Compositing EXR Scene Breakdown - Memory of a Stolen Car

hello i'm jeff webb and today we're going to cover a shot that was in my latest personal project memory of a stolen car i had a comment that said hey i love the compositing on this so i wanted to jump in and just show you a rough idea of how i did this so i'm going to stop playing that i'm in after effects here i have my denoised main shot and everything else composited on top so i really want to start with how i got it out of cinema 4d so i'm going to jump over to cinema 4d and i started working in octane and cinema 4d around the same time and i just sort of used this great tutorial to try and get a little bit more of an understanding of these exr workflows i ended up coming across this and it was really insightful so thank you silver wing i'll link to this but basically i wanted to show you how i did this so here's my scene in cinema 4d i have the shot over here and this is the octane view i'm in r19 i have the live viewer from v4 0.05 r7 that's just sort of what i had at the time this project took a while to complete outside of my job responsibilities i was doing this in my personal time so that's what i was using things have changed quite a bit i'm sure between the newest version of octane but if you have this version or if you're using r19 or whatever i'm just going to walk through what that is so i have the denoised passes here i have my main pass denoised beauty noise pass defuse direct pass denoise diffuse indirect denoise reflection direct denoise reflection indirect denoised emission denoise remainder and post post processing is really nice because when you get into your composite it's really something that you don't have to fake with after effects or anything it just looks really nice once you get it into the comp so if i'm looking at my denoise main i'm gonna let it go there it says five minutes but hopefully it won't take all that long i have all my octane settings here so i'll run through those i generally used path tracing on here and this is what i had set up this adaptive sampling is really really great it kills a lot of the noise this is just sort of how i had it set up so you can pause that if you want and check it out but i'm going to keep running through here so for camera imager that's more or less like the global change i use the response gamma and lut or lut and the response is linear and then gamma was 2.2 so i just set these to taste because you know the hot pixel removal in some shots is different than the others so this is a really nice global way to change everything you have that flexibility in your cameras as well and i have my cameras here let's see so over here we have camera imager and if you enable that you have all those settings but that's generally not where i'm enabling any of that this is just one shot this is the tunnel shot i'm setting my camera imager here and then one and done these are just tests or different things that i had so if i go through again enable denoising is super helpful it's been a lifesaver in octane and denoise on completion is really great because i don't want it to denoise over time i would rather just have it be done on completion and then i can check it once i get over here into my live viewer d noise volumes i don't use because i'm not using volumes in here and then for custom lut not really using those much as far as posts i really really like the bloom power and all this stuff makes those really nice passes in your post i'm not going to touch that because then it's going to try and reload over here but please understand that that's what that setting does and as far as devices i read somewhere that you could plug in your least powerful gpu to your best monitor and then you could plug in your most powerful gpu to sort of calculate everything else in the background and that's how i've been using this dialogue you can drop down but normally i'm setting it on priority high or medium but there are better references online than me so please check something else out about this area this is going to be different if you have like an insane rig or if you don't have an insane rig i had quite a few crashes in this version just because you can switch this and i use these both for denoising at the same time maybe i'll do that now i don't think that the live renderer will switch over until it's done other than that those are my kernel settings let me bring this over here octane settings are right here and then these are my render settings as far as the render settings go i just have my output set up at 1080p under save this is my saved file open exr 32-bit i can always come back to this and it's a really high quality version but then i'm also doing multi-pass multi-pass is checked on here but it's really under octane render and this is the drop down for octane render but if you start over here i save myself a preset and this one's just high quality multi-pass it is resend only updated objects all objects movable check materials every frame this motion blur is very high i had issues where the motion blur on the wheels was having a problem so generally that should be like one or two for render buffer type this is pretty important float tone mapped is the option i chose here i love using the denoised beauty pass i do want to use all my gpus in this case when i'm ready to render overnight yes i want all these gpus to be rendering when i'm working here maybe not but right here i certainly do so i have overwrite kernel settings i'm not touching that over here i have all of my render passes from like i said the multipass the octane render enabled the render pass file here i generally name that something like tunnel multi-pass but what i really want to do is make these folders and thank you again silver wing for describing why you would want to do this or you know i ended up finding that i wanted to do this his explanation was really great and i am using the exr but it's exr octane so that ended up working out really well as he said in his tutorial just be careful with some of the settings here do a quick test make sure that it's going to work for you before you like walk away for the end of the night but the wab was really great because it had a high quality and a small file size he mentioned that it was possibly broken on older versions of cinema 4d i'm on r19 so you know it worked there i'm using the half float generally i don't know why it's not switched on here but the half float is going to be your highlights and i want to have show passes ticked on and save beauty that is a beauty pass that i believe is not denoised i'd like to have it because it's going to take time i'm just going to render it overnight if i want to use it i want to use it if not it's there i can delete it whatever but generally i do save beauty i don't like multi-layer file i do like folders and that's sort of what i was describing and that's what it'll look like it'll have a ton of folders for your in my case denoised stuff for the image color profile i have these both set to linear okay and for the beauty passes i don't like the beauty passes except for post at least for this project it was just too noisy so i use post and then for denoiser passes i use almost all of them so these are how they come into the file name as well so you can really tell what's going on and for the render layer i'm not touching these but you can for the lighting passes i didn't touch that either but in here for the info passes i do like to have this matte id and the matte id shows up here as mid in your folder structure as far as this stuff goes i'm not touching these that works out pretty well so that's how i have it set up for the high quality multi-pass this is all rendered out this took about four minutes while i was talking here so if i have my main you can see it's really pretty noisy this adaptive sampling is really nice so that's how far you get without denoising i don't really want to de-noise in after effects as much if i don't have to because this is very very powerful i can see it pretty quickly in the live viewer so that's the difference between the d-noise beauty i really like how that cleaned up you do lose detail but to me because it's animated you're not losing that much you can always sharpen it a little bit later but it looks really great and here's the noise here's your d-noise diffuse direct so if i run through these you can kind of see how you could use these later but here's your denoised emission denoise remainder matte id material id i really like using this just because this didn't add a whole lot of render time i know that a lot of folks were talking about kryptomat when it came out i didn't actually try that yet just because i was still on this older version of octane but mad id ended up being really nice for me and then here's your post stuff i would set that overnight to render it's all done and then i get the z depth by switching over here and you can kind of see roughly what that looks like it renders very very fast so i have my z depth here and i have my high quality multi-pass jw preset but if i have my z depth selected you kind of need to be on z depth here and then this z depth pass will show up in here octane render and then i just labeled it as z depth and then i'll put it in a separate folder basically it's the same type of exr octane wab show passes this one i did save beauty i also did the folders but here's where the main difference is so if i switch over i'm going to have this render passes selected and i'm going to have this render passes selected and just toggle so you can see z depth here should really say linear and then tone mapped and this should say linear or linear if you're doing your regular multipass but if you're doing just the z depth i found that i had a real headache here and the headache was this toggle between linear and tone mapped so make sure that if you're doing a z depth at least you know this is how i found that it worked well linear and then tone mapped for the z depth and that info pass is down here you want to have z depth checked 200 samples is what i have that set for for z depth if you click here and then if you use this slider for z depth max i really wanted it to expose that area so you can see how that works for some reason when you're on the main it doesn't show it but if you're on z depth and you have to be on this z depth as well it'll show it but i think 863 was where i landed on that one so i'm going to type that in boom so that area is going to be pretty much completely blown out but in here is where i really wanted that volume once the z depth is set up make sure that you have z depth dropped down here if you have opened the live viewer let's say you didn't have the live viewer open make sure that your octane settings if you want the z depth pass make sure that it says info channels z depth i like to match these up generally if you don't there are discrepancies between those but this is normally where i'm setting my final output settings and everything once this is all set export this out it should go pretty quickly compared to the other stuff for this save beauty i do this just because i had a really tricky time understanding which one was which so if i export all that out i have all my folders ready to go let's jump over to after effects so if we're in here again this is what the shot looks like and i generally am going to start at the bottom so if i just focus on this one layer or solo this one layer i basically have a lumetri color on here and i'm going to pull these scopes over here i normally use two monitors but here we go so you can kind of see where we're at parts of this are really saturated but i have my lumetri color here and i'm pulling everything way down this is what it looks like straight out of the renderer and i'm going to toggle between the source names and you can kind of see what's going on but this is my denoised main and i have my other passes in here but when i pull them over here as the exr sequences if i want to import all of these i'm importing them separately and this is what they look like just like they did in octane so you can kind of see why they would be useful hopefully and if i was to import multiple files so here's tunnel and i'm looking for five i'm just selecting all of these and then i'm doing open exr sequence boom and i'm importing those and then i'm going through and importing each one of these if i was just using the beauty pass it wasn't exactly working the way that i wanted it to so i brought in all these separate passes myself so if you have your tunnel denoised main here and you turn on the lumetri that i put on i'm just trying to crush everything and sort of get it to a baseline where i'll be happy and then i have my denoised emission and that's sort of the lights here and i don't think i have anything on there i'm going to turn on the denoise diffused indirect so you can kind of see what's happening there that's what it looks like soloed out so for some of the layers i'm turning them down like this one is 58 opacity and there was a human shape there's parts in here where it really doesn't look like there's a human being in there and there's not i didn't put a model in there or anything primarily because i didn't want to throw a model in there i wanted it to be ambiguous anyway so i have a dark shape in there and that's what that's for and if i show you the there's a matte and i'm using the matte id here and the matte id is really useful just because you know you can use this as a color key you can color key it and that's like a down and dirty way to do it i actually think that that didn't work out for me so i just masked it so this is my denoised diffuse direct if i just have the passes on that i wanted basically that's just raising up the brightness of the certain areas in the concrete and a little bit of the car as well this is a denoised reflection and so i really wanted something to pop with the car so that's sort of where we're at and the denoise reflection that's all the highlights in certain parts of the shot so i'm really just laying all these over top of the beauty pass to make it something more because especially this part was dark so that really brings back everything here if i just keep going here's a d-noise reflection again and it looks like i just used that primarily for down here in the tunnel i wanted to sort of make that pop a little bit but i think that down here it was really not working so i use the z depth to do that and if i turn on the z depth if you turn off the levels that's how it comes in and it's really flat it's not going to help you as much as if you crush down the different parts that that you want and you can see that really well in the scopes and everything over there so if i have the z depth there you can really see it's only affecting when i turn it on and turn it off it's only affecting the end of the tunnel so i'm going to turn that off and then i have my denoised reflection direct that's really on the tires i felt like the tires didn't have enough pop or they were kind of getting lost or it looks too cg if it's like hey there's completely black there it's not even colorful at all so that's where that comes in and i think i used the matte id for that as well for the matte id all i was doing was keying out that small part and this is not the best way to do it but this is a way to do it i color keyed that out and made it softer and then that's the only part that's being revealed so it is the whole reflection direct pass but it's just being masked out and then this is the fog color and the fog color is down there at the end and you can see how that works with the z depth same thing with the z depth that i showed you earlier and when it comes in it's pretty flat but you can really art direct it and i really like that you can see down here what's happening i wanted to make it subtle i'm using the z depth pass there to add back that fog and the fog i think i had a fill on there but i turned it off and i ended up using a gradient ramp so if i turn that on and off you can see what's happening i wanted a subtle gradient that went from the end of the tunnel to emulate the lights that are outside the tunnel to the light blue that's inside the tunnel and i'll just slide these coordinates around for the end of the ramp so you can see hopefully that gives you a better idea of how that works i'm just dragging the different areas and in some ways i didn't want it to be too extreme i mean that you know it's really to taste but that's sort of where i ended up i wanted you to be able to focus on the car and i'll just turn on these other layers so here's my post effects and that adds another layer of that fog as well just like sort of a foggy look and i have my c depth for that if i hit f4 so the post is using that layer as a luma matte if i turn on my denoise remainder tail lights pop a little bit more and then there's a line here i wanted to make like a metal edge if you watch it at the beginning it is pretty bright and kind of distracting it takes your eye away from the car and i really didn't want that so if i just go to a part that's pretty bright i have a mask here and it's just this area let me look what's going on so i have a matte id that's above it and i'm using that as an alpha inverted matte to darken the top of it so you can kind of see it really crushes it to the point where it's not all the way black but it's dark enough that there's somewhat of a gradient on there and that's all i was trying to do with this and then as far as post i think it's just on the back of the car to brighten it up here's another post and that's really to brighten up as it gets closer to the camera and here's a curves vignette it all was looking a little too same same brightness and i wanted to have it be more focused on the car and then sort of these guiding lines so i really put a heavy vignette on there i really wanted to art direct this and make sure that it was telling a story and i feel like at this point you're going from the daylight and night time to sort of an unknown area and i wanted the fog to sort of represent that i didn't want fog throughout the whole piece i really just wanted it to be like a confusion and there's a piece of the comp from another part that was screwed up it's more or less a patch let's see so normally when i'm looking at the values on here i have a black and white level or let's see what it was it was just a hue and saturation and i just put that over it to see what the brightest parts are and what the darkest parts are to sort of get a read on it without color and you can see what's going on with it and without it and i'm gonna toggle that so that's about it i'm gonna un-solo all of these so you can see the final comp without the black and white on it and that's how i achieved this using cinema 4d octane render and after effects thank you for joining me goodbye

Channel: Jeff Webb

Views: 2,021

Keywords: EXR, aftereffects, compositing, C4D, octane, CGI, 80s, car, tunnel, fog, breakdown, 3D, 2D, modeling, model, buick, lesabre, 1985

Id: JtlnzQEIrDY

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021