in today's video i'm going to show you how to create a nice and vibey matte painting
using adobe after effects in element 3d just like this shot from doctor strange
every night i dream the same dream in this video i'm going to be talking about how to
create a nice hazy atmosphere look into your image and to give that image a lot of sense of
depth we're also going to see how to import a 3d model into our scene using element 3d and we're
going to take a look in photoshop to create a matte painting environment and just to detail
our shot a little bit more i have recorded this shot on a tripod which i'm going to be using to
work with you can also use a moving shot but then the only difference that you will have to do is
also track your shot and make sure that everything matches the movement i'm not going to do that for
this video as i just want to focus on the effect itself alright so let's jump back into adobe after
effects here i have my shot the first thing that i want to do is duplicate my shot and rename it
roto and so one thing that you will have to do is rotoscope yourself out you have a lot
of ways to do this but the way i would like to do this is just double click on it and go
to the rotor brush tool right here and then on the first frame we're going to zoom in
and make a clean roto of myself so we're going to just start drawing a simple silhouette
so once your first frame is pretty clean or actually as clean as you think you can get
it then you can move on to the second frame and move on and on and it will automatically generate
a mask so you can just check this and go through this with the page down key or just press play
and it's automatically going through the entire timeline but before we continue with the exact
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on into the rotoscoping because this is something that i explain rather a lot in a lot of tutorials
so um it's something on its own and yeah so once you're done with your entire checkup of the entire
duration of your video which i just noticed it's way too long i'm just going to shift the end over
to around 5 seconds and then right click and trim the comp to work area so this is something that
i'm going to have to do and i will make sure that you don't have to do that with the tutorial sample
so i'm going to click freeze my frame once i'm satisfied and that's going to take my roto and
freeze it so just make sure that you went through the entire duration of your video to double check
if you really like your mat because this is kind of locking it down you can always bring
this back and revert it but it's better to check it because this is going to take a little while
so once it's done we can go back to our composition and now if we solo this we can
see that ourself is keyed out you can always play around with these settings right over here with
setting the feather something like 20 and the reduce shatter to something like 25 and maybe
shift the edge inwards a little bit so we're getting rid a little bit of these darker edges
around here so play around with the settings clean up your mask and once you're done you can also go
ahead and go and add this to the render queue i find that exporting this as a custom quicktime
apple prores 444 is the best option to export this with an rgb plus alpha so all i'm doing here is
exporting this with its transparent background because currently it does not have a background
if we click here we can see it's transparent so going to my render queue i'm just going to export
this so i can just re-import it right here with my transparency already there and like that i don't
have to do all the calculations all the time and it's just going to make my entire project
run a lot faster so i'm going to delete the roto and bring in my off layer that i have
created beforehand so now i am separated from the background and now we can do anything we'd
like so we're going to right click and create a new solid layer and this is going to be my fog
click ok and go to the rectangle tool right over here and we're going to select and
create a rectangle like so and we're going to press f on the keyboard and just feather the
bottom quite a bit so you get something like this looking and now if you just drop this behind me
we already have a hazy look so all we have to do here is add them some effects so what i like to do
is use the effects console to bring up my effects but you can also do that in the effects and
presets right here by just typing in anything like i am doing and dragging this onto the solid so i'm
going to select my solid use effects console from video copilot and use the fractal noise effect
so i'm going to apply that to my scene and i'm also going to apply the tint effect to my scene
so like this i can go to transform and scale it up quite a bit for my fractal noise
and for the color i can now change these colors to something else maybe i want it to be a little
bit of a warmer toned storm or mist you can even go for like the call of duty gas or something so
you have a lot of options here to color however you'd like to see this so i'm going to leave
that up to you then you can also hold alt and click on the stopwatch for the evolution here
right time times 200 and that's just going to add a little bit of animation towards the evolution
of the fractal noise and that way it has a little bit of life in there as you can see
it's animating and now what we want to do is click on the fog press t on the keyboard this
will reveal the opacity and we just want to bring down the opacity a little bit
and if you want you can always click on the mask and reposition the mist to be more in distance
and then click on this solid and go to edit and duplicate it and then this time we can click on a
mask and bring it more towards us and that way you can create multiple layers of depth in your scene
and this is especially going to be handy if you want to play something in between so what
i want to do now is find myself a 3d model from a building so on cg trader i found for example
this little house here so i have downloaded that and what i want is either an obj or an fbx
uh to have it here and then right here i have the textures all in these folders so let's go back to
adobe after effects let's create a new solid layer in adobe after effects i'm going to call this e3d
and i'm going to click ok so now i'm going to use an effect from video copilot element right here
and we're going to scene setup then i'm going to click import and browse to that folder and use
the obj we're going to use this one click open and click ok so normally that should import it
already with the textures applied to it so let it load a little bit
and if not we will have to just relink the textures quickly so we can click on this texture
and it did not load so i'm going to click on this and click over here
go to the textures right here we're going to click on this and click ok
and so that should be it and now we can also choose an environment by clicking on the
environment tab and choosing a location that looks similar to whatever we have so it's a forest so
let's pick something green and click ok and then we're going over here to the gamma and set it to
one we're going to click okay and now we can see our model so we're going to click okay and that
will bring it into the scene now and let's just solo it so we can really concentrate on this model
so our model is currently in group one so we're going to open up the group one
and it's enabled then go into the particle look and increase the particle size also go to the
particle replicator and see its position we're also going to need to create a new camera to our
scene because now we're working with a 3d scene and this is going to be a 24 millimeter camera
because i shot this on a wider angle so i'm going to click ok and now click on this and then just
reposition this wherever you would like and you can also bring this closer to the camera
if you would like so maybe bring it something like this maybe you also want to go into the rotation
and change the y rotation a little bit and then move it over to the right a little bit like this
and so now let's unsolo this to see what this is doing and this is looking pretty cool
let's bring it below our first fog here and press prestige on the keyboard for that fog and
just lower this quite a bit and so now we have this house within the fog we can also click on
element 3d here and so we don't have any shadow casting on the floor so what we need to do is
open up the scene and create a simple plane then we're going to press r on the keyboard
and make sure the plane is big enough so it is and we're just going to click on our house and press
w on the key and just make sure that the house is on top of the plane and then for the plane
we're going to click on that material and go all the way over here and create a matte shadow
that's going to position our wooden hut up so we're just going to bring it down
and there we go and we're also going to right click new and create a new light
i'm going to create a point light there we go and then press a twice
and so now we're starting to see our light i'm going to move it here to the right and then
we're going into the render settings shadows and just enable the shadows and set it to raytraced
and now we're going to see the shadows appear on the ground and so we can go back to the point and
then finalize it according to if we unsolo the elementary d according to the shadow right here
so then we can go back to the element 3d and go back to the shadow and set it to something like 32
and then also enable ao and so in the light tab you can also open up your light up and go into
the shadow diffusion and just increase this a little bit and then also lower the darkness a
little bit to match it a little bit better with the actual shadow that we have here and so like
this you're starting to create a little bit depth in your scene and so also one thing that i like
to do is go back to my group and actually reset the position of my cabin here and work
with my camera to position the cabin because um we actually want to get a more accurate feeling here
so this is looking pretty cool i think so now just for my light i have to reset it
and just reposition this
and there we go so now let's disable the fog just to see how the head looks or just to see how the
cabin looks on my actual footage and we can see that rotation is not perfect so we can always uh
perfect it by going into the camera pressing r and playing just a little bit more with these settings
and we can also click on the element 3d and add a fast box blur effect
and zoom in set it to something like 2 or 1 and then add a tint effect to lower the
saturation towards the same as the footage and now what we want to do is match the color as well so
i'm going to add a curves and really simply i'm going to go into the red channel and go here into
the red channel and then compare the two so i know or i notice there is a lot more or less contrast
in the red so i'm going to increase it but there is also well actually less highlights and less
contrast so i'm going to bring the darker tones up i'm just going to eyeball it here and then go
into the green tab and do the exact same thing so the green i'm going to bring up the shadows
and just a little bit on the highlights not too much here and then for the blue
let's go into the blue channel and do the same thing here
and so once it matches your footage i'm just going to create a new adjustment layer on top
of everything and add a lumetri color tab and in the basic color correction i'm going to use
the alexa default that's just going to boost up my colors and it's really going to make me see
if i like what i'm seeing here and this is looking pretty cool so um all right and so once you're
satisfied with your color matching you can go back to the fog and see if you want to change
something about fog maybe you want to lower the saturation quite a bit here and make it warmer
and so like this you're going to create your cabin and then another thing that i like to do is use
png images of trees and just scale it up so i'm going to just increase a tree that i have
here on a white background and i'm going to use the extract effect here and if you
go into the effects we can just delete all the white all the way until here and then just drag
out the bottom one to create a little bit of a soft feather and we can extend this a little bit
more until we see a little bit more of the tree there we go and then we can add a fill
which is going to add in our color again which is going to be like a dark brown color
there we go and then we can scale it up quite a bit
and bring it here on the side of your image and that's just going to create a little bit of an
extra detail to your image and maybe we really want to give it just a touch here
and we're going to duplicate this and we're going to bring one over to the left as well
and this one is going to fill up a little bit of our empty space here on the left hand side
and so now my playing with a fast box blur on top of this to something like 15 or 5 actually
or even two we can get um a soft kind of look here and bring this one as well on the other tree and
maybe set this one to one so we have a little bit of depth going on just by adding in some trees
another thing that you could do is solo this layer and just go to save
this frame as a file and automatically it's going to choose a photoshop document
and we can save this somewhere and then bring it into something like photoshop and all i've
done here is added in a bunch of bones here on the floor that i've just tried to match the
perspective by just making some google searches on pixels for example you can also find a bunch of
stuff and trying to match it with the background using some curves so you can see this is before
i desaturated them and i added a little bit of curves in here to make it match the background
a little bit better and so now what i will do is disable my background and export this again
as that same psd and in adobe after effects we can now import that psd
and so now we can bring this on top of our footage and add also a fast box blur
set it to something like one and now we have a bunch of skulls on the floor and so just make
sure that this is below also your roto and now if we just un unsolo everything we should get a nice
combination of everything looking like this so now this looks really cool all i just want to do
is get a different look because now we have a kind of daylight shot and i would like to turn
this into a nighttime shot so i'm going to create a new adjacent layer on top of everything and turn
this into or add a tint effect actually and also add a curves and we're going to bring the curves
down all the way here make it quite dark and for the tint i'm going to use a dark blue color
actually just a blue core something like this and then bring it a little bit below
but not too much play with the amount of until you get something that you're satisfied with
so for the roto i'm also going to add a curves here because i do see that the shadows are a
little bit too dark and i'm just going to play here with a little bit of these settings
and so you also have this really cool fog option here in element 3d where you can also play with
if you don't want to use the original fog right here so well if you don't want to use the solid uh
version of creating some fog or you can combine the two ways to create a little
bit more depth or maybe show a little bit more of the yeah element 3d enabled fog
so i'm not going to do that for this example because i think my fog here
works really well for what i'm trying to do but this is how to create a cool matte painting
in adobe after effects using element 3d and this is the final result i have created before
i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned a thing or two and be sure to subscribe to the channel if
you want to see more also hit the notification bell to stay notified when i upload new videos
and apart from that i hope to see you in the next one until then create epic videos