in this second video of our Superman Man of Steel miniseries we're gonna show you
how to actually create the 3d environment and make it look like your
actor is flying through the sky if you missed the last video Tom showed you how
to set up your scene and film your footage using a couple of things you can
find around the house a lot of great tips in that video so definitely check
it out if you're looking to film something yourself this tutorial is part
two of a couple that we have planned so be sure to subscribe and ring the bell
so that you get notified when we next upload we're going to break this
tutorial down into sections so if you're more interested in a specific technique
feel free to skip ahead to the timecode linked in the description so now that
tom has kindly filmed our footage let's go ahead and dive right into HitFilm
and get started here we are inside of HitFilm Express and the first thing I'm
going to do is change the workspace this is going to make it easier to edit and
look at the different panels so I'll come up here to window workspaces and
then select the compositing workspace this will get rid of the trimmer since
we don't need it because we're not editing and it will make the controls
panel a lot bigger now come over to the media panel and make a new composite
shot out of your footage I'll go ahead and call this one actor isolation
because that's what we're going to be doing hit OK and now we should have a
composite shot with just Tom's footage inside of it so if you're shooting on a
green screen and your footage looks like this where there are things that aren't
the green screen inside of your shot you have to mask them out so that they don't
stay there let's select the footage and come up to the freehand mask tool and
then I can use the scroll wheel to zoom out if necessary and what I'll do is
just create a mask if you click and drag it'll create a curve and once I close
the shape you can see that tom is now isolated I'll go ahead and increase the
scale of his layer a little bit so that the black line at the bottom isn't so
visible now we can start removing the green-screen there are a couple
different options for green screening depending on if you're using HitFilm
Express or HitFilm Pro if you're using Express and you want to stay completely
free you can use either the hue and RGB key or the color difference key if
you're using HitFilm Pro I would recommend the chroma key effect because
that has the best formula for removing green so let's go ahead and search for
color difference key and drag that onto our footage the color green is
the default so now we just have to adjust some of the sliders to get rid of
most of the green if you select view mat you can see a
grayscale representation to get an idea of what your layer looks like so I'll go
ahead and adjust the sliders here until tom is mostly white you'll notice that
the bottom section that tom is resting on didn't get keyed out and this is
because it's quite a different and darker shade of green than the rest of
the scene that's okay though we're just gonna mask it out so once again I'll
select a layer and select the freehand mask tool and then I'll click and drag
to create a shape around this bottom chair come over to the controls panel
and set the blend to subtract this will remove it from the scene if you want to
adjust the edges of your key you can search for the matte cleaner effect and
drag that after the color difference key you have a few options to adjust these
smooth the feather which is how blurry the edges and the choke which is how far
it extends into your actor finally I'll throw on a spill removal effect and that
will get rid of some of the lingering green color in Tom's layer so now we've
got our actor keyed out and the benefit of doing this is that we can pre render
the composite to speed up our workflow to do that come over to the media panel
right-click the layer select pre-render and then make pre-render if you make a
change inside of the composite after it's been rendered you'll have to render
it again with that done we can move on to the background for the background of
the shot I actually just used a single stock image replicated multiple times
let's come over and create a new composite shot and I'll call this one
environment hit OK and then bring in the stock image that we'll be using this is
from pixels com so it's free to use and free to download the technique that I
use for this isn't new we've covered it several times in a few different
tutorials first I'll come over and select this checkerboard icon and change
the layer to a 3d plane you might get a pop-up asking if you want to create a
camera and in this case we do what we're going to do is duplicate the layer
multiple times and spread those layers out in 3d space this first layer here
will act as the farthest background layer so I'll go into the controls panel
drop down the transform properties and then set the position to something
really like negative 7,000 I also want to flip
the layer because technically in this shot the Sun is on the right side and in
the case of this picture it's on the left
so I'll unlink the scale property and then type negative 100 in the X value
then I can link the scale again and increase it to compensate for how far
back it is before we start placing the other cloud layers let's animate the
camera so that we have an idea of how things are moving select the camera
layer and come up to its transform properties activate keyframes or the
position property making sure that your timeline indicator is at the very start
drag it to the end and then drag the Z position forward to move the camera back
in 3d space if I play it you can see that the camera is getting farther and
farther away from this 3d layer of clouds and because it's gone farther we
also need to bump up the scale of the picture itself so it'll be pretty big at
the start but it will get quite far at the end now what we need to do is
duplicate this layer and spread it out in 3d space so right-click the layer and
select duplicate to help you visualize what's going on I'll create two views
inside of my viewer so down here where it says views I'll change that to two
and then I'll set one of them to perspective I'll use the orbit camera
tool to swing around my scene and you can see that the cloud layer that we did
first is pretty massive and we've got the camera here and if I play through
you can see it back up in 3d space we've got two cloud layers now so what I'll do
is bring this one forward and just reposition it until a good-looking cloud
is in the frame so maybe this one here if you need to decrease the scale you
can do that as well you'll notice that these second clouds image is blocking a
lot of the first one to fix that what we'll do is come up and add the
demultiplex to the second cloud layer this will get rid of the dark areas and
keep the light so I'm not a fan of the way that this big cloud in the middle
here currently looks I like the way these ones at the bottom do but I just
want to isolate those so that this top cloud doesn't show
to do that I'll just select the bottom layer and once again select the freehand
mask - you can also use the rectangular or the ellipse depending on what you're
scene calls for and I'll just draw a shape around the bottom here so that
only that portion of the second clouds layer is the one that shows through then
in the controls panel I'll feather the mask a bit and now we've got a little
bit of depth in our scene once that second cloud layer starts to show
through I'm also just going to add a curves effect before the demult and this
will get rid of more of the darkness of the cloud the thing to remember about
this environment is that it's going to be very blurry there's gonna be a lot of
zoom blur and motion blur going on so it doesn't necessarily have to be perfect
it can look a little bit weird before you blur it and a lot of that
will get hidden once we apply the blur so now with this second layer done I'll
go ahead and do what I did before and duplicate it I might also just drop the
saturation a little bit because it is quite blue now I'll repeat the steps and
go ahead and duplicate this layer again but I'll place it even closer to the
camera in 3d space
be sure to vary the position and rotation of the clouds so that they
don't all look exactly the same don't forget that you have a mask on it as
well that can be moved for this one I might just flip it completely upside
down and see how that looks these clouds are looking a little bit sharp so I'll
go ahead and add a diffuse effect the diffuse is basically a blur but with a
lowered opacity so now just repeat these steps as many times as you need to
create a dense cloud environment in the final shot I think I ended up having
upwards of a dozen different cloud layers but they were all the same
picture just placed at different points if you notice a seam in one of your
layers a quick way to fix that is to select a layer and then double click the
rectangular mask tool this will create a mask that is completely around the
borders of the layer then what you can do is come in and feather it as well as
decrease the expansion to choke it in a little bit you might have to change the
blend mode so that it interacts correctly with the other masks that you
have created it here's a top-down bird's-eye view of my scene you can see
all of the different cloud layers represented as white lines and the
camera moving through them in 3d space I don't want to spend too long on this
because you can spend a really long time making a bunch of different layers and
creating a really complex 3d scene well let's go ahead and move on to
compositing Tom inside of this environment once again I'll create a new
composite shot and call this one assembly then I'll bring in the
environment comp as well as Tom's actor isolation
don't forget as well once you're done with the environment you can also pre
render that to speed things up so here we've got a basic rough version
of Tom flying through the sky and it doesn't look great so we're gonna do a
couple of things to improve it the first is to blur the background so for that
I'll come up and select the lens blur effect and I'll drag that on to my
background layer you don't want to crank this up too high because the camera
shouldn't technically have that much depth of field but I'll go ahead and
hide some of the minor details by setting it to maybe 25 I'll also add a
zoom blur to help with the idea of motion I'll add that on and set the
strength to something negative so that it appears to get sucked into the center
maybe negative 10 and then I'll move the control point over to our Thomas so that
the motion appears to come from that direction I knew when we were filming
this that we wanted to aim for a 2:35 letterbox so the fact that you can see
the bottom of Tom here and that he appears cut off doesn't really matter
because I know that I'm going to add a letterbox effect and that's going to
hide some of the details once I frame him up correctly going back into the
environment comp real quick here one of the things I would recommend is turning
on motion blur for each of the layers and that's this button here you can
click and drag to turn them on all at once and depending on how fast you've
keyframe your camera that might make a major difference in the smoothness of
the comp let's start with a simple curves effect on Tom to get his black
and white levels at the right place so I'll go ahead and add that in and make
some space and I'll drag the left end of the curve down to add contrast and the
right end up to increase the brightness this is dependent on your scene so if
you're Superman effect takes place at night it will look a lot different to
what we're doing here another thing that will help the
composite is the light wrap effect and I'll drag that on to Tom's layer and
from the source layer select the environment this will make the light and
color wrap around Tom's layer which will help sell the idea that he's in the same
environment one of the mistakes people make with light wrap is they make it too
strong you shouldn't really consciously recognize that there is light wrap going
on in the scene it should just complement it and be
there as a sort of hidden effect we can add a couple extra environmental bits to
help blend the two layers together when we shot this we knew that we wanted the
Sun to beyond Tom's left side which is why you
can see a highlight here on his head to fake the idea of a Sun on the right side
of the screen what I'll do is create a new plane and then add the radial
gradient effect onto it I'll set the inner and outer radius to something a
bit more Orange and then set the blend of the plane to either a door screen
make sure this goes below the letterbox as well you can drag the viewer handles
or use the slider in the controls panel to change the size I'll then put it over
here on the right if it's too strong you can either make the color darker or
decrease the opacity in the transform properties I might also have Tom's layer
grow over time so to do that what I'll do is come over to the scale property
and activate keyframes for that skip to the end and set it to a higher number I
don't want to make it too obvious it should be quite subtle
I might just add a hue shift on Tom's layer because even though we use the
spill removal effect he's looking a little bit green so I'll just shift the
hue maybe negative something less than 10 or so maybe I'll bump the saturation
up as well it's also physically impossible for me to do a visual effect
without using lens dirt so I'll go ahead and drag that effect onto the grade
layer below the letterbox as indicated by the orange add-on button and the
watermark that appeared the lens dirt effect is part of the VFX retro pack
2 for Express so you need to purchase that if you want to use it in your final
short but you can still use it in the comp and see how it'll look before you
make that purchase in the media panel I have a picture of real lens dirt that
I'll drag into the composite and then I can hide it from view because it doesn't
need to be seen in the lens dirt effect under dirt layer I can then select that
picture and if we use that texture which is much more realistic you can increase
the intensity to your liking and I'll just increase the blur of it as well
if you're going for a man of steel color grade one effect that's really good for
that is bleach bypass I'll set that to something more subtle like 50% I can
also use the shake effect to create camera shake
I wouldn't recommend dropping the shake effect on and leaving it at that really
take a look at the different controls and customize it to fit your scene you
can change the seed to get a different variation of the camera shake
I'll also increase the smooth and you can also adjust the individual control
so how much it shakes in the X direction in the Y direction and how much it
rotates as well technically this should be placed below the lens stir the lens
dirt shouldn't shake one of the things that will really help sell the idea of
motion is particles flying across the screen so let's go ahead and create that
now keep in mind that the particle simulator is an add-on so you can do it
inside a HitFilm but if you haven't purchased it you will get a watermark
once again I'll create a separate comp and name this particles then I'll drag
in the particle simulator from the effects panel this is what we start with
and I'll come into the controls and change the emitter shape to quad so that
instead of emitting from a single point the particles can be spawned anywhere
inside of this rectangle I'll go ahead and increase the scale and height
because I want these particles to be behind the camera flying at Tom's face
I'll change the trajectory from random to cone which means they will go in a
specific direction and then I'll rotate them around so that they're going away
from the camera you can see they're not visible at the beginning to fix that
search for shift and then adjust the time shift to something negative this
means that the particles will be going for 10 seconds before the shot starts
let's increase the speed quite a bit and I'll also decrease the radius as well
because they're going a bit too crazy right now so I'll say 5 let's decrease
the life so that they are on screen for less time and I'll adjust the quad as
well to make it a bit bigger that's a good starting point so let's go ahead
and decrease the scale so that they're very small
and turn on motion blur as well I'll leave them a bit bigger so that you can
see them but technically they shouldn't be too big now let's change one more
thing so that they're fading in instead of popping in what I'll do is select the
particle system and come up to the lifetime panel select alpha and change
the type to gradient and add a black point at the beginning and end this
means the particles will fade in over their lifetime and then fade out as they
go away I can increase the particles per second to have more of them on the
screen and this is up to you to decide now that we've got one emitters set we
can right click and duplicate it and then in the appearance section change
the texture source to built-in and then I'll choose one of the fire ferocity
textures and I'll increase the scale of this second particle simulation I'll
decrease how many are on-screen this is meant to be just a sort of fog
going past Tom's face and for this particle system in the lifetime panel
I'll lower the middle slider to be more of a gray so that it's not as opaque
let's go back into the assembly comp and drag the particles onto the timeline
above everything else it depends on which particles you use you may or may
not have to change the blend mode but check how it looks and then make
adjustments as needed in this case it's quite subtle but it will help the idea
of motion alright so we've made good progress with this shot but you'll
notice that our Superman is missing his cape and that is not going to fly but
we're not actually going to create the Cape inside of HitFilm I'm gonna pass
the shot over to Tom and he's going to make one inside blender including
simulating the wind if you're watching this video but haven't yet downloaded
HitFilm Express you can do so from the link in the description and just a
reminder if you missed the first video in this series you can find it in the
card on screen thanks for watching and we'll see you all in the next video