Hi, I'm Calvin Serrano, a VFX artist and film maker from Germany and I was here for a week
to help the HitFilm guys to recreate the iconic HALO Jump scene from Godzilla.
And today I'm going to show you how to make a plane fly, in HitFilm, realistically.
Hello and welcome to the HALO Jump plane compositing tutorial.
Today I will show you how to recreate this plane shot from the 2014 Godzilla movie.
We're going to use HitFilm, a 3D model of a plane and an environment map that I created
with Blender, using its panoramic rendering function.
We will concentrate on the lighting and reflection on the plane using HitFilm's 3D features.
Let's start off my importing the material that we need to recreate the shot.
First of all I will import the two environment maps I created for this.
We will a download think for these in the description.
Next we will import the 3D model of the plane.
We bought this one so we will provide you with a link to buy it yourself too.
But there are also plenty of alternatives that are free for plane models on the internet.
Next we have to find the Skrew layers and tick them so we can animate them individually.
Now we go to Materials and select the housing material.
This will be like the main material that's all over your plane.
So we will open that and change the Illumination Model from Phong to Cook-Torrance.
Cook-Torrance is mainly used for metallic surfaces and Phong for almost any other surface.
So we can choose a Fresnel mode here, let's go for Titanium and we will give the Roughness
a value of 26% and we will increase the amount of Refraction.
You can see that when we increase this value, it kind of increases the look of the metal
itself.
It looks definitely more metallic.
So we'll put this at 10% to have it subtle but still effective and now I'll just click
OK and we can start creating a composite shot.
Let's call this one "Plane".
I will just drag and drop my plane model into the shot.
Create a new Plane layer, leave it at black, let's just call it "Black" too, to have it
a bit more organised.
But we will rename it immediately into "Environment".
Now put it below the plane and also drop the Environment 2 Map below everything else.
You can already hide this layer as we will use the environment viewer, also known as
the 360 Viewer to display the environment map and choose, on the layer, the environment
map picture.
Now we will create a new camera layer and rotate the plane model around its axis to
look in our direction.
We can also start adjusting the camera by using these controls up here.
We can move it around, change the focal length and also rotate it.
So let's get it into frame a bit better.
I will also rotate the plane a little bit like in the original.
Let's add the first light source.
This will be our sun so let's call it like that.
Let's change the light type from Point to Directional.
Directional lights only emit light from one direction, pretty self-explanatory, right?
Activate Cast Shadows in the Light properties.
If you don't see the light properties.
If you don't see the shadows now you also have to activate the functionality in the
model layer itself.
In the Materials just tick Cast Shadows and you should see shadows.
But you can immediately see that there are some fragments around the polygons of this
model so we can use the Self Shadow Bias to get rid of these fragments.
Let's put it to the back so the plane is lit from behind, a little bit like this.
We can already change the color of the light a little bit by drag and dropping this icon
onto the background, like this.
And then let's just make it a bit brighter by pulling the color down to the white spectrum
- just a tiny bit of color.
Let's get back into our media panel and drag and drop the black Plane onto the top of everything.
Let's call this one the Flare layer.
Right, let's put a flare effect on this layer.
Light Flares, Controls.
For the sun light flare I will choose the Flashlight White type and have the hotspot
position at the sun and let's reset the center to 0, 0 so that it's actually where the point
itself is too.
And let's change the Blend Mode of the flare layer to screen.
Let's see, Add, yeah, let's go for Add.
Now the flare is always where the point of light is too.
I will adjust the camera a little bit further to have a better look at the reflections.
Let's chill down the intensity of the first flare a little bit and let's duplicate it.
The second flare, I will change to Digital Stripe as I think it has a pretty cool look.
Let's chill this down a little bit too, yeah like this.
And I will also add a dirt map using the Lens Dirt effect.
For this I will decrease the Threshold so that we can get more dirt and I will increase
the Blur to have it a bit more subtle, like this, yeah.
Let's also add a Blur effect to just blur out the whole Lens Flares and Lens Dirts because
they tend to look digital and unrealistic when they're super sharp.
I will do the same with the object layer by drag and dropping the Blur effect on it and
putting it to a very low value, something around .5 maybe so we can see it's very slightly
blurred.
Here's a little trick I came up with for the shot.
I used Radial Gradient on the environment map, on the environment Plane, with Blend
mode to Multiply.
And let's put, just a, yeah, increase the opacity to 100% and change it from blue to
just black and yeah, the white can stay.
Now we can also adjust the size of the whole thing, but first, let's put the center onto
the sun layer too.
Now we can really see this gradient in effect.
Having this gradient adds to the realism of the environment map.
Alright, let's add a new light.
This one will be our ambient light, let's call it Ambient, put it below the sun layer
and yeah, let's change it from type Point to Ambient actually and decrease the Intensity.
For this you can just drag and drop the color of the background again, maybe something like
this, and decrease the intensity a lot so we can just get a little bit of detail using
this light, just a little tiny bit, like this.
Let's go into the sunlight again and decrease the Shadow Opacity a tiny bit, not much, just
a very tiny bit, yeah maybe 3%, alright.
I will also duplicate the sun layer and use it as a reflection of the Earth.
Let's call it Earth Light and put the position to 0, 0, 0 again.
Put it down into the direction of the Earth and let's just put the intensity all the way
down and also no Shadows.
And yeah, this will just be like a simulation of the reflection the Earth had on the plane.
For that we can also drag and drop the color of the Earth, like this.
And let's see how this looks, yeah maybe just a little bit less, 3% maybe.
Yeah I think this adds a little bit of nice detail to the whole plane.
We should also chill down the reflection on the plane of the main sunlight a little bit,
it's a bit too heavy for my taste.
Let's go a bit down, yeah, around like this, this looks good.
We can also chill down the whole flare layer a little bit to compensate for that.
One of the final steps is to make the propellers rotate so let's just put into the search controls
Z to get all the Z rotations for the objects.
So we can select all the propeller rotations holding down Ctrl and clicking on them and
then activating keyframes for all of them at the same time.
Now we can jump forward in time, I will just go to the end of the composition shot.
Now let's put in a high number on the times value.
Like 30 and repeat that for all the propellers.
Alright let's see how it looks.
If you want to see these kind of effects in the view port you have to make sure that under
Options and Playback Quality you have Final selected.
I will also select Full Resolution for Playback Resolution.
Alright let's see.
Oh yeah make sure to have Motion Blur activated for the Plane layer.
Alright this is not fast enough yet so let's put an even higher number, maybe, let's do
250.
Let's see how this looks.
Yeah this is better.
We can also search for Orientation to get some more variety into the propellers themselves
by having them spin in a different position.
Let us go into the materials of the Plane one more time and activate Receive Ambient
Occlusion and Cast Ambient Occlusion.
Let's zoom in here.
Ambient Occlusion helps to make a 3D object feel realistic by adding shadows where edges
are nearby, so you can really see how it adds more realism and detail to spots like this.
I think the standard configuration already looks pretty cool but we can play around with
it with Intensity and the sample radius.
Yeah so this is how I created and composited the plane for the HitFilm short film HALO
Jump and a little bit of color grading will really help to pull all the elements together
but this is a good starting point.
So yeah, thank you for watching, I hope you learnt something and see you next time.