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Making a Shot in Blender pt1: tracking/keying/masking/setup

🕑 Added 2020-05-25 10:07:33 +0000 UTC

Comments

WhaSukGo

At 7:26, how did he manage to adjust the camera so that the cube aligns perfectly with the table? My cube goes off when I play the video ..

JJ House

Hi Ian, when I try to import the image sequence as a plane, my texture is showing up pink. To the best of my knowledge I followed along directly with your workflow. Any idea what may be happening on my end?

Ozzie

Sadly yeah, at this point in modern filmmaking it's typically more common to rotoscope green screen footage rather than keying

simon wu

What should I do if I lit a green screen badly and it won't key? Roto?

Boil Man

Question: I filmed a dolly shot starting with an ECU and pulling out. Obviously this is significant movement along the Y axis which poses some challenges with the parenting image to camera and moving through other objects in the scene without them all moving significantly which defeats the purpose of the track. Any work arounds to set this up in 3D viewport or will I have to do most of my comping in AE or Fusion?

noor hicaru

you and video copilot are the best

Raja Cronous

Ok Ian tanks..Indonesia language terima kasih he he

Ian Hubert

I've got the footage right here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RkrxGFvjA2uAZIYAe5FLm9QK9tFhXGxb?usp=sharing I should see if I can upload the entire project file, yeah :)

Raja Cronous

file green screen...model please link download

Pablo Estrada

thanks a lot for the tutorials im using now blender and ue4, i want to be you on vfx in ue4

Kai Christensen

No problem, and thanks--I suspected it was something like that! Makes more sense now. As always your content is top-notch, sir!

Ian Hubert

I use a lot of after effects, but mostly out of habit :D

Ian Hubert

Oh! Sorry I missed this- as far as I know, the copy attributes option just basically moves/rotates object B to whatever object A is doing, but they're not linked at all. If you change object A it won't affect B. With the constraint, anything you do to A will be dynamically linked to B. Does that make sense?

Pudding Motion

So you use blender as main software for keying?

Kai Christensen

I do have one question. What makes the Copy Attributes add-on different from using copy location and copy rotation constraints? After doing my own testing I can clearly see they are different, but I can't wrap my head around what exactly Copy Attributes is doing differently.

Zachary Macintyre

Man, the technical elegance of this workflow is something else. Motion tracking, scene recreating, then normalising footage so you can redo the camera move, and then make the whole scene to fit the composition of that camera move. Awesome stuff!

Kai Christensen

Just wanted to say that Copy Location -- Copy Rotation -- Parent to camera stabilization/normalization technique was particularly interesting to me. Spent a good twenty minutes just now trying to get my brain to have some sort of intuition for what those steps are actually doing, but I think I get it now and wow, that's very cool. Thanks for the neat trick (among all the other incredible neat tricks I've already learned)

Kai Christensen

This video accomplished more in 28 minutes than i have in my entire life

Kai Christensen

This is absolutely amazing. I cannot (emphasis on cannot) wait for part 2

Mugrapher

Thank you Ian for this , Can't wait for part 2

Ian Hubert

Oh hey yeah! Sorry about that; I'll try to get it out by the end of the day. The last week's been kind of wild. :)

KAVN

Hey Ian, any ETA on when we getting part 2? No pressure, especially with the whole thing goin' on

Kash

Hey great video thanks! I think it is better to key the green screen in another software. I personally suggest Davinci Resolve, it is free and also industry-level software. maybe you can add that in future videos.

Tony Rizo

Thanks for this, it has really helped me take my own skills to a new level.

Zach Hoy

just seeing this has made me realize how much more I'm capable of doing as a solo - keep up the inspiration

gary hardesty

Also- have set the virtual camera to match the real camera (sensor size, etc.) and even mimicked the same height, etc. as the real camera...s till problems. Corrected for lens distortion, etc... All the same stuff you's do for a similar scene in NukeX, Fusion Studio, etc.... I normally use either Syntheyes or Mocha Pro for all my tracking, but would love to do it all in Blender if i can figure out my problems in doing so.

gary hardesty

Oops- hit send too early on my last reply. The challenge for me is: when a person is walking left to right in front of the camera, everything is OK. When the person is coming toward or walking away- wow, that is really tough! Ian talked a bit about this challenge in an earlier tut. Scaling and overall distance traveled (green screen person, VS the green screen extraction in the 3D scene). I have a ton of trouble gettting all of this to match. In other words- I adjsut scale in blender,e tc., but- seems line the real person and the virtual scene never match up- the person, as they walk away from the camera, for example, are either getting too small too soon (IE: their scale does not match the scale you set when they started their walk), or, the distance traveled by the real person, in the 3D scene, is wrong, for example, maybe they walked 4 feet, but in the scene, the walk covered the wrong amount of distance. As I said, this happens even when scale, etc. is OK at the beginning... I used the fllor, wall and scale alignment in the Blender tracking/solve system, and that seems OK...but...?

gary hardesty

I am also now waiting for---part 2... :) The biggest challenge I seem to be having is getting the real (green screen floor) and virtual floor to line up well enough, especially when the shot is a locked-down tripod shot- seems like it should be easy to match the two- but it's not. I am especially anal about the real scene and the virtual scene having all the proper foot AO/shadows to make the shoot believable when comped together (virtual floor + extracted green screen).

akim mohideen

This is awesome, Waiting for Upcoming parts.. Also looking forward for the green screen lift tutorial. Thanks Ian

shonal bose

"The boat shot took like 15-30 hours" believe me i would have taken weeks or probably given up.... but slowly am trying to understand the workflow and practicing it....Cant wait for part 2 ......

Ian Hubert

Ah! Thanks a ton for being here! :D Oh, totally! I've thrown some random footage (including this shot) here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1RkrxGFvjA2uAZIYAe5FLm9QK9tFhXGxb

Jeremy McCloud

Hi Ian. New fan here. I watched it all the way through and loved it! I’m looking forward to part two. I don’t suppose you could share the green screen footage so we can follow along with it... could you?

Ian Hubert

AH! That looks great! I love it!

Ian Hubert

An A73! I've been loving it; it's been great for greenscreen work, since it's so light sensitive I can get a fairly deep DOF to keep lots of tracking points in focus (and reduce noise :D)

Nicolas

Wouhou! Thanks for doing that Ian, you legend!!! I can’t wait for part 2!

George Castro

great stuff Ian! quick Q: What camera you using these days to shoot your live footage?

Ian Hubert

I'm hoping to get through the whole process over the next few videos! We'll see how it goes!

Ian Hubert

Ah! Yeah that's right- sorry! Let me respond to your message :D

Ian Hubert

Ooo yeah- so, oh man I have too many thoughts on that! Haha, if I had filmed someone else sitting across from him (maybe even further forward or back), I could do this same process, but just split the video plane and put the other half closer/further away, and it would all just "work" still. In this case, there's already some existing "real" camera motion burning a perspective into the footage, and the digital camera works better the closer to that original camera movement it stays. If you add another piece of footage with random camera movement to it, you'd have to split the difference when animating the digital camera. The nice thing about this process is it basically stabilizes the footage, though, so if it's just handheld without crazy perspective shift, it should work just fine)- All that to say- yeah, tripod shot would probably be easiest, yeah! This is how I went about it for the dynamo dream trailer, kind of a mix-and-match: https://youtu.be/FFJ_THGj72U

Ian Hubert

Ah, I've heard that!! We should check that out next :D

gary hardesty

Great job, Ian! I have a shoot I need help with- cam on tripod/grn screen- can't get the real floor and virtual floor to line up...

Brent Holzheimer

You legend! thanks for all of these videos.

Ian Hubert

That's a good point, yeah! Especially since blender measures in watts, if you're using real-life measurements, that could affect things. Normally I just crank the slider till I like the amount of light, so that's never really mattered, but if you're trying to emulate exact lighting conditions, that could totally be a thing. I'll be tackling lighting on this scene soon! We'll see how it goes, haha

Benjamin Lacey

YES! Exactly what I need:) THanks Man!

Ian Hubert

Oh, thanks for this! I think I fairly rarely use the distortion data (as evident by my basically deleting it all straight off when I jumped into the compositor). I'd love to wrap my head around that workflow a bit more, though. I know Sean Kennedy released some really useful videos lately.

Ian Hubert

Yeah!!! It's crazy convenient. And it's actually a lot more responsive than it looks in the video- I only realized after that I had the compositor open in a panel, so it was re-keying every time I changed frames, haha

Ian Hubert

Awesome!! I'm glad! :D

Ian Hubert

I'm glad it's useful! And for a virtual camera, absolutely, yeah. In this case, it's kind of nice that the footage has an original movement I can kind of echo, but in general you'd save yourself a few steps if the camera was just locked down :D.

Carter Burr-Kirven

Less fun, though

Carter Burr-Kirven

Any kind of reprojection in particular? Check out this one, for projecting footage onto geometry from an animated camera: https://www.patreon.com/posts/re-animating-in-36909454 and for basic camera projection, like "3d-ifying" a photograph, there's any number of videos online

Tim Evans

Thanks heaps for this. This is exactly what I've wanted to see!

Dax Blinn

Hey Ian, this is exactly what I've been looking for thanks so much! Quick question, if you are going to end up creating a virtual camera movement, would it be faster to just film everything locked off on green screen for a character like this? I understand the benefit of tracking if you want to use your original camera movement, but strictly asking for the perspective of a virtual camera

Edward Cunningham

Love this! Really helps get a feel of the workflow with real footage which is why I'm here! I'm very interested in a tutorial on reprojection. Your video on YouTube about motion tracking touches on it a little bit when you reproject footage into the room you build but I can't quite wrap my head around how to use reprojection in my own projects and would love to see more examples. Thanks for the content Ian and hi from area code 2 0 6 !

Romain Mercurol

thank you for this insane tutorial !

Zeke Faust

FYI for anyone tracking in Blender, if you plan on refining those Kappa 1 and 2 distortion parameters you need a LOT of points, and you need them all around the screen especially near the edges! 8 trackers is considered the minimum (technically the lowest is 6), but more is generally better.

Griffin Toal

Fire

Mark Miller

Wow, parenting masks suddenly makes masking in Blender super interesting. Thanks! For the record, I did watch the whole thing, and I think alot of folks will.

Chris Ak

Great all the way through! I love how you're able to put a scene together like you're sketching in a note book. Question Ian: What do the specs on your PC look like?

Mike L. Taylor

This is great!!! Would love to see some tips on combining multiple locked off clips and adding and exporting the camera moves. I’d like to build my scenes in Blender but be able to composite and color correct the footage and the 3D as separate elements after in Ae. Match grain and add more elements etc. Thanks for this Ian. You’re a real hero.

Patrick Lever

Takes me 3 days to make a room and he makes a room and adds live video in it all in 20 minutes while singing the theme song from cheers WOW true Jedi here's my 7$ just EPIC 🤩🙏🏾#KEEPFILMING

Jan van den Hemel

Amazing!

max pirrit

amazing, would love to see the full process (texturing, building the world, lighting etc) really really helpful

Gamba

Amazing, but what happen if you want to add another character en the same scene ? or more?another one with another camera? they must have to similar camera movent? i can imagen that for lots of people in a scene like, this tripod shoot will be the best... coexist videos with different perspective and paralax could work??

keith hamilton

that was epic to watch you like what ever you wanted to design in your head you can produce and then play with effortlessly it was magic to watch you I can do it in 2d but 3d is another story ,haha looking forward to part 2

Gabriel Meilikhov

Yessss, more of that please! I've began adopting a similar workflow inspired by your previuse work. Here's my draft so far: https://youtu.be/Fmwh6zZkmE0 You may recognize the steam elements.

Kennisoan

Thanks! Just what I needed!

Michiel Coene

Doesn't working at scale also affect lighting and rendering? Not sure if this goes for Eevee. Anyway, I would love to hear about your lighting process.

Max

another great video! Thanks! It is very useful and interesting to watch how you work

JØRGEN WETAAS BULL

Jess, so cool! Want to get into this workflow! Btw " i know this much is true" on HBO, is the best drama series I have seen in a few years. Mark ruffalo is just amazing in it.