I don't understand why you text me when you we are been...what's that?
I need some advice. Where did they come?
I Honey I Shrunk the Kids them.
The sequel?
Are they small Ryan? Obviously the sequel. Now like I said, I need some advice. Okay. Two things, one, are those too big?
That's not advice. Thing two, can you make that stop? Also not advice.
He's alive. There must have been some magic in that old hat I found. And you placed it on its head?
He started walking and [beep].
And following me. Have you seen It Follows? Yeah. It's like that but without the sex.
That wasn't helpful.
We've been toying around with Polycam a lot over the last few months and none of us model
so it's been a great way to get somewhat custom models for whatever we want or is in the case of
today's episode inspiration, since it was after seeing these decorations in my house that I got
the idea but if you haven't seen our previous episodes what is Polycam. But before I answer
that our holiday sale is almost over so jump over to triunedigital.com to get 50% off of all of our
filmmaker assets if you are looking for that sort of thing, link below. But long story short Polycam
is an app you can use to get solid photo scans of whatever you want, like with this episode. That
giant snowman actually looks like this right here. I scanned this little dude along with all the others
with Polycam to do that I'm going into photo mode and manual then moving around the object from a
middle position then around again high and again low giving the app enough data to construct that
3D model I also lucked out on the day that I was scanning with full overcast so it was
perfect conditions to grab these scans since you really want as flat and even of lighting
as you can possibly get but after I got my scans I checked my photos to make sure that everything
is solid nothing's blurry or off then I let the app do its processing after that I can download
and use these however I'd like which in this case is sending off to our VFX artist Ryan Thompson in
the other episodes we have used these in Cinema 4D and blender so this time we wanted to see how
element 3D inside of After Effects would handle it and since we're going with After Effects only
that means no cleanup of the models at all so what you saw in the opener are the models right out of
the app with no touch-ups at all and speaking of other episodes and polycam two weeks ago we put
out our AI tools for filmmakers and after that I found this great new AI generator that polycam
put out recently instead of generating regular images it uses AI to generate textures and it's
free to use so go give that a try to link down there but with our scans done we shot our scene
and handed it off to Thompson and we're going to start the first shot looking at the line of
decorate inside of After Effects we'll drop our Clean Plate of the Tilt shot into a new comp as
well as one of our hdris and we'll switch off its visibility now right click the footage then go to
track and stabilize and track camera once that's complete choose a point and right click create
null and camera and again we are using element 3D for all of our models this time so create a
new solid and apply element in the custom layers custom texture map drop down we'll select our
hdri then open element and change the environment texture to use our custom layer 1 hdri then create
a plain model we'll normalize size and really scale it up to cover a wide area and this will
act as our ground in the physical materials apply the Matte Shadow to the plane now we'll import a
scanned model and again we'll normalize size and we'll change alignment to the bottom this will
place the Anchor Point at the base of the model Now using the rotate tool we can hold the shift
key while clicking and drag turning it 90 degrees to face forward then reposition it more to the
center this is also looking pretty gloss at the moment so to fix we can change the surface option
to autonormals however if you do want to add gloss you can go into the materials settings and change
the gloss slider here we then imported each model and went through the same process and you could
check autonomals on import to save time we could arrange their layouts here inside of element but
what we opted to do for this project is actually have a different layer for each model and arrange
them in our comp so we'll disable the visibility for all but one of the models and exit in our
comp we will rename the solid to match with the visible model then in the world transform
drop down we will change the position scale and rotation to line it up in our scene how we like
in the render settings under lighting change the brightness to zero and in the physical environment
we can alter some of these settings too you can also change rotation if needed then we'll enable
ambient occlusion and boost the intensity slightly next to match our footage we'll use a tint effect
to lower the saturation a bit and use a curves effect to drop the highlights lift the shadows
and alter the blue blue and green Channel slightly to match our plate lastly a fast box blur effect
and noise effect set to low amounts help take away that harsh sharpness now we'll create a
point light move it off to the top left and lower the intensity just to add some more dimension for
the other models we can duplicate this layer jump back into element to change which model is
visible and rename the layer to match change the world position scale and rotation again to line
up the model how you like and we did this for each one to fill out the scene for this house
we decided to create a new solid layer and make it 3D position this over the house and use it as
an alpha matte using the pen tool to draw over the base and feather slightly using turbulent displays
you can set it to vertical displacement lower size and boost the amount and complexity to give
a quick bladed grass look to the masked Edge now we'll drop in the footage of me and Josh draw a
rough mask around us and feather then keyframe to move when the camera tilts using key light
will key us out increase the screen softness since we're a bit out of focus giving us this
it was pretty much the same exact process again for the panning shot tracking the footage then
copying and pasting each model to the new comp if your models are appearing dark like this you just
need to re-add the hdri to the custom texture map and it'll update because the 3D camera track that
was created for this shot is a different camera from the previous comp it means altering our
element World position rotation and scale again to realign but if any of you know a better way
to match frames with different 3D cameras we are always looking for better methods so let us know
in the comments for the walking snowman we'll begin with this wide shot dropping the footage
into a new comp copy and paste one of the element layers from another comp re-add the hdri and here
we are using a second one that we took closer to the building now select the 3D model inside
of element but this time create a new group and change it to two then move the model into this
group so that we have it separate from the ground plane in group one for this shot we
can create a new camera ourselves and use this to line up our model in the group 2 drop down
create a group null this will control our model and we can animate it for the walk we did have
a specific idea of how we wanted it to walk so we can keyframe the null's rotation value with
it leaning One Way first then move forward a few frames and change the rotation value to lean in
the opposite direction and now we're going to copy paste these keyframes throughout the timeline next
keyframe the position for where we want it to start and now you could just go to the end of
the timeline and move him forward but that would be a constant position change and it'll look more
like it's gliding rather than stepping so instead we need to move forward a bit adding a keyframe
just before the rotation keyframes and and copy and paste this a couple of frames later so that
the position stays static then we're going to move forward a bit again we repeat this for each step
throughout the shot and we found it best to always move forward in a value of 30 to keep
it consistent you can then select all the keys and easy ease them for the ground Shadow we change the
ambient occlusion value slightly and you can use another curves effect changing the alpha
channel to get a bit more control over the density strength and spread of the Shadow then we'll just
tweak some of our colors paste the point light in an enable motion blur for this shot we duplicated
the wide comp dropped in the new footage and moved our camera around to line up once again altering
the color and this time using a camera lens blur instead of the fast blur to knock it out of focus
but jumping back to the pan shot we will copy and paste the walking model and null but again because
of the 3D camera track we will need to use the element World transform to place it correctly into
the shot since this is much longer shot we had to extend the animation keyframes quite a bit it to
fill out the timeline and then we decided that we should have the Snowman turning and looking
at us as it walks by to do this and group 2 drop down particle look deform twist check enable and
changing the Y value will have him turn toward us we did a similar thing in our Godzilla episode to
add some simple animation it's quite a handy thing for shots like this without needing any
rigging so keyframe at zero then move forward and add twist we moved a few more frames forward
and added another keyframe to hold it for a bit before moving forward again and changing it back
to zero to have him turn away again once again we keyframed a mask around me and Josh and keyed us
both we were shot on separate plates this time to make sure the green screen had wide enough
coverage then we enabled motion blur made any final color and Shadow tweaks and we were done
element definitely doesn't give us the control of Cinema 4D or blender you definitely need to
twist more digital arms to get it there but I am impressed on how well it did overall again
we made all of our models in this episode with polycam it's insanely cool and you can get 20
off an annual subscription right now so check that in the notes below along with our other polycam
episodes but until next time don't forget to write shoot edit repeat and have a very happy holidays