A Video!

I'd thought that I wouldn't manage a blog post for another 4 months due to college, but here it is!  As a student, I now have access to Adobe After Effects (even though technically I didn't have to get it).  After Effects is a professional special effects tool, and from a few brief tutorials I was even able to do something myself...

The technical details: First, I made the fire in Blender using the Quick Smoke function on a completely green background.  After that and much struggle in After Effects, I managed to put the green background with fire (or, to abbreviate and make things more confusing, GBw/F) into the live-action bit and greenscreened it:  Search for "keying," drag & drop "Keying-green blur" onto the GBw/F, select the screen color with an eyedropper tool, and there we are!  Except that I couldn't seem to render it in anyway, save having it only open in a web browser, the fire still having the background and therefore covering a good quarter of the screen.  I eventually managed to add it to a "render queue" and was able to render it into whatever I wanted from there!

Interestingly, I'd actually recorded--and attempted to make--this video before I had the slightest idea that I'd be getting After Effects.  In Blender, I couldn't quite figure out how to make the fire appear in a later frame, as opposed to when the movie started.  Also, if I'd move the GBw/F too far in one direction, a duplicate of the fire, for whatever reason, would scroll into view.

As there should be with all videos,there is also an outtake:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Seven Quick Takes Friday

K12 Project and Assignment 3: Build a Creature and a Monkey

Blender 101 1/2: the Physics Engine