the Easiest VFX Tutorial Ever #vfx #digital #digitaleffect

Okay, I get it, maybe in the past I haven't made visual effects come across as being that easy. But really it's so much fun and it doesn't have to be confusing at all and I want even the absolute beginners to be able to start creating visual effects on their own. So this time around I'm going to be showing just the essentials to create your first visual effects shots. And no, we don't need a fancy studio setup to achieve this either because we're working in a park today. That's because visual effects is so easy that we're just going to do it outside. Also because NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs gives you all the power you need for visual effects, content creation, gaming, and STEM studies anywhere you go. Which is great for those of us always on the move, wanting to get work done or play or collaborate on the go. Or like me, just wanting to get some sunshine while doing some visual effects. And for these visual effects we're using the free open source software Blender. And rendering these visual effects will be a literal breeze by taking advantage of the super fast NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 series laptop GPU inside the ASUS ZenBook Pro 14 here. So fast in fact that all my rendering changes can be visualized in real time thanks to the power of NVIDIA Studio before ever even hitting that render button. So if you're a student going back to school and you need a laptop for everything you do throughout a day at any location or if you like to kick back and game you'll be able to play all of the latest AAA titles into the wee hours of the morning on a powerful NVIDIA GeForce laptop like this one. So to learn more about these laptops check out the first link in the video description. And thanks to NVIDIA for sponsoring this video. So of course the first step is to film some footage. Because this is the easiest visual effects tutorial ever we're going to make it super easy and film our footage on a tripod. You can use any camera even the one in your phone will work great. Of course you can shoot with camera motion if you want and I have some tutorials out there on how you can track that footage then. But hey none of that complicated stuff in this video. Now when shooting your footage you just want to make note of the lens that that video was shot on. As they're all different even the ones in different phone cameras are different and we need this because we want to know what the focal length of that lens is as well as the sensor size. It helps to write it down and Google will be your friend for this. Next keep an eye on the lighting in your scene for your shadows and the light intensity. Also it's helpful to snap a straight down photo of the environment that you'll be adding 3D elements into. This will be used for some simple light bounces. If you're intense you can do a full 3D scan of the area but hey we're keeping it simple. Now on to step two your 3D elements. You can either create these or download. Just make sure your 3D model has some basic PBR materials with a roughness map and a normal map. There's plenty of great free 3D models out there. I'll link a few in the description or if you're also into 3D modeling you can make these models yourself and I have a few tutorials for that on the channel. There's a link for one of those right there or maybe over there. So now with your footage and your 3D elements it's time to combine those. So in this step you're just opening up your video in your 3D software. For these examples I'm using Blender 3D because it's free and awesome as I mentioned and you want to line up your 3D grid floor with the surface and the footage that you're adding your 3D elements into. Then add in a flat plane and you can put the picture you took with your phone of your surface onto that plane as a texture because this will be used as a shadow catcher. What is a shadow catcher you might ask? An object that's purely meant to grab the shadow being cast from your 3D elements. Also this object will be used because we put that texture on it as a surface to balance the lighting in your scene back onto your 3D model and this little trick makes it look way more realistic when you're adding 3D elements into live footage. The next step would be to add some lighting to your 3D model to make it match the footage that was shot it. Wow all these cars and people are super distracting. I can see why they invented offices. So most commonly you'll want to light your scene with what's called an HDR. It's basically a panorama with all kinds of lighting data packed into that image and there's a few websites that make a lot of these HDR images available to everyone for free. Polyhaven is my favorite site for HDRs so I'll link it in the description and go ahead and download a free HDR there. Picking one that resembles the lighting color, shadow length, and intensity of the area that you shot your footage in. These little studio renders really help to identify this. And just using that HDR lighting in Blender you just want to line up the sun rotation to match the shadows of your actual footage. So in this case the sun is kind of coming from this angle so I'd want to make sure my shadows are kind of falling to like this side of an object. Then on that plane you just want to make it your shadow catcher. You also want to make sure that Blender is rendering with a transparent background so you don't see your HDR in the background and it's only affecting the lighting. Also while you're lining things up you'll want to make sure that you put your camera information into Blender's camera. Now it's just a matter of rendering out a few passes in Blender for these 3D elements over a transparent background. I like to enable a few extra render layers because then you have the flexibility of changing things after you've rendered your scene. Even though on a super fast laptop like this that has a 40 series NVIDIA GeForce GPU in it, rendering happens really fast. You still want to have that flexibility when it comes to compositing. So a few render layers that I like to enable are the shadow catcher, the glossy passes, and if you're doing some more intense 3D visual effects you'll want to enable the z-depth or mist pass, as well as ambient occlusion, but most of those we're not going to talk about today. Then with these layers rendered you can combine them in Blender or other creative softwares like Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, DaVinci Resolve, or any of the other 100 plus creative apps out there all accelerated by the NVIDIA Studio I might add, just giving our sponsor a little love. Basically these passes can be used in many different softwares but here's the basics of it done just inside of Blender's compositor. You would start by adding the shadows to your live footage with a multiply overlay and then alpha over with the 3D elements render layer. By having the shadow pass on a render layer you can easily adjust the intensity of those shadows to match the intensity of the shadows within your footage. This next step is optional but I always find it looks better to add a little bit of the glossy direct and indirect passes back in with an add overlay. This just really helps to pull the 3D elements into the live footage better in my opinion. And that's basically it so pretty easy right? This is just the basic animation that comes with the 3D character when you download it but now you can go ahead and add any sort of 3D animation to your visual effects characters. And of course the last step would be if you have something or someone pass in front of your 3D elements you'll need to do what is called masking. This is just a simple process of creating an outline mask of the subject you want in front of your 3D element and then using this mask to add that portion of live footage back over the top of your 3D elements. Of course this then needs to be animated and can be kind of a tiresome process so this is where green screen is also often used in these scenarios. Actually here's a one minute green screen tutorial in blender if you guys want to check that out. And then for the very last lastly here is a bonus tip if you're blending your character into nature this can be difficult to mask or green screen so for this a good option would be to use my brand new nature essentials asset pack. You can pick from all sorts of foliage assets add it right above the shadow plane object in your scene around the feet or contact area of your 3D elements. It can really go a long way of making your 3D elements feel like they're part of the scene. And you can check out these new assets with a link in the video description. And also right now save 10% using the coupon code CGGeek10. So that wraps up how to do visual effects quick and easy. Hopefully some of you guys will now be able to create your first 3D visual effects shot. And if you create something cool post it on Instagram and tag me because I love seeing your finished results. Also a huge thanks to NVIDIA for sponsoring this video. That's gonna do it for me guys. Thanks so much for watching and if you want to see another video click right here. Bye-bye! Everyone go on.