Blender VFX Tutorial: Rig & Animate a Realistic Car in Real

In this new tutorial we will learn to Make VFX effect by adding a Realistic Car into a real Background Image

Part 1: Rig your Car Model

After downloading our vehicle, we need to separate the chassis and the wheels as separate objects
You can use the ‘L’ key to selection parts of your model, press ‘P’ to separate them

Now it order for CarRig addon to understand each part of our model, we need to give them specific names
– Chassis: we need to name it ‘car.body’
– Wheels: The order should go like this ‘car.Wheel.Bk.R’
– Front right wheel -> Car.Wheel.Ft.R
– Car.Wheel.Ft.L
– Car.Wheel.Bk.R
– Car.Wheel.Bk.L

Also make sure to leave the anchor point of each object to the center because we want the wheels to rotate around their center point

All is set by now, we can go ahead and Generate a Car Rig

Part 2 – Use fSpy to Get Right Perspective

We will import our background image into the fSpy and set the X axis to be aligned with the main road where our car will be moving on

Then we will export that .fSpy file and create the road with the sidewalk and Put our vehicle into that path

Part 3 – Realistic Lighting: Find the Right HDRI Map

Now this step is essential, we must find an HDRI that looks pretty close to our background scene
We should study everything: is it urban? How’s the weather.. is it rainy or sunny?

This is what’s gonna allow our CGI to blend into the background, otherwise it will look suspisious and our VFX will be easily spotted

We can also play with our background by adding the 2 nodes ‘Mapping & Texture Coordinates’ which gonna allow us to rotate our HDRI until the reflection of our vehicle matches it’s surroundings cars

Part 4 – Set VFX Settings

First we need to hide the road in the render Buuut we need to keep the shadow.. Without the shadow, the VFX will collapse no matter how good you put the other things

Select Road
Go to “Object Settings” and Choose Visibility.. Make sure you’re on Cycle engine, this effect doesn’t work in Eevee yet
From there you can check ‘Shadow Catcher’

The second setting you need to set is in the “Render Properties”, then “Film” and choose “Transparent”

Now if you render your scene, jump into the compositing and check ‘Use Nodes’ you will see our Car

Now it’s time to merge between our Alpha render and our Background
So let’s add an image node, choose the background and connect both nodes to an ‘Alpha Over’ and don’t forget to add a ‘Scale’ node set to ‘Render Size’

And Basically that’s it, you got your VFX working