21 VFX Tips in 9 Minutes or Less #vfx #digital #digitaleffect

Tip number one is that you do not need to have a massive team to make amazing visual effects. All I'm doing here is walking on a treadmill, using my phone to control the lights for explosions, and uh yeah, I didn't even have a green screen, and I've never felt more humiliated in my entire life. But ladies and gentlemen, if there is just one thing that you take from this video, it is to know that you don't need a whole team to make great visual effects and great films. You just need yourself and a really great idea, and some of these tips. Break up with your significant other. Consider learning a 3D program such as Blender, which is free, so you can make amazing things like that. I don't know why that's there, but it is. Here are some other things that you can do in Blender. And as said before, you don't even need green screens anymore. What I can do here is render out my footage as a PNG sequence and open up Photoshop. Then I can use a script by the Creative Twins YouTube channel, which automates the remove background process. And after a little while, I've got my background removed. So now I can put all of these dead guys behind me. And if that's not to your liking, I can delete those and put dead guys there. If that's still a bit much to you, I can put alive guys there and do this. And now they're dead. You can upload a single image of yourself doing this to a site like Tripo AI and get yourself a quick and dirty 3D model. Now you can make it do this. You can also make it do this. Use free stock footage from sites such as Pexels.com to make amazing establishing shots. Check this out. Farming. Really? Man of your talents. It's a peaceful life. Alright, I'm going to get down from here now. The next tip is Skillshare. Yes, this video is sponsored by Skillshare. Skillshare has creative classes taught by amazing filmmakers, visual effects artists, graphic designers, and more. The platform is designed to help you build creativity and skill into your life by learning directly from the pros. What I've been wanting to do in my visual effects journey is to learn character rigging and 3D modelling. All I had to do here was search for these skills and I'm immediately met with heaps of classes to join. I'm currently doing this class here, The Ultimate Guide to Blender 3D Rigging and Animation. The class is great and has over 7 hours of wisdom. I'm currently on step 15 of 46 where I'm learning how to animate a tank track over a terrain, where now, here the track is deforming over the terrain. Deforming models over a terrain has always been a skill that I've wanted to learn in Blender. I've just never really known where to start. Also, the first 500 people to use my link in the description below or scan the QR code will receive a one month free trial of Skillshare. So get started today. And thank you to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. Take a look at this shot. All of the cloud volumetric in this scene made it really render intensive. If I wanted to render that on my computer, that would have taken one million hours. So I didn't do that. What I did was use a render farm. Farming. Really? If you want to have good looking 3D renders, it's also important to use real world elements within them. Here I've got a scene and it needs a sky. So what I'm going to do is go over to polyhaven.com and get myself a free HDRI, which will not only light the scene, but I can also use that as the background. And since it's a real element and not CGI, your brain automatically accepts the actual CGI within the scene. Simulating things is really hard. I don't know how to do it. So what I can do is get a 2D element of what I want, put it into my scene. Sometimes it just looks better as well. Just make sure you don't reveal the fact that it's 2D. When you're animating a camera within Blender, it's really hard to actually animate it like it would if it was a camera. So there's an add-on called Shakeify, which is free, that you can add to your camera and it gives it this realistic motion. It can be quite difficult to learn Blender, so it's important not to just dive headfirst into the first tutorial that you want to recreate. You're most likely going to get lost and give up. That's what I did anyway when I first started learning. What you need is an actual course that teaches you the basics. You could get that course from Skillshare, or you could also go on YouTube. There's Blender Guru's Donut Tutorial. That's always good. The point is, do not overwhelm yourself with all these endless tutorials when you're just starting out. It's really important to actually just become comfortable with the software. And then once you've done a bit of the course, you can go off and watch any tutorial you want and you can learn how to do it. Blender add-ons, they are your best friends. There's tons of free ones and paid ones, and most of them are really good. Take a look at this one. This is Pew Pew. What I can do here is... Yeah, it's pretty self-explanatory. And if I wanted to do this all from scratch, it would take a really long time to set up, so it's really great to have this free add-on. If you're really stuck making a certain effect and there's no other tutorials out there that you can find that answers your questions, sometimes you can just ask ChatGBT and it actually, you know, kind of tells you what to do pretty good. So yeah. Your renders might not actually be bad. They're just poorly lit. Backlight them. It looks better. If you're working with a model that looks too plasticky and CG, what you can do is get a surface imperfection texture from the web and plug it into the roughness output on the model's material. And it's pretty self-explanatory what it does. It adds surface imperfections. It makes it look a bit more gritty and real. The Eevee render engine inside of Blender might not be as good as the Cycles render engine, but you can still make really great things with it. Look at these shots here. They were just made in Eevee, and that's because they were mostly just a silhouette. Since all of the CGI is in a silhouette, you don't need to render them in the Cycles render engine. You can just use Eevee, which is instant. Now you may have noticed that all the characters in this video, they have been animated. But how? What the hell? Look at this guy. He doesn't have any animation, so what we can do is send him to a free website called Mixamo and get him some animations. In Mixamo, we can rig up the Stormtrooper and give it an animation. Now we can make amazing scenes like this. Oh wait, we've already seen this tip. No, stop that. Next. If you are uploading a Bring your model back into Blender and disconnect the roughness map. Mixamo hates roughness maps. It's racist and it's disgusting. Then you can export your model without the roughness map and put it back into Mixamo and it should work. It should. Render settings. When I'm done making my stuff in Blender, what I like to do is export all of the separate elements in their own little file so I can composite it all together in After Effects. So we go over to the output properties, the resolution, whatever you want. Frame rate, whatever you want. File format. I like it to be PNG so I can have a PNG sequence. It's always quite good quality. Then I render as RGBA, which means alpha, meaning there's no background. Also, make sure to go to film and hit transparent so the HDRI is not included in the render. And then I just specify where I want the to go. Then it's just render, render animation. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's just say you're rendering out something that needs to be bright, like an explosion or a laser. Then what I would do is change it to RGB, no alpha, so just RGB, which means it will be rendered out with a black background. So when you're in After Effects or whatever compositor you might be using, you can use a blend mode like screen or add, which gets rid of the black.