Master Photoreal VFX Workflow with Cinema 4D & After Effects 🎥

In this tutorial, I walk you through my complete photoreal VFX workflow! Soon, you’ll be able to add realistic-looking objects into your footage. I can’t wait to see what you all make - enjoy! Follow me on Instagram: andytorres_a

Dakota's Instagram: haroldfromspace

Music: Soundstripe

Outro song: Cal Scruby

First, let’s talk about how you should go about filming your shot. You will want to add some sort of horizontal movement to really sell this effect. Remember, we’re compositing this using Cinema 4D, so the more you move around, the more of your 3D object you will be able to see!


I'm going to assume you have your footage already. Let's hop into Cinema 4D.

Switch over to the motion tracker layout by clicking on Layouts, Motion Tracker. Double click to create your MT Object. You can now import your footage by double clicking again or by heading down here and importing that way.

If your viewport shows a low quality picture, you may want to increase your resample to your desired dimensions. Playback the clip so C4D caches those frames. Switch to 2D Tracking and click Auto Track. Let it do it’s thing. You should see a lot of points that appear and disappear as you scrub through the clip.

Switch to 3D solve. Since our camera is moving through space, we want to do a Full 3D Reconstruction. This will be the case for most shots. If your camera was on a tripod, you would select Nodal Pan as your Solver Mode.
Since we shot with a 360 camera at a custom zoom level, we have an Unknown focal length. If you’re tracking footage from a non-360 camera, you may want to fill out the other fields to get a more accurate track. Run 3D Solver.

If we leave our camera view, you can see that our footage and C4D’s floors do not line up. We’ll have to create Position Constraints to create a new (0,0) point. Any new object we spawn in will snap to this point.

Click on your Motion Tracker and let’s make this our new (0,0) point by clicking Create Position Constraint and Enter. Let’s spawn a cube to see how we’re doing...you can see that our 0 has been set. Now let’s fix the axis.

Click and hold Create Position Constraint and select Create Vector Constraint. We’ll pick two points on the same plane and define what axis it is. Rinse and repeat.

We can see if the axis lines up by leaving 2D Tracks mode. Looks like the cube is on our clip’s floor!

Here, I deleted the cube and imported the trophy model created in-house by the homie Dakota.

Let’s add a material and name it Trophy. Deselect everything except Reflectance. For the Type, we’ll use Phong. Bring down the Roughness to 0%.

If we render out a preview, you’ll see that it’s pitch black. That makes sense because we don’t have a light or sky in our C4D environment.

Here’s where we really sell the photorealistic effect. We’ll be adding our custom made HDRI map. An HDRI map is a high dynamic range image that covers the entire field of vision. We use this to emit light from a real environment into a CG scene. In this example, we’ll use a panoramic sequence from our 360 video.

Create a new material and set your texture as your panoramic sequence. Click on the image, Animation, and Calculate. Now, your reflections will match what is going on in the environment.

Create a Sky and add that material to it. Now when you render a preview, the trophy will reflect the environment thanks to the HDRI map. If the sky is too distracting, you can add a Compositing tag and Uncheck Seen by Camera. You can change the way the HDRI reflects off the trophy by messing with the Coordinates of the Sky.

All we’re missing is the shadow. For this, we’ll need to create a Physical Sky and a Plane. Place your plane under the trophy. Now, adjust the Physical Sky’s Time and Location and the Coordinates so our virtual sun lines up with our clip’s sun. Again, add a Compositing tag and Uncheck Seen by Camera to check how our shadows line up with the footage.

Let’s create a new Shadow Catcher Material so that our plane catches the shadow emitted from our Physical Sky. Drag that onto the plane.

Now we’re finally ready to export! We’ll export our shadows first.

Under Render Settings, make sure Alpha Channel, Separate Alpha and 8 Bit Dithering are checked. Double check your Output settings and then render. Your shadow will be the alpha PNGs. Delete the other ones. Now, hide your plane. Under Render Settings, uncheck Separate Alpha. Render. These PNGs will be your trophy layer. We’ll combine the Alphas and Trophy PNGs in After Effects.

Import your footage and C4D sequences. If you lay them out on the timeline, they should match up.

On the Shadow layer: Set mode to Subtract. Adjust opacity to match shadows.

The trophy layer shouldn’t need much. We’ll color correct and grade on an Adjustment layer in Premiere to tie it all together.

Export as ProRes HQ, drag it to Premiere and add your music. Boom.