Ok I just started working with blender for 6 days now. I found out about blender on youtube on an accident. I done some intros with the help of step by step tutorial. But now I cant seem to find or get any help on how they do the special effects with video and people in it. I have searched and pm couple people on here to find free templates or website tha has them. which i suppose that is what i need. i dont know if you can do it in blender or go straight to AAE CS4 AND CS5. I have both on 2 seperate laptops. I am working on a 64 and 32 bit laptop
I seen very cool videos of it with bubbles, fire, energy ball on youtube. but my history wasnt saved so I cant find the person on there anymore.
Nor do I even know if i put this in the right section if not i am sure it will be moved to the right destination.
I have an idea on how it can be done (I focus more on modeling than sfx buut…)
The simplest way I can think of:
If you want to add something to the video you’ll have to play with alphas.
When you render an object, the parts an object aren’t in (blank space) are invisible. I’ll have to get back to you on how to enable rendering empty spaces as alphas cause I haven’t done that in a while.
so if you render a movie of your animated character or effect, the parts where it isn’t are invisible. (think of it as a drawing on a transparent piece of paper)
so you take this and overlay it on your video. -youtube “Tomato branch” I’ll look up the specifics and get back to you.
redwards5: It’s a matter of knowing what to search for when looking for tutorials. The redirect of your thread by Fweeb gives the clue: Compositing and post processing. Those are the tutorials you’re looking for.
Blender can be set up with templates to perform many tasks, but you may still need a fair bit of knowledge of the user interface and 3D setup to take advantage of those effects. It really is nothing like After Effects, in that you don’t simply add a pluggin and turn it on or off. Often an effect in Blender is made up of many elements from all sorts of places in the app.
Here’s a little bit of “food for thought” … chew carefully and slowly.
First of all, restrain your expectations. Rome wasn’t built in a day. If you set unrealistic expectations for yourself … if you are not willing to begin with baby steps … then you are going to do nothing more than mightily (and unnecessarily!) frustrate yourself. Begin with a wide-open mind: emulate a sponge. (And, fair warning! It’s highly addictive! :yes: Even if you have no long-term intention of making money at it… and they do tell me that it’s a ferociously over-crowded and therefore cutthroat-competitive field now.)
It would be a terrible waste … and it has happened many times before … for you to burn-out. Fore-warned is fore-armed. The holes are out there; don’t fall in.
Now, as to your immediate question:
Special-effects of any sort are based on the idea of compositing, and compositing is based on the idea of masking so that whatever manipulation you do will be applied to certain areas of the image but not to others. For example, when you render something in Blender or any other package, the computer generates not only “Red, Green, Blue” color information, but also a fourth channel of information called “Alpha” which determines transparency. When you watch any “making of” video of a modern movie, you see the large “blue screen” (or “green screen”) in the background, whose very-specific color is used (in a process called chroma-key) to generate a mask.
We’re all very familiar by now with what can be done with Photoshop, and one of the key aspects of Photoshop is Layers. In fact this is another example of the self-same idea of, first, by some means isolating portions (or aspects) of the image, and second, compositing them together (and selectively manipulating them) to produce a whole.
I repeat: beyond the inevitable first throes of frustration (“a sip from a firehose,” “nothing rearranges your outlook quite like a cast-iron skillet at thirty miles an hour” …) you will find a fairly-irresistible and very pleasant addiction that can be more engaging and rewarding than any puzzle you have ever solved. “Welcome to our nightmare.”
