Blender Tutorial: Getting Bloom+Transparency in Blender (Eevee and Cycles)+ Export To .png

have you ever wondered if you could use the bloom effect outside of blender if so you may find yourself wondering how oh that's easy just go to render settings scroll down to film and set the world to be transparent render it out and it's gone it's completely gone well i guess uh google should have an answer am i going to have to deal with this problem with every single video i make let's just ignore what you saw there that none of that happened yes that's that's way better yeah you know you didn't see any of this none of this happened now where was i right a while back i wanted bloom with transparency but i had no clue where to start so i turned to google however the only thing i found was that nobody really knows anything about this which is surprising considering how many people are into photoshop and all of that stuff you would think that maybe someone somewhere would have the answer i mean this shouldn't be just blender specific but if you look it up it kind of is if you have a brain you should be able to tell that no bloom is not just blender specific it's all over the place it's an unreal engine it's in random pictures it's in the real world and yet if you want to composite it over another image you look it up and all you get is blender which i'm not saying there's anything wrong with that blender is awesome but wouldn't it be nice to be able to just composite it in your own program somewhere else without even using blender i mean is that not the entire goal of having bloom with transparency being able to export it and use it somewhere else upon googling it you'll find that many people have actually come up with a fix for this but let's be honest here their greatest and only solution is a polished turret at best so i decided to jump into blender and do my own thing for days i found nothing and of course me being me i wasn't about to accept such a cheap workaround so since there wasn't really an answer i ended up just calling it and giving up that was about a year ago more recently i took it upon myself to learn some better 2d skills so i could make nicer thumbnails i wanted to have my logo with bloom and transparency in the corner of this thumbnail i was making for the first part of my data transfer modifier video however my logo just so happens to be a 2d icon containing bloom that i made in blender which is the exact same issue i was facing before so i turned back to google and spent hours searching the internet yet again it's obvious that there's still no answer so i decided to take this into my own hands and find a way to get it working needless to say it didn't take me long i decided to do some testing with the default cube because the default cube is already here in blender i rotated it by 45 degrees changed the camera angle and started setting up emissive colors on the three visible sides i went into rendered view and turned the world color down to black so i could see the bloom better suddenly a light bulb blew up in my head i cracked the code the answer is right there can you see it no okay i'm going to put this to the side for now so i can explain myself because guess what i found out everyone has been doing it wrong this entire time if you look it up everybody is using a node called alpha over sometimes in conjunction with making blender run a bloom pass separately and if they aren't using the alpha over method they turn to some other method with the exact same effect except for this guy he just decided to blur a cube and call it good and then spam everyone with it because yeah why not when you try any one of these methods you'll notice a few things first there will be darkening around the edges of your images where you've faded the bloom in secondly the colors will be totally off and third now that you've got bloom with transparency there's something else that just doesn't look right you don't know exactly what it is but something else is definitely wrong you just can't quite put your finger on it the whole thing has been reduced to what looks like some sort of cheap android graphics if i set it up to look a certain way i want to keep that look so i will not accept this as a working method and honestly it shouldn't be accepted by you either there is apparently another method that works though save as open exr emissive light is still there to make it visible just add some background oh really of course it's still there how could i be so blind no it's not there and you didn't even bother with checking before posting this as if it was the answer while it is still there in the render passes in blender it however is not there once you save it png open exr or anything else for that matter i put links to all of these threads and videos in the description if you want to take a look at them the answers are all the same you'd think they looked it up read one thread and piggybacked off that for their answer so let me just get this whole idea that you can even have bloom with transparency out of the way because the fact is that bloom cannot be stored if there is transparency let me explain a few things starting with true bloom see real bloom always has a shifted hue to it unless the value is spot on with red yellow green cyan blue or magenta any time you divulge from any one of these colors the hue of the bloom will shift ahead closer to the true color ahead of the real value that you've set and all of the fixes that i've tested completely get rid of this excluding this one which almost gets rid of the effect that's the one i've been using as an example reason being it's literally the best option if i put the best up against my work around then it just makes it all that much worse whenever i put their worse up against it so here see if you don't go god oh whoa now going back to a minute ago you remember i said that you cannot have bloom with transparency so tell me how can i have this cube floating on screen with a perfect bloom effect and working hue shift this has been exported to png and i'm using it in davinci resolve so how am i doing it did i just use the alpha over method and change the hue manually what for every frame no i did something completely different if you look into the render passes you can see that there is no transparency in the background and if you look into the transparency layer you'll see that there is no bloom there so what's the fix well we just have to fix the transparency no that's wrong because by trying to fix the transparency all you're doing is fading in black behind the bloom so the bloom can show and by doing this you won't get the colors or the look you're after this is not a bug or a fly in blender like people are saying i'm assuming it's been a bug or a glitch with evie for the longest time this is a given in any program but the reason behind it is so simple it's shocking that nobody has figured it out yet allow me to explain this in great detail as we know bloom becomes most visible when we set the world color to black but why is it disappearing when it's set to white looking at most of the fixes you can see that they are fading black in behind the bloom making the bloom visible even on a white background but real bloom will never look this way everyone's work around methods are actually really close to the real bloom but this has a very specific look to it it appears to be lighting everything around it so what this is telling me is that the bloom effect is actually being applied with a completely different method than just being slapped there with an alpha channel bloom is not added with transparency and everybody saying that just has it all wrong now about white making the bloom disappear the only time i have ever seen this is when you're using a compositing mode more specifically this mode is known as add or additive this isn't some hidden feature that's untouchable either you can find it in the mix node you can find it in modifiers hell you can even find it outside of blender it's everywhere it's in every single 2d program that supports layering it's in davinci resolve it's an unreal engine it's in obs studios though obs studios isn't that good at it it's in many many more programs as well okay so it's everywhere but how exactly does it work to explain this i'm going to leave blender and go to a small program that i use all the time called medibang paint pro okay so the add mixing mode is used to add values to an image within its own layer an image being used for the effect would be set to that mode affecting the image in the layer below what makes the add mode so cool is that the add mode will never darken an image it will only ever brighten an image but there's more to it than that as an easy way to explain this i'll fill the picture in with black now i'll add a new layer and change my color value up just slightly scribbling on this you can see that because i have chosen a brighter color it is indeed now brighter okay now let me do another layer and scribble around now i'll add in another layer and scribble even more okay so you can see that it looks pretty much like we'd expect all four of these layers are separated with the top layer being on top of the other ones but there's nothing really special going on here so what if i set one of these layers to add nothing happened let me go ahead and just do it with the next layer now we have a little bit of brightening so what if i do it to the next layer huh okay so here's the thing with add it will take any value that is not zero and or pure black and add that onto the value that currently exists on the image below make sense let me try to explain this a little bit better the layers that are set to add are taking anything brighter than zero or pure black then if it contains values that are brighter than black it adds that value onto the values in the image below in this case it will double the brightness with every layer the first layer did nothing and that makes sense because the value that it's adding is no different than the value that i chose which is no different than the value it would be if i never set it to add notice that the others are only adding to the lines and not to the original image also notice that when i change the original image's brightness the amount added on is the same as the difference in the value from black that i chose i chose to make it this much brighter and it's adding exactly that much more on this gets interesting when you use colors okay so enough with this little explanation what does this have to do with our bloom remember earlier as we go to white the bloom disappears we lose it because there is nothing more there to add anything to white is as high as any of the values go and i know this sounds trivial but i also know that some of you don't know this so the more info the better so how would we go about exporting this from blender and using it it's actually easier than you might think to do this you need to get an object that has bloom obviously now you need to set the world background to be black and then render it out without using transparency save it as whatever you want then we need to render it out again but this time we need to check transparency on now as you probably know before coming to this video it is displaying the bloom but it's actually not there once you export so go ahead and just export this anyway we're going to need it for later i don't know if you can see what i'm getting at here but i'm going to go ahead and drag the one without bloom into medibang then i'm going to drag the one that has no transparency and the bloom in as another layer now set the layer containing the bloom to add and you'll see that it gets brighter but you'll also notice that we don't have any transparency that's because you actually have to have data below the layer for it to add to it actually conflicts with transparency as you can see so just for a quick simple picture i'm going to open blender and take a screenshot now i'm just going to go back to medibang hit ctrl v to paste pull it down below the other layers now there's one more thing we have to do we need to make the layer that has the transparency completely black i could have done this back in blender but i knew that medibang was able to do this as well so i'm just going to go to filters hue and change the brightness all the way down and there we go there is the bloom right there working perfectly and looking better than any method anybody has ever posted on the internet you thought this video was done oh no the title of this video does say eevee and cycles so how do you do it with cycles easy it's the exact same setup i already showed you except cycles uses the glare node with the settings set to fog glow another thing that you can do to push this even further is to actually render with transparency i know it sounds a little bit counter-intuitive but hear me out i've got something pretty cool to show you if i add the glare node and set it up properly to where it's giving us a nice amount of bloom then add a mix node set it to add plug the image into the second slot after running it through the glare node of course and set the first color to black what do we get what this is doing is adding the values including the bloom to a black image giving us exactly the same result as if we set the world color to black this allows for us to do two things one is that it lets us use an hdri to cast light onto our model but we're still keeping the background black so it can still be set up in another program without being bothered by the hdri because if the hdri was there in the background you would be seeing it later on whenever you set your image to additive so that's cool but another thing that we can do is kill two birds with one stone i'm going to duplicate my mix node then i'm going to pull off of the original image then plug that into the first slot instead of the second now i'm going to change the mode from add to multiply and set the second color to be completely black what this will do is exactly what we were doing before outputting a completely black image with transparency now we can add a file output node and over here in the options we can add another input so that means that we can output both versions of the image that we need for what we're doing at the same exact time while it's rendering then when it's done rendering you can just select all of one version rename it to whatever you want move it somewhere for safe keeping and then you can just do whatever you want with it one of my favorite uses for this is in davinci resolve you can actually render the images here in blender and then export them to davinci resolve as an image sequence meaning i can have effects like this or this or this now hit that like button god damn it you

Channel: Game Abuse Studios

Views: 8,980

Keywords: Blender, Krita, Medibang

Id: tmb5HRU1cUo

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021