After Effects vs. Nuke for Compositing

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This vid is very well done, and actually prompted me to download Nuke and try to learn it. However, itโ€™s a bit out of date in an important way. AE now allows effects that address another layer to pre-render the effects and masks, negating the need for pre-composing. Nuke is still a better option for straight compositing work, but that update helped AE considerably.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 16 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/Stinky_Fartface ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Iโ€™m not depressed after watching this because it doesnโ€™t resemble anything I use AE for.

AE is a Swiss Army knife. Itโ€™s a multi-purpose tool that does jobs you wouldnโ€™t have a hope in hell of managing in Nuke.

Yeah, nuke composites better but thatโ€™s like 10% of what you can do with AE. Itโ€™s a crazy versatile tool with a bigger support community for scripting, templates and tutorials than any other app out there, which is why itโ€™s still GOD in the motion graphic world and always will be.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 35 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/[deleted] ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Good stuff. But while Nuke is great for compositing After Effects is better for animation. It's not a one or the other thing.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 34 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/asmallbus ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Are their any hybrid applications that use both layer and node based compositing?

Layer based is good for editing time relationships between other clips/compositions but bad sharing specific alternations. Node based is the opposite where it's great at sharing individual alternations but bad a time relations between multiple clips.

It seems like any layer based system can be treated as node based under the hood. It's all about how you display it to the user. Most node systems let you group a series of nodes together into a single node anyway to hide complexity. That's really all a layer is doing.

Then it's just how you present those relationships to the user and not what it's doing behind the scenes. It would be amazing if you could just toggle between the two based on what you're trying to do.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 6 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/wescotte ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Hey, have you tried Natron? Itโ€™s a free node-based compositor. I canโ€™t say how it compares with Nuke and havenโ€™t tried it myself yet but I came across it while learning Blender via YT tuts.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 4 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/ErrRationale ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Funny how this was on my front page. I just spend hours last night looking at Davinci + Fusion as an alternative to Adobe.

Node based system is fun! I'm just not sure if I have time to learn a whole new set of programs. Have already spent a lot on plugins for AE too...

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 3 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/omega_point ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

Different tools for different tasks, man.
I tend to agree with the top commenter on the vid, the video is good, but it seems to purposefully show AE as worse than it is. I do believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that it's from before Set Matte was added to AE as well.

Luckily we have Resolve + Fusion too, so we can do both layers and nodes without breaking the bank ยฏ\_(ใƒ„)_/ยฏ

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 3 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/monomagnus ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

This was quite informative, thank you for sharing.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 3 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/w_kroy ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

For ages Nuke cost like $10K and required a beast of a machine to run tho..

If you reallly wanna step up your game, learn Houdini...

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 2 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/captainalphabet ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Sep 15 2018 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies
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What's up guys? Joey here at schoolofmotion.com. And in this video we are gonna talk about one of my favorite topics which is Nuke. And what I'm gonna try and do is show you the difference between a layer based compositor like After Effects and a node based compositor like Nuke. One isn't necessarily better than the other. They're just different tools. And depending on what task you're doing, one might be a little bit easier to use. And I know a lot of you guys out there have probably never used Nuke. And you may really just kind of be scared of it. And so I wanna show you how it works and why it's so cool and why it can actually be useful to a motion graphics artist and not just a visual effects artist. So let's hop in and get started. So we're gonna start in After Effects since I'm sure that's what most of you are more comfortable with. And what I have here is a pretty typical 3-D composite set up where I've rendered out multiple passes from Cinema 4D. I've rendered them as a multipass EXR file so I have one set of files here. One image sequence and I've pulled that in and I've used the built-in extractor effect to pull out each pass from the EXR files. So I've got my lighting passes like my diffuse pass and I'll just solo them one at time so you can see what they look like. This is the diffuse lighting pass. This is the specular pass. This is the ambient pass. Reflection, global illumination. And now I get into my shadow passes. So I've actually got a shadow pass and I've got an ambient occlusion pass . And then up here I haven't turned off I've got an object buffer for the sky, the floor, and the spikes . So all of these are feeding from the same set of image sequences here and I'm using this effects in the 3-D channel group extractor to pull each of those channels out one at a time. And I've set, I've already set up my my compositing so you know diffuse is generally the channel I start with. That's my base and then I'll add all of the lighting channels on top of. Now I don't want to get too much into the actual compositing part of this but it is very important to know that I'm in 32-bit mode and I'm actually compositing in a linear workspace. And the reason that I'm doing that is because EXR files out of Cinema 4D are 32 bit so I have tons and tons of color information and that's wonderful . So you can see here that this is my compositing set up and you know if I just pull all of my passes in and I set this up and I now look at it. All I'm seeing is a list of passes and I'm seeing layers, right . Just these bars that go across. And if I really want to look at all of my passes and try to understand what I have to work with to help myself figure out how to composite these things, the only way to do it is to solo them one at a time. Right, and it's not really that intuitive of a way to composite. If you composite in After Effects you certainly get used to this . But let me show you a different way. So now were gonna hop onto Nuke. I'll show you what it looks like in Nuke. So this is the Nuke interface. And if you've never opened Nuke and you never played with it this is going to look a little bit alien to you. It works very differently than After Effects . And I'll admit I mean it took me a while to get the hang of it but once I did it is so much nicer to composite 3-D passes together and really control the way your image looks in Nuke. So the first thing you're probably noticing is I've got all of my passes kind of laid out here in front of me like cards on the table. And I don't have to sort of you know guess what the reflection pass looks like. I can actually see a little thumbnail of it. But the way Nuke is set up you have instant access to any single one of these little thumbnails at any time. Now these are called nodes. Nuke is a node based compositor. And the one of the great things about nodes is you can look at any node at any time in Nuke if you hit the one key. You can see this little viewer here . This little dotted line is gonna jump to whatever I select and then hit one. So I can very quickly step through all of my passes. Another really great thing about working this way is I can see here a visual representation of what the source material is. Okay if I hopped back into After Effects for second you can see that you know I can switch to the source name and then I can see what the sources for all these layers. But generally you're looking at the layer names and this doesn't tell you anything about what file this came from. And this gets even worse if you start pre-comping things. In Nuke it's all just right in front of you and I can see even really really zoomed out like this I can see this is the map for the object. This is clearly the ground. This is clearly the sky. So that's the first benefit. Nuke is going to let you see your render passes and see the relationship between render passes in the source material in a much much easier way . Now let's start actually compositing this and doing some color corrections so you can see some of the other ways that a node-based workflow is gonna be a little bit easier in some cases . So let's say first of all the shadow pass is way too dark. So I'm just going on in the opacity for the shadow pass and turn it down a little bit. If you've never used multipass rendering before this should show you immediately the power of it. You have the control to just totally decide how much shadow you want and don't want in post . So let's say we want this much And I would really like to color correct those shadows so they're not just black. So I might do is put a levels effect on there and going to the blue channel let me solo the shadow pass for minute . And I am going to push a little bit more blue into the blues, into that shadow pass, okay?. So this is great. You know I like this. I may want to play with even the black output so that I really get some blue in there. I can see it in context which is great. Wonderful. Okay so that's, I like that color correction for my shadows. Because ambient occlusion is also generating sort of like a shadow, I'd like the same color correction on the ambient occlusion. Okay simple I just copy and paste levels onto there, now they have the same effect. Wonderful. Okay well what if now you know 10 steps later I decide whoa that's way too blue. Let's pull that back. Well now I've got ambient occlusion that has an effect on it and I've got shadow pass that has an effect on it. What's worse is when you're looking at your timeline you don't see those effects unless you have the layer selected or if you select all your layers and you hit ease . You can see what effects are on there. So you don't get an instant read of what you've done to your comp. And on top of that I've got two levels effect that I would like to be identical but they're not. Now of course you could make them identical by using an expression to tie the values of one to another. You could do that but that's gonna require expressions and it's gonna require some manual set up or a script or something like that . So now let's hop into Nuke and I'll show you how this works. Now in Nuke the way you composite one thing on top of another is by using a node called a merge node. This probably took my brain the longest amount of time to understand moving from After Effects to Nuke . There are no layers in Nuke. It is a totally different way of working . And you have to get used to seeing it . The way the merge node works is whatever goes in a input is merged on top of whatever's going into the b input. And so when you look at at Nuke artists projects you'll generally see something like this . One is a whole bunch of passes . There's sort of a stair stepping like this. And then once you get deeper into the compositing you try and make everything go from top to bottom. That's generally the way it looks. And so if we just go from left to right you can see I have my diffuse pass. And that I am merging the specular pass on top of it. And then the reflection pass, the ambient pass, global illumination and then my shadow and my ambient occlusion. Over here I've got my mattes ready to go. And so let's do the same thing we just did. Here's the shadow pass and I'd like to introduce some blue into the Blacks . So in Nuke there's a bunch of different effects you can use. And everything in Nuke, even effects are called nodes. Over here you got a whole bunch of neat little tools and you can click on these and you can see all the different effects you have. What I like to do Nuke is just hit tab and type in the name of the effect I want. It's just a little faster. So here's a grade node. A grade node is very much like the levels effect in After Effects. So I took a grade node and I've inserted it underneath the shadow pass in between the shadow pass in this merge node here . Because I did that, I can now color correct the shadow pass and I need to make sure that I'm looking through the grade node. Remember this this dotted line which is connected to this node here, this is a viewer node. This viewer node actually controls what I see right here . So I'm looking through the grade node and now I can use these controls over here And what I can do is like grab this color wheel in the lift. And first thing I need to do actually is brightness this a little bit. And then I can grab the color wheel and I can start to pull it into the blues like this. And you can see it's getting a little bit more blue . I may want to actually boost, boost all the colors a little bit and then just pull more blue out. There we go. That's getting a little bit washed out. Right maybe something like that, okay? So now we can look at the result of that in context. Right and maybe now that I'm looking at in context maybe I want to boost the levels a little bit of the Blacks. And then I'll put a little blue in the gamma as well. There we go, and you can see the blue being added to that, right? Now here's the really cool thing about working with nodes. I can instantly in like a second see that there is a color correction being applied to my shadow pass. Now that may not seem like a big deal but when you're really getting deep into a composite and you have tons and tons of color corrections and masks and all kinds of stuff, working with nodes you can see every single thing you've done. So here's another cool thing. So first let me just adjust this a little bit more because I am kind of nitpicky and I don't like the way it's looking . I maybe don't want that much blue in there . Okay great. So now let's say I want the same grade to be applied to my ambient occlusion. Well Nuke has a very nifty little feature where you can click on a node and you can control click. Go up to Edit and say Clone. And what it does is it creates another grade node with this visual link between the two nodes . And this is again the big advantage of working this way. Whatever I do to either of these grade nodes will be applied to the clone. Doesn't matter which one I mess with. They will both do the same thing. And what's great about that is that not only do do I not have to set up anything with expressions like you would in After Effects but I can see that they are cloned. I don't have to remember that they're cloned . I can actually just see it. So again you get this visual representation, okay? So that is another huge advantage of working in Nuke. Just being able to see the relationship between effects and things like that. So now we're gonna hop back into After Effects. So now let's talk about manipulating very specific parts of your image in After Effects. So let's look at the shadow pass for minute. You know when I move the opacity up and down like this, what I'm noticing is I really like the dark shadow on the ground. But when the shadow on the ground is dark, the shadows get a little too dark on the object. So what I'd really like the shadows and the object to maybe be about this dark. But then on the ground I want them to be maybe, maybe that dark. Like pretty dark. So what I do is selectively brighten parts of the shadow pass but leave other parts untouched. So how the heck are we gonna do this in After Effects? There's not like a super quick and intuitive way to do that, is there? So there is a bunch of ways you might approach this. What I'll probably do is duplicate the shadow pass and call one copy shadow floor and another copy shadow object. And then what I want to do is take my floor object buffer And there's a few ways I can do this. One way is I could just duplicate it, move it down here and set my shadow floor layer to use as its luma matte, that floor buffer. And so that's gonna do is it's gonna just give me the shadow pass where that floor is. Now that's kind of a messy way of doing it because now any time I want to split something off and just effect the floor part of that pass or the object part of that pass, I'm gonna have to have to have a copy of this floor buffer layer . So there's another way to do it which is a little bit cleaner. I'm just undoing a bunch times . And that is to use the set matte effect, So if I say shadow floor and I only want the part of the pass that's touching the floor. And go up to Effect, Channel, Set matte. And I want to take my matte from the layer called floor buffer. And I don't wanna use the off channel. I wanna use the luminance channel. And it's not working. Now why is it not working? Great question. The reason is because of the order of operations that you have to deal with and fight against in After Effects. This floor buffer layer has an effect on it, the extractor effect which pulls out the floor object buffer. So the problem is if I put the set matte effect on the shadow floor layer and is looking at the floor buffer layer, it's actually looking at this layer before this effect gets applied if that makes sense. So what it's actually seeing is this. It's not seeing here, I'll show you. It's actually seeing this as the layer. It's not seeing this because in order to see this it has to take into account the effect which it doesn't do. Because of the order of operations. I know, it's confusing, right? So one way around that is to pre-comp your object buffers, okay and makes you move all the attributes to new comp and we'll call this floor buffer precomp. And now I can use this in my set matte effect. Okay now it should work fine . So that's the workaround. You can pre-comp your object buffer and now it works but now of course your object buffer is buried inside of a pre-comp which means if you need to replace this render with another version of your render and you don't want to just totally overwrite this one, well and I have to remember that there is a copy in this pre-comp and it really just starts to get confusing. So now that we have that I would do the same thing for this object buffer, the spikes. So I pre-comp this . We'll call this pre-comp spikes buffer pre-comp . And then I would put the set matte effect on this version of the shadow pass. And then we'll set this to spikes buffer and instead of off channel we'll say luminance . There we go. So now I have two shadow passes. And now I can take my object buffer. I can take the shadow from the object and I can just fade that out a little bit. So now you have control over both parts of your shadow pass. There are other ways to do this but this way is a little bit cleaner because now you only have two layers to mess with. And I want you to just notice how little information you are given about your composite from After Effects right now. We have a pretty complex little set up here . We have a floor buffer pre-comp inside of which is our floor buffer. And then we have a shadow pass which is getting its initial image from this extractor effect pulling the shadow pass out of the EXR file. Then were using the set matte effect to pull the mat from a different layer and you don't get any feedback that that's happening . You just have to remember that it's happening . And the worst part is if you have to work on someone else's After Effects project. So now we'll hop into Nuke and I'll show you how this works and you're gonna laugh at how much simpler it is. Let me show you how simple this is to do in Nuke. So what I'm gonna do is use a grade node. And I'm going to put it's right here. And I'm actually going to rename this grade node so I can start to keep track of what each of these grade nodes are doing. So this grade node, I'm gonna come up here. I'm going to rename it grade let's say lighten. And what I want to do is just use the controls to lighten up I'm sorry I'm not looking through the node see this is another thing about Nuke I have really gone into yet which is that you can look through, you can look at any point on your composite. So you can look at the foreign effect, in the middle of an effect, all the way down here. So I want to look at this node so I can see I'm doing. And I'm going to adjust the lift. And you can see that that is brightening this area here. You can also just the gamma . There's a little bit more finer control with color correction in the Nuke color correction tools than there are in the After Effects color correction tools. And I always get them confused . But you can sort of mess around with them and see what they can do . But the gamma and the lift are going to give us the the most effect here. Sso I only want to lighten this part. I don't want to lighten the floor. So will be great is if I could just tell this effect use this matte to only affect that area. Well a lot of nodes in Nuke have a little arrow coming up the side here. And if you pull that out it says mask. So all I have to do is take this arrow and connected it to this. And now it's that simple. I can control just that part of the image. There you go, piece of cake. Now you know I'm pretty anal when I'm doing, when I'm using Nuke. I don't like when lines kind of crisscross over things like this. So if you hold down the command button it'll bring up a little dot in the middle of each of your, these are called pipes in nodes . So you can grab this little dot and then you can create little elbow. So they can nicely kind of go like this. And you can see that's what I've done here too. One of the amazing benefits of doing this is that now let's say , and actually in reality I had two versions of this render. This is the second version. Let me bring in the first version really quick and I'll show you . And I called it bizarre render. So there it is. So here's version one, here's version two. I can just do this and the entire comp is updated with this image sequence. It could not be simpler. So now if I want to test out different versions of my renderer with this comp set up, that's all you do. So that's the benefits of using these little elbows too. Cool? All right. So now we can look down here. This is the very end of our comp. The last merge node, that is where our comp is sort of ending at the moment. So if I look through that I'm gonna see everything. And so now looking through there, in context I can of course grade the shadow on the object. And you can see it's not effecting the ground. It's just effecting the object. And it literally took two seconds to do that. So let's hop back into After Effects and I'll show you a couple other things. Now I'm not gonna do a full comp in After Effects because that would take too long . But I do want to show you some of things that I typically do when I'm compositing stuff like this. So a good example would be if I wanted to get a nice glow on this object without having a glow on the sky and on the ground. So one of the techniques I like to do a lot to achieve a glow is to just take a copy of the object, blur it and add it on top of the original object. And that's how you get a glow. And then you can color correct that to kind of get more or less glow. So if I wanted to do that then what I need to do is actually pre-comp my whole scene. Okay so I sort of get the comp where I think I want it . And then I'm gonna pre-comp. I need to pre-comp the entire thing. Remember I can't just pre-comp the parts that are turned on because this shadow layer in the shadow layer, they are referencing object buffers that are up here. Even though those are turned off. So I need to select everything and pre-comp it. And then I'll say comp pre-comp. I could probably come up with a better name than that but it'll work for now. So I got comp pre-comp. I'm gonna go into my comp pre comp, I'm gonna pull out this spikes object buffers. So let me copy that. And now I'm gonna bring it back to here and paste it. So what I want to do is make a copy of my entire composited piece and I'll call this glow. And then I want to use this object buffer as a luma matte. So now I've got my scene and then I've got just those things. So now what I could do is I can solo those. And I could use levels to really crush those Blacks and try and only pull out the brightest parts of that image. And then I'm gonna use a fast blur to blur it. And we are, so here's a pretty awesome thing about After Effects that it always gets me. So what's going on here is I'm blurring this layer but it's being matted by a layer that's not blurred. So that means that I'm blurring the color inside of my renderer pass but the alpha channel is not blurred. So what I actually need to do is delete that fast blur and I'm gonna command X and cut that levels. I'm gonna first pre-comp these two things together and this is a theme with After Effects . A lot of times you have to pre-comp things in order to get them to work right. So now I'll paste that levels effect back on there and now I can use the fast blur . And it will blur correctly, that's what I wanted. And then I can set this to add mode. You can see I get this nice glow. Very nice, and I can control the opacity of it and all that stuff. Wonderful, right? That's exactly what I wanted . Except now I want to adjust that color adjustment that I did on my shadow pass. Well, shoot, that's buried inside this pre-comp. And so you know there are ways you can work on this comp while looking at this one. I could lock this viewer and then come over here and then come to my shadow passes and then adjust the levels and then once I let go it's gonna update. But you could see how many levels of abstraction have to happen to do something like this in After Effects. Now now we're gonna go to Nuke and I'll show you how it would work in Nuke. Now the first time I figured this out when I was using Nuke, it blew my mind because it is really, this is in my mind the biggest difference between Nuke and After Effects. In After Effects you have to really understand how the program interprets things based on footage and pre- comping things. In Nuke you can pretty much ignore that . The way Nuke works is every single level of a comp and by level what I mean is this is a level, this is a level, this is a level, this is a level, all the way to the end. Even the final step here. This is a level. And every level of new comp is essentially pre-comped already. So what that means is this. I want this render right with all my passes comped together the way I like, I want to now take just the object out of that, blur it and add it back on top of itself to get a nice glow just like we did in After Effects. So what I need to do is first use this matte here to get a version of this that doesn't have the the sky and the ground. So in Nuke there's a node called copy and it's kind of tough to explain what it does without getting a lot more technical with the way Nuke works. Nuke is very good at letting you take any channel, red, green, blue, alpha, and there's even more channels. You can combine with different passes and you can make different things. And so what I'm gonna do is I wanna combine this right here. I want this to be the alpha channel for my final render here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use this copy node which does that for me . And the way a copy node works is it takes by default the RGB channels from the B input and then on the a inputs it takes the alpha channel. So I'm gonna take this a input and I'm gonna pipe it to this little guy here which remembers our object matte. And now if I look through this it doesn't look like anything's different. But if I hit a button it's gonna show me the alpha channel for this node which is now this. If I go back one level and I look here the alpha channel is kind of weird . It's not actually the correct alpha channel for anything. So this copy node gives me the correct alpha channel. And then in Nuke if you want to use that alpha channel to knock out the background and only keep the foreground you have to pre-multiply it. I have a whole video series about this called Pre-multiplication Demystified on schoolofmotion.com. Check it out. It'll explain this a lot better. So now I have this and I have this. And what I can then do is maybe put a great effect on this. And we can push the black point up, pull the white point down. So were getting some really nice highlights. And then I'm gonna add a blur node. And you can also see me, you know coming from After Effects it was really kind of an eye-opener to see how quickly you can sort of like preview things in Nuke. Everything works very quickly. So here's my blur. So now we've got this and we've got this. And we want to have this go on top of this. So what I'm gonna do is add a merge node. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to say the B, 'cause a goes over B. So B's the bottom, that's the bottom. This is the top. I'll show you what this looks. It's not right yet because I need to tell this merge node to add those pixels on top instead of just placing them on top. So I'm gonna set the operation to plus. And so now we're gonna get that nice glow. So I want you to try and understand what's going on here. Imagine in After Effects, this entire comp, this entire set of nodes up here that is creating this result has to be pre-comped and then combined with an alpha channel in another pre-comp and then finally put together in a third pre-comp. Whereas in Nuke, you can literally just split off different pieces of your comp. You can just add a branch that goes out this way. So this result goes here and it also goes here . And this copy of the result has this happen to it . And then it's added on top here. And every single merge node by the way in Nuke, it has a mix setting which is basically opacity. So I can turn that glow up or down and get it exactly where I want. And the beauty is that if I want to then mess with for example the amount of shadows that are on the object I can see even with my screen zoomed way out that this grade lighten node, that's the one I want to use because again you can see the mask going right into it. And I'm looking at the result of my comp but then I can easily adjust the color correction. And again look how quickly it updates for you. It's very fast. So maybe with that glow I decide I want the shadows a little bit darker. Again and this and the result of this is now piped all the way through the comp into our glow and merged on top of itself . And that is so much easier. Once you get the hang of looking at this I can see what's happening here without having to open up effects and click on layers and solo things . You can just see it. Another cool thing about Nuke is that when you do things like this you can literally step through your comp step-by-step very easily. So I can say this is the beginning and then this, then this, then this, then this, then this. Then this. And you can step through and see all the things you've done. So now what I wanna do is just work on this comp a little bit more so you guys can see you know just really how you can fully fine-tune things in Nuke in a way that's not, it's possible in After Effects. It's just a lot more painful. Okay now we just want to start doing an overall color correct on this. So what I'm just gonna do is I'm just going to add instead of a grade node, I'm gonna add a color correct node. A color correct node is sort of like a grade node. It just gives you a lot more kind of fine detail that you can you can mess with. So it breaks the shadows, midtones and highlights up into sort of their own effects. And so if I adjust the gain on the midtones , you can see that brightens just the brightest parts of the image okay. That the highlights actually they're very, very, very finicky so I usually use the midtones. So let's say that I like what this is doing to the floor. I don't really like what it's doing to the object but I do like what it was doing to the floor. So you know in After Effects you'd have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops to have that only effect the floor. Where as here, all I have to do is come up here. Yup, there is the floor mask. So I can just take this arrow, the one that's coming out of the side of the node and pull it up here and connect it to the floor and there you go. Then I'll hold command so I can make a nice little elbow like this so it's nice and neat. And I can just quickly rename this color correct floor. Okay cool. And then there it is, it only effects the floor. And you can even get a little bit crazier if you wanted to if I said okay I only wanted to effect the floor but I kind of also only wanted to effect the floor in more of the center of the frame and not the edges of the frame. So now I could do is I could I'm gonna use another effect called a Roto node. And what a Roto node is is it just let you draw shapes . You think of it like a mask in Nuke. So I'm gonna double-click on that and I'm just gonna draw a mask around the part of the floor that I would like to be brighter. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to insert this right here and I'm gonna look through it. So here's what's happening. This pipe is bringing in the floor matte as an alpha channel. And my Roto node is also creating an alpha channel. So if I just look through the the normal RGB channels of this node and I know getting a little more complicated and technical. And maybe some of you After Effects guys are lost right now. But I have to actually look through the alpha channel by hitting a to see what this Roto node is doing by default. And by default what it's doing is it's creating a white shape wherever I put it. And so what I'd actually like it to do is create a black shape . So I'm gonna go to shape and I'm going to change the color to zero and then I'm gonna hit invert. So all it's doing is creating a black shape to cover up pieces of the optional I don't want. So now if I switch back to my RGB and look through this you can see now this color correction is only hitting where the floor exists and where this mask is. And masks in Nuke are also really pretty nice to work with. If you hold Command you can just feather them very quickly just by grabbing the points. You can do this in After Effects too . You have to use the mask feather tool which is not nearly as nice to use . And you can also see how smooth and quick the mask tool works in Nuke. So I'm gonna select all these and just scale this down a little bit. And so I'm just kind of getting, getting now. I'm getting this nice, it's almost like there's a like a flashlight on the camera lens and it's giving that little bit of an extra specular hit there. Let me limit change a couple settings in Nuke here. Make this a little easier to look at. Cool, all right. So now we have done a very specific color correction on a very specific part of the image . And again it only took this one pipe coming out of this matte and I put a Roto node in front of it to knock out an alpha channel. And then we get this piece of cake. So now let's talk about some other cool things that you can do in Nuke that you can't really do After Effects very easily. There is actually a new feature in After Effects that will let you use masks to control where an effect happens. And it's very similar to what's going on here piping in this Roto node into the mask input of our color correct here. But in After Effects you can't very easily pipe in you know mattes like this that come from Cinema 4D. So let's say we wanted to make a vignette here . It was one of my favorite things to do not just in motion graphics but in life. So I'm gonna make a grade node. And we're gonna connect it up and I'm just gonna rename this grade viggy. And then I'm going to make another Roto node So I'm just gonna hit Tab, type in Roto and I'm just gonna grab the ellipse tool here and just draw a quick ellipse like that. And so if I look through this Roto node, by the way this is one really cool thing about Nuke is this Roto node's not even connected to anything but you can still see the controls for it. And that's one of the great things. Nuke makes it really easy to look at absolutely anything but control something else very easily. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna now grab the mask input here and connect to this . And if I look at the Roto and I look at the alpha channel there's my alpha channel. And I'm actually gonna want the inverse of that because I want to only hit the edges of my comp. So I can just go to my shape tab up here. By the way, I haven't mentioned it but this is where all of the sort of properties and settings for any node pop up. So that's why when I double-click the Roto node it shows up here and I can hit invert. I can go here and I can add a vignette just by darkening the image like this. Now of course it's a very hard vignette right now. I'm gonna hit the O key. Turn that overlay off for a minute this is a very hard edge. So I could do the same thing I did here if we look at this Roto node you can see that I manually feathered it the way I wanted . But there's another way too. Because this mask input it's not taking a shape the way After Effects masks work. They are shapes. This mask input is actually taking the alpha channel so whatever the result is, again remember I said every node, every step of your composite in Nuke is already pre-comped. So I don't have to think of this Roto node is a shape. It is actually kicking out an image so I can manipulate that image to change what this mask is doing . So what I could do is I could add a blur node after this Roto. So it goes from a Roto node into the blur node into the mask input for my grade. So now if I blur this it's going to blur the mask. And it's going to create a perfect little vignette for me. The slider goes up 100 but you can actually crank that if you want to. And then here's another great thing about I'm assuming other node-based compositors do this too but Nuke makes it really easy. If I wanna just quickly turn this vignette on and off I can hit D. You can see very quickly before-and-after. And you can step through it. I can say okay here's where we started and then we have the glow and then we color corrected the floor and we added a vignette. So you could see were starting to get really fine-tuned here. All right, so here's another thing that you can do in After Effects but it's kind of a pain. And actually why don't I first hop into After Effects and show you this? All right so our After Effects comp is not all comped. We haven't done as many things to it . But what I want to do is I want to get some depth of field just at the bottom part of the image here So this is a wide-angle lens from Cinema 4d . And so with wide-angle lenses especially when you're seeing stars and stuff that are essentially infinitely faraway you know you're not gonna get a shallow depth of field but if you're very close to the ground you might get a little bit of depth of field at the bottom. And it'd look really cool so I like to do that . So what am I to do is I want to just selectively blur the bottom here. So let's think how could we do this in After Effects? I mean that's step one is you have to think about it because you've got all of these passes. And you could do that step here or you could go downstream and do it here. And you have to kind of figure out like okay where does it make sense to do it? If I do it here, one of the issues that might pop up is that you've got a glow happening. And so your glow is going to be sort of this post effect that should happen just on top of your final image. So you probably don't want to do the glow and then the depth of field . You want the depth of field to happen first probably so that means we have to do it in here but we've got a million passes that were dealing with so how do we do it? All right, so I'll show you a trick that I like to use . So first thing I'm gonna do is just create a shape like this roughly where I want the image to be blurred. And then I'm gonna take that shape then I'm gonna put a fast blur effect on it. And I'm just gonna blur it. I'll move it down so that is only kind of catching the bottom of the frame there. And I'm gonna make this white. Then I'm going to pre-comp this. And I'm gonna call this depth of field gradients. And I'll tell you why I have to pre-comp in a minute. Then him and add a solid layer that's black. I'm gonna put that at the bottom. So this pre-comp is just this gradient. And I don't need it to be turned on. It can be turned off. So then I'm gonna make a new solid setting. A new solid and I'm gonna call this depth of field and I'm gonna make it an adjustment layer. And I'm gonna put the compound blur effect on there. You could also do camera lens blur but compound blur will work pretty well for this and it renders a lot faster. And compound blur takes a gradient, a black-and-white image and it blurs the pixels based on that gradient. So now I can tell to use the depth of field gradient and don't blur it that much. Just blur it a little bit. And one of the problems of compound blur is that it gives you these stupid edges here which I don't really like but I'm not gonna mess with that right now. But I want you to see that this works and there are ways that you can get rid of these edges too . But what I want to point out is that if I want to change where the depth of field is now, this effect is referencing a gradient that is pre-comped. So if I want to change it I have to come into here and then move my shape layer down . And then come back here. And then if I want to see the result of the whole thing I come here. And so again you're in that situation where you have things that are pre-comped effecting very greatly the look of your comp and you don't have instant access to them and you can see how they all fit together. So now let's hop back into Nuke. So now we'll do the same thing in Nuke. So again I want to do this before this glow happens. So I want this to happen right after this node . So what I'm gonna do is just put an elbow here. And I'm gonna connect the glow to the elbow like this. And now I have some room here where I can do the depth of field. So what I'm gonna do is . I'm gonna make a Roto node and I'm gonna grab a rectangle and just make a shape like this. And again if I look through the Roto node it's just making an alpha channel where that shape is. And so what I need to do to make this work in Nuke, this is something that it's a little bit more intermediate Nuke I guess. But the way the Nuke node works that I want to used to do depth of field, this is called the ZD focus node. And this is what you would use with a depth pass . And I'm basically just making my own depth pass here. So I'm just gonna put the ZD focus node in here. This node is looking for a depth channel. So I actually want to take this alpha channel I created and turn it into a depth channel. So the way I'm going to do that is by using the copy node again. And I'm just gonna put this in here. And so by default again that copy node it takes whatever comes into the a input and it uses that alpha channel. I'm gonna change the settings on it so that instead of copying the alpha channel into the alpha channel I'm gonna tell it to copy into the depth channel. And now we look through the ZD focus node it's all blurry . And so I'm just gonna change the math on this to direct. And you don't really need to I don't want to make this about the ZD focus node. I don't want to get too far into that. But basically this is just gonna let me use my black-and-white image here as as a depth pass and not have to worry about focus or anything like that. And this maximum amount here ,this is controlling how much blur. Now you can see I've got a very hard edge. So what I need to do is blur this. And because of the way Nuke works , if you remember, this is the same way we made our vignette. I can take this Roto node and just put a blur node after it and that is going to effect the depth of field. And so now I'm getting a nicer blend with the depth of field. If we look through this with blur node with alpha channel I've now got a nice gradient. That's been copied into the depth channel and then that's being run through a ZD focus node to create this kind of fake depth of field. Now here's what's great about this. If I double-click this I can see where the depth of field is . And if I step through my animation and I need to make this animation a little longer because this is actually 144 frames. Not 36. Let me just make sure all of this is set up right because I don't think it is. There we go, okay. So if we step through towards the end here I don't want the depth of field that high once we get closer to these crystals. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna just go forward till about here. And then I'm gonna double-click my Roto node and I'm gonna select that shape, select all the points on it and just move it down a little bit. And then I'm gonna step kind of in the middle here and move it up a little bit more. And you can see these blue little blue highlights, that's telling me where keyframes are being set. And I can really quickly step through and just set keyframes making sure that my depth of field never gets too close to those crystals. And all of this is being done in context at any point. So if I want to see the final comp, I can just set my viewer to look through this last node . But if I wanted just look at the ZD focus node I can look at that. If I want to look at just the first part here I can still see where my mask is. So again Nuke lets you see everything at any point in time. Right and so now you know hopefully you guys are really starting to see the power of working this way. I wanna show you a couple other things that are just kinda nice. And you know one of the cool things that Nuke lets you do is be incredibly specific with where effects are happening and where they are not happening. And you can go back and adjust these things very easily. So let's take this glow for example. Let's say that you know okay I like the glow but I don't want it to glow on the right side as much as the left-side. I do want some glow but more on the left side than the right side. Okay again in After Effects you'd have to jump through all kinds of hoops to do that . What we're gonna do here is just add a grade node. And I'm gonna add a Roto node over here and connect it in. And then I'm just gonna grab a rectangle. And I'm gonna cut this in half. Okay like that. And my overlays are off so you can't see what it's doing. So let's do that again. And actually I'm gonna select the other side of the image. And I want to make sure that I'm actually selecting literally half of my image. And I want to blur that. So it's not this hard-edged kind of effect. So let's just blur it to 100 like that. And you know this is what it's creating. I'm creating a gradient. And then we'll look through our grade node here. And I can now just darken the right side of the image. And let's look at this in context. The light is actually coming more from the left side so it makes sense it wouldn't glow as much on the right side and so I can just turn it down a little bit. That's how easy was to do that . I just made a new grade node, made my own little mask and controlled it. And then let's say that we wanted to, you know, I don't know, we wanna now color correct the sky a little bit. Because now looking at it there's kind of some red in this blue. It's not exactly the color I want it to be. So I'd like to color correct the sky. And so you know this is actually gonne be pretty easy to do. You need to figure out where in your comp you want to do the color correction. I could do it at the end here. But I've already got glows a nd depth of field happening so I probably want to color correct it before that. So what I'm gonna do is just grab all of these nodes and just scooch them down. I'm gonna come in here and I'm gonna to add a, let me think here. I'm gonna add a hue shift node. And what hue shift does, it's like a hue and saturation effect in After Effects. And it's gonna let you change the hue. Oh that's kind of nice. I kind of like the sky doing that. It's kind of nice, that nice teal. But I don't really want it to do that to the object, just to the sky. So again we now you guys probably can guess how easy that's gonna be. All you need to do is connect the mask input to the sky matte and it will only effect the sky. Okay, there you go. Another cool thing you can do in Nuke very easily is add light wraps. This is another thing After Effects that you have to kind of set up in a weird way in pre-comp and do a lot of things . If I wanted to add a light wrap, It's actually a light wrap node. And the way it works is it's going to require that I have the alpha channel for my object So if I wanted to have a little bit of a glow kind of on the edges of this like this thing has a light wrap on it. Then what I would need to do is first create a node that contains just that object and it. Well hey, we already have that don't we? Right here coming out of this pre-mold node we have exactly that. Interesting. Okay so what I want to do is I'm gonna set my a input for the light wrap to be that. And now the B input for the light wrap is gonna be whatever the background is. So the background for this could just be maybe the hue shifted sky . And if I look through that and I say generate wrap only and I turn the intensity up, there is my light wrap. It's that simple. And so then I could just put a merge node right here and just merge that light wrap right on top. And there you go. And I can disable it and enable it to show you what it's doing . And so you can see I just sort of took pieces that already existed, added this light wrap node and then merged it back on top of itself . And because everything is interconnected I can see how it's all connected. And I can adjust the light wrap settings if I want. If I want it to be less blurred, more intense. And there's some other options here too . And then because I have it kind of as its own layer, because I have it as its own layer I can also color correct it. So I could add , I don't know, let's add a grade node and let's push the white points so it's a little brighter. And then let's go into the gamma and let's push a little bit of that teal color into it. And then let's look at the total result. And so I can select both of these nodes and hit D to see with and without. And it's pretty cool. It's a little bit bright. So I may wanna come into my grade node and bring that white point up a little bit . Just like that. Cool. So now I've got my light wrap and I didn't really do much work to get it. And now everything you know the rest of this is just gonna be sort of the finishing touches . I might do an overall grade. I might do some other things . Actually let me show you. I have my example here opened. And if we go to the end I'll just kind of step through the other things I did . I did some extra color correction here and I added motion blur. There is a there's a node in Nuke. It works very much like real smart motion blur. And it can sort of read frames and add motion blur to them . I did some color correction . Here's our glow. And then vignette. Oh another thing I did I wanted to show you guys was you know the vignettes, let's see the vignette is right here. And another thing that might be cool is to have the vignette not only darken the edges but desaturate the edges a little bit. So I could add a saturation node here. And I could desaturate my image. Gotta look through it right? But of course I only want it to desaturate the edges. Well guess what I already have here this nice matte that I've created. So all I need to do is grab my mask input and connect it to this . And now it's only going to desaturate the edges. And what's great about this too is that if I decide I want my vignette to be different shape, I can change this. I need to go to the first frame so I don't accidentally set a keyframe. Let's say that I wanted the vignette to actually be a little bit a little bit bigger sort of around the edges I can do that. And it's going to update both the vignette grade and the saturation at the same time. And then what I love to do in Nuke too is I like to play with color because it's really fun and easy to just kind of paints swatches of color into your scene. So add that hue shift node. And also real quick I want you guys just to notice that you know as I said sort of in the beginning of this video now the comp is moving kind of in a straight line down this way. And so this is kind of the way a Nuke tree typically looks. So with my hue shift node I can just rotate the color. I gotta look through it or I won't see it . And I can just come find a nice color that was gonna kind of play off of that teal color. If I hit D that's kind of the teal color and that's gonna be the new color. And so what I'm gonna do is grab a Roto node and actually might be even easier to just copy and paste these. They're already set up. Gotta be careful. If you copy and paste while something is selected, it's gonna connect them and you may not want them connected. Cool. So now I can grab this Roto node and I need to tell the shape to not be inverted. And I'm just gonna move this kind of up here. Kind of like that . And I can you I can now just sort of shape this mask really easily to just give a nice wash of color over that part of the image. Pretty simple. And I may wanna blur it a little bit more. So that it's a really nice soft kind of transition between those two colors . And then let's say I wanted to do the same thing down here I could just copy and paste this whole set up. Just like that. And then look through this hue shift. Take this Roto node. Grab the shape and scale it down. Kind of upside down it like this . Move it over here. Maybe put it there. And then I want to maybe blur that a little bit less. And I wanna hue shift it differently. So let's crank the saturation up for a minute so we can really see what the color's doing to the floor. And let's just mess around with this. It might be neat to have kind of a warmer color. Like something like that. Yeah, kind of in there. And you can play with the brightness too. You can even use this kind of as a color correction tool. And then now I'm looking at that I want to blur a little bit more. One of the last things I did on the comp that I rendered for the preview at the beginning of this video was I put lens distortion on . This is a wide-angle lens in cinema 4D. So you're going to get some lens distortion. And there's a great lens distortion node in Nuke and then I also added a little bit of grain. Which is a good idea to do with any 3D renders so it doesn't look so perfect . There's a lot of presets here and I don't, you know, I typically don't want too much grain. So I find a preset doesn't have a ton of grain and I'll usually knock it down by about half. There we go. Cool . And now we are pretty much done with the tutorial. What I hope you all got out of this is that when you're compositing in After Effects, at least this happened to me, you can tend to limit yourself with how precise you are with your image. You might kind of self, you know, impose these limitations on yourself like oh I would love it if I could have a glow that was only right here . And a little bit less of a glow here . But in After Effects that's gonna take so many steps and so many pre-comps . And then once it's set up it's gonna be difficult to change and difficult to remember in a month when you have to go back and revise something. Whereas in a node-based compositor, not just Nuke but any node-based compositor, you get a much better visual representation of your comp. It's a lot easier to see the relationship between things and to see what masks are doing, what alpha channels are doing . So I hope that by watching this, maybe you're a little bit more intrigued by Nuke. Maybe you want to go download the demo and play around with it. Maybe you want to take a new class and try to understand a little more. But I really hope that I demystified a little bit and showed you some of the pros of using Nuke. Now it's not all you know sunshine. If you wanted to try and animate something in Nuke, you can but I wouldn't recommend it. It's not really designed to do motion graphics the way After Effects is But for compositing stuff like this it is brilliant. So thank you guys so much and that's all. Talk to you next time. Thank you guys so much. I hope you learn something and I hope maybe you're a little bit less afraid of Nuke than before you started this . And what I really want the take way to be is that Nuke can just be another tool in your tool belt. And one that's very very good at compositing and giving you a ton of control over your final image. So thank you guys. As always please join the mailing list if you haven't. Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter and I'll see you next time.
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Channel: School of Motion
Views: 98,216
Rating: 4.9362879 out of 5
Keywords: motion graphics, tutorial, Compositing, Nuke, After Effects, Composite, Project, File, Animation
Id: OgvswMcsrps
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 59min 18sec (3558 seconds)
Published: Wed Jun 28 2017
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