Compositing With Multiple Scenes In Blender

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're going to be taking a quick look at how you can use multiple scenes to do motion graphics in blender let's get started [Music] okay so this is something i wanted to talk about because i don't really want to see many videos out about this and it's really kind of i don't know out of this box uh feature that uh you can do some really interesting stuff with blender in and i thought i'd uh highlight it because i was using it just just last night i was doing a project for a client and uh had a shot and i needed to do this i needed to have uh i needed to have some text on screen and this was the perfect solution for it so i thought hey this is a great example just to give you guys an idea of how you could be using this in your own projects so let me show you what we're going to do i've got a little scene here now this is a scene from a project that i've just been working on for a client i've just changed it a little bit gotten rid of all like the copyright stuff so this is just a couple of uh free assets i've got these cars here um which are just some free free assets that i got online so i'll um i can post a link to where i downloaded this so you can get a hold of this and i've just got some simple buildings that i've modeled and the idea behind this shot was they wanted this world that is uh sort of a white sort of expanse so i'll just jump into the camera so you can see we've got this white expanse so i got this shot flying through the city it was really nice dramatic overhead and we got this car a hero car that's got the signal coming out of it and i need to have some text to pop up on screen right so i need to have some text come down here and say like you know i don't know uh sensor detection or something you know it needs to say something you know um you know i could i could make some text i could make a text object right and i could parent it to my camera and i could shrink it right down and put it really close to my camera and i could create a material to make it fade on but that might intersect the ground it could intersect the car because you can see we're getting really close to stuff in fact it would definitely be intersecting this blue ring thing right so it's going to run into that and there's all these problems that having this text in the scene is going to cause for me now i could go into like after effects afterwards and like add that text in or go into natron and do it there or resolve using fusion do it there but i didn't really have a lot of time and i couldn't be bothered going into another program i kind of just wanted to do it all right here in blender i just wanted to have some text pop up in a cool way and fade off and that was it so how would you do that if you don't want it intersect if you don't want it to interact with your scene what do you do well you use the power of multiple scenes let me show you how to do it in order to do this the first thing we need to do there's a couple of things we need to be using all right we need to get we're going to need to use the compositor and we're going to need to use um another scene okay so let's get this second scene set up and then i'll set up the compositor and you'll start to see how this all flows together so i've got up here this is the scene box right up here this is the this is telling me the name of this scene you know i could change this right i can call this my hero scene this is the main scene that i'm working on but there's this little button here next to it just like with materials and stuff and i can click this and it gives me the option to make a new scene copy settings link copy or full copy so a full copy is going to make an entire copy of this current scene duplicate it and pop it over into a new scene so i can do more stuff to it link copy everything's linked so whatever i do in one scene it's going to happen in the other and copy settings just going to take settings over but new is what i want i'm just going to start with a fresh scene all right i'm going to get out of rendered view and turn my grid back on so here we are in a fresh scene so this is like starting a new blender project right except it's living inside of my main scene right so i've got these two scenes now i call this my text supers if you're not familiar super is the official term for a text that appears on the screen usually in the lower third of the the frame it's called the super all right so now let's uh let's start off let's create some text so shift a and text i'll just focus in on it and let's rotate on the x 90 degrees and let's turn around so we're actually looking at it correctly and let's say um all right uh what should we say uh that's a great i love that groundbreaking supers i mean that's a great text i would definitely want that in this video it really sells it i think uh we've got some we've got some groundbreaking supers here i'm gonna shift a i'm going to create a camera fun fact did you notice when we created a new scene and jumped into it it is like starting fresh in blender except there was no default cube and there was no camera and there was no point light creepy it feels really weird doesn't it like not having those things there when you start a fresh scene it's a bit like i think i know where i am but i'm not sure okay so i'm going to jump back into my camera i'm going to lock my camera to view i'm going to go here and i'm going to set my rotation i'm just going to flatten things out in fact you know what i'm going to do i'm going to take this camera we don't need any perspective on this i'm going to make it orthographic all right and now i'm going to take it and i can change my orthographic scale or i can just take my text scale it down and position it however i want now i want these supers to kind of appear down in the lower part of my my my screen kind of like this all right and uh let's get a material going for these guys so i'm going to click new and i'm going to go for an emission material because i just kind of want it to be just a bright bright color i'll go for a bright red let me switch to rendered view that's pretty good i can put a bit of glow on it um and yeah there we go now i want this i want this text to fade on right i want to do something with that so let's create a little a little extra bit for this so i'm going to create a texture coordinate node i'm going to create a mapping node i'm going to create a color ramp over and i'm also going to create a gradient texture i'm going to take my texture coordinate and i will pipe it into i think i'll use the object coordinate into the vector vector into the gradient texture here i'll take the factor or the color doesn't really matter the gradient texture into the color ramp and then the color into uh let's see i'm gonna actually go for a create a transparent bsdf and a mix shader i'll explain these in a second so and i'll use this as the factor and i'll put this into that one there okay so what's going on here we've got two different shaders the emission shader is what creates the glow transparent's just a different shader it's a very simple shader that just makes things see through and then the mix shader is another shader that allows you to make shaders based on a factor and i've created a gradient so we use the texture coordinate telling blender how to place this texture onto our object i've put this mapping node in but it's not doing anything at all i can hit m to mute it and it's not going to change how things look because the mapping nodes just there so i can have some extra control later if i want to move things around this is then being piped into the gradient texture which generates a gradient and because we've got a texture coordinate going into it it knows how to kind of place it and this doesn't always land where you want it to so you have to kind of use a mapping node to move it around before you can see it sometimes because sometimes it's like got the gradient off the material and you have to kind of shift it around and the color ramps just here to give us a little bit extra control and then that's being fed into this factor which is a slider which determines how much of each of these we're going to show so wherever we've got black we're going to be showing one of these and where we've got white we'll show the other one and it would kind of transition between the two so that's what's happening there and then all that goes into the material output now what we need to do first because we're in ev is i actually need to turn on some extra options so we bring out the little side menu by clicking that tiny little hidden arrow you can also hit the n key and i'm gonna go options down at the bottom the last tab and we're gonna set the blend mode to alpha blend or hash doesn't really matter we're gonna turn shadows off because we don't need that and we'll turn off show backface um so now it will actually be transparent you can check that as well by coming over here to your render tab and film and transparent and that will show you wherever you got this box thing that means that it's a transparent image so you can see without that uh fico opaque that's what it was looking like before you just couldn't see um and alpha hash by the way that's the difference you kind of see it's got some like noise to it you may not be able to see that with the youtube compression okay so uh we've got this you know simple gradient now and now what i can do is i can use my mapping node to animate this on and off okay so groundbreaking supers i mean that's so cool okay so uh let's go and animate this uh i'm gonna turn it right here i'll set a keyframe i'll come forward a little bit in in our in our timeline i'll just hit play right here maybe uh and i'll hit i to set a keyframe for the location of this mapping node i'll come forward a little bit and then i'll drag this so that it appears there we go not too far just a little bit because i want it to [Music] there we go i'm gonna let it stay for a little while and then i'll hit another fact i'm gonna switch to my dope sheet select the node um select the object then select the node there it is if you can't find it you can also turn this off this is only shows selected so anyways i can take this keyframe shifty to duplicate drag it out you get this solid orange color because it means this these keyframes are exactly the same as these keyframes just a visual indicator that nothing's changing and then i can duplicate this one and bring it over here so now it's going to fade back off [Music] okay so we got a cool super that fades on fades off lovely what do we do with this all right so the next step let's head back over to our hero scene and what i need to do now is i'm going to take um my panel over here where i've got my shader editor i'm going to switch over to the compositor and i'm going to click use nodes i'm also going to double check it's in the second tab in the uh output properties tab come right down make sure that compositing is turned on it should turn on automatically but just in case just double check that because that will then make sure that when you're finishing you're seeing rendering it will pipe things through the compositor all right so we just need to find where's our stuff i'll hit a to select all in the full stop key to zoom in and there's nothing here okay fine let's uh let's go first we need a render layer node and then we need a composite node these should automatically be here for you i'm not sure why mine are and we're also going to grab a viewer node this you will have to create yourself okay so um the render layer is basically just what's gonna be rendered right uh so if i stick this into here to the viewer this will allow me to see whatever is rendered in the viewer so if i come over here to my image editor so this will show us now at first it won't show it to you right so i need to also you have to make sure you've selected up here so if you don't you've got something else just look for viewer node and that will show us whatever we have in here but you have to have stuff rendered now if i hit play right it's not gonna it's not gonna do anything you have to physically go render and render image in order to get some data into this that will then show you in the viewer so bear that in mind the composite is this is what's actually gonna save your final rendered file so don't get stuck in like doing a bunch of nodes going into your viewer i think it looks great and then you hit render and it's only going to save out whatever's piped into this so you make sure these are piped into the same the same thing sometimes what i like to do is grab a re-route nut and just plug it in like this so i don't forget sorry i'm ignoring chat oh look my face is up high look at that that's annoying [Music] i wondered why i felt so you know all right so we got our thing going now what we can do is um we're going to shift d duplicate this render layer and i'm going to select right here you give this drop down and i can select my other render layer text supers there it is now what i can do is i can go all right well let's mix these two guys and we can grab both of the images and pipe them in and then stick this one into here i'm also going to switch this to my image editor viewer so i can see what's going on and if you click on this little button here this will use the alpha of the second input so it's using the alpha channel of our super here and it's piping it into here so the alpha channel is the transparency channel so it means it's going to take um like if i if i go to another frame here and i turn this off you see we're going to lose everything it's because it's not using the alpha channel it's not using any of the transparency from this shot but if i turn this on it is all right so now let's let's finish our setup so i'm going to come back over into my tech super shot all right follow me closely you ready we're getting a video sequencer make sure you've got sequence preview selected sequencer and preview i'm going to drag this up so we got a little bit more room and then drag this down go to the beginning of your timeline it helps as well sometimes to pull this up and grab your timeline just tuck that right here so you can easily control and i'm going to hit shift a in my timeline go to scene and hero scene so you can never input in the timeline the scene that you're in that scene you can never put in the timeline a sequencer timeline for that scene but you can put all the other scenes in right so watch when i do this i can now see my previous scene here in the view and then what i can do is i can come to view and right here scene strip display i can set this to rendered right it's going to show me the rendered scene from my other scene and i press play i am getting an update in my sequencer so the sequencer is somehow able to reference a live render from both so i can find a frame now where i've got uh you know the bit that i want and i can come over here to my 3d viewer and now i can actually position this and you can see it's actually coming out quite large and it's a little bit weird i'm not sure why that's doing that and you have to like refresh it so i've got to move forward a frame i'm not exactly sure why the frames aren't matching up that's a bit weird but whatever now we're doing is we're compositing right this scene on top of this scene in blender and if i go back to my first scene and render things out it's going to render both shots and put them together for me and this is really powerful because if you want to have something like text that's not interacting with your scene or you want to have an element that's not going to interact with your main scene and put them together you can do it this way and by using the sequencer like this where you just import your first scene into your sequencer strip of the second scene you're going to be able to see whatever is happening in your compositing node in real time well not in real time it's going to be very slow but you can see it so you can get updates and you can position things and get stuff set up right so that it looks the way you want it to and you can get really complex chains in your compositor which is really powerful and very cool for doing some super neat stuff so anyways i hope you found this really helpful i felt that you can use this trick in your own projects and uh hopefully it starts to demystify a little bit uh the idea of using the compositor and bringing in multiple scenes together now i mean there's a lot that you can do with this so for as another example in a different shot in the same project i had a scene where i had a lot of materials on in my scene it was a really complex scene a lot of detail and i needed that scene to transition into something like this it was just this plain white world where it was just like one shader on everything and what i did was actually set up two scenes uh i did this exact same stuff in the same in two scenes and i had one scene that held the detail textured and i had the other one that was just the one white shader on everything and then i made a third scene that was nothing but a black and white gradient that was across everything that i could animate and i used that scene to drive the the factor of my mix input between those first two scenes so the final effect was you have this really detailed scene and then suddenly there's this wipe that moves through 3d space that transitions it from the detailed to the really plain white world scene and it was a really effective result i was able to keep everything kind of in blender and just do it without having to go out to any kind of compositing software which is very very powerful so uh have a play around with it yourself and hopefully you'll be able to find some cool use cases for this and i hope you found this helpful if you enjoyed this video please hit that like button leave me a comment and don't forget to subscribe to the channel really helps it grow and uh please consider checking out the patreon so if you enjoyed this tutorial there's a whole um longer section so like the full record was there's a 30 minute long session live stream that i did and um you can check that out on the patreon if you join and also as uh youtube channel members get access to it as well plus you can get this project file if you join patreon at the second level this month uh or uh next month so it's always whenever you join you get this month the current month and the previous month's project files and that's it so and every month you stay on you get that that month's project files you just keeps kind of going through so you can start to collect the project files so um if you're interested in that hop over there and check that out as well so thank you again for checking it out and for watching this and for engaging with the channel don't forget to jump the discord we hang out there all the time a lot of cool stuff we're doing now monthly competitions um and we're gonna start highlighting those uh in a stream once a month so that could be a lot of fun the link is in the description below and um don't forget as well the gum road and the blender market got some cool stuff over there for you got stuff everywhere go check it out have a fantastic week i'll catch you later thanks for watching i'll see you in the next one adios [Music]

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 5,418

Rating: 4.9551821 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: pr6YlbELAuA

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021