Blender 2.8 Render Passes and VERY Basic Compositing [Old School but Beginner Friendly]

hey this is keV in this video I'm gonna show you how to render out separate objects from blender so you can bring them into Photoshop or After Effects or new core blender and operate on them separately and I'm gonna show you how to write out render passes so that we can composite something like the spaceship into a video and we're gonna do a really basic basic rundown of this and there's a lot more and if this video is successful and you guys like it let me know in the comments and I will do a lot more of these and show you guys you know different compositing things and you know cool things to do with this this type of thing but a lot of my videos I've told you guys that I prefer to render out in passes so here's how I go about doing it in blender 2.8 let's go so this seam right here is very simple it's a spaceship I modeled kind of a crappy little thing I did in like five minutes this the cameras over here I have a son in the scene I have this backdrop which is a movie which is just file import images as planes and if that's not available to you just go edit preferences go to add-ons ok go here type in image whatever images as planes turn that on and then you get it and I just went and found the movie file set it up and that's it right so here's where we begin if I have a backdrop and I have my mother ship ok ship and I render this ok render image I get this ok I go to view layer and here it is both together right if I want to render this alone but you'd think ok I'll just go here and turn off you know hide in viewport whatever turn that off hit render and it should go right wrong it doesn't okay so here's a quick way to do this we're gonna use collections alright collections here if I hit new collection up here collection to I can now take my la video and bring it into collection too and now if I turn off that collection inside this view layer right turn off that collection I go to render render image and there we go so showing the composite I'm gonna hit view layer and there it is alone by itself all by myself right so here it is color here's alpha if I go alpha there's the Alpha right z-buffer not showing much but alpha here it is so if you save this out as a PNG with an alpha RGBA you'll get this and you can bring just this into Photoshop and put it over whatever you want so there's a really quick way of doing it now you'll get this naturally if you have nothing else in your scene and no back trap and no background enough or anything in there but that's how you go ahead and do this that's a really quick way of settling you know of organizing your scenes so that you can turn things on and off and a cool thing is we have these view layers here where if you make a new view layer like view layer 0:01 or you can name it whatever you want now everything is turned back on and this is view layer one and you can switch to view layer where that's turned off in this view layer so that's another way but that's more for another another topic another so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to delete view layer one I don't need it and I'm just gonna stick with regular view layer so now we can go ahead and start rendering this out for passes and the reason we do that is so we have ultimate control over this in our compositing package and the one we're going to use the compositing package we're gonna use this blender because well you know this is all about blender so we're gonna use that so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna go over to compositing and we're gonna start writing this out so that we can get all of these different passes now to do that I'm gonna disconnect render layers here I'm going to disconnect that from composite and I'm going to go ahead and turn on a few things now if we use Eevee and you want a different render passes and Eevee these are the passes you have see right here we're in Eevee okay we just go to this context view layer thing and we have these passes alright so you can turn on mist you can turn on ambient occlusion and you'll get these as separate passes but for this video I'm actually going to go ahead and use cycles because it gives us a lot more to work with so if I go here to render and I turn this render engine here two cycles and I go back over here we a whole lot more see we have all this stuff so on my ship I have a metal shader so there's no diffuse at all on my ship so I don't have to concern myself with this diffuse but I do have to concern myself with glossy so what I'm going to do here is I'm just gonna turn on direct glossy direct glossy indirect and glossy color now I'm not really gonna use these in this video but this is how we're gonna put this together so I'm going to show you how to put this back together once we separate it out and I'm gonna turn on I want ambient occlusion don't really want shadow here I do want Z Depp and I do want mist okay I want those on normal is really cool in that you can relight it in comp but I'm not going to deaths way more advanced and I want this video to be and a whole lot of this vector you can use this for motion blur post-processing which is really cool but so more advanced people if you want to use those turn those on and you'll get some really good results same with UV and a whole bunch of other things material ID that's very similar to crypto matte and crypto mats awesome too but we're gonna go I'm gonna do a video on crypto matte as well but that's a little more advanced for this so ambient occlusion we have that we have this that's probably pretty good okay so now we have to do is how do we write this out as a file because if we just plug image into composite and render it it's just it's not going to give us any of this stuff so here's what we do we go to add we go to output and we go to file output and now I can plug image into image and that's great but this is still only going to give us image okay it's just going to give us this without any of this so here's what we do we go to file output we go to item and under properties here if you don't see it hit properties here's our base path where we're gonna tell it to save and here's our add input right now we have image that's this this is this so this little add input means we can add another slot which we're gonna call alpha so I go here and I rename this alpha and there it is so I can plug alpha into alpha and now it'll write out the Alpha Channel which we're going to need so that's really useful so that I can go add input I can go depth and there it is depth to depth and don't worry that this is grayed out and this is a yellow thing it's it's fine for this okay so I'm going to go ahead and do that for all of these and then come back okay I'm back but I want you to see something before I go ahead and painfully do all of this right now we're on openexr that is not gonna that's gonna save all these out of separate images I want to save these all as one image so you're gonna run into this problem if you don't heed my warning here change this first open the XR multi layer I'm going to use that for this that's going to put all of these inside one EXR file and keep everything nice and tight so I'm gonna do that and watch what happens all of that now changes back to this okay so you want to set this first then go name this kind of an annoying thing but do that or you're gonna get this and it's gonna make your day kind of suck so now I'm going to go ahead and pause the video and I'm gonna rename all these things okay so now I'm back this is correct this is correct everything here is fine all renamed and all connected perfect now we just have to tell it where we want to save it so path this is path path same thing you just hit this button okay and go to your temp file I just created a folder called UFO video and we're just going to call this a UFO point number number number number point II X R and these number number number number it's gonna go ooo 100 200 3 and iterate so you want to put those in there and then hit accept and then an annoying feature that to get this to render you can you you would think you just go here and then you hit this render active scene but that's just going to give you one image so what we need to do now at the time of this video is we go over here to output and temp I'm gonna tell it to go to the same folder ok this UFO video folder I'm gonna create a new folder inside here I'm gonna call it junk because I'm going to throw it out later go into junk call this junk point pound pound pound pound point PNG or whatever and hit accept so now we're having his junk thing render oops that was set there so set it to PNG and whatever doesn't matter because I'm gonna throw this stuff out there's probably a way a better way to do this and I'm sure somebody in the comments will tell me the better way to do this but right now this works and it will render your whole animation so when you hit render now and you say render animation it's going to render that whole series of stuff so I'm gonna hit render it's going to go through here it's gonna take a while I'm gonna have to pause the video and come back when it's all rendered and we're back so now we're gonna load that into the composite so we don't have to get rid of this we just have to select this and hit M on the keyboard to mute it and I'm gonna pull it way out of the way and now I'm going to concern myself with our composite node so I'm going to load in the images that we rendered I'm gonna go add input I'm gonna say image sequence and I'm gonna go to my UFO did folder which some of you will see that it's not UFO because I didn't actually want to wait like two hours for this thing to render so I just went ahead and did this before the video and I'm just gonna hit this so you'll see like all of your frames in here so I'm just gonna hit this okay the first one and I'm just going to see this one says PNG sequence not junk but it's same thing I'm gonna hit import image sequence drop it here it is and you see that this EXR file that we load it in is two hundred and forty of them steady frames 240 worth of them because that's how what we had on a timeline and it gives me all of this information so now what you can do is you can with this selected you can hit ctrl shift left click and that throws in a viewer node you don't have to use the shortcut you can go add okay input and or output and you can say viewer and then hook it up and that's hooked up to depth but I don't want that so I'm going to replace that with image and you'll see here is our our render and you see it's 240 frames of this thing revolving over well not over LA because it's over nothing now but we're gonna add that in now so we're gonna add in la so let's do that so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do ad this time I'm going to say input I'm gonna say movie clip I'm gonna go find the movie clip on my hard drive so here's the movie clip and I'm gonna hit open and go and then I'll come back when it's loaded okay so I loaded my movie clip in and you can see if I change that to viewer there's my movie clip so yeah now we need to do is we need to start our composite so I'm gonna pull the composite out of the way and go to viewer here I can actually move this into frame I can shrink it a little bit this is a really cool feature of 2.8 and throw it in there and you can see the whole thing so now let's go ahead and composite this so the first thing I'm going to do is I want this to be I want the UFO to be over the movie clip so to do that I go ad I'm going to say color and for this I'll just use alpha over plug that in here and whatever is in the foreground is going to be on top or where it is in the background is background on top foreground on the bottom okay it's it's reversed so watch this I go I go image okay foreground and now you see that our ship nicely rendered is sitting over Los Angeles however it's a lot smaller than it was when we saw it last so being that my iPhone shoots at 1080 and I rendered this at 720 we have a discrepancy so here's how you fix that I'll go add distort scale I dropped that on the movie clip noodle and for this it's set it relative I'm gonna go ahead and just say render size okay and that shrinks it down and puts it to the render size that we're rendering at so everything is working now it's gonna be 720 and I did 720 just so it renders faster because I didn't feel like waiting for 1080 but there we go alright so now what we do is that's that's great we have a nice comp it's all set up but why did we even bother using this stuff well the reason I use this stuff we could just go with this and that's fine but if you want to break it out and have even more control you want these kind of things and we're gonna set it up like blender does so how does blender use these images well over here I had called in a screenshot of the blender manual and you can see here that it shows you how to put the image back together again so this is what blender render does when it composites and it takes all this data and throws it into your one image so what we're doing by breaking it out into these passes is we're just separating it so that we can play with with these things and we dictate how they work and blender doesn't so we didn't use diffuse direct if you have anything that does not metallic in your scene you want to use this okay so diffuse direct I did not all I had was that metal spaceship so I just use gloss direct gloss indirect and gloss color I have nothing no glass but if you use glass you can use this as well I didn't choose a mission or environment but that's how it works - and these little pluses and little X's the pluses addition the X is multiplication so you see we're gonna we're gonna add gloss direct and gloss indirect together and then we're gonna feed it into gloss color and multiply it there and then put it into combine that was a lot I said a lot a lot of words here is how it works let's go back to composite and I'll show you I'm gonna add color mix and we're gonna use these mix things for almost everything here we want to add gloss direct and gloss indirect together so let's change this to add okay if you look at here you have all these like Photoshop options here right all these different blend modes use add I'm gonna say add gloss direct and gloss indirect together we're adding these together I don't know if it really matters what's foreground was background I mean I haven't seen a difference personally so I don't I don't know but that's how we add that together okay then I'm just gonna chip D to duplicate this add I can change this to multiply and I'm gonna hit multiply and now I'm gonna take these guys as the foreground record round is on the bottom sorry foreground is on the bottom background is on the top and now these are multiplied over each other and if I feed this into the viewer here which I think I'm going to do now I'll feed this into the viewer and show you that this is now put back together again if I mute one of these you'll see that it's just this information so you're multiplying this color over this indirect and direct and you're getting this alright so in this case it doesn't really matter but this is how you put it back together so now let's continue on with our composite all right I'm going to take this guy and I'm going to throw him into here take this put it in here and now we have this guy coming in here alpha over into here problem is this is black this stuff is not necessarily carrying the Alpha that's why we wrote out an alpha and I did that purposely because sometimes when you render more of these you'll actually get the Alpha but right now we're not and if you run into this problem here's how you fix it okay we want it we want to set the alpha for this image okay so this glossiness all this stuff doesn't necessarily have that alpha coming through here's a quick way to do it I'm going to add go to converter set alpha and in here we're gonna plug that drop that in and now watch this we take the alpha that we rode out okay remember we wrote this to the exe file in that file out node before we take that we plug it into alpha and now it's using the alphas and now it's forcing that alpha from here into this and we have a nice composite and we can go ahead and we can play with any of these things here and affect the look of this of this ship so now that we have this set up let's go ahead and start blending it so this is what you would get just in camera and it's kind of nice I mean I set up with this I had an HDR wrapping around the scene so it's giving kind of this reflection map here but it's not quite blending in and we want it to blend in more so let's go ahead and do that and we're gonna use this mist all right so this mist is really really awesome this is what the mist is I'm gonna plug this into viewer so you can see it it's a z-depth pass and so anything farther away is lighter and anything closer is darker so we can use that to our advantage to really make it blend into the sky and look like it's actually sitting in the atmosphere instead of just on top of our image get it cool all right so let's do that so let's plug this back in and I'll show you how to use that it's a little bit tricky but it's it's fun so we're gonna do is we're gonna go here right before our set alpha I'm gonna hit shift D duplicate this throw it in here now I'm gonna say mix and now this is mixing this white image with the whole image so it's basically like taking this and mixing it together see here's no mix and here's mixing with white we don't really want that we want it to be controlled and here's how we use the control we're gonna go add let's say vector map value and I can put that out here so you can see and the value here is going to control the factor and then the mist is going to control the map value and now you see the darker areas are more you know less fog and the lighter areas are more fog and you see that it's it's kind of multiplied over the whole thing or it's added or whatever over the whole thing right we don't want that so we just go to alpha over and we change pre-multiply to 1 and that goes away and now you see whoa that's kind of crazy right we don't we don't really like that that's that's not cool because it's using the white let me let me zoom in here it's using the white of this so what we can do is we can go ahead click in this white get the eyedropper and go to our sky and just grab and now it looks like it's sitting in the sky sort of so then we can just go and play with the strength so the size of the map value here we just set 0 nothing we start stepping it up a little bit and it starts sitting in the sky a little bit more and you can go ahead and play with more of this you can add in a ramp node over here you can tweak this really really like push it and I'm gonna leave it as is for now because I want this video to end at some point but that's how you would go about doing that so now I know a lot of you guys like the bloom effect of Eevee so we have something in cycles that we can use that's very similar so I'll go ahead you know I could do it even after this that's fine no no add filter glare and if I throw the glare in here ooh look at that I mean I could glare on my spaceship right that's kind of fun it set the streaks but we have a lot of cool things we can use here streaks we have ghosts we have fog glow which I'm going to actually use and we have simple star I found that fog glow is the closest to bloom so I'll use that and we have a different threshold we have the size okay it goes down from 6 to like 8 and it just gives kind of a glow on that and we can mix it okay mix it take it down a bit so it's not so crazy but that's kind of like adding your bloom effect to the higher the highlights of yours of your scene and we don't read too much of it but you know it's fun to put in there so it's in the sunlight we can add it more if we want and it just gives it that kind of glow cool effect and then you can turn it from low to high and it'll just be better and last we now can go ahead and I can use ambient occlusion if I want just to darken it a bit and I'll do that before so you see how I'm kind of thinking about this okay there's like an infinite infinite combinations you can do when you start compositing like if you just render this out against the video great and but you're locked into only the last stage of the compositing which is tweaking the actual overall look but here let's you get in inside and actually play with different things so what I'll do here is I'll use the ambient occlusion pass and I'm gonna multiply it in here so I'm just gonna duplicate one of these multiply nodes throw it in here and remember foreground is is the bottom so I'll go ambient occlusion here and it darkens these cavities so we don't need that much but it's cool to have as a control and you can play around with it and there's your ambient occlusion now lastly we can go ahead and Michael Bay if I this if we want and add in an overall color correction in here right so this is really cool you can go add color color balance you get this like hue saturation thing lift gamma gain put that in and we can like quickly Michael Bay Fi it if we want I'm not a huge fan of this look but you know it seems to work pretty well for a lot of people so let's go ahead and we'll take the we'll take the take the gamma and throw it more and kind of like into like the blue area and I'll take the the warmth in the highlights and just kind of Michael Bay Fi it I don't even know that than adjectives it's just kind of funny alright so there we go and it you know if you want that look this is how but you can go ahead and control the look the overall look of your entire composite right here and you can add you know anything else you want after this and when we're ready to render it out we can just go over here take image up to composite and now here's where that remember we wrote the junk out we can tell it to render in here so if I want a movie say I can go file ffmpeg video if I want I can go encoding h.264 and I can tell it where to save it and that's good that's good that's all set that's set this is off you want to make sure that this is still muted that's good and you can render it out now render animation and you'll see renders pretty fast with all your changes so I'm gonna pause the video and come back and we'll take a look at it and see if it's any good and then we'll wrap it down wrap it up and we're back and here's our video so yeah you know it's really fast obviously it's like a lot more we can do with this you know color grading you could have shot this video better you know a million dollar plate superflat whatever done a lot more to this color you know crush the blacks whatever I mean you can you can go on and on and on but this is the basics of how to do this in this very very basic overview of a video so hopefully you learned something in this video and you can go and use it and you don't have to do a spaceship over LA it could be anything this could be any scene that you create but you can break it out and put together the composite like that and have a lot more control over your final image then you can just rendering it out of the camera so hopefully that helps and if you want me to do more of these let me know in the comments and I will gladly gladly do more if you have questions let me know and yeah I'll see you in the next video thanks bye

Channel: Kev Binge

Views: 97,165

Keywords: blender compositing for beginners, blender compositing, blender tutorial, blender animation, blender 2.8 render passes, blender 2.8, blender 2.8 render layers, blender enviornment, blender easy, ian hubert, blender cycles, blender 3d, b3d, blender guru, intro to blender, cg geek, cg cookie

Id: Sdaj9Y_1mOY

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 22 2019