Compositing EXR passes & color correction in After Effects - VFX Plane Part 05

alright guys welcome back now we're going to finally start compositing our sequences we're also gonna hop back into Maya to fix some problems and then render out a couple more versions we're also going to be later on showing you how to do bloom so if that sounds interesting be sure to stick around for that otherwise so let's get started in After Effects alright so now that the rendering is done it is time to start compositing when you launch a perfects the first thing to do is double-click your project window and then go and select the sequences from your images folder and double click the first folder up here and then it doesn't really matter which file you select as long as openexr sequence is checked after effects will figure out that this entire collection is part of a sequence and then it will automatically import the entire sequence however since we have three of these there is a more efficient way to do this so I'm going to delete that if we open up the images folder in Windows Explorer select all three of these folders as long as there are any subfolders within these folders we can simply click and drag these into the images folder right so if we click on the first one here if you notice up in the data it says it's at 30fps but in Maya we worked at 24 FPS which is standard for visual effects let's right click go to interpret footage main and then we're going to assume a frame rate of 24 we also need to go up to color management and under interpret as linear light we need to force this to be on what this means is by default After Effects will only interpret a sequence as having linear light if it is a 32 bits per channel file now we rendered out a raw or linear image sequence but we only did it in a 16-bit per channel format so by default After Effects is not going to recognize that so we need to force it to be on and we can click OK and since we have three of these files we can save the settings from the first one we changed and apply it to the other ones to do that we right click over the first one go to interpret footage again remember interpretation then we select the other two right click again interpret footage apply interpretation now both of these will use the same settings I'm gonna grab this plain sequence here and click and drag it into this comp filmstrip icon what this does it makes a composition that is the same length as the sequence with the same size and frame rate let's magnify this by clicking this button down here and fit up to 100% this sequence is 200 frames but generally for visual effects you will put a slate on your first frame we need to increase the length of our composition by one frame now to do this we need to be viewing frames if you don't see a frame counter here and you only see timecode like this which is hours minutes seconds frames hold down the control key and select and this will switch it to frames next you can right-click over the title of the composition go to composition settings you can also do it in the project window and you can also do it in the menu appear composition settings or you can use the shortcut key control K so for the duration I'm just gonna change this to be 201 click OK we're going to increase the time navigator end so we can view the entire composition click page down on the keyboard to go forward one frame or you can just type it in here and with the layer selected click the left bracket key this will snap the layers a starting position to the position of the time navigator be the same thing with the exhaust and the sky layers drag these underneath and then again click the left bracket key make sure your sky is underneath your exhaust so right now we are looking at the master layer as if we were to render this from the frame buffer this is what it would look like if you could include the exhaust in with the master layer by default which we can't since this is using hardware 2.0 and the sky and the plane are using v-ray the advantage is now we can solo just the sky the exhaust and the plane and make adjustments to them separately now what we're looking at here is the beauty pass of the plane so this is what you would look at in the frame buffer it does not include AO does not include z-depth it includes all the other passes that we used so the very first thing that we need to do is separate this plane into all its separate passes but before we do that we are going to rename this one to be the plane beauty click enter on the keyboard and notice when I click enter this changes from source name to layer name layer name is whatever we rename the file source name is what the original file name is we're gonna duplicate this layer with ctrl D unsolo these now and the very first pass that we're going to add is the GI or global illumination layer so we're looking for an extractor effect so the extractor effect if you notice this as EXR they're all capitalized and this is a way of separating passes of a multi-channel DXR file so to do that we're going to select anywhere in this blank space go into layers and here we can see all the different passes that we specified in v-ray so we're going to start with g notice also that the RGB values are all changed to the GI equivalent so we have a GI for r g and b respectively click ok and now you will notice that this is looking very very dark so this is something that we need to do right at the very beginning but I just wanted to show you the result because sometimes it's not evident if you make these adjustments beforehand we need to set up our working space so click where it says 32 B PC this might say 8 or 16 for you select this this is an absolutely vital part of compositing you need to make sure you're using a linear workflow and you have set up the correct working space I need to move the project window down here so it could fit on the screen select where it says none and you want to go up here to srgb srgb is the standard working space for most computers and monitors at least for windows monitors so this is using a gamma of 2.2 and then we need to linearize the working space so by clicking linearize you'll notice that the color changes if you forget to linearize your working space and then you realize halfway through your project that you didn't do it you will have to recompose at nearly everything because the values are very different to view the same colors and values that we saw in maya we have to linearize so before we separate out all the passes go back up to this extractor and we need to unmold apply it if you notice on this edge here gets a little bit darker when we don't unmultiplied now the unmultiplied effect is a way of removing the background from areas of partial transparency or in this case it's just motion blur if I were to Solo this layer and select my transparency toggle and see that this area is a little bit transparent if we turn this off you'll notice that areas of the alpha channel that are not occupied by pixels by default will render as black and because this is black we get a really thin black edge around the plane sometimes it is not necessary to unmultiplied but quite often it is so it's safer just to check mark the box so right now we're going to duplicate these passes just go one by one change the extractor effect and change the past name so the next pass is going to be the lighting pass the lighting pass is going to be our direct illumination and the blending mode for lighting is going to be additive so we come up here to add one more thing before we continue if you do not see your blending modes here there might be a toggle switches so you can select this button to toggle between your switches which are these your modes which are your blending modes and track mats if you'd like to see them both on the same panel which I recommend right click on layer name kind of columns and then select switches and or modes whichever one is not selected and then both of them will be on one panel if you have a large enough monitor I highly recommend this it's far more efficient than having to click a button every time okay so next we can duplicate lighting rename the next one to be reflection this again is going to be additive specular which is also additive refraction which is additive and self illumination which is also additive next we have ambient occlusion or AO ambient occlusion is multiplied and lastly we have Z depth now for Z depth you'll notice that if you select Z the RGB values do not change this is because the Z depth channel contains no color information and it only contains a single channel to get any non color channel to work properly go into the each RGB Channel and select a channel name now Z depth is not composited with a blending mode so we're just going to set this to be normal and then we'll turn this layer off and use it later now we can unsolo all of these and have a look at the entire result but in your project folder just go ahead and make a new folder called comps now when you say version numbers you should always save the same version number as whatever the latest render that you did in Maya the latest render was version 2 so you should save your After Effects composition as version 2 as well this makes it much easier to go back and forth between projects and clients can use the version number to tell you what they like to what they didn't like and that same version number corresponds to a composition and also corresponds to a scene file and if you're using After Effects and Maya consistently going back and forth between them make sure you always have the same version number for the comp and the Maya scene and all your frames have the version number on them as well otherwise it's very easy to forget which version corresponds with which file and it can make your life hell - good try to figure that out especially weeks after you've worked on something in a client finally in response or something like that just go ahead and make sure these always are the same as your Maya scene file click OK let's set this to 1/2 resolution so this renders a little bit faster let's go to the very beginning and then just click the spacebar this will load in the sequence into your PCs rim and then it will play in real time now depending on the size and the length of your composition and how much RAM you have in your PC you may not be able to load in the entire shot this case we only have 200 frames so we can it will make it a little bit easier to check what we rendered all right so now this is loaded in the RAM what we can see that it is now playing at 24 yes and there are a few things right away that I noticed that need to be corrected so when you load in your sequence and you get everything composited the very first thing that you should check are all the being viewed correctly so when I was compositing mine all of them appeared to be correct none of the passes were black so a lot of students have this problem where their reflection and specular passes are completely black this generally indicates that in v-ray you've either have the amount set to zero you have a black map placed in the reflection Channel or you have a glossiness of one and if you have a glossiness of one with no HDR image and only one object that you're rendering is very difficult to get reflections to show up properly the same thing can happen with GI just go back through make sure you're using an HDR image or you have at least an environment setup you've placed your reflection maps in the correct channel your maps are not black and your amounts are not at zero those are the easiest things to fix that some of the most common mistakes that I see as far as the composition goes the nose of the plane gets very very close to the edge is almost touching so I want to fix that I want to pull this out a little bit more likewise the exhaust does not extend far enough back and then right at the very end here I'm noticing that the camera kind of does like hits a wall it just seems to stop at around frame 120 it just seems to hit and then just slide it's not very smooth so I want to go ahead and fix that as well also looking at the glass here the refraction looks a little bit too strong it's kind of warping the image behind it a little bit too much glass is not going to be that thick so we want to go back and correct that as well so I'm gonna go ahead and set up another render and then we can come back in composite right so in Maya the very first thing I mentioned was the camera not being zoomed out far enough so I want to go ahead and do that so we're gonna up verge in this file save it version 3 it's like the camera and then I'm just gonna pull out just a little bit I set this back to 200 also getting two keyframes here so and that's probably part of the problem pulled back out a little bit to have a closer inspection of these key frames we're gonna open up at the graph editor and yeah this is a problem here I don't like these key frames seem to have two key frames very close just gonna delete those move this off to the side here yeah that's that solves a problem one thing that I would like to do though take these key frames here so I'm just holding down the shift key and clicking and dragging over these key frames moving this over to frame 200 so this is looking a little bit better I think what I'd like to do though is around frame 160 I'm gonna take this plane and maybe it around frame 120 I'll set a keyframe got a frame 160 and then just pull up the wing let it bank a little bit and then by frame 200 it can go back just so we can maybe see just a little bit underneath the wing select the camera again at frame 160 I'll just lower the angle just a tad we're gonna have to zoom out a little bit more and it around frame 60 we're gonna pull the camera down just to get this more in frame another thing that I'd like to add is a little bit of camera shake in After Effects so pulling out this far will allow us to be able to crop back in after we add the camera shake so I'm pretty happy with this right now I think this will be okay next thing that we can do here is go into the exhaust and scale both of these exhaust objects back so the furthest out we I think we see is falling around here so as long as I clear the canvas we should be good pull these out and we're also going to have to go into the flare with the flare handle and take the high-bound back up maybe to around 3 otherwise it's going to bulge too soon something like that should be good one more thing I'd like to do is go into perspective you hear really fast so like the pilots head I'm just gonna add just a little bit of animation to this pilot makes it well make it feel a little bit more alive so maybe as the camera is coming down kind of glances up at the camera and looks back the other way it's a little bit of really subtle motion but it can look a little bit more realistic this guy he can he's not doing anything important right now you can just look up around here you can look back get this guy just a little bit more movement on his head you look a little bit more realistic there something just really subtle that's something I might we might notice in the final result okay I also mentioned the class had a little bit too much refraction on it so let's go into the canopy glass go down to the refraction IOR and for this we're going to turn on IPR and we're looking at some of the distortion around the edge here and one thing you can do with IPR is a little bit more convenient than rendering the entire thing we select this little icon up here turns on the region render then we can just click and drag a region that we'd like to focus on and it's not gonna waste time rendering anything else and I'll try a refraction of one point two that looks a little bit better we look at from some different angles yeah that looks a little bit more realistic turn off the region renderer gonna have a look at the overall lighting here and one other thing I'm noticing is I kind of want this screen left side of the plane to be a little bit brighter and this would just allow the plane to look a little bit more visually interesting in our composite so one thing I can do I could go into the HDR and make it a little bit brighter but perhaps what would be a little easier here is do just create a directional light and line it up with the Sun in the HDRI let's go up do you create lights directional light it's gonna rotate this around pull this up and just tilt this down a little bit turn IPR on again I don't want any of the light to brighten the screen right side of the plane so pull this up a little bit that's looking a little bit too bright so I'll go ahead and just drop that down to maybe 0.5 and if we compare this on/off on I think that's gonna help our composite just a little bit all right I don't think there was anything else that we needed to fix let's go ahead and just make sure this is set up properly again rares and label we need to update that to be 3/4 now we're gonna still leave the max render time pretty low and just go ahead and make sure that we are updating everything that we need to so in this case we did change the camera so all of our layers have to be rear-ended if we were only making changes to let's say the plane and we'd only have two rerender at the plane all right so while we're waiting for that new render to finish we can go ahead and start setting up our color correction and doing some other adjustments as well so the very first thing I want to do is some color correction so I'm going to select this top layer up here right click at the bottom go to new adjustment layer type in color correction and I mentioned earlier that in v-ray there was a way to transfer the color information from the frame buffer into a prefix I want to show that really fast here I'll go back to being angle like this and do a proper render I'll turn on my image adjustments and we had this curves effect on here which is making everything a bit brighter we also have things like the white balance which will be color temperature who can make the image warmer so let's say I was really pleased with the color of this and I wanted to save this exact color correction and I wanted to use this same color correction inside of After Effects you go up here to Global's click Save we'll just save this in comps I'll call this plane version 3 and we're looking for a LUT file so in after-effects you can add an effect called the fly color LUT and what this does it is a lookup table which will use the same values in color correction in v-ray and across other platforms as well it is a common format for transferring color information quite often clients will send you this yet they have a color that they are happy with and they want all the artists to be using the exact color correction so that is how you apply a lot I'm not actually going to use one in this case I'm going to do my color correction manually I'm going to turn this off and add a curves effect so with curves what I want to do here is I want to make the highlights and mid-tones just a bit brighter and then I'm gonna darken the shadows to add a bit more contrast something more like this I'm gonna go into the red Channel and pull out a little bit of red from the shadows then I'm gonna allow the Reds and the highlights to creep back into their original values which is this straight line here no just toggling between this we've made the clouds a little bit more blue we've pulled out some of that red we've added a little bit more contrast next I'm going to add a luma tree color effect now the Illuma tree color gives us a lot of adjustments all in one effect which is nice and it is the only way inside of After Effects to change the color temperature without using a photo filter so I'm gonna turn on high dynamic range and then in the temperature gauge we can just increase the temperature you know a value of around 90 and make it look a little bit warmer like it's sunset unfortunately these values are not in Kelvin which normally color temperature is in Kelvin but the higher the number the warmer the image in this case we also have a lot of options for highlights and shadows without for example if we wanted to boost the shadows a little bit because they are looking slightly dark we could view a value of around 30 now all of these adjustments you can use in curves but it gets a little bit more complicated so it is nice sometimes to be able to have just highlights or just shadow control next we can also add some contrast here without having to use an additional curves it be something at around 40 would be a good value now one thing that we do have to be careful with when adding contrast and brightness especially is clipping now clipping is when the value of a pixel exceeds the working space so in this case this is going beyond 8-bit and my monitor can no longer display these values properly I'm just using a standard 8-bit monitor and any value appear these are floating point values so one represents the limit of an 8-bit working space to any value that goes beyond means that the value cannot be displayed properly and there's no subtle gradient between higher-level values anything at one that's the highest it can go so if there's pixels that are even brighter than that it's just going to stop at one if I were to add another curves effect here to really extend you eight this effect you'll notice a really harsh line that appears so this looks quite poor it's something that you always want to avoid we're going to just delete this curves that was just as an example and we're going to either lower our brightness of the curves or we can use another effect called the HDR highlight compression so the HDR highlight compression is a way of tone mapping high dynamic range values to low dynamic range values or HDR to ldr so in this case what it does it tries to make sure there's nothing that's going to clip which it does but it makes the image look very gray there are tone mappers I work a lot better than this but if we lock this off it may be a value of around 30 I might just lower this brightness of the curves a little bit here and you want to make sure there's no valleys getting above one so this looks pretty good now we go into full resolution here and have a look at these pilots visors you can see there's some highlights on them that are clipping they're getting really really bright so because we have this refraction pass on a separate layer we don't need to fix our overall color correction to simply fix these pixels instead what we can do is go down to our refraction layer and solo this layer and apply an HDR highlight compression on it this is going to be much dimmer and go back so underneath our color correction we can add an additional adjustment layer and call this vignette places underneath our color correction and there is an effect called vignette just drag this on and for now we'll just leave the default values basically this is going to help pull our eye into the shot a little bit more one other thing that I'm noticing here with the contrast of the intakes they're looking very very dark so if we mouse over these intakes we're getting a values of zero zero zero in the upper right hand corner it's not just bright valleys that can clip is also dark values and here we're definitely getting clipping so let's go back to our color correction layer and on this curves effect we'll zoom in on our curves hold us up very slightly you do have to be careful with it go to high so we're gonna zoom in a little bit more here and just lift this up very slightly then we can zoom back out so these valleys are no longer clipped so the next thing we're gonna do is is make the exhaust so we already have a mat for the exhaust which is fine go rename this layer to be exhaust mat and underneath the exhaust mat we're gonna grab an adjustment layer let's call this exhaust now on the exhaust layer we're gonna change the track mat to be alpha exhaust is going to disappear but that's just because we're using a track mat and there's nothing on this adjustment layer yet to make this show up we're just gonna grab a curves effect and then just darken down the value something something around there will be good we can also add some heat distortion with a turbulent displace effect you can set the amount to be 100 and the size to be five flex 'ti maybe around 3d you'll notice that it is kind of wobbling the clouds a little bit hold down alt and click on the stopwatch next to evolution and type in time multiply it by a thousand so this is going to allow it to constantly wobble this looks really really strong right now don't worry it'll look okay in a moment we can either adjust the curves values or we can go and click T and then just lower the opacity so we're going to just increase these curves a little bit make it not quite so dark we could also add a fractal noise pattern over the top of this you can change the blending mode to be multiplied the noise type we could say dynamic go into the transform and then just reduce the scale quite a bit and we can also do the same thing with evolution I've been time asterisk and then maybe something like 2000 because this does not track with the plane this is kind of everywhere over the entire comp we wanted to move around quite a bit and then we could even lower the opacity of this so it's not quite so strong we want it to be fairly subtle we just want an essence of it being there I think this will look pretty good I will have to just see it rendered before I can make those judgments alright guys thank you so much for watching be sure to stick around for the next part of this tutorial we continue compositing this shot alright guys so if you learned something drop a like if you have any questions post a comment otherwise I'll see you in the next video peace

Channel: CGStirk

Views: 23,697

Keywords: visual effects tutorial, after effects tutorial, animation, composite passes, composite EXR, EXR passes, Maya passes rendering, vray render passes tutorial, vfx after effects, vfx tutorial, maya vray

Id: YqER0xcIEIg

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2020