Today we're going to be looking at how you can make 3D content from Blender into HitFilm
Pro; and also giving you a really amazing 3D model.
So that's awesome!
If you've created your model inside Blender and animated it there, how do you get that
into HitFilm Pro?
Of course this is a thing we've done very recently in Rebellion where there's that final
shot and everyone comes running out of the bunker and there's that huge Walker there.
The Walker was created in Blender and it was animated there to by a very talented HitFilm
user.
We then took that across, into HitFilm to do the compositing, the grading, the lighting
and the final rendering all in HitFilm for the short.
The process we're showing is very particular to Blender version 2.78 and HitFilm Pro 2017.
If you're using a different 3D product, maybe Cinema 4D, maybe 3D Studio Max the process
could well be different.
It's also not the only way you could move this content from Blender to HitFilm, but
it's the way we used in Rebellion so that's what we're going to show you.
Let's do this!
So we're going to open up this Walker into Blender 2.78.
Now we're actually going to try and export two different files here.
An animation file and a model file.
When it comes to the model file, you're probably going to wonder why we're not going to use
an OBJ and the reason for this is that we need the groups inside that file to match
between the animation file and the model file and this doesn't work if we do this in Blender.
So instead, we're going to use and FBX to export the model.
Now in the settings for the FBX we're going to make some changes.
Firstly we're going to switch off everything here in this section other than the mesh and
then we're going to go into these other sections, we're not going to do anything in geometries
but inside 'armatures' we're going to switch off the 'add leaf bones', and then inside
the 'animation' we're going to switch off 'baked animation, and do make sure you're
using FBX 7.4.
Now all we need to do is we're going to save it in this default location here and click
'Export FBX'.
This will give us our model but now we need our animation.
So this looks fantastic, the Walker walking along.
We're going to use alembic for this so we go up to File and then Export and then we're
going to be Alembic .abc.
In here we're going to make a couple of changes.
The first is we're going to increase the scale to 100, this will make it match inside HitFilm.
The next thing is we're just going to make sure that we select the frames that we need
to export, there's 350 in this case, and make sure we have these other settings presented
exactly like this below.
We're then going to use the default path and click export.
Now, what this will do is take quite a while to export as you can see down here there's
the progress happening; I'm going to speed this up in the video because you don't want
to be here forever but it will slowly update in the progress bar as to what exporting is
going on as it exports each of those individual frames into the file as baked animation.
Right, now the animation is finished we can close Blender.
Now, we've got an FBX and an ABC file so let's open up HitFilm and get importing.
Now I'm just going to create a standard new project; 1080p, 25 frames a second, as we
like it here in Europe and then the first thing I'm going to import is the FBX file.
Now here we're going to need to do a few different things.
Firstly, I can't see the model, where is it?
I need to go to the Advanced tab, what I need to go down to, under Normals is say Generate
with smoothing.
I'm going to change this angle to 20, I've found that works well and then update the
preview.
Here he is, here's our Walker.
I'm also going to switch off auto-normalize and update again.
Now in the materials we have four different materials here, they don't seem to be in the
right order but that doesn't matter.
I'm going to type in map so I can just see the image maps I need to apply and then quickly
apply the images which are in the same folder as the model.
Now first is material 3 so we're going to want the diffusion map 3, then the specular
for 3 and then lastly, the normal for 3.
Do the same for 2 and then the same for 1 as well.
Interesting thing about this model is where it says material 4 it actually uses the diffuse,
specular and normalfor 1 as well, so I'll put all of those in there as well.
We could leave it with the textures but I'm going to do a bit more here but I'm going
to change the illusion model to Cook Torrance.
And then I'm going to select the titanium type.
I found that this made the model look more metallic in my final rendering.
So now the model is imported this other file is actually FBX animation which, in this case,
wouldn't have worked so I'm going to delete that.
I'm now going to create a comp and drag my model in.
There he is, all textured, looking great.
I'm now going to add a camera so I can pan around the model.
Oh, hang on, he appears to be half way into the floor.
So let's go to the front view, yes, he is stuck into the floor, and then if we go into
the world transform of the model and alter the anchor point we can put his feet on the
floor plane.
Back to the active camera, that looks much better I'll just re-position the camera a
little bit, get rid of the grid.
Ok, yeah this is looking as it should.
I guess we could also add a light at this point just to make things a little more dramatic.
Let's move it away, it seems to be inside him at the moment, forward a bit, up a bit,
that's a bit better.
Now we can really see the model looking great.
Of course we haven't got any animation yet but he's all textured and he's looking like
he'll render well once the animation has been applied.
Next we need to import the animation so we just select our ABC file and bring it in.
Now, in the 3D model in the model section under the Walker we have an animation section
we simply just drag and drop the ABC file in there.
And all of that animation that we had in Blender is now being applied correctly to this model
and it's as simple as that to bring the animation and model in from Blender.
We can now do all of our compositing here.
We can now create virtual cameras here, add lights, and render it out as we need.
We hope you found that really helpful guys.
We've been asked for a while "How do I move my stuff from Blender to HitFilm?".
Well that's the process we use, we find it pretty quick and pretty easy but maybe the
Blender experts out there know some other ways, please tell us down below in the comments.
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Bye!