Blender Underground

I would love to say that Voodoo works real well for all video but it does not. If you are working with very little camera movement or smooth movement the Voodoo and other camera tracking programs is the way to go. What about armature shaky cams?

Part 1 - Making a real stupid video.

This is the easy part of the process. If you can act better than I do, then it should be no problem pretending something is there when it is not.



Next I examined the video for (markers) fixed landmarks - it would be good to use trees, power poles, and houses. Don't use dogs, snow, or parked cars because these things tend to move. I then went back outside and measured the street and sidewalk making notes on where these markers are located in relation to my video.

Brrr... it was cold out there. But I got my measurements and I found my side walk tiles are about 5' x 5' square and the street is 25' wide. So in Blender I used 1 Blender unit = 5 feet or 0.2 = 1 foot. (1 BU = 1.542 Meters for the Canadians)



Now I make a scale map of the area in Blender. This model is for reference only it won't always perfectly align to your video. You won't need to color and texture as we won't render this in the video. Most of the time you will work with this model in wireframe mode.



Now I have my moronic looking video on my PC (actually my brother's PC due to technical difficulties) and I load the video into the Sequencer. Then I add both the video and the scene in the ADD menu.



Select both the video and scene, go to Effect-> in the ADD menu and chose Alpha Under (you could chose Alpha Over depending on which one you select first).

At this point I render a test frame with F12 and if it works I save my project.

Part 2 - Making the fake elements in the new mapped model.

For this part I needed a transport pod and an alien. Since my brother's PC contains a lot of gaming mods I grabbed this spaceship and this bug alien.



I used append for both objects and lucky me the alien is already boned! Whoo hoo! I am not going to go off on a tangent about how to animate the alien, that would be a chore. I could have used a BVH (mocap) but went with the traditional manual movement since he won't be in that many frames of film. Besides I just love wiggling dolls.





Now the spaceship flys in from the south and lands on our street. The bug emerges and chases us up the sidewalk. The fake part of this scene is complete.

Part 3 - Making the camera match the scene.

You will need lots of time and patience... First time through I want to match about every 10th frame. The second time through I will offset by 5 and match every 10th frame again. Which means, if I was having to do all 930 frames, that would be 186 IPO keyed frames. However, I will be starting closer to 360 and end around 900. That puts me around 200+ key frames for the camera. To clarify, I moved the camera the most in the last 200 frames of the film. The idea is to match the character to the film the best you can.



Part 4 - Sequencing the Video and getting the bugs out.

At this point we have foreground objects that should overlap or cover the ship as it enters this scene. I tore the frames out 479 to 544 and manually pasted the tree back over the rendered frames and this took a couple of hours.



We still have a lot of camera jitter up and down that is not represented in the fake camera. The scene is far from perfect but better than most movies on SyFy.

Lack of shadows from our 3D monster and spaceship. I could superimpose shadows but that's is outside the scope of this tutorial.

Sound effects are a big plus! I borrowed some sounds from my brother's modding library. But should have done the sound effects for the ship...

Download links for the Blend file, supported models, video, and sounds.

Blend File

Sound FX

Video is packed inside Blend.

Very cool guys, you were a bit unclear about how you did the camera match. Did you just manually adjust the 3D camera to match the video every 5-10 frames and then make a new key?

Hope you guys make more tutorials like this, keep up the good work.

Basically in my rough final, I had ever 5th frame matched up to some target on the video. But even then the camera shakes about every other frame so you have to hunt down the frames that "look" wrong and fix them. I am not against using Voodoo but it only works well for tripod mounted cameras. I know they claim that freecam mode works but only if you have a steady camera. I used my $50 Polaroid 10 MP, I am certain there are some better cameras for this type of work. Another option would be to mount your camera on a telescope tripod and take accurate readings as you film.


BTW Dad is still missing, but the good news is I found the camera where he dropped it in the snow!

Ha ha... I hope the aliens don't too many invasive experiments on him

Cool!

video made me laugh. It is very cool. Only thing I would change is making it so the models arent as sharp to match your video if that makes sense. Maybe I mean the color boldness of the ship and alien dude. fade of the models maybe? I dont know exactly what I mean something like that lol. Reminded me of District 9.

Cool!
And just a question - which code do you use to insert Youtube videos?

it didn't work for me a long while ago. In fact, it was the ability to do 3D terrains that got me looking into Blender in the first place. The rest is history....

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