Compositing V-Ray renders using FUSION | a Beginner's Guide

in this tutorial we'll learn how to composite video under passes using Fusion this is the first fusion tutorial from magrav plus and there would be more it's not about understanding we are under elements and what each one represents what you should already know that before watching this tutorial this one is just going to be a fairly basic introduction to get you started in Fusion so let's get started hey folks will come to Makarov plus be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos make sure to visit our website magrav plus calm Oregon mod page and calm wrote calm slash McGruff loss and check out our premium rendering and motion graphic courses or cinema 4d 3ds max Maya Arnold Corona very Maxwell and so on first let's have a quick look at the scene setup in 3ds Max and v-ray I'm using this scene from ever motion of just a few more models to get all the passes that I want and the render settings were adjusted to achieve a linear render if I go to the render setup window and open up render elements tab we just have the most essential passes and some match render elements in this tutorial and maybe in another tutorial we can go more deep in the frame buffer we can take a look at some of these passes that we'll be using in a few moments inside a fusion or essential passes to be able to recreate the beauty pass our lighting global illumination reflection specular refraction and SSS - to have a successful composite we need mats for our objects and materials in the scene and thankfully very support scripto mat in the render elements tab you notice we have three render elements based off of the v-ray Krypton mad render elements which you can simply add it using this Add button I have added three and changed the ID type option to node name for the first one know the name with hierarchy for the second one and know the material name for the third one if you go back to the frame buffer you notice that the first creates mats based upon node names the second based upon nodes name consider the established hierarchy in the scene and the last one create mats based on the materials in the scene so we have this crypto mass render elements in case we wanted to specifically adjust an object or a material inside fusion and honestly having crypto mad makes other mad generators like multi matte less relevant as crypto mad is just much easier to set up and gives you everything you need to save out mathematically and linearly correct render elements out of rewrite I always tend to use the v-ray raw image file section under the v-ray tab in the frame buffer section and this is the best way to ensure you get a reliable and mathematically correct multi-layer EXR files just click on this browse button after enabling the v-ray raw image file and change the format to openexr i have saved out this render as a 16-bit multi-layer EXR file and honestly in most cases a 32-bit EXR file is an overkill and a 16-bit EXR file is more than enough and will give you enough dynamic range to do whatever you want compositing wise I will also provide this render for you to be able to follow along just click on the link in the description below if you are planning on having it back to beauty composite in fusion you need to render in linear workflow and V Ray's default render settings assured that just make sure the color mapping is set to linear multiply or Rinehart and as you know Reinhardt at its default state is the same as linear color mapping if you are using reinhardt for example and adjust the burn value to compensate for blown out pixels the render is no longer a linear render and you can't have a pixel to pixel accurate back to beauty composite within fusion I definitely advise you to check out our ultimate introduction to very for 3ds max course it's a 20 hour long course which goes through all of these concepts and more in detail now let's start compositing in Fusion fusions default UI is fairly simple the menu is up here there are two image views where you can see any note that you specify here is the timeline notes section down here is where you'll load images and work on them and on the right side we have inspector panel where properties of selected nodes will appear to be modified the first thing we need to do is to import our render into Fusion and to do that we need a node called loader from the Tools menu you can access all the available nodes in Fusion and loader node is within this i/o section a faster way to access this node is to right-click in the notes panel of the UI and use this add tools option now let's add a loader node and our render is called ever 49 final dot EXR and if I click open a new loader node with that EXR file has been added to the flow and if I select that note you can see and adjust its properties from the inspector panel on the right side now how can we see the render that we just loaded as I mentioned before we have these two viewers up here and to see any node we can just simply drag and drop it to any one of them in this case let's drag our note to the left viewer now we can see our render to fit the render to the view simply click on the viewer and press ctrl F or you can right click in this view and from the scale menu choose this scale to fit option before starting any composition I tend to set the frame resolution and color depth of my composition so from the file menu choose preferences you can adjust it globally or locally for the current composition that you are working with now come down to the frame format for the current composition Derner we have is a 1000 by 1200 render so changed it with to 1000 pixel and high to 1200 as it's a single frame render we don't care about frame rate in this comp and finally change the color depth to 16-bit float now if you create a background or a gradient all the nodes are gonna be in sync and will be 1000 by 1200 and 16 bit even though fusion is not resolution dependent and you can change the resolution and the color depth anywhere in the node chain but it's a good practice to set your comp properly now the image we currently see is much darker compared to the render we saw in v-ray frame buffer the reason being is what we see is a linear image without any gamma correction applied to it but what we saw in v-ray frame buffer was a linear image with a 2.2 gamma correction applied to and if we want to see the image in that sRGB color space we need to apply that gamma correction to do so enable this LUT icon in the image view and open up its options you can stick with this fusion view LUT for now and if you click on this edit button you can set the color gamma to 2.2 from 1 and as you can see we get our gamma corrected image back I want to do the same thing for the right image view as well I can drag and drop the image or if you select any node and press 1 or 2 on your keyboard it will load that image into the left or the right view one for the left view and 2 for the right view control F to fit the image and enable LUT and change the color gamma to 2.2 now we are ready to extract our passes and composite our beauty pass from scratch so the question is where are all the passes that we exported out from 3ds Max and VA select the node and in the inspector panel go to the format tab and open up this channel section here you can define red green blue and alpha channels by default we have our for the red Channel G for the green and before the blue and a for alpha and this gives us the beauty pass let's start with the main lighting pass I'm going to change the our channel to vary lighting our G to very lighting G and blue to vary lighting B and as the lighting pass doesn't have a specific alpha Channel will leave the Alpha Channel to come from the main alpha pass great now we have extracted the lighting pass out of our EXR file lighting pass in v-ray is the same as the fused direct pass in Arnold in case you are using Arnold as your render engine and exporting a Ovie's if you click on any of the image views you can press R G B a and C to switch between the red green blue alpha and color channels or you can use this drop-down menu up here to do the same thing I'm going to select the node right click on it and rename it to lighting and the hotkey to renaming is f2 now let's get our GI Pass simply select the current lighting pass control-c and control-v to make a copy now we can select the new node press f2 and rename it to GI and change the RG and B channels to vary global illumination RG and B now that's our GI pass right now both our image viewers are occupied with the lighting pass let's assign the GI pass to the right view we can simply drag and drop the GI pass the right view okay so that's our GI pass right now we only have two nodes in bigger compositions we can simply end up with tens of nodes if not hundreds so we need an indicator that tells us which node is currently assigned to the left or the right view and that's what these white and black dots show below these two nodes for this light note which is currently assigned to the left view the first study is turned on and for the GI note on the right view the second dot is turned on by the way you can use one and two hotkey as I mentioned to display and note in the image views one for the left view and two for the right view let's quickly get the other passes as well I'm going to copy the GI pass rename it to specular and change the RG and B channels to respective specular channels and press 2 to view this pass on the right view I'm going to copy the specular pass and rename it to a reflection and change the red green and blue channels to a respective reflection channels and press 2 to view this pass on the right view next we need refraction copy one of the existing nodes and rename it to refraction and set the red green and blue channels accordingly leave the Alpha Channel as is and press 2 again to view the node and finally we need SSS so do the same process as before copy one of the existing nodes rename it to SSS and set the red green and blue channels accordingly and leave the Alpha Channel as is now press 2 again to view the node now we are done with our main passes obviously it is a bit time-consuming to extract these passes manually and there are scripts for fusion to automate the process but that's how you do it manually when working with bigger composition having a tidy organized flow is a good idea and one of the ways to achieve that is to enable grid snapping for the notes simply right-clicking the flow and from the arrange nodes menu enables snap to grid up and just quickly move the notes around and organize them in a straight line as we'll be starting to comp these passes together from left to right horizontally we can put the first note a bit lower compared to the other notes now if we add all of these passes together we can get our original beauty pass back let's start with the lighting and the GI pass and to combine passes in fusion we use a node called channel boolean x' when I right click in the flow go to tools colors and here you have channel boolean node you see this toolbar section below the timeline here you have access to some of the more frequently used nodes and tools for example there is the loader note there are some color correction nodes rectangle and other masks here is the channel boolean node merge node transform node and so on that's really useful for now let's add a channel boolean node from the toolbar you notice each node has a few colorful triangles and a gray square the yellow and the green triangles are the inputs usually the yellow indicates the main input or the background input of a node and most nodes have a yellow input and some of them also have a green input which indicates the foreground so the yellow and the green triangles are the inputs the gray square is the output and the blue triangle is the mask input for most nodes if you hover over any of these you can get a description down in the status bar let's start with the lighting and the GI pass when reconstructing Beauty passes the order of the nodes doesn't really matter so connect the output of the lighting node to the background input of the channel boolean node and the output of the GI know to the foreground input of the channel billions node now let's view the channel billions in the right view in the channel boolean property set the operation to add and now we have added the lighting and the GI pass in this render we don't have any visible background elements so the Alpha channel is completely white but if we had some background elements we had some grayscale data in our alpha Channel because currently the channel bullion node takes the Alpha from the foreground input we would have lost that data so said the Alpha in the channel bullion node to do nothing for most cases it's a good idea to keep an eye on your alpha channel to make sure it goes as you want I'm gonna press C to enable RGB display in the viewer now let's add the specular pass simply copy the channel bullion node set the combined lighting and GI paths which is the previous channel boolean node as the background input of the new channel bullion node and set the specular pass as the foreground input and press 2 to see the current Channel bullion node and because we have copied the channel bullion node the operation is set to add and alpha set to do nothing so we don't have anything else to do here now we need to repeat this last step for the rest of the nodes just copy and paste the channel bullion node set the previous bullion node as the background input and the new pass you want to add as the foreground input you let's see the last node in the chain which basically gives us the combined and reconstructed beauty pass let me disable great snapping for now now let's make sure the reconstruct Beauty pass matches perfectly with the original Beauty pass I'm gonna just copy the lighting node rename it to beauty and in the inspector make sure red green and blue channels are set to RG and B accordingly which gives us our Beauty pass back now view this Beauty pass in the left view and the last node in the chain in the right view and you notice we have an exact match remember if you have other elements in your v-ray scene like self illumination pass you need to add them as well if the beauty pass and the back to Beauty composite did not match pixel perfectly in this face the reason most likely is that your image was not rendered in a linear workflow just get back to Max and very and assure the linearity after under let's start with a basic color correction I want to make the leaves it beats more vibrant more saturated we know most of the green colors of this leaves is coming from the SSS pass the lighting and the GI pass also contribute to the color and if we wanted to change the color we probably needed to take all of these passes into consideration generally as the SSS pass contributes the most for the color of these leaves we can safely apply our color correction to adjust this pass so let's add a color correction node we can right click and from add Tools menu and color submenu add a color correction or we can add it from the toolbar another way to add a node is to press control space and search for the node that you are looking for so type in color corrector and here it is each node has a shortcut as well for the color corrector node is CC so if I clear what I've typed before and just type in CC we get the color correction node now click on add or press Enter before inserting this color correction node after the sss node to disconnect the connection simply click and drag it away and that's it to insert the color corrector node after the sss node simply hold down shift and if you hover over the connection it turns to this green and blue line and if you let go of the mouse and the shift button it has been inserted and to remove a node from the chain simply shift drag it away let's view the sss node in the left view and the new color corrector node in the right view in the color corrector node we can increase the saturation to one point 85 maybe and voila the leaves are more vibrant and if we see the last node in the flow again to the left view we can't see the result better to see how a specific node affects the whole composition you can disable it you can use this red button to enable and disable a node and the hot key is control P as you can see now the leaves are more vibrant and really eye-catching next I want to change the color of this rug to a nice bluish green color lighting and GI passes contribute the most to the overall color of this rug and mostly lighting paths so let's add a color corrector node after the lighting pass first if you select a node by clicking on it and then add a color correction node from the control space menu or the tool bar here the node will be automatically added after the selected node let's view the colour correct node in the left view and the last node in the chain in the right view I'm just gonna use this color to add a bit of bluish greenish tint to the rock as you can see the color correction adds this green tint to the entire image and we want to restrict it to only the rock and that's where the crypto mats that we exported from where it comes into place to be able to use to match with fusion you need to install crypto map plugin for fusion I'll be living the link in the description to where you can download and install crypto mat for fusion let's start by copying any of the loader nodes that contain our original EXR render select a new node and go to the format tab change the red green and blue channels to crypto mat node material name our G and B and you can view it on the right view and rename it to crypto underscore material name if you select this node and press control space to add a crypto mat node and see the result of the crypto mat node in the left field descriptive math note that we just added is basically what that plug-in that I mentioned before will add to fusion make sure to install that crypto mod plug-in before actually starting the lesson now the node has this red handle and to select the rock we need to move this handle on top of the rock press this Add button and now the rock has been added to this mat list here if I hold on control and use my mouse wheel to zoom in you can see the fringes of the rock are not selected yet so move the handle over them and click on the Add button and do that for both the upper and the lower fringes now we have properly selected the rock and if I enable this mat only option we get a perfect black and white mask let's see the color corrector node after the lighting pass in the right view now how can we tell the color corrector node to use this mask and restrict the effect to only the rock the blue triangle is where you connect your masks in fusion so connect the output of the crypto mat node to the mask input of the color correction now this particular color correction node only effects the rug as I mentioned the GI pass also contributes the color of this rug so how can we use the same color correction to affect the GI node as well that's where we can utilize instancing and this way the parameters of these two nodes mutually affect each other let's see how it works I'm going to ctrl C to copy the color correct node instead of a simple ctrl and V for paste use ctrl shift and V for paste instance function you can actually right click on there's a paste instance there as well and now as you can see there is a green line between the original colour correct node and this new one which indicates the instance nature of the relationship and now any parameter adjustment in any of them will be copied to the corresponding parameter in the other one so for example if I said gain value to 2 in any of them the other one will get that adjustment as well I'm going to set it back to 1 let's simply hold down shift and insert a new one after the GI node and use the crypto matte node as the mask for this node as well I want to just move these nodes around to have a better flow great to keep the comp more organized we can color code our nodes to be able to recognize them faster later on in this case let's select all the color corrector nodes and change the color of the nodes to a hot pink and to do that simply right click on them and from the set color menu change the color to pink we can select our crypto match nodes and change the color to orange from now on all the nodes that are used as masks can be orange now it's much easier to understand what each node does especially if you work on a much bigger composition let's see the last note in the floor in the second view and think about the next thing we want to do with our comp I don't want to make this video much longer so let's finish it up as one of the last thing let's change this copper pot to a golden pot the color of the pot is mostly coming from the reflection and the specular passes if you take a look at them so first let's create a mask for the pot using crypto mat we can use the same crypto mat we use for the rock so press ctrl space to add a crypto mat node and place it underneath the reflection and the specular passes I'm going to connect the output of our a loader node that contains the crypto mat pass from theory to this input now view the crypto mat pass on the Left view and the crypto mat node itself on the right view move the handle onto the pot and click on the Add button and enable Matt only now add a color corrector after the reflection pass and set the Krypton the mask for this color corrector note I'm gonna copy the note and paste instance it's using ctrl shift V and hold on shift and put it after the specular pass and connect the crypto mat node as its mask as well great set the hue value 2.06 let's make this color correct notes pink and the new crypto matte orange now I want to add an overall color correction to the entire image so had a new color correction node you can use curves to color correct your image at any point and there are other color correction nodes as well if you take a look at them but let's use a simple color corrector node here and connect the last node in the chain to the input of the color correction node and I'm going to change its color to pink as well and now because this color correction node has been applied after all the nodes it will affect all the composition the image lacks a bit of saturation so let's increase the saturation to maybe something like 1.2 and finally I want to add some contrast there is a contrast parameter in the color corrector node but it tends to clamp the values and I tend to use a combination of gain and gamma to adjust the contrast so let's increase the gain to around 1.3 and gamma 2.91 now that's much better if you like what a node does but you want to dial up or down its effect on your composition you can go to the settings tab of that node and use this blend value to decrease or increase its effect if I increase the blend value to two the effect of this color corrector node is much stronger and if said 2.5 the effect becomes half as strong as before let's set it back to 1 again and you can tell a node to effect only a specific channel so if we want this color correction know to only affect the blue channel we can disable red and green channels if i zoom out and take a look at the entire composition I think I'm going to disable the to color correction nodes that made the pot golden so just select them and press control P I won't delete them we can keep them in case we wanted to come back again I think I'm done with this comp but before calling you today I just want to show you one last thing and that is how to use shape masks in fusion you notice in the toolbar we have a rectangle and ellipse a polygon and b-spline masks and if I right-click and go to the Tools menu and math submenu you notice we have other mask types as well including bitmap masks which can be very useful maybe we can add some vignetting and in the process use some of these masks so let me add a background note and this is the node to create solids or gradients within fusion we just want a simple black solid and by default we get that from a background node which is perfect we can view this note in the left view and to create that vignetting effect I need to multiply this black solid on top of the comp we can use the channel boolean node but there is a simpler node called merge so let's add one I'm going to use the last node of the comp as the background input and the black solid as the foreground input now in the merge node using the apply mode you can change the blending mode and in this case we can use normal or multiply it really doesn't matter I just need to go to the blend tab and decrease the blend amount 2.9 now we want to limit the darkening effect to only the corners to create that vini ating effect so we need a mask and to add a mask just select the background node itself and add a rectangle or a polygon mask let's go for a polygon mask and as you can see the mask will be hooked up to the mask input of the background node let's go for a polygon mask and create a Lowe's mask by clicking around you and now in the mask properties you can adjust a mask using parameters like soft edge border width and invert I or vignetting effect the comp looked nicer to me without whinnying so let's use the last color correct note and disconnected three nodes we use for vignetting from the comp but keep them around in case we can actually make a group out of them simply select all the three nodes or right-click and choose group you can double click on the group to open it up and rename it to something like anything so we know what these nodes are responsible for perfect finally we can compare our original Beauty path straight out of the render with the composition we built let's view the original beauty pass in the left view and the last node in the floor in the right view let me just pull down the timeline to make the image view bigger or we can just disable this node section using this button up here and press ctrl F to fit both the views and the color corrected image is looking much better compared to the original render currently we have this dual view but we can turn it to a single view by clicking in this rectangle up here and click on the same button to go back to that 12u again let's get back the flow again and the only thing that remains is to save the image out I want you to remember that what we see as the final result has an LUT applied to it so we are applying a 2.2 gamma correction to the image we did that at the beginning of the lesson if you remember correctly and if I turn off the lookup table from using this button in the image viewer this is the actual linear image that we have you can save it out as it is and have a linear image if we wanted to but in most cases we want to save it out as an sRGB image with a 2.2 gamma correction applied to now to save out the image you need a saver node which is available in the toolbar as well when you add a saver first you need to define where you want to save the image and name the image as you wish I tend to add a post suffix to my color corrected renders and now press save I'm going to connect the last node in the chain to the input of the saver node in the saver properties change the format to JPEG for example and make sure the dot jpg extension has been added to the file name as well and let's see the saver note in the left view to get that sRGB image go to the export tab of the saver node and open up the output gamma space section we don't want to keep this linear color space that we have so change keep to space and change the gamma space - srgb and click on apply curve now we get a corrected as RGB image okay in the timeline make sure we only have one frame and you can do so by zeroing out all of these timeline and render range values and click on this render button and click on start render and as it is just one frame we get this render completed message quickly and if you take a look at that output folder we can see the results okay we are done just save out your fusion come from the file menu and good luck we barely scratch the surface and if you want more fusion tutorials just like this video and leave a comment down below well I hope you enjoyed this video make sure to visit our website mograph plus calm or our gamma old page at gamma calm slash McGruff + and check out our premium rendering and motion graphic courses for cinema 4d 3ds max Maya Arnold korenev Aaron Maxwell and so on please like share and subscribe for more videos from Agra plus see you next time you

Channel: MographPlus

Views: 11,741

Keywords: Fusion, davinci resolve, vray, 3ds max, compositing, exr, render eleemnts, MographPlus, maya, cinema 4d

Id: y27iNhzBb2Y

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020