AE to Blender 3D Scene Setup

Very much a novice in blender but have lots of experience in AE. Absolutely loved this tutorial! Feel like I'm already too powerful having these blender secrets revealed to me this early on.

Quick add on to this Ian so you don't have to mess around with the sphere to get your scene orientation right, in after effects after the camera solve has finished if you place the red target on the ground and find a spot where it appears to be correctly orientated, you can right click and set ground plane. Now when you copy your camera position and orientation info over to blender it also gets the ground orientation right :) cheers for all the help man you are an absolute inspiration.

Red Belly Media

WOW. I didn't know this way to share datas between Ae and Blender. I made a Blender addon to do the opposite but I never thought to use the clipboard 😨. Does Ae scripting space allows to do that? ... 🤔

Simon Salord

You can say Again

WT🙊 ..... Have I dieD ....?? AM i, am I iN VFX HEAVEN..?! THE HELL IS GOING ON AROUND HERE .... I Need Answers GoD DAmn i, IS THIS SOME KIND OF revo??! 😨

You should rename this post so that people know that it's got the super-cool "parent image to camera and normalize scale" technique in it, because I had no idea until today that's what this was about :) Maybe something like "Dynamically Placing Pre-Keyed People In 3D Space AND Importing Camera Data From AE"

Kai Christensen

ok, THIS video has everything. I can't believe this is the ONE video I didn't watch in the backlog because it has to do with After Effects, and I don't extensively use AE!!! TOP NOTCH CONTENT.

Kai Christensen

Oh THAT'S what that means! I'd seen that posted around, but hadn't watched the video. Yeah, that's super handy, thanks! :D

Ian Hubert

There's a free ae script for normalizing the tracking data with one click: https://youtu.be/vNfGgJ9k3IE?t=269

hey Ian, do you export the 4k potage out of AE or you work on a 1080 comp?

Kash

this is amazing!

Wow! I have watched this video the most. The light finally went on! This is a great idea. I could see doing some crazy stuff if you 3D scanned the actor with the same clothing, you could use it to bridge keyed footage and crazy stunts with the Model.

You can align the camera simply by rotating it by double pressing R

HeyHo!. Wich Blender/Plugin/AE Version is used on your tutorial?. I have problems by the Camera on blender with the plug in. The markes are on the right position but the camera on blender has a very wrong orientation :( . I need help . Thanks (btw. Great Videos!!). ps: My Software (Blender 2.82a, AE 17.0.5 Build 16, Plugin 1.3)

This was well worth the subscription. Thank you

Hey Ian! That's some dope stuff. Question! Do you render out the final sequence with her (the actress) in Blender or do you do the final composition in After Effects? I'm thinking if you have to clean up the key etc. Thank you for sharing your knowledge!!!

You could just check the field of view value in the 3D tracker camera in AE camera settings and type that value in blender, instead of eye balling it. Also you could specify the angle of view, if you know the lens you used before camera tracking, to get accurate projections.

Dude...... some of this stuff is flippin gene-yuss, and i'm only 8 mins in. a well spent 3 bucks.

Jimmy Deface

this technique is absolute genius. thanks for the tutorial!

Keith Lynch

This is really illuminating. Not that I ever have to take live action stuff into 3D, but I do have to sync up 3D stuff with 2D animations a lot so this info could come in very handy. Thanks!

Pete Burges

This is super helpful!

Harry Robins

It's super useful :D

Ian Hubert

am going to purchase AEtoblend plugin

shonal bose

Ahh! You're welcome! I hope it's useful!

Ian Hubert

Yeah!! And at 10:45, you can see that the process of doing that cancels out the original camera motion, so she's just moving normally through the scene- meaning you can add your own camera motion if you want to with a different camera, which is crazybeans! I gotta come up with a better way to explain it, though

Ian Hubert

Ohhh man definitely getting that plug in. I’m a little confused on why at the start you had scale her image plate and try to make her feet touch the ground. However when you repeated the process and started blocking out the environment you didn't have to scale her image plate but you still got the illusion thats she’s moving through the environment.

Excellent Ian! Thank you!

Erich Stenzel

Woooo!!!!!! I'm stoked to see what you're doing! :D

Ian Hubert

I don't know what type of work they've done on it, but it's been giving me eerily good results in general (as long as I roto out anything that might confuse it, but even THEN it's pretty good at ignoring anomalies).

Ian Hubert

You totally can! Just check the "Animated Image Sequence" box :D.

Ian Hubert

do you know offhand if you can bring in a sequence with an alpha in any other formats (like .tiffs with alphas for example) or is it limited to the .mov format? It'd be pretty sweet to bring in matte painted elements into a scene that way as well as footage

Charles Tigner

i feel like AE camera tracking is highly underrated nowadays, amazing job overall!!

(as I watch it) holy crap this is insane

Blake Rizzo

Bless thou tutorial

Blake Rizzo

This is so cool, Thanks for letting us in on the process!

Phillip Park

Yes, this is just what I needed. Awesome duuuuude.

JØRGEN WETAAS BULL

Really good stuff. Thanks 👍

Chipp Walters

Totally! Although I specifically avoided having it be a "tracking" tutorial (I want to take some time and try to do that right). I do spend some time talking about copying from AE to Blender, but the actual useful bit is once you have the camera/empties cloud set up- and those results are basically identical whether you use AE or blender for the tracking :D. That said, if you're looking for a good intro to blender tracking, this is one of my favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNU_lXjWtWM

Ian Hubert

This is gold... thank you Ian.

Jan van den Hemel

I'm Adobe free so I too wish you had skipped AE and done it in Blender or a freely available tool like Fusion built-in to Davinci Resolve (also a free download).

Mark Pratt

Ah, totally! :D

Ian Hubert

Yeah.. very exciting to watch.. please (later)make a time-lapse video about the lighting and compositing work flow of the huge environment you did. Example : Train shot. Thank Ian Hubert.

You're doing God's work, Ian Hubert.

James Ballard