After Effects to Nuke: 1 Hour FREE Course | Compositing in Nuke

if your goal is to step up from short films up to feature film level visual effects then stick around for this video because this video is designed for you if you're like me starting out in visual effects you're probably an After Effects user you've probably done some Andrew Kramer tutorials the OG and maybe some of your own short films this is where I started in visual effects as well but if you want to go professional you have to transition to new when I was younger I was always going out and shooting films with my friends the process of coming up to shooting a story filming and adding visual effects I had a green screen I'd hang on the back of a garage key it out and add some effects or enter small competitions at the time I didn't even know what the term compositor was however once I learned about nuke I was hooked once I saw the potential so this is a clip from way back in high school a little short film with lightsabers and after effects and then a shot I did on the rise of Skywalker with nuke so this video is aimed towards my prior self people out there who want to transition from After Effects and work on feature films so if you stick around for this tutorial this will be the first shot that we comp and nuke we're just going to be working with still images here so I'm going to give you guys a few images to work with and we'll start to see how this node-based workflow is actually working and I'll compare it against After Effects and show you guys how we can take a very basic composite that isn't really finalized and then we can kind of add those creative adjustments to get something that looks a bit more polished so the first thing you're going to want to do is download nuke now commercial it is free for non-commercial use you can use it for all your personal projects your demo reel uh it's a pretty good deal and there's very few limitations you can render up to HD and there's no problem so the link for that is in the description and you'll want to make sure you launch nuke X it comes with two versions when you download it and one says x on it it just has like all the features when you launch the X versus the non-x version so that's all you really need to know so just make sure you launch that when you start so if you download the project file zip that's included in the description as well you'll get a few images here that you can drag into after effects of the way you normally start in After Effects so I'm just going to compare the two interfaces real quick and then we'll kind of explain more of the nuke's interface after that so we'll make some comparisons along the way just so you can transfer your knowledge really quickly but it in After Effects if we start here that normally you have your images on your sort of media project file over here and when you drag one in it will create a new composition and when you create a composition in the composition settings you see it's automatically grabbing the format so nuke is a little bit different if we open up nuke this is what it's going to look like and if we drag in an image the same way we just in After Effects we can take an image and just drag it in and we get a little node down here which is a read node Now by default we don't see anything so what you actually have to do is click the node and hit one on your keyboard and this is going to create a yellow line and there's this little node here called viewer so if I if I just move it up here so I can see it we see this little viewer node and the way you can navigate this little node graph is by holding your middle Mouse on your keyboard and you can click and drag these nodes around and you'll see this connection so whatever this viewer is connected to is what we're going to see in our window here so that's a bit different in After Effects and whenever you just put all your toggles on your visibility layers which are these eyeballs here it's kind of like that in Nuke but whenever we want to turn something off we just look at the layer we want to look at so we'll just grab another image here we'll go here we'll grab the soldier image and we'll bring it in and then we have two images so if we select the other one and we hit one we'll see we're looking at that image now so we can swap between the two by hitting one you can also hit one and then click on this one hit two so you can hit one and two on your keyboard and switch between them easily so that's kind of useful if you're working on different parts of your composite so in After Effects if we were to do the same thing we can bring in our guide we can put it on top and automatically they start being layered together and nuke it's a little bit different this is where people start to get tripped up in Nuke there's two places that people start to get confused and overwhelmed right away and it's actually really not as complicated as it seems but it's just something that coming from After Effects you don't understand the purpose of why it's doing this so if we want to merge this guy over this background we just need to do a merge node but there's one extra node that we have to do and we're going to explain in just a second but if we just click this and we hit M we can say merge and then we would say A over B so we work from top to bottom in Nuke we don't work uh bottom up so here the bottom layer would be the background then we work upwards it's just opposite in Nuke and so the way you can think of it is each one of these images coming in A over B is is a new layer so you could have many layers if I were to select these hit Ctrl C control V it's going to be built out like this so we'll always be going down you'll always see that your b-pipe is pointing down you'll see these layers coming in over and it's kind of like a painting So back around the foreground the same as After Effects except we're just working in a tree now the only thing is where people get tripped up uh here is if you view this node so we hit one again to look at the node that we want to see you'll see that we're not actually seeing this guy over the background and this is a PNG so it does have an alpha but nuke doesn't automatically apply the alpha to the image in some cases and this is where people get confused and you're like it's a PNG it has an alpha why is it not just merging over like after effects there's one node you have to put and it's called pre-mold so if you hit tab on your keyboard and you type pre-mult that's how you can get a pre-mult node and that will automatically make this work so essentially what's happening if we just compare the idea to photoshop real quickly is the same as in Photoshop if you have an image and you want to apply like a mask we can create a little mask layer here you see that there's an alpha but it's separated from the RGB so there's the colors of the image and then there's an alpha of the image and it's really important to always think of these things as two different things and all that pre-mold node does is apply the the stored Alpha in the image so if we if we look at the image and we hover our Mouse over the viewer and hit a we can actually see that there's an alpha stored in the image and so it's just taking that and multiplying that against the colors of the image in other words it's applying the cutout just as it did in Photoshop we just saw so after effects automatically does that nuke it doesn't and later on that's actually really really useful that it doesn't do that but we don't need to talk about it really in this tutorial since this is a beginner tutorial so before we continue further I'm just going to explain the layout a little bit more and we'll also compare to after effects to see where the similar effects will be and those type of things so over here on the right side is your properties panel and this allows you to control different effects in different nodes so if you want to create a node again we kind of did it real quick but if you you click down here and hit Tab and you you type something it'll open this window and you can access all your nodes here so there's a lot of nodes that we'll use and it's good to like start to memorize them but you also have this panel over here where you can access them so these are all the nodes that you can use in Nuke and you can click in here and find them a lot of them you're not going to know what to do at the start so we'll just talk about a few by typing them so we hit Tab and we'll say alert and then we can create a blur node and so the control for the blur node would be here and if we take the blur and we plug it into the layer uh or sorry the image we can view it so we want to make sure we're viewing it if we're not viewing it we're not going to see anything happen so make sure we click it hit one and then we can just start to increase that and you'll see that the image starts to get blurred and you see that I've put it off to the side here so we can have different Composites going in different directions here which is what's interesting about nuke and you'll see how that becomes really beneficial later on but if we view here we have this blurred image if we view here we just have our normal composite so to go over a few other just quick shortcut keys and things you'll need to know we have up here some sliders this will kind of adjust your viewer brightness so it's not going to permanently affect the image it's just if we want to kind of brighten it see some details like maybe we're working the shadow area for example this is the gamma control so gamma and gain are a little bit different this is gain and this is gamma this one right here and you see that when we bring this one up it looks a little bit foggier it's a little bit different and if we bring it down it gets more contrast and so we'll explain that later on in some more advanced tutorials if you're interested in you know the actual curves and why that's doing that behavior but just to know that those are there is brightness and Gamma which looks a little bit different so also you can move around by holding middle Mouse drag by zooming in and out so you can hold middle Mouse and you can zoom in with no mouse or you can click and click your middle Mouse in and drag it around like that you can also hit F on your keyboard to frame up your shot so we're not going to have to use Z or any shortcut key like that in After Effects we can just use the middle Mouse the whole time the other thing I did here I just brought in a video file if you have a video file you can just drag it in this is an image sequence actually but if I view this and then I hit F by holding my mouse over to frame it up you can see there's some video of the Embers here um this if we drag on this timeline that's how you play so it's it's a it's a little bit different in After Effects where it's sort of a timeline this is just showing the frame number and if we switch the input it'll switch to the the frame range of the video and if we switch to Global it'll switch to the project settings of the frame range and if you want to access your project settings to set the frame range or the resolution you know for example in After Effects when we create a new composite in the composition settings you see it's automatically grabbing the width and height of the image that we Dragged In and nuke is not doing that so if we go here and we hover hover over the mouse uh sorry the node graph area and we hit s that will access your project settings and you know we'll want to make sure that we're working the format that the image is set to so if we go back to our image here and click one we can see the image is this size 1456 by 816 and all the images we're working with in this specific project are that size so you want to make sure your your format is set to that and if if you drag in an image it'll actually create these additional formats down here at the bottom where you see that that format is there so we have some standard formats like if you're working on YouTube maybe 1920 by 1080 uh something like that would be which you render out and maybe you're working but if we're working with something that's not standard if we drag it into nuke it'll appear down here and we can just click that and set our project to that resolution so that's another place that people get tripped up a little bit is with formats because after effects is automatically handling that for you so now we're just going to talk about the color channels real quick and the alpha Channel again just to make sure that we get the concept and we'll do a little bit of a roto just to do that because it's a very common process and you're probably familiar with doing it in After Effects so to see different color channels uh and maybe you're not even familiar with what color channels are but the color channels just represent each amount of color in each channel so an image is made up of red green and blue and so we can look at those channels independently so if we look at this merge node and we we click over a viewer and hit R we'll see that the areas that are the most red will become it'll kind of be a black and white representation but the areas that have the most red will be the brightest areas so you see like this area that's more blue you know is going to be a little bit darker so if we go to the green Channel or the blue Channel like if we say the blue channel for example we hit B you see the areas that are yellow are getting darker but the areas that are blue are staying bright so we know there's more blue in this area we can also hit Alpha which again is just our guy but if we want to create a mask for this guy how would we do it so in After Effects you just go to your layer you go to your pen tool and you would just click around the head here and we would just hit this and it would automatically cut that out in Nuke it's a little bit different we need to cut out this guy and his Alpha by another Alpha so how we do that is we create a roto node so we can hit Tab and hit type Roto and you get the Roto now the other way you can do it is it is hit o on your keyboard um if we double click that Roto node we'll have the properties here and we'll have this little panel on the side um so if we hit Q on our keyboard when your mouse is pointing over the viewer and you'll see that we keep having to do the keyboard shortcuts where your mouse is pointing it's important you're doing that so pointing over here make sure Q is on it'll say overlay on and you'll see the little format here if we click around we can do the same effect and we close the curve here so that's how you can create new curves you can just draw them and hit enter and then you'll see that they stack up here and if we are viewing that Roto node so let's go to the view and hit a we'll see that those two are stored there so we can view something else even though we're not working on it see how the Roto node is not connected to anything but we can be viewing the soldier so if I hit one I'm viewing the soldier we see the overlay from the Roto node even though it's not even connected so that's just something that you can keep in mind it's like the overlay can be sort of from a different layer but right now it's not doing anything because you can see that these nodes are not connected and so how do we connect these nodes if I view this and hit a we do have an alpha but we want to cut this out by this so all we do is we create a merge node by hitting m and we can say a over B but we don't want to be an over because we don't want to merge something over we want to mask it so if we switch this to mask you'll see that this Roto Alpha is now masking the layer that's being connected with here so we have that result and if we merge it over A over B we have the result that we're expecting so that's the difference between After Effects is just that the nodes are kind of separated and this is actually pretty useful because you can say what's cool about it is you could mask different layers because it's a tree so you can do another merge node and you could say we could take that Roto and we can mask the background and we can switch it to mask right and so you can see how that could be start to be interesting when you have many many layers and it might not click yet but when you start dealing with 10 20 30 layers it's really useful to have things displayed at tree like this another thing I just did it but you can press space to full screen different areas if you're pointing over if you just want to see everything laid out you can also hit space on the on this area and hit F to just get it bigger so those are just some extra shortcut keys there I'm going to delete this now because we don't need it but that's just how you can apply a roto shape really quickly on a layer that has an alpha already so just to mention some other things real quick if you wanted to do the opposite um we'll just do it real quick anyway so I'll just create a Rota node and I'm just going to do a stencil instead of a mask so operation set the stencil and then uh the same thing so if we click around it would just stencil it out so that's just useful to know that's kind of how you would invert it and that's a useful thing to see otherwise you can have it set the mask and you could use an invert notes you could hit Tab and type invert I wouldn't do it that way but just to know that that note is there is pretty useful one other thing and just to I know I'm going fast but there's a lot of things to cover so if we want to if we wanted to make this Roto node have color in it because right now it only has an alpha right says Roto and it says Alpha and one thing to know is if you want to know what's coming out of a node you can look at these little colorful boxes here so this one has red green and blue and an alpha so we have the colors of the image and the alpha the little white box but we'll see here it's only giving us a white box so how could we if we wanted this to just be a solid like we want to create a solid in After Effects we go here we do new solid and we would pull this over and then we would just select the color and we'd have a solid here but it doesn't have an alpha so we would go here and kind of mask it out like that's how we would create this red block over this image if we wanted to do the same thing we need to give this some colors so if we switch the Roto note instead of just outputting Alpha we just switch it to RGB and a so it'll give us colors and an alpha and so if we switch that you'll see now that in our red green blue channels we had RG and B you'll see that white is there and we can give it some color so we could go over to our shape by clicking it so we click the layer first and then we go to the shape Tab and then we can just adjust the colors that is coming out of this and if we were to merge this now so we hit click it hit M A over B uh now we can see that that is being merged over so uh you see it's a little bit semi-transparent because in our shape I did affect the alpha so we have red green blue and then Alpha is at 0.81 so that means it's going to be a little bit transparent so if I were to want that solid I would just push that up so it's completely solid so that's just why uh you know when you start to look at these nodes you'll see all of these things as this rgba or just Alpha and so again remembering to always think of these things different like in Photoshop if we just think of the color and the alpha is something that's separate we can we can control them separately and that's going to help us a lot so to further emphasize that example we could blur this by hitting B on our keyboard and then we can blur just that specific element and then it's being merged over and so wherever you're placing these effects are it's only going to affect the the nodes that are before it so let's just delete all this and do it again so if we if we wanted to blur just the background we could put a blur node and then we we put it in between uh these nodes that are connecting and we would just blur it like this if we wanted to just blur the guy so you can hit delete and delete it put a blur node here and we'll just blur the guy like this and we are only a blurring our guide if we want to blur them together we put it after those those nodes and we just blur it together and so that's how we can construct our image and how the the tree and the Order of Things matters so now that we saw how the order of things matter um what is it compared to After Effects and the pre-comp workflow so in After Effects if we wanted to blur these layers together I mean there would be two ways to do it you could use an adjustment layer I'll just delete this you can use an adjustment layer to affect everything which you know we don't need to do in Nuke because you saw that if I want to do everything I just put it after but the other way to do it would be to merge things together and make them like a pre-comp so I'm going to take these two things I'm going to bring in this Mist here I'm going to put it over our image so I'm just going to drag it in and I'm just going to scale down I'm not going to make it transparent or anything I'm just going to put these two layers together so if you wanted to blur the guy and the smoke together normally what you have to do is you select those two layers by hitting shift and you go to layer and you would pre-compose it so you pre-compose two together and now we would apply the effect to that layer because they're now merged together so we could say if we go here we could put a gaussian blur and then we would drag it to our pre-comp and then we would just blur the pre-comp so you can see these are blurring together now a nuke we don't need to actually pre-comp anything um we can do renders and pre-coming layers that's not we don't need to talk about it necessarily in this case but if we bring in a smoke element here so I'll go here I'll grab our Mist I'll drag it in and then we will merge them together just like how we did in After Effects so you see one thing real quick you'll see that it is a JPEG so there's no Alpha so it's going to get a little bit confused here so you'll watch so we'll take this and merge it over and you'll see that it comes in like semi-transparent right it's like it's kind of like um a plus uh whereas here you see when we merged over it's a black Square um so what we want to do to just make it solid because it doesn't have an alpha it doesn't know what should be solid and what shouldn't be so that's the thing with nuke that again uh beginners will be a little bit tripped up on it's just like you have to think of the alpha separately so it doesn't have an alpha we just want to give it one so to give it a solid Alpha just so that this will be black and this will be uh White like how it is we want to do a shuffle notes we type Shuffle and then what we're going to do is we're going to hit this little white button here so without having to explain this whole Shuffle node this isn't really necessary for beginners again don't get overwhelmed it actually is really easy but it all we need to do is if we press that little white button and we hit a you'll see that there's a solid Alpha now and when you merge it over um it's going to block the other image kind of like how we would expect so the other thing we want to do is we want to scale this down so we can do the same as what we did in After Effects so we kind of scaled it down put it next to the guy so how we can scale images in Nuke is to create a transform node so we'll put it we'll hit after it hit t on the keyboard or type transform and then we could just scale it down so you'll have the controls for the for the node if it's double clicked and you have q so your overlay is on we have our little transform controls um you know in After Effects we can just click the different layers and scale them but in Nuke we gotta double click the node that we want to control here so I'm going to put it here and next to the guy like this and so we don't need to pre-comp these layers now it's already done if we wanted to blur these layers together we just put the blur between these nodes here so we put the blur here and then we just blur and you see that those two layers are being blurred together so just the the order of our nodes and the way we design this tree is going to be essentially it's sort of like a logic of the way things are flowing and the effects are always in between uh where where the merges are so one other thing to mention is if you do put a transform node after an image that doesn't have an alpha it will actually automatically create an alpha as well so you see that the little white thing is appearing so if we merge it over it will do the same result so if I merge it over hit Q take the scale scale down a little bit it is doing that effect and if I disable that you'll see it says transparent so that's again just like a little Quirk of nuke that when you're starting out you're like well if I just merge it over why is it semi-transparent but if I scale it down then suddenly it becomes solid it's just adding an alpha there because it thinks that you're probably trying to merge an image over another image so that's why I explained it with the shuffle node first and then the transform but you actually don't need the shuffle node you can just do it and it's going to automatically create it so if you ever see a problem where it's like doing stuff that you don't expect you probably don't have an alpha that's probably what's happening so just keep that in mind so I want to go over a few merge operations that are present in After Effects you might be familiar with so if I just go over into our project and bring in our Mist again uh you might be familiar when with if you hit F4 um you can switch between these modes here and then these are all your kind of blending operations similar to uh Photoshop and so ad is going to make it kind of you know add over the top we could do a multiply uh we could do a screen there's different ones that we can do here multiply would be another big one so you get this type of effect it's the same in Nuke uh if with our merge operations so it's got that that knowledge is really going to transfer over if you're familiar so if you do a merge node and we do A over B at the beginning and we switch it to plus right now it's not going to do anything because again it doesn't have an alpha but if it had an alpha so let's give it an alpha by hitting transform and we'll move it around a little bit so if it's set to over and it has an alpha it's just going to be like a merge like we just saw but if we switch it to plus it's going to be that kind of that transparency result where it's adding over the top and then multiply it's going to sort of cut through like this so you can see uh the same effect that we just saw in After Effects we want to compare color correction in After Effects versus nuke I'm going to do a grade note so I'm gonna hit G on my keyboard or you can hit Tab and type grade so this is the most common grade note the other one that you might be kind of familiar with if you're coming from After Effects is the curve tool but it's called color lookup so if you type the color lookup and you plug this in and you click on the master right here you'll recognize this curve probably if you're coming from Photoshop and stuff like that the grade note does the same thing it's just in a different way it's actually faster I actually prefer this versus using a color lookup all the time most people once you use this you're not going to actually want to go back and have to use a curve every single time because you could do the majority with basically these two sliders the gain and the gamma that's what you're going to use the most often so if we just use the grade now to plug it in I'm just going to gamma down a tiny bit and you'll see that we're adding contrast overall to the scene and if we were to go in After Effects and try the same thing we could go we could let's create an adjustment layer so we do it to everything so we'll create an adjustment layer and then we'll just do a curve we'll plug it in and we'll just pull down the center here and you see we're adding contrast so it's the same thing we can adjust the white Point here so we can grab the top Corner we can push it over and if you want to adjust uh sort of like this in nuke you can do the same so let's bring the gamma back up and we can push up like this and that's going to brighten like that so if we wanted to do that in After Effects let's bring that back up and then I'll just get rid of the center point here actually so we'll just create a new curve and then we would just pull up towards the top and you see that that's visually the same so I'm doing a gain and that's that's how that effect is happening so on that curve we're just doing it in a different way uh so gain gamma that's a very common uh s-curve so what you're doing is you're adding contrast and you're bringing up the highlights so in After Effects you might be familiar with doing that so you would bring it up like this and then you pull it down like this and that's why it's called an s-curve because it's creating something that looks like an S but it gives you that sort of film uh grade that is very common so you can push it too far it's a little bit too far for this shot but that's just to know what we're doing so um it's good to to know though that a gamma is in the sort of in the center of the curve and the multiply is when not when we have the second Point here but when we pull up uh this this uh Point here that's kind of what we're doing now if we want to go further and we want to adjust different colors we can put a new grade node here I'll just delete the old one out of the little color wheel you can split into the colors and we can adjust the colors this way so we want to take red out of the image we can do that if we take green out of the image we want to take blue out and so that's the same thing as going into your curves here and going to your different color channels and uh basically just manipulating those there so you can do the same thing the other way you can do it I don't really do it this way but you could disable these and then just start pulling down like you just affect only the red channel for example so you can gamble down only in the red Channel I don't typically work like that but you can get some interesting Effects by just you know disabling the color channels I prefer to just work with the color wheels with all the channels enabled for the most part but that's pretty much it for the basic color correction um and we can continue on so one last thing I'm going to mention is uh node cloning and so if you're familiar with the pick whip in After Effects that's something that might confuse you if you're transitioning over and you want to make things move together and you're not exactly sure how to do that if you're on different layers so let's say we have a mist and we bring it in here and let's say we want these two to move together but we don't want to pre-comp them together for some reason like maybe there's just a reason we want to do that and we're moving this guy around we want that to move with it we would go here and we would grab the pick uh pick Whip and we would drag it to our guy and then they'll move together and so there is a way to do that in Nuke so you can create a transform node and merge this over again so we have an alpha and we can scale down and we'll put it behind and then we'll view when they're merged over so how could we get those two layers to have a relationship to each other what you can actually do is create another transform node and you can stack transform nodes like this uh and what we want to do is press alt k I would be option K on Mac if you if you're doing a Mac and you'll see this little orange line between the two nodes here we can drag it and put it on the other layer so it means that these are basically doing the same transform so if we double click that make sure that we're doing the the right layer here because if we're if we still have this one open you might get confused so make sure the last one that you double click will be the one that's being controlled in your sort of viewer here so I'm going to close the other one just so it's not confusing and if we double click it and we move it you'll see that both layers move together now so these nodes are a clone and that's how you could make them move together alternatively like we mentioned earlier you could just have them on the same layer like so and then we can put a node after and then they would move together like this as well so that's just a different way for some reason your node tree needs to be in a different order um you know maybe there's some effects being applied to the background but that's the foreground but they move together for example so that's just to know uh if you're trying to do a pick Whip or a parent essentially that is the way you would do it so the next thing we'll mention is to merge different images that are different size over each other this is where again beginners get tripped up it's always the pre-mult thing it's always this and it's always the two different size of image but once you get past those two a little bit of confusion versus After Effects I promise you there's no other huge hurdle of understanding it's just those really simple things so here we have this 14 56 by 816 and then we have this this thing that was filmed on iPhone vertically and so if I want to merge this over the other one remember there's no Alpha so we're going to see the semi-transparent weird result by default so again if we hit T it's going to create an alpha through that transform node and then it's going to be merged over but you see that it's not sized to the project size and after effects would do the same thing it would be kind of scaled off of your video so what we can do is take the transform and just scale it down and we could bring it in like that and so that would be a perfectly fine way of bringing in an image and making it fit the other way we could do it if you wanted it just to automatically fit to this project size 1456 would be to put a reformat node and so reformat node allows you to change the size of a node and so by default if you set your project size correctly if you hit s which I I believe it'll be delivered like this to you automatically so your project size should be this 1456. if that is set by default the node will reformat whatever this thing is to the project size so this thing is coming in as 1080 by 1920. it's going to automatically go to the project size but you see that the way if you view it you see that the way it's reformatting it it's just cropping off the top and the bottom which maybe that's not what you want so there's different resize type here and so you can switch it to height so to take this vertical video it'll shrink it down into that rectangle format that we're working in and you it'll create this weird stretch pixel effect and the reason it's doing that is because this dotted line is the pixels that are being calculated so it's only calculating the pixels inside your um Bounty box so that's what this is called It's called The bounding box these dotted line um and essentially what you can do is just you press this little button here that says black outside and it will just get rid of everything out there the reason it does that is just because the edge it's not calculating beyond that and it's just stretching the color because it doesn't know what to do so you just click that little black outside button and it fixes it the other way you can do it is if you leave it off and you hit T and and you create the alpha it'll automatically just discard everything that's not being calculated outside of the bounding box so if you merge it over same result it's fitting perfectly to a video and that's good to go the other thing to note is if you scale this up and you see that that dotted line is going beyond your frame again our bounding box is going beyond the frame but the term for that important to know because when you're talking about it if you don't know what the term is it's called overscan so any pixels that are outside of the frame are called overscan and sometimes you want some pixels to be outside of the frame because let's say you want to animate this clip moving into the frame right you want to have some data that's out there so that's just important to know overscan pixels are outside of the the frame that we can see and the reason that can be useful as well is if we blur this image so we'll put a blur node and we'll just blur it so that blur is taking the average of all the the colors and so if there was no pixels outside of this Frame it would just be pulling in Black here so for example to show it to kind of show that let's just disable the blur for a second and we'll use another node that's very common called the crop node and we'll crop it and the crop will automatically cut the pixels to the edge of the video and so now you see that that dotted line if I hit disable if you press the note hit D it'll disable the effect you see that the pixels that are outside there are getting cut off because our dotted frame is no longer showing that over scan and so if we were to blur it now you see that the edge there's nothing for it to pull in there's no colors for it to pull in so that's why it's useful to have some over scan sometimes but at the same time if you have a really big bounding box and let's say we've scaled up this image you know we've let's say we brought in this Ember video and we've scaled it and we've rotated it and we put it like this and we have like all this giant um you know pixels out here every frame is calculating all this stuff that we actually don't see and so if we were to like take this and then we blur it it's blurring the pixels in here but it's also blurring all the pixels out here so it's going to slow down your computer if it's wasting that processing power to blur all these pixels and so this is where the crop node would be useful but again we just said that we can't crop it because oh sorry we can't crop it because there's not pixels to pull in but we can crop it and then double click the crop node and then just there's actually a little line here if we hit Q make sure it overlay is on we just expand it so we give it enough over scan so that it doesn't have that blurring issue but at the same time we're not processing all of the pixels that are like way way outside of the video frame so that's where the crop node comes in it becomes an optimization issue when you have like things that you've massively scaled up and then you know it's just wasting processing and it will happen that's like a media issue that people run into you scale two images that don't fit together and then your computer starts slowing down if you start having some really slow stuff or something like that zoom out check this little dotted line that's most often the issue that beginners run into it's it's very very common uh even to make that mistake uh you know just working so definitely check your bounding box is something that I would recommend and so uh this is good and we can switch this video clip here to a plus and then we could you know see instead of having it over black we have some of those like uh Embers blowing of the the video we're gonna make this look better this is just a quick example that's just kind of a quick and dirty uh example but um yeah that is something to know when merging images that are different sizes over each other so next we're going to talk about how to take this image and bring it into a composite that is sort of more final so I'm going to give you guys my full node tree here one of the best ways to learn nuke is to learn from other people's scripts so I provided you guys my simple script here you'll be able to step down one really good way to learn is take the viewer node and just look at each layer to understand what the person's logic was and that's a really really good way to follow and understand what the decisions were to kind of make the composite work and so I could step down this comp and I can look at every single layer every single color correction that's being done here and you can see exactly how it's done so that is available for you guys we're going to rebuild this from scratch in this video so um not to worry but that is there I'll leave it in the script uh on this side here so this viewer knows here this is the example we just did and I'll start building it from here again we'll have our elements and I also providing you guys with one extra node called exponential glow the way you can save this is a custom node but you can save it by pressing this little uh thing a little kind of a wrench here and hitting create and then if you just type a name it'll save this in your nodes that you can search later so if you say x glow X glow like this and hit enter whenever you hit tab you can type that and you'll actually get that node and so all this node is is just a better glow than the normal glow there's a normal glow and Noob called glow ah this one just looks a little bit better because if we hit uh if you put it on something to show you if we create a radial node which is just a circle I'll just turn the softness to zero and then I'll plug the glow into the radio and you see what the normal glow looks like and then if we put an exponential below and switch our viewer it's a little bit better it just kind of falls off nicer and that's something you'll learn about as time goes on exponents glow and quadratic fall off and those type of things we're not going to go deep in those Concepts in this video but it is better so save it and it'll make your stuff look better so with that in mind we'll start building this composite so now we're going to start the composite one thing to mention is we want to look at our pictures first so we have all of our pictures laid out here and we have the basic start for our script which is what I'll give you guys to set up um also to keep your script organized you can add these little elbows these little dot nodes by holding Ctrl and then clicking on these pipes in between the nodes and that just helps you keep these straight lines I always give a little bit of space and usually I will always add the nodes vertically and then we just connect it over to the right and that's really good way to keep your scripts organized so first thing we want to do is look at our images we can see here that he's a little bit out of focus on his back arm and shoulder and he's in Focus towards the camera so what we want to actually do to make this look kind of cool is make it look like a long focal length lens so a longer lens is going to have a shallower depth of field depth of field is where you have a certain portion of your frame that's in focus and the rest is out of focus and you get a bokeh background so some of you guys might know what that is some might not but just speaking broadly here that's what we're going to do so basically what we need to do reframe the background and make it look out of focus so I'm going to put a transform though by hitting t I'm going to scale it up and I'm going to start to position it in a place that makes sense um he's lit from the top left so I want to have something that sort of justifies that kind of lighting and I'll just play with the position here to get something along those lines move it into place and make it look like these mountains are the trees are pretty far behind him so something like this would be good I'm gonna have it more on the left as well because I do want to add a smoke element back there so if I put just you know white it's going to be hard to see any additional layers of elements and that wouldn't be as interesting so something like this is going to work it doesn't matter that our image is really low res because we're going to make it out of focus anyways so one thing we want to do before we add the focus is remember our good habits as soon as we scale that picture up we're going to have a really really big Bounty box and we don't really want to do that because if we had a defocus node and this is kind of like a blur but it acts more like a camera defocus it's gonna defocus all these pixels that are out here and that's going to waste a lot of computer memory so what we're going to do is add a crop node after transform and then just pull that a little bit outside the edges so that we don't run into the issue that we talked about earlier and now if we add the focus double click it and we can increase that amount we'll start to see that that looks like a camera defocus so let's look at the result of the merge by pressing one and we can get something interesting like that so we could scale that up and down now one thing to note visual as a visual difference is if you plug in the blur node and we blur it and we compare to the focus I press one and look at this and press one and look at this they actually do a different thing so you'll see that we get these sharp circular bokeh highlights and that's what a camera does when it's defocused uh image versus blur which is not as photorealistic so it is better to use this in this type of scenario it's a good thing to understand visually that there is a difference there so if we look at our guide there's a few things we got to fix on him as well because this was cut out just roughing Photoshop The Edge is not matching the focus if we look at them you see that we have like a dark and sharp edge where it should just be kind of out of focus on that edge so what we can do is just add a simple Edge blur so we can add an edge blur node and this will just blur around the edge and we kind of Grease We can increase this amount until it matches the focus and the way to match it is to look at the highlights try to find circular highlights is even better to look for but even just the edges and you can see how wide the edges are and try to match that we could do some more advanced Edge fixes and Edge extends but I'm not going to get into it in this tutorial just to not over complicate things for beginners so this is perfectly fine for what we're doing and what we can do is we can isolate this effect because if we're doing an edge blur what it's doing is it blurs The Edge all the way around but you know we don't want to blur this side so we want to isolate it so we press o and we can plug in this little mask input so that many nodes even the grade node for example this little side Arrow has a mask input and it will isolate the effect through that rotor shape so if we take the row shape we double click we turn our overlay on and we just draw a roto around this area and then we view this node make sure we're looking at it you'll see if I zoom in here that the edge blur is only being applied within the alpha and so that's good but we don't want to have a sharp you know cut off where that effect ends so what we can do with the Roto points is hold Ctrl and just soften them off a little bit and that's going to be good enough for what we're doing so that's a good result and now we can look at this and it looks like he's fading back out of focus we could brighten the edge slightly but like I said we won't uh we won't nitpick too much on this comp one of the reasons I moved this down like we said was to get the smoke element in there because we didn't want to put it over something really bright so let's go grab our smoke element and we can put some uh just an additional layer of contrast between them and that will give it a little bit more interest so we can grab this guy I'll hit Ctrl V so we leave the original up there and just control Ctrl C Ctrl V rather and we'll put a transform node and we'll merge it over so of course this is not what we want we want that to be kind of uh you know transparent uh one mistake that you will make probably is doing this plus operation and in some cases this kind of technically works but um it's actually you're gonna get slapped on the wrist if you ever do this in the visual effects Studio because it's not actually what you're supposed to do with smoke uh over black it works but if you do it over things that have any kind of light this is actually incorrect because smoke should not brighten something that is behind so you should never be plusing a smoke over and even though you may have learned to do it this way at after effects or photoshop there's tutorials out to show this the technically correct way is slightly different so I'm going to teach you guys this early on just so you have a good habit so we're going to keep it as an over but what we're going to do is we're going to give this an alpha and so right now it doesn't have an alpha but what we can do is create an alpha from the luminance or the brightness of the image so we're going to use a keyer node what the snow does is it looks at the brightness of the image and creates an alpha channel so if you hit a we see that there's now an alpha Channel if I hit D on the keyboard and disable it you see it's no longer there so it's creating that Alpha Channel which if we do over you see that it's doing a similar effect now so if I disable the key here and enable you see that's doing that there's a slight difference visually though so if we take the two I'll just show you to compare I'll make this one a plus so the same thing as we had before and you see if we look real close it's brightening what's behind and then this one is actually occluding what's behind so smoke occludes it doesn't brighten and so that's an interesting uh thing to keep in mind now what we can do as well is we can grade this a little bit to get it in the color tones that our images in so I'm just going to move it into a more interesting place real quick and maybe we'll just flip it over so I can grab these little things and just flip it like this so we can use maybe the bottom half or you know scale it in different ways we could even create another transform and just kind of play around with the position so maybe something like that I'll just keep playing with it to get something that looks interesting um you know maybe maybe something like this um and it's also going to look kind of weird because like I said cars aren't matching so I didn't put a grade note before the keyer that would affect the keyer slightly but we're not going to worry about it right now because I don't want to worry about the there's a workflow called on promote promote we're not going to get into it in this video uh we're just going to keep it simple so what we're going to do is go to the multiply and we're just going to put a little bit of blue into it so if you notice uh everything is kind of neutral it's pretty neutral but with a slight kind of blue color in there we don't want to be this reddish color we just want to get those tones to feel slightly similar and also we could make it a little bit more transparent and we also need to defocus it so again what we want to do is we're going to copy this defocus and we're going to paste it on here now what we're going to do is take that defocus and just reduce it a tiny bit so we'll kind of pretend that that's a little bit closer to us and so it would be a little bit less out of focus and that's why we're not using same defocus the other way we could do it if you wanted to keep it the same you can have one defocused node after and it'll just defocus everything so this will be fine what we can also do is take the alpha here and we will reduce it so there's different ways we can do that um one way we'll just do it through the merge node for now to keep it simple there's a mix option so if I double click this merge node we can just bring the mix down and we can make it a little bit more see-through that way so there's a few ways to do it uh to continue down the path of learning nuke we'll learn some different ways but this is keeping it simple and we'll just tweak the color a tiny bit more on the smoke I realize it's slightly too blue versus a little bit of this kind of greenish tint there so all we can do is just take this and just pull over a tiny bit and we'll see that that start to match a tiny bit better so we just need to make sure we have that those colors a little bit closer there and that's pretty good so the colors can be pretty pretty small differences but when you look close you want to make sure that those are matching so continuing forward here we're going to add some fire back here and we're also going to start to match the contrast a tiny bit so if you notice how how bright his armor is and how bright the sky that's reflecting is we have some bright sky but if you look at the value of the sky it could be a lot brighter just to make it feel like that Punchy contrast and that's what we want to add first so we'll just after the defocus node before the smoke We'll add a grade and we'll just start to increase the gain a bit and then we can just bring down the gamma a tiny bit and that's just going to help our image feel a bit more punchier and that's going to help that blend together so that's a good starting point another thing we can do now is grab that fire element so we'll copy and paste so copy it paste Ctrl C Ctrl V and we'll merge it over it doesn't have an alpha in this case so we'll just we're going to plus it uh and by the way if it's an over with an out without an alpha it's already a plus but just to know that and then I'm going to position this so it's not so intense I just want it to be kind of something subtle and in the background so I'll just kind of move it off to the side here and we'll just use maybe the bottom corner of it uh just just to hint that something is going on back here we're thinking about the story we're trying to think about why is there light on his right side maybe there's a fire right in front of him that he's standing in front of and we're going to add some Embers and stuff like that but maybe the forest behind him is on fire so we can kind of justify that and play with the position here until we get something that you like one thing is it's just like a pattern so part of being a compositor is designing shots with either the map painting or the elements themselves and trying to just find areas that you think look cool and it doesn't conflict too much with your eye and where you're looking and so I I usually spend like a few minutes playing around with the position of things if I were to go up and grab the position I already did and paste it here I'll just use that position so this is what I picked before and I think this was a pretty good position now we can mask this off and we're also going to have to do some color matching here because it's really really red if you notice it's kind of very red compared to him and right now it feels a bit disconnected so we need to kind of Roto off some pieces so we don't have just um you know things that are distracting if you notice here it's kind of pulling your eye uh you know we don't want to look straight to there we want to be looking at at him and also make the colors better so let's do the colors first I will do a grade note and what we want to do is we want to reduce some of the red to make it a bit more yellowish so we're going to go into the the colors here we're going to reduce a bit of the red and that's going to bring it to something less red and we'll also reduce the blue if you reduce blue what do you get on the opposite side of the color wheel is yellow so if you actually reduce blue you're going to get more yellow in the image and so you can do it that way uh and then what we can do is add some contrast to it so the colors are feeling more correct but it feels very flat and it doesn't feel like Punchy like this so what we can do is another great note close everything else we'll gain it up a bit and we'll gamble it down just to add that punchiness to it and that's something that's a little bit closer so let's look at it just before the deep focus to see what we have so that's kind of interesting we want to make it look like fire so looking at it before the defocus can help um and then the other thing we can do is another trick so another trick that after the focus you know you see these little circles that come from the bokeh highlights we can actually add more of those by targeting the highlights and boosting them just a tiny bit so if you take a key or node and you plug it in remember we said the key or creates an alpha based off of the brightness so we're going to use this Alpha not as an alpha that we're using but as a just as a control to Target and grade just the highlights so if we view this and we hit a we can see this and if you pull this bar over you'll see that it kind of crunches down towards the brightest areas of your image so we're going to Crunch it down a tiny bit like that and this Alpha is what we're going to use to color grade so we plug it in another grade and then use the little mask input and plug it into this Alpha so if a view here and now we use these controls we say you can see here it says mask rgba.alpha so it's using the alpha that's created here and if we view it there's the alpha and now if we gain up it'll only boost through there so if you look real close you can see that just the highlights uh the very tips of the fire are getting brighter and what that does visually after a defocus is it's going to give these little sort of boosts in the bokeh Highlight so if you boost it up a tiny bit you'll see the circles only a few of them get boosted out but it seems to add more detail gives a little bit of that punchier look that we're going for and we can push it a little bit further here even and maybe we need to expand our key here so we can grab that little bar and if we move it over us different areas would be affected as well so we can push it up much further and then we get something kind of like this and we start to get something that's kind of nice so put our Roto node here and we'll just uh we're gonna cut off this side so we're going to switch the rotor to a stencil and then we'll take the Roto double click it Q for the overlay and it will draw a circle here and then we'll just hold Ctrl to grab these points and just feather it outward and we can just reduce the brightness by essentially stenciling it out so we don't want to be looking there but maybe just a hint of something it's kind of interesting um so there are more ways we can balance this image out even more so right now as a compositor my eye is going here it still feels a bit um it's just like your eyes going here if you just zoom out and look at this as almost an abstraction you know you have like this just black hole kind of thing and also like you're not feeling the connection between this light and what's off screen and of course this fire might be in front of him so you wouldn't see it behind him but what I like to do as an artist I like to try to hint those like directions as much as I can and so what we can do is we can put a grade note after our defocus and our other great note here and we're going to plug it into a radio I like to use these radials for this sort of pools of light concept so if we turn on our overlay essentially the radio is just creating the circle here like we did earlier and we're going to put it over on this side and we're going to use that to just boost up the side so just boost it up in the gain we can kind of brighten what's back there just a tiny bit and that's going to help uh make it not so dark we could even add a bit of a gamma which would actually decontastic a slight bit so we can have a slight gamma a slight gain which actually boosts the highlights and just make that Circle a little bit bigger and we'll kind of have something more like that and then we can add a tiny bit of color to it if we want so we can add a slight bit of warmth into that side so it feels like there's just some light casting and if we just disable that and enable it so we'll disable and enable you see how just those slight grade Corrections we can we can guide the eye in certain directions here so continuing forward we can do another one here uh we did this little spot correction we could do another spot correction here I typically try to avoid areas that look very cut out like very dark on something bright it can happen but I try to avoid those areas if possible so I'll put a radial here and then I'll move it to area so put it down we don't actually need to see it while we're doing it but we can just grab it put it here and then we'll just take this great note and we'll just kind of brighten that uh sorry darken that a little bit you don't want to be looking there right if in those areas of high contrast is where you're going to look so we can adjust this one a little brighter maybe just behind him it gives a little bit more that that hot feel behind we could desaturate that slightly more potentially but we'll leave it at that for now and we'll start to bring out some details on this guy so I'm going to expand our comp just make everything really clean once thing we can do if you want to start organizing your script is to label things so you can actually hit Tab and type backdrop and it will create this node that surrounds the other nodes which is useful for just grabbing stuff but what you can also do is double click it and you can put labels so we'll just say smoke element and then we can do the same thing for this guy up here move all these and then we'll just put a backdrop around it and call it fire trees and you can change the colors of these nodes as well so you could you know if it's fire we could make it orange Etc usually try to use desaturated colors because if you stare at colors too much it'll actually affect your perception of color you actually burn colors into your eyes it sounds kind of ridiculous but it is true you have to be careful with looking at really saturated colors because it'll it'll distort your perception um so I'll try to use a little bit desaturated and continue forward here so next thing we're going to actually do is we're going to start to make his metal look a little bit more hot because if we look at the highlights there they look a little bit clampy right now and what happens with really bright metal when it reflects something like fire is that the very very highlights will get almost like blown out and there will be a tiny bit of glow so what we're going to do is we're going to isolate the highlights of of the armor and we're going to Ping out those highlights and add a slight glow just to give it a little bit more of that metallic feeling so now we're going to add that glow and how we're going to do it is we're going to start with a keyer node and we're going to plug it in off of this Branch so we're not actually not going to do it on the same layer we're going to have the glow coming in as a plus because it doesn't need to be something that's solid so if it's something like a glow usually you can think of it like that you don't have to think of it as something that needs an alpha necessarily it's going to be plus down at the end but we're going to use the alpha that we create from this key or node to isolate different parts of the metal so if you look at this and hit one and and we hit a on our keyboard and look at the alpha we're going to Crunch this way way down until we just get this the very small details of the metal and what we can do is we're going to do a pre-mold so you remember if we have an alpha that's stored in the image and if we pre-malted it applies the cutout to the colors so it'll apply that change that we've made and now we just have those areas and now what we can do is we can take a mask so o and then M will mask off the side that is in the fire like this hit enter and then we get that and now what we'll do is we'll grab our little exponential glow node that we create that we have and we put it on the end so now it's going to only glow those highlights now this might be too intense it's going to be way too intense but let's just put it over and then we can adjust it so put it to a plus b right now it's over but we'll set it to a plus uh and then we have something like this now this is way too bright it looks like overblown so we want to keep this as a really subtle effect so we're going to take the brightness and put it really really low and we're going to take the spread and put it low as well we want it to be like a very tight uh glow it's just on the edge so we can we can actually maybe we can write that tiny bit and and just try to find the right spot for that so we can do something like that then we can plus it on and something like that looks kind of good now on the top it might be a little bit too much so we might need to adjust specific areas another thing we can do to make it look better is if we desaturate just the very highlights it's going to always help so I'm going to go here with a keyer note before and we're going to desaturate the highlights of the very hot metal areas so I'll do the same thing I'll Target those areas and I'll just take a saturation node so if you hit type saturation and you plug that into the mask and then we then we pull it down what it's going to do is it's going to take some a bit of a color out of the very very bright areas and that can help sometimes by by uh you know just not having everything in one color kind of feels a little bit more two-tone so if you disable it and enable it just adds a tiny bit of color into the range there and it's a very subtle effect we don't want it to overdo this otherwise it's not going to look good so some of the the white areas are not working so well so we want to make sure that those are not included in the mask so what you can do is take another Roto shape on the same layer by double clicking we'll draw it over the areas that we don't want so I'll draw around those white areas and then it over here we can click this little uh little sort of stacked Square icon and switch it from an over to a minus so it's actually subtracting away so if you look at the alpha in here it's actually subtracting all within one note and then that's what our resulting glow looks like and then we're just putting it only on certain areas and that's a pretty cool result that would just start to feel a little bit more photographic by blowing out certain areas now the next thing we're going to do is create some Embers uh flying in the foreground to give a little bit more depth to the image because having something really close to the camera is just an interesting trick that filmmakers use a lot and visual effects artists use a lot to give more depth especially in these very shallow images where we're very zoomed in on somebody and so uh here's what we did in the script before and you'll see it we have a few of these uh burning little flakes of Embers going in front of the character just to feel like there's a fire towards us and so usually you can do that with a stock element or something like that but we're just going to create it in Nuke with a noise pattern so you might be familiar with noise patterns from After Effects or sort of generating clouds in Photoshop same idea so we're going to use some noise patterns and just do a very simple uh still frame since we're doing a steel frame but uh it'll just get you comfortable using the noise pattern as well so if you hit Tab and type noise it's going to give you this node here and so what we're going to do is we're going to gamma it down and we're going to make the points really small like very very small like this we can gain it up to make them a little bit brighter gaming down we only want a few of them we don't want to go crazy with it and we'll do another noise pattern so we have another one and then we'll make that one smaller but not quite as small kind of like bigger clouds like that and then what we can do is take this one and mask it by the other one so we're going to mask the small points and so what we have instead of just having a ton of small points is some small points have been like masked out uh and you'll have to play with the scale and the size of it so I'll just do this real quick and then I'll grab the one I already did because I kind of played with the size uh but this will be good and what we can do is we grade it up we'll give it a bit of color so we'll give it a little bit of uh yellowish orange yellow and then what we can do is we can gamma a little bit of red so by doing this separately multiplying a bit of color and then gamma the gamma will affect more on the edges because the gamma typically affects more in the shadows and the mid-tones and the multiplying gain is more towards the highlights so we can just pull that in a tiny bit like that and you know while it's not obvious here once we defocus this it's going to start to look like something so if you start defocusing these points and making them bigger we're going to get these sort of you know out of focus spheres and it's not bright enough so we can't see much so we'll take another great uh grade and just boost it a lot until we start to see something and you see we have uh this which is starting to look interesting now it doesn't look like they're in motion so what actually happens with something that's out of focus and emotion is it creates a streak so if we go back to the one that I did you see how they look more like streaks and so we need to actually make them move and add motion blur to them so we can create these streak effects and then we will defocus them so before I defocus we're going to need to add some motion to these so I'll just expand the script and we'll continue and we'll do that so the way we're going to do this first I'm just going to reduce this a tiny bit more with the bigger clouds we just want a few of these points if there's too many it's going to look it's going to look sort of chaotic so just run a few and then I'm going to put a transform node I'm going to middle Mouse click and so we can see the whole timeline if you if you kind of minimize click and drag you'll see like a certain amount of frames but if you middle click it'll show you the whole frame range there I have it set to Global so I'm going to go to frame Zero by just clicking it and then I'm going to hit create a transform node so we haven't talked about keyframing yet but uh one thing you can do is you can right click and say set key and then you can move to another frame you can move the position and it will automatically create a keyframe see how it turns blue and then down here turns blue just to make this a bit easier I'm going to middle Mouse drag over these frames so we can just see the frames we're working with so you see that it moves from those two positions now we're designing this shot as a still image so we're kind of doing a cheat here and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move it off the video kind of like this and then at the end I'm going to move it kind of far away and so we're going to design everything else on frame five so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn the motion blur on by clicking here and saying one and what it does is it gives a streaks so you see it'll it'll go from our first position all the way to our last one and that's creating the motion blur and now we'll just continue working at frame five we'll ignore that this is animated if we're doing video obviously we need to do some different things but this is just to show how to use motion blur how to do a simple keyframe and then how we can defocus these to create this effect now if they don't look long enough we can adjust the shutter speed so that is the that is setting on the camera on how long an image is being exposed per frame so if you're familiar with photography that's what shutter means and if we increase that it's going to increase the length of these sort of little Embers that we're creating here so I'm not really reading them very well so I'm going to increase the brightness maybe buy a lot so I'll just increase that number by a lot and they're a little bit yellow for me I want them to be more orange so we can just add a little bit more color and the nodes that we already did something like that is kind of good and instead of doing anything else to transform if I don't like the position because this is creating the motion blur I don't want to mess with this what I'm going to do is create another transform node close everything else and then I'll just move it back over so now I can play around with that position find something that looks that looks cool and just have a few Embers that look like they're blowing in front of the camera and I would probably try to darken specific ones like this one I would darken maybe I would brighten some here because I want some more on that side so I'm not going to spend too much time nitpicking each Ember but if you were to design this and you want to have specific elements that look a specific way it's worth the time to invest by playing around with these values and there's no way to just type in numbers you shouldn't type numbers you should play around with these sliders and play with the size and play with the amount just to get or even the seed if you play with the Z it's kind of like adjusting the seed um so we can keep messing around with different Cloud size so this one maybe looks better so you said just adjusted the size of the bigger clouds that we created and it just gave us a different random sample of of points um and that's kind of it and what you could do and what I did in my original script was I did two variations of this so I broke it off into another Direction so to show this I had some motion blurring one way and some motion blurring in another way and I merged these two together to make it feel like the particles are blowing in different directions because they shouldn't all be flowing in the same direction and if you had an element or a video they're blowing in all different directions so I just quickly did it this way so you can look at the script and study it I really recommend doing that to see exactly how I did it and then I use a frame hold on frame five which is between the frames just to make sure that we're on a frozen frame there so if we want to do a similar effect I just deleted the node and then we can hit Tab and do frame hold and it will frame hold the frame that you're currently on so frame five so if we drag this they won't move anymore if we disable it you'll see that they're kind of sliding around which I didn't I didn't want to deal with the animation just because we're doing the basics here and dealing with motion and designing the motion is a whole different process and so we're just doing a still image so that's a good point to end the Embers it looks pretty good you'll have to play around with it and just to get comfortable that's the good way to comfortable especially with noise notes these are really creative notes but they're only creative if you play with them and you just have to play around to get good at doing it so the next thing we're going to do is add chromatic aberration we're going to do a very cheap and quick version of that so there's a node called transform mast transform masks The Masks is on the end it's not the same as transform essentially what this node is actually used for is moving stuff around but through a roto shape so that's what it's normally used for it has a mask input so if you look at the normal transform it doesn't have the little triangle on the edge whereas this one does so that's what it's normally used for but it does give you some alternative options in this extra bar up here this is channels so if we split this to RGB we can actually just move one channel and what that does is it simulates chromatic aberration which is something that happens when the light is splitting in the lens because lenses aren't perfect and so you'll notice this on different things so if we uncheck the green and the blue and what we're going to do is zoom in here we'll zoom in quite a lot and in the translate X we'll say 1.5 pixels and what this does if we view it you'll see that we get this sort of color splitting on the edges and it's simulating the imperfections in a camera lens now you know this might be too strong and we might we might want to mask it off or things like that but you know people typically will overdo this it's kind of a Trope in visual effects you see it very very overdone especially Motion Graphics and stuff you'll see like a ton of this effect being applied so I think 1.5 is good you can even mix it down slightly if you didn't want to do exaggerated but that's a pretty cool effect that we can do the other thing we can do just before it is we can hit Tab and say lens distortion so that's another note that that you can actually get real lenses and so this is typically used in CG composing workflows so you want to switch this from undistoric to redistort and after that you'll want to take this little slider here and just push it up a tiny bit and we can add some fake lens Distortion around the edges so it's going to add the curvature you would see around a lens so a piece of glass curves around the edge and so that's kind of what we're simulating here the last thing we're going to do here at the end is ADD film grain so in film cameras there are grain and in digital cameras there's sensor noise so sometimes the the term is used a little bit interchangeably but that is technically correct so we're going to do just the grain node and there's some presets here if we zoom in we can see what it's doing it's adding grain over the shot and there's different size and intensity here for different color channels so so most often there'll be more grain in the blue Channel than the other channels just because there's typically less light but we can switch the preset here so we can do this one I think the preset GT5 274 it looks pretty good it's like a bit smaller grain it just looks uh yeah overall pretty nice grain and that will also kind of cover up any imperfect edges sometimes in compositing so it's always good to have grain you always want to have grain for sure because that gives it that kind of film quality that we're going for also you want to make sure to uncheck apply only through Alpha sometimes you can forget this and that's not good because sometimes an alpha will get carried down this stream and we haven't really talked about you know data going down streams and a little bit more complex subjects but that is the case sometimes so just want to make sure that's off so it applies to the entire image and the very last node we'll create is a write node so if you wanted to save this out as a picture you want to save it out as a JPEG or a video we didn't do video in this time but you just want to save as JPEG you give it a file name so you can say file name dot JPEG and it will automatically detect the format the file type and we can adjust the quality for example if you were to dot mov it's going to give you the options for a movie file Etc so that's good to know I also we're not doing image sequences yet but if you did want to set up save out a set of images instead of a video which typically loads better and faster nuke you can do the underscore and then three hashtags and then for example jpeg or another file format that's common is exr so it would just save out a folder of images instead and you can load those into nuke as well but that's all just to say those are some different options but dot jpeg will work if you want to save out your picture that's about it for this project so congrats on getting to the end not everyone probably made it through so you know project complete big congrats having the the guts to push it through it's not always easy to transition from after effects to Nuke but I promise you it's worth it in the end and the level of compositing that you can get to and the complexity that you can really dial in on details is going to be worth it in the end especially if you want to work on Films if that's your goal so we do have more tutorials that are available on

Channel: Compositing Academy

Views: 10,578

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Id: pyiyfadan6c

Length: 71min 27sec (4287 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 21 2023