How to bring real life pilots in a 3D airplane cockpit

Hi guys,

I am new to this forum and quite new to Blender with a very basic question:

How can I bring a real life actor into a 3D airplane or a 3D car? After watching dozends of Youtube tutorials I haven’t found the right one which covers my problem. (Most of them deal with the topic how to set a 3D model in a footage.)

My scene: A droll airplane (Blender) is flying over my city (video footage) and we see the pilots talking (tracked green screen footage).

Putting the airplane in the footage is no problem. I can do that in Blender as well as in After Effects.

But I failed to place my green screen pilots into the cockpit. (Transparent glass material with intransparent bars). I don’t know how to composite all that in Blender. Trying to do that in After Effects cant’ be the right way as I’d need to mask, track and rotoscape the airplane.

  • So, what is the workflow?
  • Can it be done in Blender or better in After Effects, and how?
  • Does anyone know a good tutorial?

Lots of questions for probably a standard technic, I guess.

Thanks for any help.

Alf

Place pilots as texture with alpha chanel on a card or plane object in 3d space. Then place that inside plane model.

Thanks for replying. Now I understand the way of doing.

But could you give me some more details about placing the video onto a plane in Cycles?

I tried it different ways but no one succeeded as I can’t add keys/masks in the shader node editor.

So, how to add my keyed video as a texture?

Make a plane, give it an emission material. Then use the footage as the color of the emission shader.

Scroll down to the fourth video titled F-15 Fly-Over. They show a breakdown of how the shot was made.

Steve S

Thanks for this link! This is exactly what I want to do. But I am not sure if I understand how they did that:

Can all this compositing be done in Blender? Or did they render out the different layers and mattes from 3D and put all together with the green screen footage in a composition program (AE, Nuke, Fusion)

I downloaded the footage from the link above and did a quick compositing in AE which worked fine apart from the transparency of the cockpit.

It would be so great to have a detailed workflow or tutorial for a project like that (real actors in 3D car or airplane) and I wonder why I can’t find anything on the web…

All the compositing can easily be done in blender. If you need a tutorial, Track Match Blend is the way to go. This is a training video by Sebastian Koenig, who did the matchmoving of Tears of Steel. You can access it by becoming a cloud member. The good thing is that you then also support Project Gooseberry.

I had a quick look at the Track Match Blend series and it’s definitely a great source to learn from. But like all other videos I’ve seen they deal with the same story; Using a real life footage as a background video and putting in 3D models. That’s the way I know and did.

But I want it to do exactly the opposite way: Blender generated background and airplane with life footage pilots in the cockpit. (As in the video Steve S mentioned above)

Maybe that’s the same, but at the moment I can’t make it.

I don’t quite get how it is different, but maybe I just don’t understand what you mean. If you would start from thw hcw footage, you would obviously first track the shot. Then you would make a garbage matte to get rid of stuff outside the green screen. You could do this by making a mask in the movie clip editor and parenting that mask to a track on the actress. Then, you would key out the remaining green and you can put whatever you want behind her with a simple alpha over node. This can be footage or a blender renderlayer or whatever. Then, you setup another renderlayer with the airplane on it. For this render, you set the background to transparent. You can then alpha over this on top of the footage. The tricky bits are to get the lighting of the plane to match your background, get reflections on the cockpit windscreen, etc.

Do you want the shot to be of the pilots, from inside the cockpit or outside the cockpit? If outside then you will be matching the real world camera move in 3D and this could be quite limiting. Conversely an interior shot would probably be locked off anyway, realistically.

If outside the jet could make a travelling pass across frame which could mean that your pilots are shot incorrectly and won’t sit inside the cockpit with the right angle of view. This is why space ship windows are often just head on shots. As a projected txture on a card will soon belie it’s flat origin.

Perhaps you should make a small storyboard of the effect shots you need to make, including any camera movement. Here are some useful tips:
http://undofx.blogspot.com.au/p/vfx-workflow.html
And stuff you need to know before shooting:

They’re basically the same. The main difference is that when putting 3D into live action, Blender automatically creates an Alpha map for the 3D object. But when putting live action into 3D, you need to use a Keying node to generate the Alpha map.

Note that in the video I linked to, they made some extra passes of the nose of the jet. In order to make the girl look like she’s in the cockpit, she has to be in front of one wall of the cockpit, but behind the other. So you would have the video of the girl and Alpha Over her on top of the jet video. Then on top of her, you need to Alpha Over the video of just the nose of the jet.
On top of all that you would Mix the canopy reflection pass and adjust the opacity of the reflection.

Note the in the video we see the jet from both sides. That’s why they did two different passes for the nose of the plane.

Steve S