From the course: Creating a Short Film: 09 VFX Environments

Introduction to this course

- [Instructor] Hey folks, welcome to this training series where we're going to begin our two part exploration of the Visual Effects and the assurance. In this course, we're going to look at environments or in other words, world building. We'll talk about the basic concepts behind compositing, combining elements together to sell a shot. We'll take an in depth look at isolating a subject from the background using a whole host of different plugins and methodologies. We'll look at motion tracking and how to remove blemishes and clean up shots in several different ways, including how to use Mocha Pro to instantly and kind of miraculously remove objects from shots. We'll look at how to create terrain and environments in Vue xStream and we'll even have a little tutorial to teach you the basics if you've never used the software before. And then we'll dig into several effect shots and dissect them in detail. We'll look at the aerial shot, how we shot it, how we created all the elements, composited them, made the smoke in particular and changed the time of day using color correction tools. We'll also look at the helmet shot. We'll model the candlesticks and the melted candles from scratch in Cinema 4D Lite which you already have if you have After Effects CC installed. We'll talk about bringing 3D data in from Cinema 4D to After Effects, how to create flickering candlelight from scratch using Trapcode Particular, how to add a depth of field to 3D renders after you render and much more. We'll look at how to remove characters from shots by rotoscoping, including how we remove the bad guys from this shot of Teani. And we'll begin our look at the big finale sequence from concept to creating matte paintings, compositing tips and we'll go through all the layers and see what they each contribute. This is only part one of our look at this sequence. In the next training course on effects we'll dig deeper into the other components as well. Now one thing to note is I'm primarily going to be using Adobe After Effects for this training. Now you don't have to be experienced with it to learn and get something out of this course, but I'm not going to explain After Effects basics like setting key frame, navigating layers, applying effects, stuff like that. However, we will also be digging in to all kinds of plugins which we'll detail in the next tutorial as well as Cinema 4D, Mocha Pro, Vue xStream, Photoshop and more. So as you can already probably see this course is going to a blast, tons to learn. So let's take a quick little breather in the next couple tutorials to go over some important albeit annoying things about working with the exercise files and the plugins I use and then let's jump in and get going.

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