How to add leaves movement in real footage to coincide with steps of animated character?

[brianh41419584]

Hi,

Doing my first CG project.  It is personal project, where I am trying to add a robot cat to real footage.

https://youtu.be/9ujmIVTZmA4

I am currently working in Unreal Engine, but people seem to think I will be better off exporting the animation and mesh, rendering in something like Blender.  For now the link shows things in UE via screen capture.  When I render it, depth of field should end up looking more proper, and planning to add shadow catcher via a ground mesh that I created in SynthEyes that approximates the ground surface (somewhat uneven).

For now, I am trying to see what to doa bout the leaves.  I imagine there is some way in AE to add random variation around a point that would mimic the movement? Since the leaves here are blurry, that should maken things a bit easier, since I don't need sharp in focus leave movement.

Curious what the pros here would do!

-----

As an aside, would love to hear ideas about how I can actually animate the cat such that it follows the ground mesh (that is, feet contact the ground mesh surface). Either in UE or in Blender.  What drives me crazy about UE, is that so many tutorials about more advanced animation topics deal with animation blueprints designed for gameplay.  

[Mylenium]

Wouldn't it make more sense to just do it entirely in UE? Adding some fake leaves and connecting them with an event trigger tied to the paws so it causes some turbulence surely wouldn't be too difficult to set up, or would it? Since your footage is quite blurry and over-exposed you would need to fix it with some extra stuff like a photo, anyway. One way or another you will end up having to do some masking work and animating motion with a subtle wiggle() or manually as well as potentially further refining it with distortion effects.

Mylenium

[brianh41419584]

I would like to just do it in UE, but there are so many nuances in UE, things that are easy, say in Blender - like adding shadow catcher - are trickier.

This sceen is part of longer take. In FCP doesn't look this blown out.  This footage is result of me saving as image sequence for camera solve, maybe something about color space isn't translating.  Original footage is 422 all intra 10 bit.  When I do composite it will be with original, graded footage.  I think during these bright frames, while sky is blown out, rest of frame can look ok.  With these scenes I am going for casual walker in woods taking video, so maybe the non ideal aspects add some authneticity.

Will see how fake leaves look in UE. Thanks!