Compositing in VFX Suite: faster compositing with Supercomp, intelligent blending of layers

good morning everybody hey there nick everyone can everyone hear me okay and i'm just uh getting in the process of uh switching the screen over to me hey simon and also hello chad hey guys hello hello everyone else out there as well good morning or good start to the afternoon and just wanted to check to make sure that everyone can see my screen okay and everyone can hear us just before we begin so feel free in the go to webinars panel to just type in the chat field or the questions field oh there we go we've got a couple of responses hello from my bank holiday that's great for you to join us hi kent awesome hey simon that's awesome and uh yes we are on the last week of the demystifying uh series for vfx workflows uh isn't that crazy chad it is crazy it's like i was thinking about that this morning i was like brushing my teeth i was like man this is kind of bittersweet like this is like a cool accomplishment we did the month you know it's been fun but like kind of bummed this is like this is it yeah this is it and this week's gonna be all about faster compositing with super comp in after effects and i can't believe we got even an extra week because uh august has five mondays and it feels like we could cover so much more but i'm pretty excited to kind of wrap this up and draw a conclusion and just to let you know this uh series is continuing simon if i'm correct right now it's definitely continuing for september and october although october is not listed right now and for september it's all cinema 4d focused uh with ellie matt and jonas and there's going to be some fantastic tips about mograph generators effectors fields and fracturing am i my corrector isn't even longer simon absolutely right there's we've got um c4d stuff all through september and they've the team got some really cool things to show and in october yes spoiler alerts we're doing october and we're doing a lot more about different um nles and how you can make different effects work on the timeline as you're editing as well so we'll have that information up shortly yes and uh on top of you know going to the red giant blog and being able to sign up for these webinars you should know that we are recording the session and you can go to the max on volume program training on youtube subscribe and usually a few hours after this webinar this will be posted maybe a little bit longer but roughly around that time give it a day you'll be able to watch this webinar over again and if you miss something just fast forward to the part that you need to so feel free to to share those links and yeah without further ado we're kind of uh we're covering today all about faster compositing in vfx suite and primarily looking at super comp we did look at supercomp a little bit in week one and throughout the weeks as we went along we looked at little tidbits but today we're going to try to cover a few of the areas that we've looked online and seen about certain effects within it that aren't covered as well as just cover the overall workflow and see how you can make it advantageous for you guys and what you do so without further ado i i know i know chad you have some stuff to show all right so what i'm going to do is just head over here and hand this over to you oh i can see your name that's fantastic you should uh see a screen just heading over to you and then i'll hop back in a little bit and show you guys some uh breakdowns of some projects that i love and have seen within super comp are you seeing my screen nick i am not just yet no okay let's see here uh i can see it okay okay then i we're we're probably fine if one of you can see it then we'll probably say uh so okay i see it now too i'm just i'm a late bloomer better late than never though uh so yeah welcome everybody as nick said i want to talk a little bit about supercomp you know we um mentioned supercomp briefly but i think it's worth like kind of digging into like just the basics of what it is so that's what i want to talk about like for the first kind of half of this morning um and then nick is going to kind of go into more details of of super comp but just understanding really what super comp is is really important and um it's it's a really unconventional tool and i find that a lot of people are using it for things that you shouldn't use it for and then they're getting confused by that and frustrated um and so i really want to break down just like the really the purpose of super comp and some basic uses here so you know and just to kind of bring everything home uh i did this rendering houdini this week and uh houdini is a little bit of a challenge to use and so i have this thing that i created um using like code and like all this stuff that's above my pay grade um and i lit it with an hdr and so it has like you know it's too bright in some spots i wanted to be more vibrant in others and i really didn't know um how to do that in houdini yet um because i just i'm not that great with like look development so i rendered out one single exr file and i put the render passes in that we've been talking about all month and that allowed me to go in with this single file and use the extractor plug-in to extract you know the base color which is just like just the diffuse color and to extract the reflection pass uh and mat that with the depth pass and uh specularity and the whole bit and kind of put it all together to uh this look which is kind of more what i was going for this is the original and this is um what i what i did after i fiddled with it and the the point of this is leading into our super comp conversation is that i did this all in after effects using native tools using the blend modes using track mattes and that's a huge part of super comp is not doing what after effects already does well so all these blend modes and mats and things like that i did all of this not using super comp and i think that again in order to use it well we have to understand what super comp is and is not and what super comp is for is for blending things together it is for blending things together so if i then had my final version of this uh file and i added some text here which i've done and i want to blend this together and make this text looks like it's look like it's part of this scene then that is when i would want to use super comp so what i'll do is i will select the layers that i want to add to my super comp into this blending of files and then i can go into the effect drop down vfx and then add supercomp and what that's going to do is it's going to put these two layers or the selected layers into a super comp and then i get this like floating window and the reason why it's a floating window is that i can look at the end result and also my work here in super comp so when i'm selecting something in super comp for example i'm looking at just that layer and uh what it's what what's being done to that layer and then in the composition panel i can see the final result so it's good to have both of these open and obviously if you have you know multiple monitors going on like that makes things a little bit more convenient but let's talk about this text for a second and what makes super comp so powerful um i saw some stuff online when um supercomp came out last year that like oh well it's a bunch of effects and we all have effects already and things like that and no that's not what it's about again this is all about blending so i have these layers and i can create um effects so i can select like say for the background i'll click on this and in most cases i choose optical glow but in this case i'm going to choose layer glow and i believe nick is going to explain the difference between those two later and if not i could just kind of dig into why i chose that in this instance but i'm going to go ahead and choose layer glow which is very similar to optical glow the regular standalone effects that is was introduced with the vfx suite last year that's incredible and then i can go over here to my text layer and you can see again i click the plus icon i have all these cool effects but this is this is a um a result of the coolness of super comp and not the coolness itself the magic is not the fact that we have cool effects like diffusion or haze or whatever the magic of super comp is that we have these effects in this environment where the layers talk to each other like they're unable to do in the layer based compositing workflow of after effects so i can click the plus icon here and let's say i'll choose light wrap and so i add some light wrap here i basically have two values that i'm concerned with right now amount which is like the intensity of the uh the light wrap but i'm going to crank this value up quite a bit just so you can really see what's going on here and then the size which is how far in the uh the glow is allowed to kind of encroach upon the text i'm going to take that down a little bit just so we can see it's a little bit more clearly but this is the advantage of super comp because the text is on top of the glowing city but the glow from the city is on top of the text so and another thing too is that i mean we can create this this is not like a ground breaking effect but it is groundbreaking in that is it is dynamic so if i make a change to the background if i were to color correct it if i were to do something else to it then my glow would update accordingly or if we decided to like move our text to a different part of the image then on these areas where there isn't much glow then we don't have like any glow coming across our text and like where we have uh this text over a green object the light wrap you can see it's spilling over again if i move my text over this way that it's not getting the green glow maybe just like a like an edge of it a little bit but this is the power of super comp where we are dynamically allowing layers to speak to each other and to hop over the layer order restrictions that we typically have now before i show you another quick examples let me go over um just a couple things really quick to know about super comp two things to know about supercomp number one it's an integration engine like i talked about the purpose of it is to blend things together it's to integrate different objects that is its main purpose and number two like i said it doesn't replace anything that after effects does well so if you're looking for like you know where's like the fractal noise and where is the blah blah blah whatever that after effects already has it's not going to be there it's not meant to do things that after effects already does well and as i mentioned there are three three things to know about supercomp and uh we use it at the very well three and a half things and so we use it at the very end of the workflow that's another important aspect of supercomp is that we don't um use it as we're going you want it for the best results you want to use it at the very very end of the workflow and then finally um is that the three three and a half thing as it's always in 32 bits per channel and that's one of the miracles of uh super comp because as we're uh playing with this you know after effects normally we're allowed to change the the bit uh bit depth uh on a per project basis but a lot of times we might have tons and tons of compositions and eight bits per channel might make more sense and we can work a lot faster but then sometimes we want to do um compositing in 32-bit to get like these you know highlights and all the blossoms and all the beautiful things that come along with 32 bits per channel and super comp always works in this its own environment it processes things in 32 bits per channel which is amazing so those are the the things that i want to show you about supercomp let me show you a couple other benefits to supercomp um chad yes do you mind if i ask a question because you you brought up something i was so i'm very curious about it because you talked about blending things together and i was curious how you would differentiate this from the blend modes that are built into after effects um that's just one thing that kind of came to my head so it's like oh you have blend modes in after effects but then you have the blending of objects and how how supercomp would differentiate itself from that right yeah so it's a good question so what a blend mode does in after effects is that it takes uh the layer and applies a certain set of rules to it so like let's say like right here this example i just switched to the fire's in screen mode if i took it in normal mode this is what it is in normal mode and then we take it into screen mode and one of the things that it does is it takes the black and it removes it and it has an algorithm for lightening the fire against the background and like that's it and it's a great tool it's a great thing that it does but like that's what it does and in a sense it blends it together but again in a prescribed way that you don't have any control over realistically but what supercomp does is it creates a world of blending that gives you all kinds of control over the way that you uh blend things together so it's not just kind of like okay here's this one set of circumstances where you can blend things together it's a world of uh blending options for the edges for how we adjust the color for how we glow things and how that glow speaks to different layers above and behind it um light wrap reverse light wrap all these different tools to allow layers uh to integrate with each other if that makes sense so uh it's almost like um like uh these blend modes are like a donut and super comp is a kitchen if that makes sense i love it that does make sense to me yeah okay um so i'm gonna go and i'm gonna um load up all of these layers into super comp and i'm gonna show you a couple really cool tricks uh with super comp you could also do the effects and presets panel thing this is actually where i use to like as a tutorial person like when i'm doing tutorials it's like very common to go into the effect menu um so that people can see where things are at but realistically in my workflow i never use that ever on my own i always use the effects of presets now i just search for it and then don't remember where it's at it's my preferred way of doing things anyway so i have this uh pop-up here and a couple things you'll notice i'm to get back to you in just a second is that a couple of these layers you know like the last time we looked at super comp they had this kind of like a grayish bluish color then we have some layers that are yellow and what it is is that when we click on a layer in super comp there's different layer types there's the normal layer which we've seen but there's also additive and displacement layers and when you have a layer that's in an additive mode like additive blend mode like screen or add then when you put it into supercomp supercomp recognizes that automatically turns it into an additive layer we'll talk about the power of that uh momentarily but i want to show you a new feature in supercomp that just came out a little bit ago and uh i have here um the mazinger the robot and then i also have the uh the island background i'm actually gonna shrink my super comp um so i can kind of move it out of the way here so we can see this there we go so one of the features that's new i'm going to go ahead and click on this plus button button i'm going to add color correction one of the challenges of color correction is going through and trying to make a subject match the background and this has been become much much easier with the new release of super comp because in the color correction area there's this gargantuas match background button and i can just click match background and instantly it looks at the black levels and the color of the um the area behind the object and instantly makes it uh apply to your object which is really fantastic now what you might do here let me select my um my mazinger layer here in this case the background is actually much further away than the robot is so we wouldn't want to actually match this background he's probably more in line with this area right here so what i could do is move him to this spot click match background to kind of like sample this uh area this area of dart maybe even like right here boom do that and then when i put him back in this spot he blends in a little bit better because he's about on this depth play which makes a little bit more visual sense and what i can do here is i can click this button right here which is the on and off icon for each effect in super comp so i can see the before this is the original and then after look how beautifully that's composite it looks like he has just a little bit of depth haze on him and uh that just looks fantastic so that's another that's a great new feature in super comp that allows you to blend things together in a much quicker way now i'm going to turn on some of these other layers again here so we can get to what i think is the the one of the greatest features of uh super comp and that's the ability to composite additive layers especially things like fire because fire is one of the biggest jerks you know it's such a jerk like fire is absolutely gorgeous it's one of the most like beautiful things on the planet to me um it's just like really like ragey and it has like all this like passion and energy to it and like tons of light and so it's gorgeous um and it's like destructive so it's kind of like got this like you know scary element to it that's kind of like fun and dangerous and stuff but the thing is when we composite it it's such a jerk because it wants to use like these additive blend modes like screen but then it makes it kind of like semi-transparent and weak and so fire is kind of like this hybrid thing that is really really really bright but also opaque and not totally transparent like that so which makes it difficult to composite so one of the things that supercomp does is it gives us tools to make this infinitely easier i'm going to do a couple things to this fire really quickly and you'll notice that when i have an additive layer we have different effects we have a regular effect we have like this full ring of things and when we have an additive layer we don't have as many effects but we have a couple that we don't have on regular layers including heat blur and core matte and i'll talk about those momentarily first i'm going to just add some optical glow here and i'm going to turn down the amount a little bit and the size a little bit i'm also going to uh go to color correction very quickly and um change the temperature a little bit like this is like this has a little bit cooler of a a deal here this world and so just kind of cooling off this fire a little bit um that's good so already it looks better but uh nothing you know earth shattering or revolutionary here but the magic comes when we click this plus icon and we add one of these two deals i'm going to try coremat first that's really what i what i want to get to as i mentioned with fire uh it becomes too transparent oftentimes like we when we use the screen blend mode and so this core cormat effect that i uh that i just added here it allows you to create density uh using a mat and so it creates opaque opaque areas as we increase the grow amount we're increasing the the black and the matte i'll crank this up a lot so you can see that here and let me just um spread this out so i'll move this over uh and so we're creating a mat that's going underneath this fire and the black areas are opaque and the white areas are transparent so if we want to again we could keep increasing this grow and then that will make this fire more dense and i could increase a road which will erode the um the edges and make them more transparent so we have total control and it's also procedural it's dynamic it's using the fire itself as its own mat behind the scenes and so we create this really realistic fire so if i turn this off and on you're seeing these areas getting more opaque and transparent as we turn it on and off so now we have more opacity and our fire looks a little bit more genuine now i'm also going to go back to this little plus icon i'm going to add some heat blur this does a similar thing where it takes a black and white version of the fire but in this case we're using it as a heat displacement map which is really incredible now i need to turn up displacement a bit to be able to see this and also what i can do is increase the add texture value which will increase the area around the fire where the displacement texture lives which is pretty cool um i'm going to i don't think i need to go that crazy with the add texture i might need to go a little bit more with the displacement just so we can see it here and then what i want to do here is go into my text and i'll just add some just optical glow here and tone that down just a bit now here's where the magic is folks here's where the power is with this uh effect uh as i start playing this we're going to start to see this text being displaced and right here this is this is what i want to show you this is super competent nutshell to me this is where the magic is so we're seeing the fire which is on top of the text we're seeing it on top of the text even though the fire is in the screen blend mode and the fire is uh on top of this white text we're still seeing the fire on top of the text so the fire and the text are speaking to each other and normally when you have something that's bright like fire in screen mode on top of white glowing text it would just be white but in real life there would be more dynamic range than that there would be values brighter than white and that's kind of what we're getting with this fire where we can see some of it on top of the whiteness and so there are areas uh if we were to kind of keep playing this back here there's areas where the displacement of the text is on top of the fire and there's times when the fire feels like it's on top of the text and this type of effect where you're kind of like we can't really tell what's on top because we're getting the heat blur from the fire adjusting the text and then we're anyways you can tell that the the text is in the middle of the fire and you really can't replicate that any other way with layer based compositing this is the magic of super comp to me really as a compositor person like this is very very difficult to achieve with just using after effects on its own um let me show you one other example here i love using super comp to composite smoke because there's a really great uh effect for me that i love using so i'm just gonna add this to super comp very quickly this is by the way a little um a little comp i made here and then this triangle uh has a luminance pass we can select the triangle reflection and the triangle itself and then we also have some smoke that i made in trap code particular so what i can do here is i'm going to go to my triangle and i'm going to add my optical glow and um i'm just going to do this really quickly since i'm just about out of time here um i'll tone down my glow amount a little bit and the size of the glow just get a little bit more reasonable there we go and what i want to do is i want to make this smoke look like it's really receiving this glow in a dynamic way and one of the tools that i've found to do that because this is i mean this is not really realistic i mean the smoke i think looks fairly decent on its own the particular smoke um the triangle the glow looks cool but like if this were real life just the volumetric nature of smoke this light from the triangle would be permeating uh this particular smoke in a uh more volumetric way we would see the volume of the smoke which as you know it's a difficult thing to fake in a 2d compositing program because really like with uh particular these are just kind of like you know 2d cloudlet sprites right but what we can do here is go to a particular smoke and one of the effects i like to use is blur behind so what it's going to do is it's going to um blur the things that are behind the smoke so i'm going to take this up to a ridiculous level and as i do what it's doing is it's taking again this is on the smoke layer but it's blurring the stuff behind the smoke in this case it's the glow from the triangle and we can intensify that by using the amount value if we want to but i think in this case keeping it low is fine but as i take this to ridiculous values we start to see that the the glow from the triangle is kind of wrapping around the smoke in an interesting way and um this is kind of hard to see here what what's my resolution ah actually i'm only a half resolution i'm gonna just dock this for a second take this up to uh full here and you can see it like this like what's happening to this little area of smoke here is exactly representative of again the magic of super comp it's taking this object the the triangle on the layer that's below it and because of this blur behind effect it's creating these kind of like edges these pink edges which makes the smoke feel more volumetric and illuminated by this uh triangle of course we can you know go in and tweak this and get this to look a little bit better but you know the magic here is that we're able to take these layers and again using super comp's integration engine bring all these things together so the layers are talking to each other and that creates these type of effects where we're having this dynamic uh effect and if i were to take the particular smoke and move this over and just shift it all the way over here to the left-hand side then it would glow on the other side of the smoke because it's this dynamic thing we don't have to jerry rig all these kind of like hacked together bubble gum duct tape options that are not live and uh flexible super comp is just this dynamic procedural thing that's actually allowing the layers to talk to themselves uh talk to each other in a way that normal after effects stuff just doesn't allow so that's super comp the the basics of super comp in a nutshell very cool um there was a there was a question chad just here in the chat that i wanted to bring to your attention which is uh rihanna hopefully pronounce your name writes it was just curious to super comp warp with 3d environments and after effects so specifically 2.5 d and then true 3d like cinema 4d or or i guess maybe that's putting through something like putting it through something like elementor uh trap code mirror well if you're just using a regular uh layer so these are renders from cinema 4d so if you're doing a render then it's like um it's that's not an issue but um with 3d layers yes you can use them in super comp often times you'll need to pre-compose them in order for super comp to use them i believe that's still the case um keep in mind that super comp is a baby super comp just turned one year old in june so it's still a new effect um and so like they're constantly adding like new features to it and um there's definitely places i think that supercomp wants to go as like they continue to uh enhance it and sexify it a bit and 3d objects again you can they can be used in super comp but you often need to pre-compose them okay awesome and it just appears that there might be a bit of a delay on the system i think i don't know if that just happened in the last little while but i know zach was reporting that it seems like the screen is updating like every 30 seconds on your end but since it's coming back to me anyways chad i was just thinking we could just see and take the audience poll to see if there's still a delay on my system and then i'll try to adjust accordingly from there phooey i'm sorry everybody i'm gonna just make you a presenter and hopefully then okay be all fluid and junk after that so no deja vu i do have um zinger up on my screen too just for a second don't worry we're gonna go to another comp but um yes does uh chad do you see it okay simon how is it looking on your end of the switch i am currently uh pointing my mouse at mazinger in the vfx super comp panel yeah your mouse is moving in real time to me anyone else just can let me know in the question field that that is real time good here awesome great thanks everybody i just had to scroll down in the question field to make sure that that everything was okay so uh chad that was such a great breakdown by the way of the fire and the additive layers that was awesome man and just being able to kind of see those those like individual components specifically for additive layers and how you could use them and i'm still shocked today uh with how like quickly you can set that up you know and you added those effects which was kind of cool and it was just so quick and easy for you to use those layers composite them together uh during the last stages uh within your after effects composite now i wanted to show something here specifically you had mentioned layer go and layer glow and optical glow which are both two options for layers within super comp and what the differences are and i have made a duplicate copy of my mazinger hero character here in in the front as you can see in the foreground and what i'm going to do i already have the two effects just disabled on the layer and i'm going to enable one of the effects which happens to be the layer glow if we take a close i don't oh it looks like i turned it off with a shortcut key so now let me just enable that effect again there we go i if we just kind of take a close look chad do you see how it's kind of wrapping up just a little bit around the edges of the character and there really isn't any type of foreground interaction with the globe yes i uh could you zoom in on the comp window i'm actually just going to press the tilde key just so that we can kind of see that full frame my i tried to zoom in but i don't think it transfers through um the go-to webinar but here we can kind of see the how the layer glow is interacting with the layer there is a little bit uh tailing off at the edges of the character and that really has to do with the the light wrap that's turned on and i'm going to disable that effect and let's just take a look here now with um it's uh it's brother or sister which is optical glow and you see a huge difference with the foreground there not to mention the intensity at the edges chad yeah i would zoom in again just to make that like just zoom in just to make sure that everyone can yes yes okay so it's much more intense and that's because the optical glow is wrapping and interacting greater with those foreground objects i think that's what's one of the benefits of optical glow we've mentioned it a few times which all optical glow is also a standalone effect within the vfx suites so you don't have to go to supercomp to use it if you're just interested in that effect now if you happen to add optical glow at a later stage like i have right now in fact i'm just going to turn off my amazing character and just show a few things kind of an example of the fire again and it's interactivity here with the the text layer uh the only difference that i did compared to you chad was in this in this example because i was in a rush to put this together i went to the plus icon and chose a preset and here are already like a series of presets within super comp that you can use you can take your favorite presets and mark them as a favor and then that's going to pop up at the top of the layer presets menu under the favorite section and then you can just take it and apply it to a super comp layer it should be mentioned that also if you're going to be finding yourself doing the same type of composites over and over again within super comp you can select the layer and you'll notice that when i right click it you have the option to save this collection of effects as a layer preset as well that's just going to save you a lot of time if you need to apply the same type of technique to a very similar looking shot now a lot of times i don't know it's just me chad but a lot of times when you know i have something that is glowing like i wanna i wanna make it blink like i wanna wiggle it it's just one of those things it just comes up here you know here's optical glow i want to take this amount and i want to make it blink and you'll notice that if we take a look at the super comp panel i really just have one effect here and that's because i added it earlier but if you see super comp by default here it will have no effect parameters whatsoever this keeps it super clean and super fast and you should note that when you decide or want to add an effect to animate from add an effect parameter to animate from an effect that you've added onto a layer you can let me actually just move my playhead noticeably to the beginning of the comp here you can add a parameter by clicking on the stopwatch now the stopwatch is only going to appear when you're kind of hovering over a parameter you can kind of see that happen right now little stopwatch icon you can then simply go over here to the side and and add that over here and now you have all of the effects that would be within after effects that you could use so here i'm just gonna you know option click that sort effect that i added and now i can add my favorite wiggle expression here um two by ten in this case and we could start to see that there is a little bit just bring down the compos a little bit of a blink happening there with the optical glow it's awesome fact i might just make that a little bit more intense so it is super noticeable there we go wiggling way too much but it does kind of show the intensity wiggling and that's not the only thing that you can of course keyframe any of these parameters are available as well as some of the new ones which are in optical glow so in the latest release which is 1.5 you know optical glow got even better and some of those parameters include you know separating the size in both x and y values which could create um a glow just on one particular level so expanding it right now on the y channel along with this radiate control which would create yet another kind of cool glow effect so this is way too much but if we see a little preview here specifically in the vfx super comp you can see what radiate is doing with that glow and just like before if we take a look at some of these values as i hover over them again these are key frameable and you can use them and bring them outside of the super comp panel and into your effect controls to animate anything else like you would in after effects so besides those things i wanted to mention about the super comp panel and management this is a really kind of cool example of super comp in action with a bunch of different elements at play and shows how it helped composite several elements together along with a few things that were used before in vfx suite to tie this all together so i just wanted to first of all after my auto save does its fantastic job just solo my my sorceress layer so you can see it here and we can see a collection of effects that were applied before bringing this to super comp let me just turn that off chad you demonstrated last week or a few weeks ago the spot clone tracker yeah how awesome it is and here you can see multiple versions of that spot clone tracker keying out the tracking markers here and then a version of primatte keyer and while this isn't so filled up just note that there is an actual mask on the sorceress layer now the magic part about this you'll notice that the sorceress isn't pre-composed chad like it's literally all of the effects are there and you're able to send this to super comp there's no need to pre-compose that layer it's going to see all of the effects that you've added before which is kind of kind of sweet in my opinion it's going to save you time for some of those workflows other pre-comps that you see here are more for organizational purposes and for the fact that i want super comp to treat which is a collection of particles or organic effects separately sorry as one element combined so now that we've seen the source source layer basically the same process where we selected a bunch of layers inside of your composition and then from the effect menu i want you to choose super comp it's going to add all of those layers for you automatically and for any reason that you forgot a layer usually here in the source layer area you can click a plus icon and that's going to be added to it too so it's literally seeing everything in your after effects composition at all times so i wanted to take a look uh right now actually at the foreground layer so let's draw our attention i want to turn off the mystic energy as there's some pretty cool effects that uh brought this fog together and one thing you can always do is if you're ever looking at a super comp project that you get your hands on you can always right click that layer and then choose to disable all of the effects on it and here you can see how strong that fog is by default right it's quite strong and it's not really integrating well with the with the background it's through that combination of effects that are available for different types of layers that you're going to get to your your end result so here i have that that super comp layer and the first thing i want to draw your attention to is that there's a subtle color correction effect now this isn't using a match color effect as much as it's just being used to bring down some of the intense white levels in the fog to sort of match the more grayish atmosphere that you see right now happening in this four up in this forest and with all of the blocking of the trees um ice basically blocking some of the outside light so you've got a a simple color correction effect here and then chad you've already showed you know the power of of light wrap and light wrap is currently being used on the fog here wrapping the light specifically of the the forest's ground here and some of the forced horizon to to integrate that a little bit better i always like to mention that for me at least in super comp when i started uh chad and simon was that when i added light wrap it took me a few seconds to actually see its effect on like the foreground characters that i was applying it to so usually i would end up you know cranking up this amount but i i just like to mention that you know the the amounts start off rather low for a good reason which is that you want it to be subtle the whole idea is that you want everything to feel unified and you don't want a specific effect like light wrap to essentially take over a layer or an object and it to be noticeable so that's why when you add some of these effects they are rather subtle to begin with minus i would say some of the additive effects where you do want it's to feel much more integrated because of some of the distortion that those elements create such as fire and what chad demonstrated now on top of the light wrap effect there's a haze effect and this is just a great overall effect for kind of taking an element and making it more atmospheric especially the more further it is in the background while it's great specifically for our fog here in the foreground to sort of bring down let me just disable the effect so you can see what it's doing to the overall fog and i always like to pay attention to my composition window and just the element by itself isolated in the vfx super comp panel we can sort of see the effects of haze bringing that down through a softness in the shadowing and integrating it a little bit better into the background not to mention that the further it moves into the into the background kind of seeping out it blends in with it a little bit more it's let's if this was an object specifically with a lot more color it would appear less saturated the closer it would be to the background which is why haze can be such a useful effect now this isn't talked about too often but a lot of times while you want a foreground element to basically have the light of the background wrapped around the edges of the subject there are a number of times where you want the foreground object to also right basically wrap light around the background objects and that's where the reverse light wrap is we're essentially telling the fog in this case a very low amount to wrap some of its light on all of the background objects included within the super comp panel so i'm just going to crank that up just a little bit so we can see the results you can see it's way too strong in this case but the light specifically from the fog this grayish element is wrapping itself around all of the background elements right now which is which is pretty sweet and can be useful depending on the type of object that you select now last but not least there's a little bit of diffusion added to the fog as well to sort of soften the lights and the or the this organic source this can be also used on a bunch of light sources that you would have in your final composite as well and now this collection of effects you know by selecting the super comp layer here is easily saveable as a preset to which we can say apply for fog in forest and then becomes available to us inside of our preset section so just let me hit on the plus icon here and just show that in a new section called custom that collection of effects now another thing i love about this specific example i have a number of various sort of organic elements and it's it's just worth noting what this particle system this is a particle system specifically made with i believe particular if i solo it out here this is how it originally looked you can see it's it's colors completely different but it's a series of a trap code particular sorry trap code form systems in fact a number of form systems that are here and emitting slightly using a various uh types of reactions within the plug-in so a number of form systems but this could also be kind of created uh specifically with um particular as well so this energy composite if we take a look at here it was just simply color corrected and not using the color values but the temperature and tint slider to give it a completely different look and then a heat blur was added to it so it did almost feel like it had a source of energy to it and one great thing about the heat blur effect is that it has some displacement controls which is why you see as this just surrounding this actual energy pre-comp field there is a series of distortion and displacement occurring on the forest background the canopy here of the trees and that was specifically done with heat blur now speaking of chromatic displacement there are also uh standalone effects for that one in vfx super comp that we didn't i don't think we covered did we do we covered chad i don't think so so there's a chromatic displacement yeah and it's available as a standalone effect which you can add and apply to layers without going to vfx super comp not to mention there is also you know if you add something as displacement layer you have those options that you would have from the chromatic displacement effect so that was the composite that i wanted to show and i did want to mention i have an example here where you can see an element 3d helicopter here this is also using lens distortion to bring in all of these elements as well as what i believe to be these organic elements specifically from action vfx and they were brought together into a composite and if we just take a look at the the helicopter the job specifically within super comp was the use of haze because of it off in the far distance let me just actually disable all of the effects temporarily here so you can see what it looked like before it was handed over to super comp let me enable these effects and now disable haze by itself and enable it so you can sort of see how it's much more kind of muted in color based on where it is in the clouds we've then got some light wrap from the environment not to mention some subtle color correction specifically using the match background effect to integrate it here in the far background and besides selecting layers you can also select the entire super comp effect containing these layers and on this effect it should be noticed uh noted that there happens to be a master grain control now i covered this really briefly in week one but it's worth mentioning that you can apply grain to all of your elements and it's a two-step process so step number one is cardi already enabled for you where you have a master grain control i'm going to come up here and just set this to 25 so that we can notice it not to mention that we could add or increase the size and the texture of the grain so i'll make this 15 uh to each of these values i'm just tabbing down in in terms of the controls here now that it's activated on the super comp level it's now a matter of going to these individual elements that you sent to super comp so the element helicopter and then turning up how you want how much of that grain you want it to affect your helicopter so let me just you know crank it up to its full amount which is 100 and then also do the same for the background plate which is containing all of my other objects and just to make sure that you guys see this i'll actually increase the master gain grain a bit to here and we should start to see the grain pattern much more noticeably the noise pattern in the vfx super comp panel and uh how it's taking effect in the composition window as well let me bring that down a bit to something more like 20 and that grain control just gives you yet another way to tie in and finish off your composite for all of these layers cool awesome man i have not um checked so i'm just going to head back to the go to webinar page because i've been deep in after effects there's one question that i want to address really quick um about uh working with openexr in supercomp and um most of the examples that i use i just want to point out really quickly like were just like raw exrs like when i did the text over the houdini render like um i pre-composed that but it was all yeah open exr stuff so you could take reflection passes and you know whatever else you're using and um use that in super comp just like you would any other layer as well so um i i feel like it's it works best um to do like the basics of the composite in like regular after effects that way you have like uh luma matte options and like uh that kind of stuff for creating um keys if you need to with certain passes but um blending it all together like reflection passes specular passes whatever in super comp is a really great workflow and a great idea and open exr files work just like any other layer so just want to say that real quick cool and then i i know there was a question from elizabeth here about this asking about if the smoke can also be reflected in the water i guess there's probably two ways that you can um attempt this and one is actually even just before going into super comp elizabeth you can use the reflection effect that's available to you and sort of try to align and then track it uh to the water position specifically if it was a moving background plate so there is a actual standalone reflection effect in vfx super comp and remind me if i'm incorrect chad but this is something did you cover last week or the week before yeah i believe we talked about the reflection uh plug-in last week and so um that was actually the reflection was actually rendered into cinema 4d um like before that feature was added to the reflection plug-in so i if i were doing that now i would do that with the reflection plug-in and not burn it into the render within before you actually have a lot more control that way yes yeah so you can find the reflection effect which is going to give you kind of like a t based here i'll just actually isolate this and we can actually even see that this does have a subtle reflection effect on it already that we can of course soften a little bit more but it is using the vfx reflection here on the ground for this mystic comp and its opacity has been brought down and this could be found just under all of the rg vfx plugins you can see reflection here as a standalone so that's one way to do it and then there's some tricks to do like a sort of semi-reflection using different um light wrap modes and increasing the intensity you could sort of mimic a really subtle kind of blurry reflection uh if it was an organic element like that that's what i would think would be your two ways that you might want to attempt that that's awesome now i always like to make mention uh about the red giant website so i mean usually you'll go straight to look at red giant suites as super comp let me just actually head over here to the products vfx suite and if you dive a little bit deeper you know i mean they give you a basic rundown of all of the effects but specifically the amount of information with vfx supercomp is pretty impressive so if you scroll down past all this it gives you a one by one breakdown just in within a paragraph of each of the effects and that we've covered today or the majority of the the effects that we've covered oh i love that yeah it's like some great information so you know talking about grain chad you talking about the cormat and the heat blur diffusion but then also you know a whole other level to this which we which we didn't mention but there was some talk about exr and it's also worth talking about color space and color space management so just to show that in the super comp panel here hey while you're getting that loaded up nick really quickly there's another question a follow-up question about the open exr stuff and uh yes like uh the the stuff that i was showing like all had um mats and uh um a few of the things that i was that i was using as components here and there were just regular opening xrs that were not pre-composed so it will uh respect the extractor and set mat and like all that kind of stuff the only thing that i found that you need to pre-compose when you bring into super comp is a 3d stuff um other than that like i haven't noticed um anything that like needs to be complete precomposed simon you might be able to speak to that more than i um do but like i haven't noticed that like it you need to pre-compose a lot of stuff for super comp yeah absolutely right chad the the the door they're two and a half d even in after effects as well that's works best was bp pre-composed and i loved your comment earlier on when you said that we're looking at developing further things as supercomp gets older after being a baby so yes um this has been a feature request about how this is integrated in the future a bit more so all those comments are being taken on board and we're looking at it as well yes and then i don't know if anyone saw here just with the when i selected super comp the overall panel with all the layers onto the output gamma is where you have your color manage controls and there are quite a few options to choose from which is pretty sweet and that was added in 1.5 right simon yes that's right that's another example of working on things and adding to them as we're going along so you set that up nicely nick yes so whilst i got the floor um i i loved your analogy about what you're talking about light rap and um the phrase that hangs in my head whenever i think about this thing is kevin shaw from the international colorist academy a long time ago was talking to me about color grading and explaining that it's like focusing a camera and you know when you've gone too far and then you can just pull it back again so for me whenever i'm doing things like right wrap that's exactly how i approach it and you're right it's an invisible effect but then when you've gone too far you can see it it's easy to dial back in so it's it's something to experiment with and i think that we've always we've all gone too far with focus or color grading so i think that's the same kind of approach i like to take with light rep brilliant yeah it's a great analogy that is a great ecology and um chad i i have some some bad news this is the last week man i know it's like we're like we have two minutes left of this whole thing that we've been doing yeah it's like so great oh yeah it's like five weeks and counting so first of all i i've seen so many names of people who've attended every week and i just wanted to thank you guys all for being thank you so much it's awesome it means a lot to me chad and simon for you guys to be here and just be watching us talk about super comp and the vfx suite and keep in mind that this is all going to be available for you on the maximum volume program training the youtube channel subscribe and you'll be able to see this video uh probably within a few hours after we finish this webinar so again thank you so much i also want to make mention to a resource which i'll send out in the email simon you might remember a few months ago we did a a presentation or talk on demystifying uh particles and there was one focus on fire and with what chad brought up about fire today it's good to kind of maybe compare some of that conversation specifically as it has to do with with particles and fire and then super comp that just came to mind and that i believe is on the volume uh program training am i correct or did that not hit the here we go creating fire sparks dust and smoke i've just answered my own question but there is some conversation about fire there yeah there we go answering my own question okay and then yes so then uh next month you know it's all about cinema 40 don't forget september starting next week wow it's september 2020 yeah i have to say both of you thank you so much for sharing generously all your knowledge for the last five weeks it's been so it's been super useful for people i've just been watching the comments and how appreciative they are but it's also wonderful to hear how you both personally approach projects as well as technically what the settings are because no one does production in a vacuum and so hearing what people do and what has worked for other people and obviously always as workarounds as well and how to do things if you're in a pinch for time and so on so that's been invaluable so i just want to officially thank you so much for your generosity and for sharing all your knowledge and the in the terms of the questions that yes we'll have you back so we we love this format so we're planning to do more um and so please stay tuned thanks everybody guys have a great rest of your day bye everybody take care thanks so much you

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 2,444

Rating: 4.6999998 out of 5

Keywords: Maxon, Red Giant, VFX, VFX Suite, Supercomp, tutorial, compositing, After Effects, plug-in, OpenEXR, workflows, render passes, C4D

Id: DnB88KUSn38

Length: 62min 11sec (3731 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020