Nuke Compositing an Advanced CG Shockwave | VFX (LookDev)

[Music] hey everyone welcome to this tutorial uh this time we're going to talk about how to create this advanced shockwave that you guys might have seen me post in the last couple posts on the channel so we're going to kind of talk about this and how i use some of the elements that i just released as a library to kind of kit bash this sort of thing together so this is the effect i'll just let it play in case you guys haven't seen um we have this ball kind of dropping down and in and then we have like this huge kind of shock wave explosion uh explosion and sort of this refractive thing happening and there's sort of a couple levels of complexity to this explosion it's not simply like a 2d element that's not going to work so just to point out some of the levels of complexity in this if i pause on maybe one of the explosion frames here we can see that first of all we have obviously this very bright over exposed uh center here where we're losing detail and this is an important part of i guess compositing is like losing detail is really important and knowing where to maintain or lose it as part of the photographic quality of something is something you want to consider so that's kind of something we have happening in center but we also have a couple of different variations of color happening and then we also have this like huge explosion with sort of these like manifolds of uh i guess like additive uh sort of overlapping ripples uh that give it this sort of quality so it's not uh as straightforward as just you know using an eye distort and kind of uh you know putting it over the scene so i'm going to talk about how i did this and how i use the elements and also why i call it kit bashing so it really is a lot of the elements combined but you'll see how i'm working with them and i think that this is probably something that's maybe not understood directly when you're looking at the energy effects library that releases it's not meant to just be something you take and you just slap it over your your footage and you're done uh really there's a certain way you can actually work with these and i think it's actually sort of a new way of working um i also think it's sort of combining an old way of working like kind of the lost art of some of the people you know like in after effects the way they composite and they use patterns uh is something that i think is almost kind of lost art you see some people doing it but not that many people are doing it so yeah i think that having this library is really useful and if you want that by the way you can get it here so it's on the website composite academy slash energy effects fx in the domain and then you can see basically 200 simulated effects for look development so i'll put this back and we'll look at this next there's a video i'll show you guys next of how i actually use some of these elements to generate some of the lens flares and the lens artifacts so these are these elements even though it's called the energy kind of effects library really it's just a bunch of patterns and you can do anything that you can do with a pattern so that's like part of a big part of all these lens flares and that sort of refractive quality is also coming from those elements so i'm going to talk about the main part here first which is uh this let me just zoom here to my shockwave so this is the main shockwave event so we have this pass that i created uh we have all that kind of glassy refraction happening in there and it's kind of scary scaling up and going across our scene and then we also have the second part so there's kind of a two parts to the main shock wave there's like this bubble that kind of comes but we also have uh where the bubble is contacting the geometry so i created kind of like an electrical pass that is utilizing uh another element but we're revealing it across the geometry where the shock wave is touching and if you look at the final comp um go back to the final comp you can see it gives it that quality of it feels like something is truly kind of traveling along the surface so even though it's split into two elements it looks like one whole event that's happening together and so let me just go back to that so i guess i'll explain the contact point first just because i'm already at this part of the script so essentially what this is is we have this element from the pack from the library and you can notice that it's actually a circle and that's not going to work for our situation but one thing with this library is that they're 4k so you can basically bend them you can warp them and you're going to maintain a certain level sharpness and you can kind of re-wrap them onto geometries in different ways so in this case we have a circular kind of portal which could be used for a multitude of things but in this case i unwrapped it into a straight kind of linear pattern so we have a note here called polar distort this is from nookipedia you can do the same thing with a spherical transform node i just don't like messing around with all the settings here there's a bunch of stuff you have to memorize and i'm a little bit lazy with that so i just keep the puller distort chuck it on whenever i need to unwrap or re-wrap so what that does is you can wrap circles into uh basically straight lines and that allows us to take this circular pattern uh put it into a linear pattern and what we can do with that is st map it to our scene so again the st map i've covered this many times in some other videos go check them out with uv passes but basically we have a uv pass for this environment and we're wrapping this new uh effect and as it kind of spreads if i just like kind of play upward this thing will kind of expand across our scene so we have the pattern st mapped to it which is going to give us something kind of everywhere in the geometry so if i just look at the if i just look at that and give it a second to load here uh we can see that that's kind of wrapped uh on the whole scene but we only want this texture to appear where the shock wave is touching so the way i did that was i essentially just used pmats so i used the p mask node again from nukapedia you can grab it i'll just type it in there's other ones as well i just use this one they all do the same thing basically but yeah so basically i expand this mat at the same time as the shock wave so we have this black and white alpha that is going to reveal our quote unquote kind of contacting energy effect so this effect is only going to appear on the edges and that will just give us that like kind of leading edge of the effect that's spreading so that's basically how that was done i know that's a quick overview and i'm not covering every single node but this is a more advanced uh i guess tutorial so i'm not going to cover every single node because the videos will just end up being way too long i'd rather cover the concepts and if people have a specific question i can maybe try to answer it but um i think covering the concepts and and the way to think about approaching a visual effect is actually maybe more useful than just like a specific note and one other thing i can i guess mention here just to point it out is i did use some crypto mats to isolate certain areas and kind of mix in texture a little bit differently and that's because if you just slap on this whole effect with an st map the way the uvs are mapped on different pieces of the scene you know you might have a little bit of texture that's stretched too far or too big so what you can do is sort of st map it uh differently so you kind of scale this thing up and down and then just kind of key mix that between different pieces of the geometry of the scene if that makes sense so essentially we're just taking mats of different pieces and scaling that effect for each piece so that uh it doesn't look stretched and stuff like that so that's kind of a very quick and uh simplified version of i guess the explanation of that but hopefully that makes sense uh so you can see how that circular element became something totally different and that's something i'm really trying to demonstrate uh with this video and you'll see again with this uh main shock wave basically the same thing so it's like an effect but it looks totally different than the original effect so i'll show you guys that now so i'll go up here uh one way i like to work with these elements that i've discovered after creating them is i just like to load them all in nuke at the same time so basically i chuck them all on like an external drive so i don't fill my computer with some memory throw them on external drive and i can just step through and i just load them all into nuke at the same time and i can just find a pattern that suits what i'm doing so i wanted to make a shock wave so i found this pattern and i thought this one was pretty cool um but this isn't going to work to just scale up in 2d towards the camera it's not going to really give us that that look and that's actually what i tried originally oh maybe i could just stick it on there and kind of scale it so usually i try to go for the very very quick solution first but that's just not going to work because we need that three-dimensional quality so the way i used this element was to so i did some grading here let's just see go back in time here so at the right frame so like this i used this another element here this kind of liquid one you saw me use probably in the last tutorial i did i really like this one it just has a lot of depth and layer and you can do all kinds of stuff with it so i use that as a basically i distort to the other effect so we have this main effect being distorted by this other liquid effect i'm using a node called glass again another one from nukapedia you can just type it in it's the same thing as an eye distort but the the nice thing about this note is you can i distort the color channels slightly differently and what that does is it gives us this nice aberration in some of the highlights and gives it that really refractive quality so we get something that looks like this but again we're still working with a 2d sphere here so now we need to solve how can we make something 2d have multiple layers of depth and have a nicer quality so essentially what i did was i took a sphere and we have a sphere here and i did a apply material and the reason i used to apply material because we don't want to apply the texture right away because we actually need to change the uvs um of the effect that we're trying to apply so what i mean by that is if i disable this i guess i could have maybe applied it as a as a texture directly let's just see so yeah let's see that versus yeah i probably could have applied it directly as an image let's just see the uv project yeah looks like it does the same thing so maybe the ply material is not necessary here but in any case essentially what i did was i took the sphere i used a uv project and what is this doing uh we have the normal uvs of a sphere so if you look at the way the sphere normally uh maps the uvs if we apply like a checkerboard and we look at that we see it's just kind of wrapping around but actually what i wanted to do is kind of project um let's just switch back to the effect quick it'll be easier to demonstrate what i wanted to do was kind of uh project this effect on both sides so instead of having it just on one side wrapping around the whole thing which you kind of lose the texture almost like i wanted to make it look like a multi-uh layered effect sort of so by using a uv project you're basically doing uh you're changing the way the uvs are mapped and you can check out the video on uvs i have i think i have a pretty good description of like what are uvs and everything like that but i used a planar projection on the yz plane from an axis so what is that doing um when i move this axis around uh essentially let's just move it up and down so we can see so essentially it's doing this it's kind of projecting that texture on this plane onto this surface so we get this double sort of effect here and after that i just took a transform geo and merged it over itself so i rotate it at 90 degrees and merge this thing over itself so we get this effect of like four different um i guess patterns here and we could time offset them if you want to make them slightly asymmetrical or something like that um in this case there's so much motion blur and everything that i didn't really bother but this is like the base of the effect and then what i did was a displaced geo so i did a displaced geo with a radio and i put the radial at the center of this sort of format and then i used the displaced geo and what is this doing uh basically i animated this displaced geo to have a smaller scale towards the start of the scene so if i go a little bit backwards in time you'll see that our sphere starts to bend inward towards the center and i wanted it to feel like an explosion coming from a center point so rather than just having a sphere scaling up i did a sphere that displaces from the center outward so basically everything is like curving in at the start like this and it's just displacing from a radio and then i just animate that scale off of the displacement so we can see it like kind of goes more circular as it uh travels further away so you see the bend is becoming less as it gets bigger so if i just skip forward again in time that displacement reduces over time so we have like a perfect sphere and what does that give you it gives you something that basically looks like this so we have that kind of weird shape at the start that kind of have these nice like triangle like almost uh explosive look and then it's kind of moving outward and then becoming more spherical as it expands and we also have that nice kind of glassy effect i did use some deep compositing here i'm not going to cover a full tutorial decomposing yet because i haven't completely dived into those concepts and that is a pretty deep concept in itself so that's not what this video is about but essentially what it is is just taking a scanline render taking the geometry of the scene and doing a deep merge and that basically allows you to cut out the shock wave from the geometry that it's passing across so it's basically just a demerge i think i used the reformat as well to make it faster i think it was pretty slow but again i don't want to get too much in deep on this tutorial because that's a really long topic i just want to kind of cover the look dev of this shock wave so yeah now we have this nice base of this exploding thing and let's go back to the script and see so shockwave and then i did some color grading on it to make it a little bit more blue because that goes with the color scheme of our scene i'm going to talk about a little bit more of the color scheme in a few minutes once i get to that but uh yeah and then just merging this over um also i used it as a map for distortion as well so like we if we have the scene without it they have a scene with it but also i'm using the same effect as another distortion map so that kind of distorts the background below it like this and then merging the effect over the top so now we have all those like layered highlights and that kind of complexity i was talking about as well as uh you know as it's crossing we have that uh all this stuff happening um so let's keep going um down the script i'll start talking about i guess the lens layers now i'm not going to cover every lens flare i'll just cover kind of the ones i use the uh elements in here so let's just go down one other part was i just forgot to mention this so part of that shock wave i created another render pass not a render but i did this in nuke i just took an element and i wrapped it on that same sphere that i created with all that distortion and everything happening but i put a refractive element on it so let me go up and just explain that real quick before i move on to the lens flare portion if i can find it i don't have it properly labeled here and it's been a couple days here we go so uh here it is so this is the element i used on there instead so i this is the same sphere setup i just showed you guys but instead of putting that other material on i took this element from the library because i thought that it had kind of a glass like quality to it in the way that things overlap with each other and i'm going to show you guys a video of a real flare and kind of refractive element and a second here of some footage i took with a drone uh just to explain that further but i want to go over this real quickly anyway so we have the color space uh into hsv and i'm doing this sort of trick to like make it a rainbow i have a tutorial on my channel about how to make a rainbow in nuke so you can find that so i'm not going to explain this whole concept because that's a video in itself but essentially we can take a black and white image and we can make basically make it a rainbow and then what i did was i took some of the greens out because i don't want those those colors uh that very hunter like woods green i didn't want that in my scene so i'm going to show you guys the color scheme i was working for but so i just took a little bit of that out so we have this crazy looking element uh that we can essentially uh distort so i use the same trick there and then i just applied that to my sphere and then we basically get an element that looks like this and this is something we can just mix in a little bit to give more of a glassy kind of quality and you see it gets a little bit low res when it's really really close to the camera but it really doesn't matter because the amount of motion blur that's happening here we can also blur it a little bit more as it comes and fade it off so this is going to be a really great pass to have as a compositor so yeah i'm kind of like creating each layer each pass but just in nuke you know we don't need to create everything in cg so i'll just go down here and start talking about some of these other parts let's go to a good frame to demonstrate it so let's see so i think this is a good frame so one of the things i want to mention before i talk about the flare aspect is is the color scheme because this is important it's always seems to be overlooked in tutorials and stuff like that you never you never hear compositors talking about the art side of compositing you always hear about you know just cg passes and stuff like that but that's actually not the most important part um so one of the things when you're working on this is not to just start chucking random colors uh in a scene you want to come up with a color scheme and try to work within those mental barriers those artistic barriers so one of the uh kind of color schemes i worked in here is i mean you can see it pretty much at the start of the shot so we go here and we have this pretty monochromatic sort of scene like just basically blue and kind of teals and then the highlights go a bit desaturated so if we were to like draw that out as a color scheme just to visualize it and it does help to do this let's just draw it out so we have something like that and we have something a little bit more in the teals kind of teal greens like that and then we have some saturated highlights maybe make it a little bit brighter for demonstration desaturated highlights this is our main color scheme sort of um but what i wanted to do was rather than have it completely monochromatic was to chuck in some uh just some cooler tones but not completely breaking the image if i go in there really reds and orange and green everything's going to look rainbow and it starts to look a bit cheap like you have to do that very carefully if you're going to use a lot of colors and if you look at marvel films you know like you look at doctor strange and some of these these films they do this quite brilliantly in terms of the way that they're managing these colors and some of their frames look very stylized because the the amount of saturation they're using but it still is very static in the way that they're doing it because they're very cautious in the way that they're they're choosing their colors um so for this what i wanted to do was chuck some of these these cooler tones in so i took a little bit of this kind of purplish color and a little bit of this kind of slightly more green uh sort of color in the in the flare so we're just seeing this uh pretty much in the picture i did use a tiny bit of yellow yellow green uh on some of the flares at one point but yeah it's really not as prominent as everything else it's very a very subtle addition but that just gives it a little bit of color variation so you start to see that in our highlights in our explosion flare and all of these little elements here so it just adds pops of color to your scene so let me talk about how these flares were actually made not just the color i'll go back up to it so let me just go back earlier in my comp and give it a second to load um let's go to frame 50 yeah frame 51 actually i think it's fine just let it load for a second i don't have the whole thing completely pre-comped out i do have a lot of pre-comps in this comp this is a pretty big script as you can see let's go here a little bit further down in our comp there we go so let's look at just one of these elements here uh yeah i have some of these elements these explosion stuff coming towards the camera as well i'm not going to talk about every single element i use but i did use a lot of those energy effects layered together and that's the nice thing about having them already rendered it's like you wouldn't necessarily think if you're doing the simulations yourself you'd have to make every single effect from scratch but having all that huge library at your disposal it speeds up this process so these are some of the elements i created for lens flares so this is an element from my energy pack that it's supposed to be probably i don't know maybe some kind of wormhole or like emp or some kind of crazy explosion so you can use it for all kinds of stuff but when i was looking at this you know i just dropped them all in nuke i was like well this kind of looks like a refractive type of quality and what i mean by that is uh let me show you a video so this is a video uh that i took uh and i have some really nice lens flares in this video so there's like basically no post production in here except some very slight grading on davinci resolve but i like to keep these videos and i have like basically library pictures and videos that i uh mentally store because there's all kinds of details that you want to remember so something like this you see this flare forming down on this car with all these tiny little uh rainbow streaks and this is like a crazy flare uh it doesn't happen that often but you know it's something that you're not gonna maybe intuitively think of so it's nice to have uh those things so you can see that little flare forming there but that's not the one i wanted to point out there's a couple flares in this video that are very interesting um and and kind of demonstrate this sort of uh idea so you can see uh here on the bottom of the frame we have this uh flare coming in and it looks like some shapes that are kind of almost overlapping in the way they move and this is something you see a lot in sort of lens flares you see these like little overlapping highlights so we'll go here again another one forms here so we can see these little almost i don't know slight brighter pieces in a larger glass like flare and as it keeps going there's a couple more that show this that well as here so we can see it again here so we see that little pieces that are changing highlights at different rates from each other and kind of overlapping which makes this really nice organic looking motion again with this one so we see this kind of weird shape that appears at the end and if we look at my comp i always try to take those things into consideration uh to try to mimic those effects you can see this this kind of flare thing happening we have something similar happening here um and those kind of refractive elements are happening in the edge flare so let's go back to it so yeah this this library can be used for a lot of things and i use it in this case for an edge flare so i took this element i scaled it up to the edge of the frame and then i kind of like frame holded it on different frames and dissolved between so like as i switch frames as i tap through here you see that these uh highlights are kind of changing in within the shape of another shape so it gives that sort of look that i just described and what we can do with that is kind of push it into our color scheme that i mentioned so if i go into that color scheme we have those blues and uh those nice highlights there as well so we can kind of plus that on as the explosion is happening um so let's just load it here go back to frame 51 i think it's sort of cached so obviously it looks kind of weird everything looks weird on this frame because there's not enough uh elements here so everything looks just like a very ugly glow in the center but if we again if we step down the comp once we have all the other stuff that's where it comes together so it's a lot of layers but you can see that just even that base layer that little refractive element it adds that the edge here i also used another one of my effects from that library so if i time pin it and look at it so this is another element that's that comes with that library it does something like this where there's like these like two spheres that like protrude outward um and that can be used for like a bunch of different stuff but in this case i actually looked at the start frame and i said well that actually looks kind of interesting it doesn't you know even though this is like some kind of energy ball explosion the start frame looks like an optical element so actually i just frame hold it on that frame and scale it up like crazy and then what i did was add some color to it so i i basically went into the blues the same kind of tones were in here and then i added a slight bit of purple into the highlights so i kind of blurred it so it's like all blurred together and then i add a slight bit of color uh into that image and that's again just giving a slight pop of color is going to add interest to your image rather than just you know going completely monochromatic so you see even though we have a blue explosion i'm adding pink highlights and as i step down all these same concepts are being applied so as i step down we have more different color highlights so again i use this element as a lens flare as well so if you remember this is the same element i wrapped onto the i guess the shock wave as a refractive thing but i also use it as a lens flare so you can see it it's used in different ways and yeah basically just did the rainbow technique which is explained in the video how to make rainbow nuke and then i'm just kind of scaling that up and adjusting the point of time of that video to make it kind of flicker so same thing here so we have that same element just at a different point in time and i'm mixing them on and off at different points and let's see and then this one i think this is just an optical flare so this is from the optical flares plug-in so that's how we can get a more complex looking flare using a kit bashing and let's just keep going down i think yeah this is an interesting one as well let me go to frame 51 this is cached uh this is another interesting one so again like we've constructed it to here at this point and we can add layers of color just to make it more interesting so i took this shock wave element and motion blur to outward just a 2d motion blur very simple and then just add a bit of that greenish tone in there and we can just add those little those stacking those pops of color as we build this image up let's just see and yeah there's a bunch of other stuff but i think that's basically it for the shockwave i know a lot of people had a question how to do that and i think this tutorial will be very useful in seeing that um obviously if you guys don't want to get to you know the library for for whatever reason a lot of these techniques still apply and you can see like the the sort of logic the way of combining patterns and stacking things and uh combining colors to get a result and that's i think pretty useful so hopefully you guys enjoyed hit like if you liked the video really helps the algorithm and yeah thanks so much

Channel: Compositing Academy

Views: 39,454

Keywords: nuke, shockwave, energy, vfx, assets, explosion, lookdev, grading, flares, action, film, filmmakers, cgi, blender

Id: ErwClH-dQA0

Length: 30min 29sec (1829 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021