hey what's up my name is Alea and I do VFX in today's video I'm going to replace my
head with a pumpkin so for this video I would need a carved out pumpkin then find a way how
to put that pumpkin into my 3D software and then I need to track my head and replace it with that
pumpkin then we need to composite everything together and hopefully get a pretty cool final
result oh and by the way if you are watching this as this video is uploaded in four days we
are going to close the Epic VFX Academy so as you might already know we currently have the
doors to the Epic VFX Academy open where you can become a student of mine so if you would
like to learn how to create epic visual effects in a structured way from A to Z having me and my
team as mentors to get yourself up to that level that you want to get to then this is
the perfect opportunity but as said the doors are closing in four days and that's because all
the students that have already joined or will be joining until the end of this date they do
deserve to have my full attention and I can only give that to a certain amount of people so we
have put a deadline and also have limited spots available so if you would like to become one of
those people then definitely check out Link in the description the academy comes with a bunch
of bonuses and if you decide to sign up in the next four days you will also get a extra module
for social media and tiktok visual effects so that's a really cool topic that we're going to
be covering inside as well so basically yeah if you are a beginner an intermediate or already an
advanced user looking to upgrade their work then the academy is definitely a place for you anyway
if you would like to learn more definitely check out Link in the description below because we are
ending soon and closing our doors and I don't know when we're opening again so yeah alright
so now back to the video the first thing that I needed was a pumpkin but a good looking pumpkin
and luckily our main editor enzoi actually had a pumpkin lying around that he was holding aside
for his Halloween party where he wanted to have a carved out pumpkin now I asked him if I could use
that pumpkin for our video so we ended up using it a whole lot sooner than we anticipated the idea
was that I would carve out a pumpkin then use it for the video and then he can use it as decoration
for his party of course I'm not a carving expert but actually a friend of ours does it every single
year her name is Kim and she will be carving out our pumpkin so here we go the first thing that
we need to do is take the top part off and then you need to empty the pumpkin completely so try
to clean it completely from the inside using your hands in a spoon and just put it aside in a cup
maybe you can even make some pumpkin soup after that you need to start carving so obviously you
will need to have a design in mind you can scroll through the internet and yeah start out cutting
out your design Kim here was experienced enough to do it without drawing but I would suggest that you
draw a face onto the pumpkin and then try to cut it out try to make it look interesting we didn't
want to go too crazy with the face for the pumpkin we kind of wanted a regular Halloween pumpkin but
still to look good so this is what we ended up with alright so our pumpkin looks really cool
it's also an amazing pumpkin to start with and now we have something to use as a prop in our video
so here is another tip if you want to keep your pumpkin as long as possible then you would need to
use hairspray as much as possible on the pumpkin just so it doesn't create fungi unfortunately
for us that didn't end up working and two days or three days after the recording yeah this happened
sorry ends away that you couldn't use it in your decoration for your Halloween party I owe you one
alright so next I need to record my footage and obviously I want to hold a real pumpkin and then
slam it into my face or act like I'm going to do that and then I have my broader here this is
my brother he comes to take it out of my hand so then I just act out a few things and there we go
then I go a little bit crazy and I cover my head this is actually for later in the video
we had a lot of fun though alright so now to keep this pumpkin forever and ever because obviously
it's going to die out soon because as you can see what happened to it well because we're making this
video later I can go back in time and luckily I took 360 photos all around the pumpkin so the idea
here is that you take as many photos as possible and you just walk around your pumpkin centering
your pumpkin and just try to cover every single area of the pumpkin so start off with a low angle
looking up and go 360 then go centered and do 360 then have a top-down angle and also do another
360. and I brought all of these in Lightroom when you are doing this three things are really
important the first thing is that you put it on a static object that is small but still can support
your object without jiggle the second part is try to avoid any kind of Reflections so try to do this
in the early morning or when it's cloudy so you have your natural diffusion of the sky or do it
indoors with an evenly lit skin then the third and most important part is also to have your camera
settings and manual so you can either do this using your phone for free really simple just going
to the Google Play app and install the Kiri engine app then you just log into your free account and
you just take a 70 photos maximum I think for the free version and you can just take 70 photos
of your pumpkin and that's going to make a scan automatically in the app I took the more advanced
route but really it's not necessary if you want to create a video like this I just like to do things
in Overkill using my s1h as my main camera having high resolution photos and then uploading these
photos in the in-app browser from the Kiri engine app this is only available for the pro users but
if you want to use this or try this you can just use this completely for free and you can get like
three exports fully functional exports a week so if you have a free version you can just do as much
as I can just with your phone I let it upload and then it's going to process in the background and
end up give giving me something like this this already looks perfect all I have to do here is
download it and open up Cinema 4D in Cinema 4D I'm just going to import this 3D scan object
and it also comes with its textures I'm going to just quickly optimize this a little bit more by
removing the background and also the stand that my pumpkin was on I'm also going to re-center my
pumpkin and remove everything that is unnecessary and then just re-center all my access points just
to optimize the object a little bit more after that I'm going to create a redshift material and
here I'm going to import that diffuse layer that we have from the Kiri engine then I'm going to
create a new texture and I'm going to also add in some ramps I'm going to use this texture in
some ramps just so I get a grayscale image of that image this I can then use for a roughness map or
a bump map just to get my materials a little bit more realistic and get a little bit more texture
in all these different areas so playing around a little bit with the material ends up giving
me something like this and by the way if you would like to know more about this I also did
a live stream on how I actually did the entire 3D scanning process so not how I replaced my head but
how I 3D scanned it how I then um optimized it in Cinema 4D and how I ended up doing a render
using redshift so if you would like to see the full version of that just go and check out these
live streams I'll put a link in the description the only problem here is when you're doing 3D
scanning it's going to recognize the depth of the eyes and the mod but it doesn't have a complete
hole on the inside so it's not a hollow object so what we're going to do is create a new sphere and
place that in the pumpkin then using the points mode I'm going to use the magnet tool to kind
of put it in place and make it just a little bit smaller than the pumpkin but big enough to cover
up the areas of the eyes and the mouth then I'm just going to cut this out using a bull object
and voila so now we have a hollow object where we can see inside of our pumpkin so now I'm going to
create another material and this is going to be an emission material that is Illuminating a red
or dark orange cord this I'm going to add it to a new sphere that I'm going to be placing inside of
my pumpkin just so we get illumination from inside of the pumpkin casting outwards the next thing
that we need to do is open up Adobe After Effects I'm going to import my original file and I'm just
going to cut it where I actually slam into my face and then I'm going to make sure that my brother
takes it away try to keep in the same position and when I continue the movement I'm just going to
make a simple cut and that's just going to be the transition after that I'm going to isolate My Head
by just masking around it and making sure that I only see my head then I'm going to pre-compose
this and I'm going to use a 3D camera tracker the reason why I want just my head to be seen is so we
can use a 3D camera tracker as an object tracker instead because all it sees is a moving head and
it's going to just track the points on the head so that's a really cool way on doing object tracking
unfortunately because my face and my actual shot was a little bit out of focus I didn't
have a really sharp face having a sharp pain days when doing 3D face striking is really important so
I ended up having a great representation from the position of my head but I didn't have the correct
rotation values so then I 3D camera track my head and I'm going to add in a solid on these points
so now I have something like this I can see that my track didn't fully work this is because my shop
is slightly blurry and it's not completely sharp also my face is pretty small in that shot so it
doesn't have a lot of detail to capture my track so anyway I already have the position of my head
that's already really important information so now I'm going to export all this data and I'm going to
import this in Cinema 4D Sudan Cinema 4D I'm going to replace this solid with the actual pumpkin head
make sure that your scene skill is correct and I'm also going to add in my dome light that represents
the garden now to get the facial expressions of a pumpkin that was actually shot or 3D scanned
statically we're going to use a pretty cool technique called pose morph I actually added a
few points POS morph allows you to just manipulate the points on your existing object and wherever
you move that to it's going to make it as a pose so basically creating new poses and then using
the magnet tool to just deform your entire object creates a pose now you can animate between these
poses so I did different poses for closed eyes open eyes open mouth laughing mouth and closed
mouth and stuff like that after that you can just keyframe the animation of these once you're ready
of course I'm going to render everything out and multi-passes and bring them in Adobe After
Effects to do some final comp work I added in some Shadows below it and also some reflections
I added a perfect glow on my emission channel to just make everything stand out a little bit
more added in a night overlay grade that I always enjoyed to do and then at the end I also wanted to
make the pumpkin fall off my head and you would actually not see a head and that's exactly why I
recorded myself like this at first get the texture of what it would look like if I wouldn't be having
a head obviously now you can still see my hair I'm just going to freeze this Frame so for this I just
removed my head using a clean plate or you can try to do it with the content aware fill then I use
this part here from the video where I acted like a stupid this was just to get the texture of the
back part of my hood so I could actually see how it would look like if I wouldn't have a hat so I'm
just using that to track it back in and of course you can change the hair to like meat I didn't
want to go too crazy so I just kept it black and after that you're playing around a little
bit with all these settings compositing everything together you will end up with something like this
you happen
all right so that's pretty cool I hope you enjoy it as well and if you did definitely
like this video and also maybe subscribe to the channel and hit the notification Bell so
you stay notified when I upload new videos apart from that I'm going to leave you with
another upload of mine right here so you can continue your VFX journey and hopefully I'll
see you in the next one until then creates epic videos happy Halloween