Making your own movies isn’t easy, and it gets even harder when you don’t know the right tools to use. I’m not just talking about animated films—think bigger. Action-packed stories, epic adventures, fantasy worlds, even live-action projects. Let’s break down how you can bring these movies to life in Blender.

Its no secret that blender is not the most used 3d application in the movie making industry, but its not a secret how expensive other applications are compared to blender, and they are also designed to be used by other programs, Houdini is the best at effects simulation but the worst at modeling, unless if you install some addons but even then its not going to be at the same level as blender, 3d max might be great at modeling but its not as good at texturing and skulpting as blender.

so while this applications are popular in large studios, they have to be bought in conjunction with applications like substance painter, zbrush, vray, and others to help with there weaknesses, for an individual or small studio thats alot of monthly subscriptions we can’t afford. Most of blenders weaknesses as we shall see in this video can be eliviated by a one time purchase of an addon.

for example, if your movie is a live action and you want to add some CGI effects, you need to track your footage, blender comes with a power motion tracking system, that works quite well, and may i add very few of the pro-level programs have a motion tracking system so you endup having to buy something like pftracker if you dont use blender. the motion tracking system is a great solution for camera tracking, object tracking, wire removal, plate cleanups, making masks and alot more, all without spending one extra dime, the only time you may want to invest in an addon, is to make motion tracking long scenes faster, the addon flax tracks makes adding and tracking features automatic so that you don’t have to do it manually which greatly speeds up the process.

Motion tracking by its self, is not enough to make visual effects for a movie, it just allows you to track and place objects into the real world, usually you want to make things break add explosions, change the way the world looks and blender is well suited for all of that.

But we are getting ahead of our selves, usually before you start adding any effects to a movie, you edit it, to make sure the story and action is coherent, you can use premier pro, final cut or blender, blender has a constantly updated and improved video editor that can do a great job, it doesn’t have all the features a dedicated program like premier pro has, but it has all the features to make it a great video editing software.

in this editor you can also create masks to hide or remove things like the sky to replace it with a better sky, and since you can motion track the footage right into blender it means you can use a dynamic 3d sky like pure sky pro, to add convincing weather effects, sky replacement is one of the most common thing done in movies, since we have no control over the weather, but the sky can drastically change the mood of a scene, having a quick way to change how the sky looks is really important in film making, using 3d tools like pure sky pro give you are chance to make the effect more dramatic, you can have godrays, timelapses and more, but you can also use Hdri’s for a standard sky replacement, the advantage of using Hdri’s instead of a simple image background, is that you 360 degrees of rotation in the image so you can rotate the image to get the best looking sky for your scene, and if you are picky the HDRI maker addon is a large library of hdri images, with extra features like ground, a shadow catcher, editable HDRIs and alot more.

when you do a sky replacement you are likely removing some other things like birds in the sky, insects, especially if your camera was not that great, this could be a good thing if you don’t want that, but birds flying in the background adds a touch of realism and grounds your final scene, if you want to add them or if you need a swarm of controllable birds, bees or any 50 plus animated bugs and creatures included in this pack, you can easily add them using geo-swarm. the addon comes with different presets to make the swarms behave in interesting ways, like move towards a target, avoid different objects, fall from heights, follow curves, spawn endlessly and other presets.

one more thing you can add to the sky is lens flares, its a final touch that is always expected especially in wide shots and on bright day, or night times from cars and lights, unfortunately blender does not comes with a lens flare tool so the only way to add them is by use of addons like flared2, the great thing about the addon is that it works directly in the viewport, and you don’t have to use the compositor either, the flares go away automatically if an object passes Infront of the light source, and the addon gives you a number of flare elements to make your own flare that suits your scene.

while am listing alot of addons here, it should go without saying that all of the things these addons can do can be done in blender without any addon, even the lens flares, it just takes alot of clicking, experience to do that, and if we go back abit for example, most of what geo-swarm does can be replicated using the particle system, using the boids system, to attract particles, push away particles or make them swarm like bees, the value of these addons is that they do 98% of the work for you so that all you have to do is click one button and everything is setup, in the case of geo-swarm, yes you can get the same behavior using the particle system but what you wont get is the 50+ realistic bugs and insects that come with the addon, for HDRI maker, there hundreds of addons on hdri haven you can get for free, but you would have to download one by one, and the import process is atleast 10buttons and you wont have controls for rotation, or ground or shadow catcher automatically, we can go futher back to pure sky pro, blender has a builting sky texture that is physically acurate too but it does not come with clouds or god rays, or a day and night cycle, so all these you would have to set them up your self every time you start a new project which sucks, so every time i mention an addon just know there is another way to do what it does except

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