CGCookie – Compositing a 3D Monster into a Live Action Scene

In this course I will show you some of the major stages of a Visual Effects (VFX) pipeline by doing a fun little project: Compositing a 3D monster into some life action footage. The scope of this course is speficficaly teaching you the VFX skills so we won’t be focusing on modeling and animation much. We are going to grab a pre-modeled and pre-rigged character from Blendswap, made by Theory Animation: George.

First I will cover some housekeeping to get familiar with the file structure as well as some small tasks like fixing a few bone-weights and modifying the shaders of our monster. Since we are not going to cover the whole animation process, I will use a pre made run-cycle. However, this cycle needs some minor cleanup so I’ll go over that real quick. If you are interested in creating a run-cycle yourself. It’s perfectly fine to follow the course with your own run-cyle. A great resource to make George run is the tutorial by his creators at TheoryAnimation!