point.
| | 02:05 | So on frame 0, I'll drag it back up to where
it needs to be, and in frame 1, do the same.
| | 02:09 | All right, that's looking pretty good.
| | 02:11 | So now we have motion paths for these two
track points, we can apply it to the spaceship.
| | 02:16 | Now there is a potential issue. Normally when you
apply the tracker to a layer, it keyframes the properties.
| | 02:23 | In this case, because we have Position and
Rotation, if I apply to spaceship, it's going
| | 02:29 | to animate position/rotation here.
| | 02:31 | Therefore, although I can offset the positions
to the anchor point, I cannot offset the rotation
| | 02:36 | unless I change the resulting
keyframes. That could be a lot of work.
| | 02:41 | So one thing we could do to avoid this
potential problem is apply the tracker to a Null and
| | 02:46 | then parent the ship to the Null.
| | 02:48 | Now what's a Null? A Null is a special
layer inside After Effects, it doesn't actually render.
| | 02:53 | It has a set of Transforms which you
can apply something like a tracker to and
| | 02:57 | parent things to but
doesn't occlude anything below it.
| | 03:01 | So if I apply the tracker to a Null, then
parent the ships to the Null, I'm free to
| | 03:06 | later adjust the position offset or rotation
offset on the ship layer itself. Let's try that.
| | 03:12 | Now there is one thing we should probably
do before we apply it though to the Null,
| | 03:15 | and that is remember that the tracker
applies the data based on where the anchor point is
| | 03:21 | for the layer, so the anchor point
is basically stuck to the motion path.
| | 03:25 | Now in this case, because we have two track points,
that'll be stuck to the motion path for track point 1.
| | 03:31 | So we really want the anchor points for the Null on
the spaceship over here where the track point 1 is.
| | 03:37 | Let's go back to the composition view.
| | 03:38 | So here is the spaceship. While we have that,
let's go and select that layer and move it
| | 03:43 | to anchor point from here, down to where the
light is for frame 0. Let me go to frame 0.
| | 03:49 | I want to use Pan Behind tool to move that,
and I'll zoom in so I can see it better.
| | 03:54 | So there is pretty much the center of
that track point 1 for that frame, frame 0.
| | 03:59 | Okay, so we need a Null.
| | 04:01 | I have already created a Null inside After Effects,
you go to layer > New > Null Object, and there
| | 04:07 | is a Null, it comes in as a red bar, it's
indicated by red square inside the viewer.
| | 04:12 | Now this doesn't actually interfere with the
final render, it's just there for reference.
| | 04:16 | It also has its own anchor point
at the top left, and that's red.
| | 04:20 | So while we had a Pan Behind tool activated,
let's try that over also, I want to put in
| | 04:25 | the same place, about right here.
| | 04:28 | By doing that when we apply the data, it's
going to make that the ship is pretty much
| | 04:33 | where it needs to be right here.
| | 04:34 | Okay, I'm going to go
back to the Selection tool.
| | 04:36 | Now there is one another step we should take,
we fix the anchor point for the Null, fix
| | 04:40 | it for the spaceship, but we have to
think about what to do with the matte.
| | 04:44 | Remember the mattes supplying the Alpha to
the ship, so it needs to travel also, so I'm
| | 04:48 | going to do that through parenting.
| | 04:50 | I'm going to parent the map layer to the
ship and then make the ship follow the Null.
| | 04:54 | I am going to parent the ship to the Null,
so matte is parented to the ship, the ship
| | 05:01 | is parented to the Null.
| | 05:02 | So now we're ready, fix the anchor point to care the
parenting, we have the Null, now we can apply the data.
| | 05:08 | Now we go back to Shot2 and make sure I can
see the motion tracking, click the Edit Target,
| | 05:15 | select the Null, click OK, then apply
the data, Apply, and Yes for X and Y.
| | 05:22 | So here the Null has picked up the motion
tracking data, and therefore the ship is following
| | 05:26 | the Null and the matte is following the ship.
| | 05:28 | Now there is a problem. You see how it's
rotated? Looks like it's a little off kilter there.
| | 05:32 | Let's play it back until it's going on.
| | 05:34 | So the ship feels like it has the same motion as the
camera, so the motion tracking is therefore successful.
| | 05:38 | However, it's off a bit in terms of rotation,
but since we use the Null, we can offset that.
| | 05:44 | Now the Null itself has the position/
rotation animation placed on it by the tracker.
| | 05:48 | Now if I go down to the spaceship layer, you
can see the position/rotation are still free.
| | 05:53 | So what we can do is change the rotation--offset
the rotation and get the ship back where it needs.
| | 05:58 | In fact, if you enter 7.5 into the Rotation,
it snaps back down to where it needs to roughly
| | 06:04 | be, on top of the building.
| | 06:05 | Now it's not exact match yet. We left those
planes we placed in Maya little bit loose,
| | 06:11 | so our layer step will deal with a really tight fit,
but at least the ship is rotated correctly now.
| | 06:16 | We'll play it back, rotation is now correct.
| | 06:19 | Beside from the edge tightness here,
eventually there is the issue of the fact to seeing cut
| | 06:23 | off here, but we'll deal
with that in the later step.
| | 06:27 | So we have successfully motion tracked this
footage through two track points with rotation
| | 06:31 | and position and applied that to a Null, and the Null
basically drives the ship and the matte layer along.
| | 06:38 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting shadows and matte edges| 00:00 | We have motion-tracked the spaceship so it follows
the camera movement within the original footage.
| | 00:05 | We're now ready to move on and refine other aspects of
the ship so that it better integrates with the background.
| | 00:11 | Let's take a look at the footage and
see what's going on so we can match it.
| | 00:14 | Now, the background in terms of the building is
actually quite soft. It's a little out of focus.
| | 00:19 | Also, there is a lot of blue haze.
| | 00:21 | The sun is up here at the right, and it's
kicking a lot of blue haze in front of the
| | 00:25 | building, and in front of the actress.
| | 00:27 | So, it would be great to get that soft quality,
plus a little bit of blue sneaking into the ship.
| | 00:32 | Now, in terms of the blueness, we can
use the Opacity trick to achieve that.
| | 00:36 | Basically, what we have is an empty sky.
| | 00:39 | It's mostly the same color of grayish blue,
little bit of brightness variation, but not too bad.
| | 00:44 | Now, the fact that there are no objects behind
the ship and we have a clear sky will allow us to
| | 00:49 | reduce the Opacity and therefore
introduce some of the blue into the ship's color.
| | 00:53 | So, I am going to go to the Ship
layer and set the Opacity to 85.
| | 00:58 | That gives you illusion
that there is some blue haze.
| | 00:59 | Now, if you had a background where there were
objects like telephone poles, this would not
| | 01:04 | work, because those poles would show through.
| | 01:06 | What you'd have to do instead is apply
some Color Grading tools like Color Balance or
| | 01:11 | Curves to try to introduce that blue color.
| | 01:13 | But we have the blue here, now we can start
thinking about the edges and the overall softness.
| | 01:18 | The ship is much sharper than the building,
also its edges are sharper than the building.
| | 01:23 | One thing we do for the body of the ship is
simply apply a Gaussian Blur to soften that.
| | 01:27 | So, with the Ship layer selected, I'll go
to Effect > Blur & Sharpen > Gaussian Blur.
| | 01:32 | Now, here the background is quite blurry,
so we can use a fairly high blur.
| | 01:36 | I'll put a Blurriness of 2
in here to soften the ship.
| | 01:40 | That softens the body of the ship,
but doesn't really do with the edge.
| | 01:43 | The edge is still pretty sharp, especially
when compared to the top of the building.
| | 01:46 | So in order to fix that, there are
a couple of approaches we can take.
| | 01:50 | One, we can apply effects to the matte which
is applying the Alpha to try to soften that.
| | 01:55 | The other thing we can do is perhaps add a
mask to the top of the building to better
| | 02:00 | fit the ship to the building and also
feather that edge even more right here.
| | 02:04 | Before we do that, though, let's play it back
and make sure the ship is really motion tracking
| | 02:09 | correctly to the very top of the building.
Now in fact, there is a little slippage.
| | 02:13 | The ship is slipping to the right.
| | 02:15 | See, right here, there is a gap
opening up where that little cut-out is.
| | 02:19 | Now, since we applied the tracking data to
Null, we're free to adjust the position of
| | 02:25 | the actual Ship layer.
In this case, I think we have to keyframe it.
| | 02:28 | Now the reason the ship is slipping is in
Maya, we roughed in the perspective in terms
| | 02:33 | of the camera position and rotation,
but we never animated the camera.
| | 02:37 | There is no camera animation.
| | 02:38 | You potentially have slippage when the
real-world camera's moving quite a bit.
| | 02:42 | I have worked at this footage in advance.
| | 02:44 | I believe a good place for
keyframes is on frame 0, 10, and 25.
| | 02:49 | So, let's look at frame 0.
| | 02:51 | Let's make a mental note that this edge of
this cut-out should line up with this edge
| | 02:54 | of the building right here.
| | 02:56 | So, I'm going to set a key here by
clicking on the Time icon for position.
| | 03:00 | I am going to move the frame 10, then, and
figure out how to get that edge back to left.
| | 03:05 | So, in this case a Position of -14 in the
X and 6 in the Y works pretty good, so here
| | 03:13 | is frame 0, here's frame 10.
| | 03:16 | Actually, 6 in the Y maybe brings it down a
little bit too much, so here you see a tiny
| | 03:22 | gap on top of the building.
| | 03:23 | Actually, what we might want to do is
leave it here on frame 10 where it intersects a
| | 03:28 | little bit, go back to frame 0, and adjust that.
| | 03:32 | So in this case, you
actually want a positive 4, so 04.
| | 03:36 | So, it looks like the same relative position.
| | 03:39 | The ship is tipping down a
little bit into the building edge.
| | 03:41 | There is Frame 10, and then also frame 25.
So in frame 25, we can enter -24 and 8.
| | 03:50 | So now if we play it back, it's
lined up with the builder better.
| | 03:54 | Now, it's off the slippage but doesn't deal
with the fact that there is a sharp edge here,
| | 03:59 | and it dips down a little bit.
| | 04:00 | So, in order to soften the edge,
there are two approaches that we can take.
| | 04:04 | One again is to go back to the matte and
adjust that, and second one is to add a garbage mask
| | 04:08 | to cut out the very top of the
building, that's where the ship overlaps.
| | 04:11 | So let's adjust the matte.
| | 04:13 | I'll go to the matte layer, and we'll apply two
effects we have used before, Gaussian Blur and also Curves.
| | 04:19 | I'm going to increase the Blur, let's try 3.
| | 04:23 | And the advantage of that is you can already see
that the upper edge of the ship is slightly blurred.
| | 04:28 | That's actually good.
| | 04:29 | We want that a little bit soft.
| | 04:30 | Now in order to expand or erode the
matte, I can adjust these curves here.
| | 04:34 | For example, if I pull it down, it
erodes it a tiny bit. That's good.
| | 04:37 | I don't want to wind up with that little
dark edge, so about there looks pretty good.
| | 04:42 | Now, that makes the upper edge look great, but we
still have the problem with the top of the building.
| | 04:45 | So there we're going to switch over to
the garbage mask, cut out the excess.
| | 04:49 | In this case, it's going to
go on the Ship layer itself.
| | 04:52 | So, picking the Ship layer, I'm going to go up
to the Pen tool, and draw a mask that represents
| | 04:57 | the top edge of the building.
| | 04:58 | We're going to do fairly rough
at the start and then refine it.
| | 05:01 | We'll go fairly wide as the ship does move.
Then I'm going to close the mask.
| | 05:06 | Now, as soon as I do it, it cuts out the top
of the ship, so we want the opposite result.
| | 05:10 | So I'll go down to the Mask section
and on Mask 1 set that to Subtract.
| | 05:14 | There we go! Now, the mask
will make a hard edge still.
| | 05:18 | So what I can do though is go down to
the Feather and put a Feather in--say, 4.
| | 05:22 | I'm going to hide the Mask now.
So that's giving me a nice, soft edge.
| | 05:25 | So basically I just need to adjust the mask so
it looks like it lines up in the correct place.
| | 05:30 | I'm going to do that by grabbing the
Selection tool, then hide the Mask.
| | 05:34 | Now, there is a little bit of blue
tracked in the top of the building, that's okay.
| | 05:37 | But now we have achieved the soft edge there.
| | 05:40 | Now you don't actually have to rotoscope this over
time, in other words, you don't have to keyframe this.
| | 05:44 | What has happened is we have
applied the mask to the Ship layer.
| | 05:48 | The Ship layer is inheriting the motion of
the building through the motion tracking.
| | 05:53 | Remember, we motion-tracked the building
lights right here, and then the other ones in left.
| | 05:57 | So, that's the motion of the building,
which is of course applied by the camera.
| | 06:01 | But the building is moving through the view.
| | 06:03 | The motion is applied to the null, the
ship follows the null through parenting.
| | 06:08 | Therefore, the mask inherits the motion of
the building. Therefore the mask is always
| | 06:12 | in the same place relative to the
building, and we don't have to keyframe it.
| | 06:16 | Let me play it back as an example.
| | 06:17 | So, you can see that mask is relatively in
the same position to cut out the ship where
| | 06:22 | it crosses over the building.
| | 06:23 | So now we fixed the edges on the ship, one last
thing we can do in this movie is add the shadow back.
| | 06:28 | Now the shadow is trapped in the matte
layer, which we're only using for a matte now.
| | 06:32 | But what we can do is duplicate this layer, Edit >
Duplicate, and use that copy as a new shadow.
| | 06:37 | I'm going to turn it on so we can see it.
| | 06:39 | Now, first thing we need to do is
reverse the mask to get the shadow back.
| | 06:42 | So, I can go down to the mask and
change that from Subtract to Add.
| | 06:46 | Now next thing I need to do is go to the end
of the timeline so I can see where the shadow
| | 06:49 | appears, and there it is.
| | 06:52 | Now what I need to do is
make sure it gets inverted.
| | 06:55 | I want a black shadow on white.
| | 06:56 | So I'm going to go up to
Effect > Channel > Invert.
| | 07:00 | Then I can multiply it through a
blending mode against everything below it.
| | 07:03 | So I'm going to go to the blending mode and change
that to Multiply, and there is a shadow over the building.
| | 07:08 | Now it's extremely hard edge,
so I'm going to soften it.
| | 07:10 | I'm going to apply a Gaussian Blur.
| | 07:12 | I can put a very large blur number in here in
terms of Blurriness to really soften that out.
| | 07:17 | Now, it's still extremely dark and heavy.
| | 07:20 | So what I can do next is reduce
the Opacity of that matte layer.
| | 07:23 | So I'm going to reduce that to 20.
| | 07:25 | And this is barely in there,
here's with the shadow, here's without.
| | 07:28 | Now, if I want to continue to fine-tune
the darkness, I can go up to the Curves, it's
| | 07:33 | left over from the
duplication of that matte layer.
| | 07:36 | If I adjust this, this will affect
the overall brightness and darkness.
| | 07:39 | Of course, we can also adjust the Opacity.
Let's try the Curves.
| | 07:42 | So there it's getting a little bit darker.
Let's play it back.
| | 07:45 | So notice soft channel is coming over the edge.
Well, it still looks a little too heavy to me.
| | 07:49 | So I'm going to reduce the Opacity to 10%.
| | 07:51 | The idea is you want the ship to look like it's blocking
some of the light, but not casting a super-hard shadow.
| | 07:57 | All right! So we have adjusted the matte edge on
the ship, we prevented the sliding by animating
| | 08:02 | the position, we have introduced some blue
into the ship by reducing the Opacity, and then
| | 08:06 | we added the shadow back.
| | 08:07 | So now we're ready to move on to the final
steps where we improve the integration even more.
| | 08:12 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using color correction to improve layer integration| 00:00 | We have spent some time working with the
edge quality of the spaceship to make it
| | 00:03 | better integrated, we also softened it
slightly and then adjusted the color by
| | 00:07 | just reducing the opacity.
| | 00:09 | There is more room for color adjustment,
however, to make it integrate even better.
| | 00:12 | In fact, I am going to pick the
spaceship layer and apply three new effects.
| | 00:17 | First one is Color Balance, next one is
Curves, and then we will add a new one
| | 00:22 | we haven't used before which is Hue/Saturation.
Let's start with Color Balance.
| | 00:25 | Now, of course, the goal is to make it look like
this was shot in the same scene as the actress.
| | 00:30 | So I think we have too much red and
not enough blue even at this point.
| | 00:34 | So what I can do is reduce the red for
both the shadow midtone and highlight,
| | 00:39 | maybe increase the blue for the Highlight.
| | 00:41 | So let's enter -10 for the red, -15 for
the red Midtone, -15 for the red Highlight.
| | 00:48 | So it's -10 for the Shadow, -15 for
the Midtone, -15 for the Highlight.
| | 00:54 | Also, I am going to increase
the blue of the highlight.
| | 00:57 | So what that has done is reduced the
overall amount of red and snuck up the blue.
| | 01:02 | So now, it feels a little bit
better integrated into that sky.
| | 01:05 | Now, it's still very
saturated compared to the background.
| | 01:08 | So what I can do is go down a little
bit deeper to my Hue/Saturation and reduce
| | 01:13 | the saturation through the
Master Saturation control.
| | 01:15 | When I put -40, you will see it becomes
much less saturated and feels a little
| | 01:21 | bit like there is additional
haze in front of it which is good.
| | 01:23 | Now, we still have the Curves
tool right here in the center.
| | 01:29 | I can go ahead and adjust that.
| | 01:30 | I'd like to get this a little bit brighter
because these are very brighter in that scene.
| | 01:35 | So I am going to click one time in the
center and pull up the curve just to brighten it.
| | 01:40 | Now, one thing to keep in mind as
you're adjusting the colors to the curves or
| | 01:44 | the Hue/Saturation or the Color Balance is the
fact that you want the blacks and whites to match.
| | 01:48 | Now in particular, the blacks are
important here, you want the values in the
| | 01:52 | black area on the spaceship to match the
dark areas when the live action plate,
| | 01:56 | like on the actress' hair.
| | 01:57 | Now remember, you can check the
Info Panel to see what the values are.
| | 02:01 | So if I place my mouse over the
spaceship here in the dark area, my values
| | 02:04 | are in the mid 30s up to low 40s, with more
blue, then green, and definitely less red.
| | 02:10 | If I check the hair, I have similar
values, little less red, little more green
| | 02:16 | and definitely more blue, all
somewhere in the mid 30s to low 40s.
| | 02:19 | So as you're adjusting those effects,
keep that in mind you might want to test
| | 02:24 | and see what your values are.
| | 02:25 | So now that matches much better in terms
of color. Let's move on to the next step.
| | 02:30 | One thing we might want to do is
reduce the intensity of the logos.
| | 02:33 | Remember the logos are an
incandescent layer by themselves.
| | 02:36 | Let's go back to the Shot2Ship comp
and adjust the incandescent layer.
| | 02:41 | I am going to expand that.
| | 02:42 | One quick way to reduce the
intensity is to reduce the opacity.
| | 02:47 | So I am going to reduce
this even further down to 60%.
| | 02:50 | Now, I will fade out the
logos a little bit more.
| | 02:53 | Let's go back to comp 1. All right!
So the ship is looking pretty good.
| | 02:57 | Now, there is one additional thing we
can do to make it look like the CG was
| | 03:01 | shot in that video to start with.
| | 03:03 | Now, video normally has
compression artifacts and noise.
| | 03:06 | The noise takes a form of shot noise which
is 1 pixel variations of light intensity.
| | 03:11 | The compression artifacts are more
blocky kind of compression artifacts that are
| | 03:15 | necessary to store the video.
Now, CG does not have any of that to start with.
| | 03:19 | So if we want to add that,
we have to use another effect.
| | 03:23 | And one effect that's
great for that is Match Grain.
| | 03:25 | So I am going to go up to
Effect > Noise & Grain > Match Grain.
| | 03:29 | When I do this, I get a
little preview box that's white.
| | 03:32 | You can reposition that if you
grab the center circle and move it.
| | 03:36 | That just shows you what the
grain is going to look like.
| | 03:39 | Now, it's not functioning yet
because what it needs is a source layer.
| | 03:42 | There is a Noise Source layer right here.
| | 03:44 | We're going to change the menu to the
footage where you're going to steal the
| | 03:48 | grain and right now what has the
grain is Shot2, and there is the grain.
| | 03:52 | Now initially, that grain comes in very heavy.
It basically exaggerates it.
| | 03:57 | We don't want it to be that intense.
| | 03:58 | So what we can do is go to Tweaking
and reduce the Intensity, say 0.2.
| | 04:03 | Now, it makes it very subtle but still in there.
| | 04:06 | And what's great about this is the
grain from the video and the compression
| | 04:10 | artifacts from the video
changes with each frame.
| | 04:12 | It's kind of like static on the TV.
| | 04:15 | So the same motion is picked up by this
effect Match Grain and applied to the spaceship.
| | 04:20 | Now in order to get rid of the white
box, I have to go to the Viewing mode,
| | 04:25 | and set the final, Final Output.
| | 04:26 | So now it places the grain
over the entire spaceship.
| | 04:29 | Again, it's fairly subtle with these
settings, but it's going to add some more realism.
| | 04:34 | Let's move on and deal with another
problem which is the fact the spaceship gets
| | 04:38 | cut off and the reason it gets cut off
is we motion-tracked it, and we end up
| | 04:42 | moving the ship to the
right and left the gap here.
| | 04:45 | Quick way to fix that is to do another nesting.
| | 04:47 | We're going to create a new comp or a
new composition, make sure it has all the
| | 04:52 | same resolution, frame rate and
duration, and then nest Comp 1 inside Comp 2, so
| | 04:58 | here is Comp 2 which is empty.
| | 05:00 | Go back to the Project
Tab and pull Comp 1 into it.
| | 05:03 | Now initially, I am still going to
have the same problem, it's cut off.
| | 05:07 | But what I can do is scale up this
nested comp to 105% and then position that
| | 05:13 | nested composition so
that we never see that gap.
| | 05:17 | So I need to move it pretty far
to the left, so let's test that.
| | 05:22 | So that's good, that's good, that's good.
So I think we're safe there.
| | 05:26 | So that prevents the clipping of the spaceship.
Now, a small scale is not too bad.
| | 05:31 | We're working with a pretty high
resolution to start with, so scaling by
| | 05:34 | 105% is not too bad.
| | 05:36 | The same scale is not gong to
degrade the quality too much.
| | 05:39 | Let's apply the final step.
| | 05:40 | Now, you notice that in the footage,
the sun is right here, so it's making
| | 05:44 | the haze very bright.
| | 05:45 | In fact, the bright haze is traveling
across the actress' hair and also in
| | 05:50 | front of the building.
| | 05:51 | So it would be cool to get
that over the spaceship also.
| | 05:54 | So there is a quick trick for that.
Let me go back to frame 0.
| | 05:58 | What we can do is duplicate this
nested comp, Edit > Duplicate and then
| | 06:01 | make this layer brighter and apply a curve
to do that, or Curves and make that brighter.
| | 06:07 | Now of course everything gets brighter
but what I can do then is create a mask
| | 06:11 | that is circular in this area.
| | 06:12 | So in order to create a mask, I can use
one of the mask shapes we have up here.
| | 06:17 | Now by default you will see the Rectangle tool.
There is also the Ellipse tool.
| | 06:21 | If I grab that and click-drag, it
cuts out that layer in a circle.
| | 06:25 | So now I can position that circle such a
way that it starts to overlap the spaceship.
| | 06:30 | Now, the overlap is very hard right now,
if I click off of it, or Escape--in
| | 06:35 | this case I have the transform handle,
so I need to escape--and then click off of
| | 06:39 | it and then hide the mask,
you'll see a really hard edge.
| | 06:42 | So what I can do is feather that mask,
and that ellipse shows up as just the
| | 06:46 | mask underneath your layer. So here is Mask 1.
| | 06:48 | I can increase the Feather to 500
pixels and therefore soften it.
| | 06:52 | So when I brighten this, that bright
fake sun starts to bleed on to the spaceship.
| | 06:57 | Just play this whole
thing back. So there you go!
| | 07:00 | We have taken a CG Render of a
spaceship from a Maya scene that did not even
| | 07:04 | have an animated camera, we have
applied motion tracking and some masking to
| | 07:08 | make it look like it's actually in the scene with
the same camera motion as the live action footage.
| | 07:12 | We have also spent some time color-
grading the spaceship, adjusting its edges
| | 07:16 | and in general making it look like it's in the
same lighting with the same atmospheric haze.
| | 07:20 | That's pretty cool!
| | 07:21 | You can apply these techniques we have
talked about in this series of videos for
| | 07:25 | this project and apply it to any CG
Render where you need to make it look like
| | 07:29 | that CG was in the real world to start with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Stabilization and Corner Pin Motion TrackingStabilizing shaky video with the Tracker| 00:00 | It's time to start Project 3. In Project
3 we're going to use Motion Tracking to
| | 00:04 | stabilize a piece of footage.
| | 00:06 | Now so far we have used Motion Tracking
to Transform Track where we identified
| | 00:10 | some motion in the piece of footage
like camera movement and transferred that
| | 00:13 | motion to a CG Render, like
the spyglass or the spaceship.
| | 00:16 | We can also use Motion Tracking to
stabilize, and when you stabilize you
| | 00:21 | identify the camera shake in the shot
and then remove it so it looks like there
| | 00:26 | is never any motion at
all, so let's get started.
| | 00:28 | I'm going to up here and go to File >
Import > File, and retrieve this shot.
| | 00:32 | In this case this is shot3 in the
Shot3 folder in the Footage folder.
| | 00:37 | Open that, I am going to drag that down,
make a new composition, here we go.
| | 00:41 | Let's play it back, see what it looks like.
| | 00:44 | So it's definitely lot of camera
shake, much more than other shots.
| | 00:47 | But we're going to apply the Stabilize
function of the Tracker tool to get rid
| | 00:50 | of that, so let's go ahead and do that.
| | 00:52 | With the layer selected I'm going
to go up to Animation > Track Motion.
| | 00:57 | Tracker opens in the Transform mode.
| | 00:59 | You can see right here it is Track Type:
Transform, I want to switch that to Stabilize.
| | 01:04 | Just like transform tracking
I'm going to get a track point.
| | 01:06 | Now because the camera is also
rotating left and right, I need to click on the
| | 01:10 | Rotation button down here beside
Position, and it gives me two track points.
| | 01:14 | So the idea is to place these two
track points of our features in the frame
| | 01:18 | that are visible the entire time.
| | 01:20 | I don't want to place the track points
over the actress, she actually moves.
| | 01:23 | I don't want that, I want to be in
the scene that does not move on its own
| | 01:27 | chord, therefore the wall is a good candidate.
| | 01:29 | Let's take a look on the
less blurry frame, say, frame 10.
| | 01:33 | So this splotch right here is a good feature to
pick, and also this bush, let's try that.
| | 01:37 | I'm going to reposition these track
points, going over to the splotch and the
| | 01:41 | second one track point 2 over the bush.
| | 01:44 | Now for the bush I'm going to center it on
this leaf at the top that kind of sticks out.
| | 01:49 | I'm also going to make the boxes much
larger--the feature box and the search
| | 01:53 | box--and you can make this any of size you want.
| | 01:55 | In this case it's going
to help with the accuracy.
| | 01:58 | Now it will slow down the tracking
process, but should help us in the situation.
| | 02:02 | So now that we have our track points
set we can try to analyze, I'm going to
| | 02:06 | analyze forward from frame 10, and
zoom in a bit and just play it back.
| | 02:10 | So looks like those motion paths are
pretty accurate from frame 10 to the end.
| | 02:14 | Let's analyze backwards from frame 10.
| | 02:15 | All right, it looks pretty good, but
eventually it does slip off because there is
| | 02:19 | a very heavy motion blur at the beginning.
| | 02:21 | If I zoom into track point 1 you can
see that splotch is right here, whereas
| | 02:25 | the track point's over here.
| | 02:27 | Now let's see to another problem we
haven't dealt with yet, and that's the fact
| | 02:30 | there's a zoom on this shot.
| | 02:32 | If I play it back to the viewer, you
can see it starts closer and ends further
| | 02:36 | away, it's because the lens is
changing, how do we deal with that?
| | 02:39 | Well, what we can do is activate
Scale for the tracker, scales of third
| | 02:43 | transform we can pick right here. What
that will do is when we apply the data
| | 02:47 | we'll animate the position, the
rotation and the scale of the layer.
| | 02:50 | So we definitely want scale in this
situation because the track points will get
| | 02:54 | farther and closer apart as
do the features we're tracking.
| | 02:57 | Just give it that a try, and start frame
10 go forward, play that back, it looks
| | 03:02 | pretty good, pretty much the same.
And you go to frame 10 and go backward.
| | 03:06 | Let me zoom in here.
| | 03:07 | So the track points still slip
off for the first few frames.
| | 03:11 | It's okay that we have activated Scale, however,
because we still want the scale to be animated.
| | 03:16 | So in terms of first few frames we are
going to have to deal with that manually.
| | 03:20 | So let's see where it goes bad.
| | 03:22 | So frame 4 looks goods, 3 is starting to slip,
so I'm going to move this track point to fix frame 3.
| | 03:27 | I'll put it in the center of that
streak, which is the blob or the splotch.
| | 03:31 | Here is frame 2, fix that, frame 1 right
in the center of that streak, and frame 0
| | 03:37 | where it's the most far off.
| | 03:39 | All right, that one is fixed.
Let's go up to the track point 2.
| | 03:43 | So frame 5 is good, 4 is good, 3 is
pretty good, 2 is actually good, 1 is
| | 03:50 | starting start into slip, that's a
little harder to see what's going on with the
| | 03:54 | blur, we have to kind of guess
where the center of that leaf is.
| | 03:58 | And now frame 0 which is further soft.
| | 04:00 | All right, so those two motion paths
are repaired, now we can try to apply the
| | 04:04 | stabilization. Now it works differently
in this case because I want to apply the
| | 04:07 | stabilization to the layer
itself and not some another layer.
| | 04:10 | So what I can do is go straight to
the Apply button and say yes to X and Y.
| | 04:15 | It jumps back to the Composition view.
You'll see that the anchor point position
| | 04:19 | scale and rotation are
keyframed for me by the tracker.
| | 04:22 | Now most of the X/Y movement is taking
care of the anchor point, let's play it back.
| | 04:28 | So see what happens is the entire
frame has moved in order to keep those
| | 04:32 | features locked in the same place, so those
features don't really move, but the frame moves.
| | 04:38 | Now the problem with the black
gap we have to deal within a minute.
| | 04:41 | Let's get closer to this to see if the
first few frames are still working for us.
| | 04:46 | There is such heavy blur here, it's
often very difficult to deal with.
| | 04:49 | Now one thing that happens is there's a
little but too much or little too less
| | 04:53 | rotation for the first few frames.
| | 04:54 | So say around frame 4 or 5, it's looking pretty
good, after that the plate looks pretty stable.
| | 05:00 | Before that, though, the rotation is not
quite correct, so in that situation we
| | 05:04 | can do is go down to your rotation
animation and try to repair these keyframes by hand.
| | 05:09 | So again, let's see where it
looks good, maybe frame 2 and on.
| | 05:13 | Now yours might be slightly different.
| | 05:15 | Very small changes to the track points
and very small changes to the boxes on
| | 05:20 | those track points can give you
different results in tracking.
| | 05:23 | But the idea is to go in and repair the
keyframes for changing their values to
| | 05:27 | try to fix in any kind of glitches.
| | 05:29 | So with my version, it's frame 0
and 1, they're not really good.
| | 05:33 | So let's see frame 2 looks
good, so I want to match 2.
| | 05:37 | So I'd go to frame 1, I am going
to try to match rotation there.
| | 05:41 | Let's try 0 rotation, okay, it looks pretty good.
| | 05:43 | Let's go down to frame 0, it's already
0 there, so I will try some different
| | 05:48 | numbers, may be negative number, -0.5,
but it's a wrong way so how about 0.5
| | 05:52 | then we'll play it back,
not enough back to frame 0.
| | 05:56 | Let's try 1, and it looks pretty good.
So now there is now major change in rotation.
| | 06:01 | There's still a lot of blur at the beginning.
| | 06:03 | That is permanent to the footage. You're
not going to be able to get rid of that.
| | 06:08 | But at least you have stabilized
the play, so let's play it back.
| | 06:11 | That looks pretty stabilized.
| | 06:12 | Now again, you might have certainly
different variation, you might have to spend
| | 06:15 | additional time adjusting rotation
keyframes at the beginning, also it's been
| | 06:18 | how you set your track points you might
find you have to adjust the scale too.
| | 06:22 | But generally, it's just scale and
rotation for a shot like this.
| | 06:25 | So let's deal with the black edge last.
| | 06:27 | We got that gap opening
it up, and that's not good.
| | 06:30 | So a great way to fix that
is to nest the composition.
| | 06:33 | Let me go up to Composition
and make a brand-new composition.
| | 06:35 | Now I need to match this
to the first composition.
| | 06:39 | Now note this size of this project is smaller.
| | 06:41 | This is actually 1280x720, so you
need to make sure the composition I make
| | 06:46 | now is the same size, 1280x720, but still
has a same frame rate 24 and also duration of 90.
| | 06:53 | So where your first stabilization
does not really matter based on the
| | 06:58 | resolution, that seem to be
consistent within the project.
| | 07:00 | So I am going to click OK, now I'm
going to pull shot3 comp in the Comp1.
| | 07:05 | Now I need to make sure my durations are the same,
and I went a little bit too quickly there.
| | 07:09 | My duration for this project is only 60
frames, so let me go back to Composition >
| | 07:13 | Composition Settings,
and make sure to set to 60.
| | 07:16 | So I can change Composition
properties at any time.
| | 07:19 | All right, now we have the correct
duration, and now the shot3 is nested into
| | 07:23 | Comp1, which is a new composition.
| | 07:25 | At this point I can scale this up, let's say
107% and therefore disguise the black edge.
| | 07:31 | So let's go through the footage and
make sure we don't see the edge, and now I
| | 07:35 | have to move this around.
That looks pretty good.
| | 07:38 | So now if I play it back, we see the gap a
little bit there, right there on this frame.
| | 07:43 | So I have to move the entire nested comp,
move it to the left, and we'll try it
| | 07:47 | again, so there we go.
| | 07:48 | So now we have stabilized play, and aside
from the heavy motion blur on the first two
| | 07:52 | or so frames, you cannot
tell the camera's ever moving.
| | 07:55 | It's just a great way to take footage
you might not otherwise be able to use
| | 07:59 | apply the track over
stabilization and stabilize it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Tracking rectangular elements with the Perspective corner pin option| 00:00 | We're ready to move on to Project 4.
| | 00:02 | In Project 4 we're going to apply
motion tracking in a different form.
| | 00:06 | It's going to be Corner Pin tracking.
| | 00:08 | Corner Pin Motion tracking is great whenever
you have to track a rectangular or a square feature.
| | 00:13 | For example, you might track the corners
of a billboard or a poster or a window or
| | 00:18 | a screen, anything that's rectangular.
| | 00:20 | After you track, you can then apply new artwork
or new footage to that rectangular area.
| | 00:25 | In fact, in Project 4 we're going to
replace the screen of a futuristic PDA
| | 00:29 | device, so let's get started.
| | 00:31 | Let me go to File > Import > File and pull in
that original footage, features an actress.
| | 00:35 | This is called shot4 in the Footage
folder, so I'll bring that in
| | 00:40 | as an image sequence.
| | 00:41 | I am going to pull that down into
the timeline and create a new composition.
| | 00:44 | Let's play it back and see what it looks like.
| | 00:47 | So you see this features a PDA,
has a screen, that screen is blank.
| | 00:51 | We're going to put in new artwork in
there, in fact, we have an animation that
| | 00:55 | was pre-done we will put in this area.
| | 00:57 | So we are going to Corner Pin track
this green rectangle, let's get started.
| | 01:00 | So you start the same way, you pick the
layer and go to Animation > Track Motion.
| | 01:04 | Now tracker opens up in Transform
mode, once again, so you can switch that.
| | 01:09 | Now there are two types of corner pin, there is
Parallel corner pin and Perspective corner pin.
| | 01:13 | We actually want Perspective corner pin
because that give us the ability to
| | 01:17 | move all four track points that we
will have. And in fact, once I choose that
| | 01:21 | there are the four track points, if
I zoom in, you see 1, 2, 3, and 4, and
| | 01:27 | these are all attached by strings, but you can
move anyone of them separate from the others.
| | 01:31 | So the idea is to place this at the corners.
So I'm going to go to frame 10, it's a
| | 01:36 | good starting place, not much motion
blur, and place these track points.
| | 01:39 | So you want the corner at the very edge of
the corner where the green meets the blue.
| | 01:46 | So now that these are
positioned, we can try to analyze.
| | 01:48 | So I'm going to analyze forward, you can see
as it analyzes, it looks like its pretty stable.
| | 01:53 | Let's try 10 to the start.
| | 01:55 | Okay, it definitely slips off here.
You see the actress lifts up her hand to
| | 02:00 | raise up the PDA, so there's some
amount of motion and blur, and the tracking is
| | 02:05 | just not able to figure out
where are those blurred corners are.
| | 02:08 | They are almost invisible now
because there's so much blur.
| | 02:10 | We could try to adjust the track points
further, change their sizes and reanalyze,
| | 02:15 | or you can just manually adjust it.
| | 02:17 | Let's see how many frames are bad in
this case, so look pretty good around frame
| | 02:21 | 6 or so, so the first 5 frames
are starting to slip off.
| | 02:25 | What I'm going to do is manually
adjust this. I'm going to do at on frame 5
| | 02:30 | first, it's not too bad, so I'm going to
zoom in, because what you don't want to
| | 02:34 | do is accidentally select any of the keyframes
on motion paths, so you have to look pretty closely.
| | 02:39 | So I'm going to fix track point one, two,
let's get down to three here, and then four.
| | 02:49 | I do have to do the other frames. I'm
going to skip ahead though, because that
| | 02:53 | might take a little bit time to
move all four of these track points.
| | 02:57 | So we have now jumped ahead, I have
adjusted frames 1 through 5 or so, and now I'm
| | 03:01 | ready to deal with frame 0. Frame 0 has a
biggest slippage, you can see how far off it is.
| | 03:06 | I'm going to try to adjust
the track points for this frame.
| | 03:09 | Now here I have accidentally grabbed one
of the keyframes from the motion path,
| | 03:13 | you can see it pulls out
there is a little square box here.
| | 03:16 | I want to undo that.
| | 03:17 | Ctrl+Z, or Command+Z, so if you have a
hard time selecting the anchor point
| | 03:21 | without getting one of the motion
path keyframes just zoom in, and then
| | 03:25 | it's easier to select.
| | 03:26 | So you fix frame 0, so now 0 to 5 or 6
is correct, so now if I move forward, you
| | 03:32 | can see that the track points
follow that square, the rectangle.
| | 03:35 | Now we're ready to try to apply this,
now the application happens a little
| | 03:39 | bit differently, I do want to apply it
to different layer, but I want to prep
| | 03:43 | that layer in advance.
| | 03:44 | So with this project there are some
premade animation that features some screen
| | 03:47 | graphics, let's bring that in.
| | 03:49 | File > Import > File, it's in the
Renders folder, it's called Shot4Screen, bring
| | 03:55 | that in, we're going to drop
that on top of the composite.
| | 03:58 | Now I do need to prepare it for
apply the motion tracking to it.
| | 04:01 | Now because the corner pin will apply
the tracking data based on track point
| | 04:06 | one to the upper left-hand corner,
it's actually a good idea to zero out the
| | 04:11 | anchor point which is right here and
the position of this artwork or whatever
| | 04:16 | you're going to play the tracking data
to, so it sits in the upper left-hand
| | 04:20 | corner, and just do that. I'm going to
expand the transform section of this new
| | 04:24 | layer and zero out the Anchor Points 0,0,
and also the Position. You'll see that it
| | 04:31 | stuffs it into the upper left-hand corner.
This is actually the idea for the corner pin tracking though.
| | 04:36 | So I can go back to the tracker, make
sure I check my edit target, make sure my
| | 04:41 | screen is selected in terms of this
new layer, click OK, and hit Apply.
| | 04:46 | As soon as I hit Apply it snaps that
artwork right to the screen. If you look at
| | 04:52 | the layer you can also see that it's
had a corner pin effect, and that's where
| | 04:56 | it stores the position of the four corners terms X,
Y for upper-left, upper-right, or left or right.
| | 05:02 | In other words, all four corners of that
artwork are pulled down to these positions.
| | 05:06 | It's also animated the overall position of
the entire layer. Let's play it back, so
| | 05:11 | it's looks pretty good.
| | 05:12 | There are so some issues with some of
the early frames, because of the heavy motion
| | 05:16 | blur, doesn't quite match exactly.
There's also little bit of wiggle in there.
| | 05:19 | Now we can deal with that, and we'll
talk about that a little bit later.
| | 05:23 | We have the basic tracking down now.
| | 05:25 | So now we can move on to better integration
of that animation with the background.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adjusting corner pin points and paths| 00:00 | We applied the motion tracking tool with
corner pin options to track the screen
| | 00:05 | onto the PDA in the actress' hand.
Let's take a look at our movie so far.
| | 00:09 | So it's tracking pretty well, but there
are definitely areas we can improve to
| | 00:13 | make the integration better.
| | 00:14 | If I go to a non-blurred frame, one thing
that pops out is the fact that there is
| | 00:18 | a strange gap at the edge of the screen.
| | 00:21 | There is a new screen animation on top
of the old screen edge, and that edge
| | 00:25 | kind of shows through
and looks a little strange.
| | 00:28 | What might be nice here is to stretch
the screen out a little bit more to cover
| | 00:32 | up that old screen to get rid of that edge.
| | 00:35 | So one trick for doing that is to adjust
the corner pin properties and move this
| | 00:40 | set of keyframe as single units.
| | 00:42 | So let's go down to the layer first, expand the
Effects and look at the corner pin animation.
| | 00:47 | So again, we have the four corners here,
upper left, right, lower left, lower
| | 00:52 | right, here's all of the keyframes.
| | 00:55 | There are so many keyframes, we don't
really want to adjust them here in the
| | 00:59 | timeline, so another trick is to go into
the Graph Editor, where we have more control.
| | 01:03 | So what we'll do is we'll edit one
corner at a time and offset the curve in both
| | 01:07 | the X and the Y so that the corner on
the screen appears in different place.
| | 01:11 | So, how do you go into the graph editor?
| | 01:13 | Well, first pick a curve you want to
work with or property you want to work with.
| | 01:18 | For example, maybe we want to start
with the lower left corner. I'm going to
| | 01:22 | click this Include this property and
graph button right here, so it turns dark.
| | 01:25 | Next thing I'll do is go to the big
Graph Editor button here, which switches to
| | 01:29 | the graph editor view, so I'll
click that and here's the view.
| | 01:32 | Now the way it works is the red curve
is the X, it's the traditional way that
| | 01:37 | After Effects colors these, so you have
the X value here and the Y value here,
| | 01:42 | and you have the curve that
results from that in the graph editor.
| | 01:46 | The cover is made up of a bunch of
keyframes very close together, and the curve
| | 01:50 | just threads through those
keyframes to show you the result.
| | 01:53 | Now in terms the way that graph editor works
as for its values, the frames run left to right.
| | 01:59 | The value that's stored by the
keyframe, values run from 0 above 100.
| | 02:04 | So there is particular keyframe, maybe
this one right here I just clicked on it,
| | 02:08 | well, you can figure out the value by
reading down to up on the graph, so it has
| | 02:12 | a value of around 150, 160.
| | 02:15 | Its frame number is determined by the
left or right motion, so this is frame 36.
| | 02:19 | All right, so what we do with
the curves now we have them?
| | 02:21 | We want to move these curves as single
units, so what I can do is drag a marquee
| | 02:26 | selection box around the curve,
so let's start with the Y.
| | 02:29 | I'm going to click right here in the
empty space and form a marquee box,
| | 02:34 | highlight the entire curve and let go, turns
to deep gold yellow, which means it's selected.
| | 02:38 | I can then move this curve
straight up or straight down.
| | 02:42 | Now I'll change the values of all the
keyframes in that direction, so I'm going
| | 02:45 | to click right here and drag straight down.
You can see it goes up in the Y in the viewer.
| | 02:50 | If it goes opposite direction, it goes
down, in this case I want to go down.
| | 02:55 | Now you have to careful not to go
left or right, that'll change what frame
| | 02:59 | number it's on, that'd be bad, so just be careful.
So there I pull that curve down, that's great!
| | 03:04 | Now I can go and get the X curve,
select the entire X curve and then pull that
| | 03:09 | up or down to make it go further left.
| | 03:10 | When I say left, I mean left in the
viewer, so there it's going further left, to
| | 03:15 | where that corner is.
So it looks pretty good.
| | 03:17 | Now what we will do is do
that for the other three corners.
| | 03:21 | Now it's going to take a little while,
so we're going to skip ahead, and we'll
| | 03:25 | come back to that completed.
| | 03:26 | All right, so now we're coming back
after I have adjusted all four of the corners
| | 03:30 | to the corner pin section in the graph editor.
| | 03:32 | For each of these four, I have gone
in and adjusted the X and Y curves.
| | 03:36 | Now I can see them all at once, but
what I do is go through one at a time.
| | 03:41 | So Upper Left, Upper Right,
Lower Left, Lower Right.
| | 03:44 | Now once these are adjusted, you can
see that that all of the edge is now
| | 03:48 | covered up, that looks a lot better now.
| | 03:50 | So I can go out of the graph
editor and work on the next step.
| | 03:54 | So let's look on ways to integrating
the screen render better, so looks like
| | 03:58 | it's actually in the live-action footage.
First thing we can do is activate motion blur.
| | 04:01 | This track screen is ruined quite a bit,
so motion blur would help us with the
| | 04:05 | blurriness, especially at the beginning,
so when I turn on the motion blur for
| | 04:09 | the screen layer, now it's in by
default, so I can go down to Toggle Switches
| | 04:13 | and show that again.
| | 04:14 | So I want to turn on Motion Blur right
here for that layer, and also motion blur
| | 04:19 | for the entire composition. Once we do
that and I go to an earlier frame, you can
| | 04:23 | see there is lot of blur.
| | 04:25 | In fact, there is so much blur there, it
looks like the screen is popping off the top now.
| | 04:29 | This would be a good place to adjust the
corners individually for individual frames.
| | 04:34 | So as we click the Corner Pin section,
you'll see these four circles, you can
| | 04:39 | move those interactively.
| | 04:40 | So if I zoom in here, and just click, say
this corner up here, I can move it around.
| | 04:46 | They don't want to do this for all the frames,
but for just a few frames it's not that bad.
| | 04:51 | So I'm going to adjust this so that the
blur doesn't quite go that far.
| | 04:55 | I'll do that for the bottom ones
also and go to the next frame.
| | 04:58 | It's mainly the top that's
looking a little strange.
| | 05:00 | Set the frame 3, it should be pretty
good. Let's take a look, okay, not to bad.
| | 05:04 | So now we have added motion blur to get
that very, very blurry beginning and also
| | 05:08 | adjusted those corners so it looks
like the screen fits better at the start.
| | 05:11 | So what can we do to improve the integration?
Let's move to a non-blurred frame.
| | 05:15 | Well, right now the
screen animation is very crisp.
| | 05:19 | One thing you can do is reduce the
opacity on that layer and let some of the
| | 05:23 | phone show through, let's do that.
| | 05:25 | I'm going to Transform here on
that layer, reduce the Opacity to 80.
| | 05:28 | When I do that, some of the colors
sneaks through and actually that fades out a
| | 05:33 | bit, I think it make the screen more integrated.
| | 05:35 | Now if you had a reflection on the
original PDA, then that reflection will also
| | 05:39 | show through, so it's a good trick when
you have something that reflective where
| | 05:42 | you are replacing the screen.
| | 05:44 | Now I can also add a regular blur to
the entire screen just to soften the
| | 05:48 | letters and little graphics, I
think it's a little too sharp now.
| | 05:51 | So I'll apply Gaussian Blur to the layer,
so Effect > Blur & Sharpen > Gaussian
| | 05:55 | Blur, probably a fairly subtle blur will work.
| | 05:58 | Let's try it 1, so just a little blur
to soften it, I think it looks better.
| | 06:03 | Now speaking of blur, the edges are
very sharp still, in other words, the edge of
| | 06:06 | the original animation that was
stretched to fit the screen is still pretty
| | 06:10 | sharp, that's why I softened it.
| | 06:13 | Now since the Alpha is working
correctly here, the way I do that is apply a
| | 06:17 | special blur that just works in the
Alpha by itself, and there is something
| | 06:20 | called Channel Blur for that.
| | 06:22 | So if I go up to Effect > Blur &
Sharpen, I can apply Channel Blur.
| | 06:25 | Now Channel Blur allows you to blur
any channel, including the red, green, or blue.
| | 06:30 | We just want to blur the Alpha,
so I'm going to change that value.
| | 06:34 | Let's try 3, so just by blurring the
Alpha Matte or the Alpha Channel by small
| | 06:38 | amount and see the edge gets
softer, that looks much better.
| | 06:42 | We have adjusted the Corner Pin Tracking
to make the screen fit the edges of the
| | 06:46 | PDA much better, we also added some
additional blurs and manipulated the opacity
| | 06:52 | to get the animation to feel like it
was shot in the same original scene.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying corner pin data to multiple layers| 00:00 | We have adjusted the screen animation
to better match the footage of the PDA.
| | 00:04 | Now since we have used motion tracking
to move that screen around, we can use
| | 00:09 | that data and apply it to another layer to
make that move in conjunction with the screen.
| | 00:13 | For example, with this project there
is a render of a Wireframe ship, and we
| | 00:17 | can bring in and make it look like it's a
hologram floating above the PDA, so let's do that.
| | 00:23 | We go to File > Import > File and
retrieve the Shot4Ship animation.
| | 00:28 | Now I want to bring in so it
will look a little different.
| | 00:31 | So far we have used layered PSD files.
| | 00:34 | However, when I bring this one in, we'll see a new
window pop up, and this is the Interpret Footage window.
| | 00:40 | Now layered PSD converts the Alpha Channel
automatically and knows what to do with that.
| | 00:45 | However, when you bring in some other
file format like a Targa or TIFF, it's
| | 00:50 | going to pop up this window if it
senses that there is an Alpha Channel.
| | 00:54 | And what it's asking is is
the Alpha premultiplied or not?
| | 00:57 | Now when you render something in Maya,
it pre-multiplies the Alpha, that means
| | 01:02 | the values of the Alpha are multiplied
by the color channels, and this is just
| | 01:06 | done for efficiency and
for higher-quality edges.
| | 01:09 | So if you see this window and the render
has come out of a program like Maya, go
| | 01:13 | ahead and pick Premultiplied,
that will give you the best result.
| | 01:17 | So Premultiplied, click
OK, here comes the footage.
| | 01:20 | We'll drop this around top of the
composite, that's going to be too short.
| | 01:23 | I'm going to back my
slider up so we can see it.
| | 01:27 | It's basically this Wireframe ship,
and because it's so short, it's only 30
| | 01:30 | frames, what we need to do is loop it.
| | 01:32 | And this animation is designed to
repeat over and over as it spins around.
| | 01:36 | So I'm going to go to the footage
itself, up here in the Project panel, right
| | 01:40 | mouse key, and go to the
Interpret Footage, and then Main.
| | 01:43 | This way you can change your frame rate,
but also you can make the footage loop.
| | 01:49 | In fact, there's a loop
down here at the very bottom.
| | 01:51 | So I'm going to loop this three times
and then hit Enter to close this window.
| | 01:56 | So now the bar has stretched out, now
the breakout of the bar is still short,
| | 02:00 | so I need to grab the end of this and
click-drag it so it fills the entire duration.
| | 02:05 | So now it repeats three times and
will spin three times on the screen.
| | 02:09 | So let's move this and scale it so it looks like
it might be a hologram, say, on top of this PDA.
| | 02:14 | I am going to scale it down. I'll go to the
Scale, under the Transform, scale it down to 70%.
| | 02:20 | I'm going to move it, so it looks like
it's near just above the PDA right here.
| | 02:25 | A good place to test is at frame 58, that's where
the nose of the ship is pointing straight down.
| | 02:30 | So I'll move it up some place around this area.
| | 02:33 | Now it's a little light, we can try to
experiment with blending modes to get
| | 02:36 | this shot better and then
apply some effects to it.
| | 02:39 | I'm going to switch over to the
Blending mode menu that's hidden now.
| | 02:43 | I'll toggle the switches one
more time and get to that.
| | 02:45 | Let's try Screen, that makes it kind
of interesting, where it's a little bit
| | 02:51 | lighter over the background ground,
but darker over the screen itself.
| | 02:54 | The other thing we can do to integrate
this is just to activate Motion Blur.
| | 02:58 | So I'm going to toggle my switches again,
activate Motion Blur, now eventually
| | 03:01 | this is going to move along with
the screen, so I need to blur it also.
| | 03:05 | Now it's not actually moving, what I
can do is parent this to the Screen layer
| | 03:11 | and therefore, I'll inherit the same
animation that the screen has, and the
| | 03:15 | screen got that from the Motion Tracking.
So I'm going to switch to Parent menu to Screen.
| | 03:19 | Now if I play it back, you'll see that
it follows the screen the entire time,
| | 03:24 | even at the beginning
when there is a lot of blur.
| | 03:26 | It's blurred because of the Motion Blur,
and because of the way we positioned
| | 03:30 | the scale that render, it looks like at some
place just above the screen, as if it's floating.
| | 03:34 | Now it's still a little dim, it's hard
to see, so what we can do is apply an
| | 03:39 | effect to make that a little bit glowy and
more bright. In fact, there is a Glow effect.
| | 03:43 | So with that chip layer selected, I'm
going to go up to Effect > Stylize > Glow.
| | 03:47 | And you can see already, it's starting to get
brighter and a little bit more glowy-looking.
| | 03:51 | So you can play around with the
threshold and the radius and the intensity.
| | 03:55 | Threshold determines what pixels
get glowed and which ones are ignored.
| | 03:59 | The radius is the size of the blurry glow,
how far it goes away from the original render.
| | 04:04 | Intensity is just the strength of the glow.
| | 04:06 | So let's try a threshold of 20, a
radius of 45, and an intensity of 2.
| | 04:13 | So now it's little bit more visible.
| | 04:16 | Whole we are at it, we can use this
glow and apply to the screen itself, and
| | 04:21 | you can copy effects from one layer to
another, so I can highlight this Glow
| | 04:24 | effect here and do a copy.
| | 04:26 | I can do Edit > Copy from the menu
and then go down to my screen layer,
| | 04:30 | highlight that so that screen layer
is selected, and then Edit > Paste.
| | 04:34 | That glow is transferred down to the screen. Looks
like that gets a bit strong, so I can adjust that.
| | 04:40 | It's right here in the Effects Control
Panel, I can experiment with making it a
| | 04:43 | little less intense, so there we go.
| | 04:45 | So we have added our additional ship
render, we have scaled and positioned it to
| | 04:51 | make it look like it might be a
hologram, we adjust its blending mode, and
| | 04:55 | applied a glow to it to make it look
like it was glowing along with the screen.
| | 04:59 | We now have our futuristic PDA.
| | 05:00 | So we started off with the blank
screen, and now we have this cool
| | 05:04 | animation, let's play it back.
| | 05:05 | So tracking is great anytime you need to track
something on to a rectangular feature like this PDA.
| | 05:10 | And of course, all the effects can
really help integrate that CG render, so it
| | 05:15 | matches live-action much better.
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ConclusionNext steps| 00:00 | Thanks for joining me on this video series,
Maya Rendering for After Effects Composites.
| | 00:05 | We discussed various ways to get started with
visual effects compositing using Maya and After Effects.
| | 00:09 | Now if you'd like to expand your
knowledge and continue to practice this, there
| | 00:13 | are many great resources on the web.
| | 00:14 | The first place to stop would be lynda.com.
If you search for software, you'll see an
| | 00:19 | entire section on just After Effects.
| | 00:21 | It's a great way to expand your knowledge
on how to create composites within that program.
| | 00:26 | You can also search for Maya.
There's an entire section on just Maya.
| | 00:30 | For example, you can expand your knowledge of
lighting and rendering just within that program.
| | 00:35 | Beyond lynda.com, there
are other great resources.
| | 00:38 | For example, there are forums
that deal with just visual effects.
| | 00:42 | Here's one, Visual Effects Talk,
vfxtalk.com, it's a great place to post
| | 00:46 | questions and look for solutions for problems.
| | 00:49 | There are also forms for just Maya.
For example, there's a Maya section of
| | 00:54 | creativecrash.com, another
great place to look for resources.
| | 00:58 | Beyond that I would like to mention a
few books I have written, one of which is on
| | 01:02 | Compositing, you can find this on the Amazon.
| | 01:04 | The title is Professional Digital
Compositing, this covers After Effects and a lot
| | 01:09 | of the basics and theory you
need to be a good compositor.
| | 01:12 | So thank you again, and have fun with
your visual effects compositing.
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