How to Make an Army with After Effects & Blender #digital #digitaleffect

Today I'm going to show you how I went from a dude running on a green screen treadmill to an entire army defending Middle Earth. Let's get started. Here at my studio we have this giant green screen psych wall, but you could get away with a pop-out green screen, a green blanket, or heck, even the blue sky. For this video, I was going to need a green screen treadmill, which I have an entire video showing how I made that right here. And now it's time to see what we have to look like characters from Middle Earth. Let's go! With the costumes picked out, it was now time to do the part I was dreading the most. Running. All moving at the same pace, I swapped out different aspects of the costumes to give as much variety as possible. I wish I was tracking how far I was running, because I'm pretty sure it was at least a few miles. Now that I'm thoroughly tired, and I have all the green screen assets I'm going to need, it's time to get this footage ready for battle. And that's a wrap. First things first, I opened up Premiere, and chopped up the video to all the pieces I was going to need for the running bits. With all those pieces ready, I moved them on over to After Effects. I started with a simple key to see how efficient that would be. Now the biggest problem are all those cracks and shadows in the treadmill. This made an accurate key pretty tricky. Thankfully, After Effects Rotobrush 3 works really well with green screen footage. Using Rotobrush as the base, and pairing that with some keying, I came up with some pretty decent results. And after half a day of cutting myself out, here's what I got. Not too bad. Now at this point, you're probably wondering, what do I need this army for anyway? That's a good question. I was commissioned to make this really fun video for Max where I'm running from different worlds from different movies on their platform. But that's a story for another time. I'll put a link down below. Anyway, here is the video that I'm working with. You'll notice that I look pretty ridiculous right now running through the field with nothing going on. You may also notice that the background doesn't look very middle-earthy. But that's okay, because with Photoshop, I was able to make the field look a little bit more like it was a field and gondola outside of Mordor. Or something like that. Before my army can hit the ground running, I first need to track the shot to make sure I'm able to replicate a proper camera movement for all my soldiers to run. I was able to get a really accurate track with After Effects' default camera tracker. You could also accomplish this with Blender's tracker, SynthEyes, PFTrack, MochaPro, and a bunch of other options. I used a plugin called AE to Blend to bring my camera info over to Blender. Now for this next part of turning myself from one into an entire army, there's so many ways to go about this. For me, I went ahead and used Blender to create this army. But you could pull off similar effects with After Effects or somewhere else. It may just take a little bit more manual work. Now inside of Blender, with the 3D track information, I was able to make some rough geometry that matched the terrain of the world. Before I started working with the army inside of Blender, I went ahead and took that Photoshop file and rendered it out in 3D space in the background inside of Blender. I then brought all my army assets into Blender. I turned all of these into their own collection called Army. At first, I tried to recreate the army using a particle system in Blender. This provided a few headaches, including the need to simulate and not properly matching the geometry of the ground. Instead, I ended up using geometry nodes. The nice thing about going about it this way is I was able to move the army wherever I wanted on my terrain later and the assets moved accordingly. I made sure there was a nice variety of soldiers, halflings, and a bunch of different other people in Middle Earth. I quickly noticed that all the hobbits and halflings looked too large, so I went ahead and scaled them down to half size. Once I laid out the army in a way I was happy with, I also added a grass hair system to the ground. I then took the ground as a whole and turned it into a shadow catcher. I then matched the sun in the 3D environment and set a proper HDRI. First, I rendered a pass of the army in the background, then another one in the foreground that was a lot more sparse so I could justify the main version of myself running through the different characters. In order to get the timing just right, I changed the seed value until I found a pass where I never intersected with another character. I then added one more instance of the army in the back left side of the video. I then took these rendered out batches of the army and placed them inside of my composition inside of After Effects. I then rotored out the door and then myself as well to put them in front of the armies that were supposed to be in the background. I also rendered out a depth pass inside of Blender so I could properly have certain soldiers be in front of me and behind me depending on where I was in the shot. Since I had the 3D tracking data as well, I added some fire and smoke in the distance as well as close to the camera. Then using an orange solid, I added a wiggle expression to the opacity and then cut it out on the ground plane to look as if the fire was illuminating from behind the door. At this point in the edit, my wife Karina pointed out that none of the capes really made sense for Middle Earth and sure enough, nobody really had this really bright red cape. I went ahead and changed the capes to more of that earthy green tone. For the keying, I used a plugin called Composite Brush which is one of the best keyers out there. Much better. I thought it would be extremely fun to recreate the eye of Sauron for the shot as well. So I set up my phone and recorded my eye moving from left to right to simulate the eye searching for me in the video. I then brought that inside of After Effects and used Mocha to track it. I then created a black solid and cut out the shape of an eye. I parented that to the tracking data. I made another black solid and cut out the shape of the eye and I used this as a matte for all these fire assets. I used roughened edges and animated it moving up as if it was fire. I then added a bunch of fire assets around the rim of the eye. I time reversed all of them so it looked like the fire was being sucked into the center of the eyeball. I then added two more fire reverse assets on the edge of the eyeball and one last black solid behind everything to give it a core matte. Finally, I added some lightning behind and in front of the eye to finish the look. And with all these pieces finally together, I was so excited to put it into the shot until I realized it, uh, yeah, it was like three pixels big. But hey, it's not about the destination. It's about the journey getting there, right? Well, with the eye in place, I went back into Blender and animated a spotlight to represent the eye of Sauron looking around the scene for me. When I was happy with that animation, I rendered it out and brought it back into After Effects. And with all of those pieces together and then Quentin's amazing sound design, here are the results. This video was a ton of fun and this was only one of three different worlds I created for this video. And, uh, I'm pretty happy about the dino one. A lot of hand animation going on there. Maybe I can make a tutorial about that in the future. If you liked this video, make sure you like and subscribe for future videos just like this one. Let me know what other tutorials you want to see in the future and I'll catch you in the next video.