Depth of field, atmospheric compositing, bloom, & camera shake in After Effects - VFX Plane Part 06

alright guys so this is the very last video of this tutorial I'm gonna finish up the compositing feel free to look at description for all the specific parts that we're gonna be going over otherwise let's get started so moving on now I want to do the depth of field depth of field is the way that the camera is going to focus on different elements of the shot if you have a really shallow depth of field objects closer to the camera or further away depending on where the focal point is are going to become a lot more blurry now for aerial aviation photography is unlikely we'd see a shallow depth of field because the photographer or the camera man is gonna have the f-stop up pretty high however we can still add a little bit and especially if we look later on in the shot maybe around frame 150 it would make sense for this part of the plane to be the focal point and the rest might begin to just get out of focus just ever so slightly so in order to do depth of field properly and after effects it is a little bit tricky to do there is a plugin that takes a lot of the hassle out of this but there is a way to do it natively in After Effects so before we do that we're going to go down to this plane beauty shot just noticed this needs to be at the top and we turn it off we don't usually need this plane beauty but we can just leave it there for reference later if you remember at the plane beauty is simply what was rendered from the frame buffer with all the passes already composited so we don't actually need this one so we'll just turn this off next we're going to go into the plane depth gonna make a copy of it click ctrl shift C or right click and do pre compose move all attributes into the new composition double click this layer right now we're looking at just the z-depth now this needs a bit more contrast on it but right now we're going to add a background and the background we're going to sample the color of the wing at the backend of the plane and place this layer underneath it kind of makes it look like the plane is coming through some fog here this is fine now the reason we have to do this is because without this layer the depth of field will stop wherever the plane stops and that's not how real focusing would work so we can't just single out separate objects otherwise it's not gonna look correct pop back over to plane 2 and we're gonna add a new adjustment layer underneath and call this depth of field and we'll be using two of these Z depth passes so we're going to rename this one as well let's call this DOF or depth of field so on the depth of field we're going to grab a camera lens blur effect right so right away you'll notice that when we put the camera lens blur effect everything is coated in same amount of blur so to change that and actually use that depth of field map we're going to go into the blur map change the layer to be the plane Z depth the DOF and then we need to change this from source to effects and masks so we can put curves effects on this Z depth layer and then it will propagate those results through otherwise it will only look at the source seam out here and I got a crank this value up to be some ridiculous value just so we can see this very clearly now right away you'll notice that the edges look a little bit odd and that's because anything that's blurred up to the edge of a canvas that since there are no pixels outside of it it's going to give this kind of effect so repeat edge pixels attempts to fix that next what we're going to do is select our plane Z depth UF layer turn it on so we can see what we're doing and then add a curves effect to it so we need to crush these black values quite a bit to really begin to see what we're doing we want the front end of the plane to be black and we do want to try to smooth out this transition we don't want there to be a hard edge here turn this layer back off and now you can see that this is currently InFocus this part right here go into the depth of field and change our blur focal distance we'll just start increasing this slightly and as we increase it is going to shift the position that's in focus so we're looking for maybe a value of around point one or maybe point zero five so it's more or less in the center there the rest looks absolutely ridiculous and not realistic at all but this was just so we could figure out what part isn't focused very clearly now we can drop the blur radius back down to something like five and this is going to look a lot more realistic so this part is in focus and then as we get further away from the plane it gets a little bit softer has more of a film look to it so it is reasonable to expect that the edges might get a little bit more blurred you know as lower this value if you want to but this looks pretty good another thing that you'll notice is that the clouds look a lot better so without the lens blur on we get a lot of artifacting from the pretty low sampling time that we had in v-ray so by adding just a little bit of blur we kind of get rid of a lot of that without having to do a higher sampling rate now we will go ahead and do that because there's areas around here where it's is still far too grainy but for this large area background adding a little bit of blur goes a long way in there that up I'm gonna rename this effect to be ID up the field the UF I'm also gonna add a second camera lens blur effect underneath this and I'll put the value quite low at around 0.3 so it will coat the entire scene again and another layer of blur but it's going to add just a tad amount of blur here we might even lower that to point two just so it's not so sharp when we rerender we might also just lower this very slightly if you want to do at 4.5 or maybe 4 might look a little bit better now also you need to check from different positions the further we get away from this the more out-of-focus it's going to appear by default so if we wanted to here if we go to the very end of the composition you'll notice that the plane is much darker so it's gonna be far less blur on the front end of the plane that at the beginning the plane is quite bright so to make this image look a little bit better what we're gonna have to do is go into the z-depth layer and you'll notice that the background blends in with the tail at towards the end of the shot but at the beginning is really not bright enough so well I'm gonna add a curves effect to this light gray solid at around frame 130 this appears to be pretty good to be 140 from the set a keyframe on the curves and I gotta go to the very beginning and at the very beginning I'm just gonna crush these white values up so they're a bit brighter it kind of blends in a little bit better because we want to make sure the background is all always not really the focal point of this is always going to be the plane next we can pop back out to the main composition and you can see that now the plane is sticking out more the nose is always darker than the background okay then we can now turn this back off and then move on to the next part okay so now that my renders have finished I want to show you how we can easily import new files so up here we'll just start with exhaust right click on exhaust go to replace footage with file we're gonna navigate to the version 3 folder go to exhaust and you can see this is now being updated grab the plane do the same thing right click replace footage file if a plane see the plane is now being updated and then we're also gonna do the sky as well okay it's very very simple to import new versions of files and just screw up through this and just make sure everything looks pretty good I like the wing being brighter there I think that's gonna be it's gonna be better and I like seeing underneath the plane - there's one last thing that we can do with the z-depth and that's going to be atmospheric perspective so atmospheric perspective is going to be if there is atmosphere or air between the viewer or the camera and the subject now further that distance is the more faded this subject is going to look because there's more atmosphere in the way so I could go into a whole lecture on this but I'm going to try to sum that up pretty quickly and we're gonna control this again with Z depth so we're gonna leave Z depth here but what we're gonna do next is turn off all of these passes except for GI so we just want to keep one of these on so we can work out one at a time and then just copy and paste the effects as we go up but we need to be able to see what we're doing just on one layer we're looking for an effect called the set matte effect so the set matte effect is a way of being able to use a mat without having to put a track mat directly above the layer since we're gonna be using this mat several times it's much more convenient to use the set matte effect we're gonna be using the plane Z depth flare and then for this we're again going to use effects and masks and we're going to be looking at the luminance channel so the bright values so when you do that you'll notice that the plane goes partially transparent if I were to solo this layer toggle the transparency grid you can see is more faded at the front than the back which is the opposite effect that we want so we'll go into the invert mat and now is more faded at the back so this might be a little bit too faded but for right now this is this is fine we can go and correct this in a moment but one thing that you will notice the way this effect works it is going to make the plane or faded so we're gonna fix that in a moment but before we do that we're just going to select this set matte effect copy it and turn on these layers again and then we're gonna paste each one of these passes we don't paste it on z-depth that is the matte we don't need to add anything there so this looks way too transparent right now so let's go up into our plane Z depth layer and add a curves effect we'll turn this on so we can see it more clearly the front end of the plane is going to need to be a lot darker so actually what we're gonna do here we're going to take this crush the black values if you do something more like or like this for our plane this small you're not gonna notice a huge amount of difference from the front end to the back end but if you had multiple planes in the shot you would probably want to do this a lot more on the planes in the distance but something like this will give us a really subtle effect but it should work pretty well so if we just look through different angles here we should be able to get a good read of how this is going to react so the further away the camera is the more faded it should be this is looking a little too faded though so we are going to need to crush the black values a bit more and reduce the contrast so right here it is looking a little faded but let's just go ahead and see what it looks like when it is composited let's turn this z-depth layer off so we can see that there's that far too faded here but we can can fix that in a moment what we need to do now though is fix the fact that we can see through the background so to fix this we're gonna go down to our plane gie layer just duplicate that and move the duplicate underneath and then rename the duplicate to be plane mat so let's solo this layer so we can look at it unobstructed so of this layer toggle off our transparency grid instead of using the GI layer here what we're going to use is the Alpha so for our G and B we can just say alpha alpha alpha and then click OK we do not need a set mat effect so we can just delete it and now we're just left with an outline of the plane a faster alternative to this is to simply use a fill effect over whatever layer you have you can just do something like this to color it in that's perfectly fine so it's either change the extractor to be alpha only or fill it in turn this layer off and then next we're gonna need a copy of our sky well duplicate the sky and place the sky right underneath the plane map and rename this layer to be sky blurred so the track mat on the sky blurred layer is going to be an alpha matte of the plane mat some of this and you can see that the background is now showing up in an outline of the plane so we need to blur the sky so we'll add a fast box blur and then for the blur radius we'll do a value of around 50 we will repeat edge pixels it we shouldn't actually ever get to the edge but just to put it on just always do it now we're only caring about averaged values here so as the plane moves through the sky it's going to blur these values so if this is not blurred enough heat maybe increase this to a hundred because we're looking more for the average value turn this back off we got to go ahead and save this and also we need to save this to a version 3 file since we already using new frames set Version three so to really see if this proceedeth is doing anything if we turn off the curves effect we can see how faded it is without the curves this looks pretty good so we're getting slightly more fading at the back than we are at the front this might be more evident at the beginning which it is it's we're quite a bit further away from the plane this looks a little bit silly though so what we're gonna do to fix these frames at the beginning we're gonna grab another curves we're gonna animate these curves turn this plane Zita flare on by frame eighty it looks like this part of the plane is pitch black so we'll set a keyframe there at the beginning we need to crush in the black values a bit more and then we'll lower these white values again something more like this look at you so we can see the keyframes I'll select this key frame click f9 to ease it out turn this lair back off and this looks a little bit better canal's go ahead and change these but we do want to make sure this is animated now unfortunately with curves is very difficult to animate them between two keyframes so if you did want to go ahead and reanimate this you're gonna have to go to a key position that you've keyframed and then you can change them all right so this is beginning to look a lot better now there's just a few more things that we need to do and then I'm gonna go ahead and add some bloom to this so this next part I want to look at the lights and the wings so I'm going to take the self illumination layer solo this and I'm gonna add a glow effect add the glow I'll lower the threshold and then we're going to just lower the opacity down to about 75% and I think that's gonna look a little bit more subtle another thing I'm noticing at the beginning of the shot the front of the plane is looking a little bit too blurred and this is because in version 3 we pulled the camera out quite a lot so the depth mat needs to be adjusted so we're going to go ahead and fix that as well so we're gonna go back up to this plane z-depth the comp double click and we animated a curves effect to try to match the background with the back of the plane we're just gonna tweak some of those values and make it blend a little bit more especially here and then at the very end we'll add another keyframe something more like that and then we'll add another curves effect and at around frame 70 I think this is looking pretty good we turn this back on well set a keyframe there and frame one we can barely see it anymore so we're gonna crush the black values here so the nose of the plane will begin to appear and we need that to be dark so the dark area indicates what is in focus so we can do something like that and as soon as we go back we can see this is going to look a lot more in focus okay so the next thing I want to do is just brighten up the background a little bit we'll go to our sky layer add a curves effect and boost the values of the sky and next we're gonna add some bloom now bloom is gonna be where the highlights glow this is often seen in film or with photography where writer objects have kind of a glow to them often is overdone in games but it does give a nice visual effect and I'd like to add it to this plane I'm gonna try to find a better angle here towards the beginning of the shot and we're gonna just take a copy of the beauty pass duplicate that just rename it to be blue it's from this layer on and then solo it so it's possible to do in after-effects which I'm going to show you here it's also possible to do in v-ray as well so in v-ray you can add bloom by going into the frame buffer selecting this icon down here and enabling the bloom layer effect now I have set these values to something that would make it show up by default it may not appear to do anything the most important effects to get it to work are going to be increasing the intensity and lowering the threshold you also probably want to turn off hardware acceleration because this often does cause problems at least between the times that I've used it and you can see around all the highlights of the plane we're getting this glow now this can be saved out as a render element or a pass so by selecting this going up to your passes you can select glare and you'd get an effect like this now that's perfectly fine to go ahead and use this however I want to show you a way that we can do it in a perfect so we have this copy of the beauty pass and on this pass we're going to add a set in that effect now usually you don't use a set matte effect as the layer that it's on in this case is okay so we're just going to use itself so we're using the same layer we're going to change it from alpha channel to luminance I'm gonna grab a curves effect I'm gonna crush the black values and then boost some of the mid-tones back up next we're gonna add a glow effect now the standard glow effect does not have a realistic fall-off if I lower my threshold increase the radius it doesn't have a natural fall off it stays pretty consistent there is an effect called real glow which does a much better job of this so if you can find this plug-in I'm not sure if it's available anymore but it is a very good plugin it handles glow and bloom in a much more realistic way I'm sure there are other plugins as well however we're gonna want to work with this and get it to do what we need turn off the solo and I'm gonna set the mode to be screen now the difference between ad and screen is that ad will allow the addition of all the pixels on this layer and below to exceed 8-bit and enter high dynamic range where screen clamps the values at 1 by using screen you avoid clipping at least from the layer that you're blending so the layer itself is quite bright but if we were to compare this with ad we can see clear amounts of clipping here we're almost getting values of 2 by setting this back down to screen we're not getting such harsh results I am still gonna use a HDR highlight compression effect and I'm just gonna leave that on at 100% for now all right so I'm pretty pleased with that I need to see this whole thing we rendered out to really know for certain but we only have two more things left to do that we can go ahead and render out final frames of this and after that render out the composition I mentioned earlier that I want to add some camera shake we're gonna go ahead and do that really fast go up to here add a new null object now on the camera shake null object we wouldn't add to slider effects click enter and we're going to rename the first one frequency and the second one is going to be intensity then we're going to duplicate both of these effects and on the second one we can just call it rotation we're gonna grab all of the layers underneath we're not going to grab the color correction or the vignette or the camera shake itself and then you can either use the pick whip and attach all of these layers to the camera shake layer or you can go into the parent link option and just select it this way next we're going to open up the position click lick P hold down the Alt key and click the stopwatch for position and we're going to type in and wiggle open parenthesis then take the pick whip and attach the first parameter to the slider control of frequency do a comma space and then take the pick whip again and grab the slider control for intensity so the wiggle effect it takes two parameters the first one is going to be frequency so how many times per second the value can wiggle or just move around and the second parameter is going to be how many pixels or how many units of whatever channel later on can move so in this case we're using pixels because we're using it position transform then we can just click the numpad enter key and for the frequency we might try a value of around 2 and the intensity of around 10 and when we do this you'll notice perhaps even more if you increase the intensity so if we did something like 50 we'll notice that we're gonna get a border depending on the size of the or intensity you will have to scale up this layer so I'm gonna hold down the shift key and click s to open up the scale and I'm going to increase the size of this null object by maybe 2% they'll have to scrub through and just make sure that that is consistent you might need to do a little bit more depending on what your intensity is next we're going to hold down shift and click R then we're going to add an expression to the rotation channel again we're going to be using wiggle and we can attach the first parameter to the frequency rotation comma and grab the intensity rotation and click the numpad enter key or just click off to the side now for rotation we wanted to do something that's really really subtle so I'll actually do 0.5 so it's going to be every two seconds and then for the intensity will only do a maximum of one degree and the reason we're using slider controls is so you can animate the camera shake if you were just to use these numbers directly in the wiggle function that's fine to do but there's no easy way to animate those values so if you put them in sliders you can control the values at any point just with basic key framing so throughout the animation this is going to kind of wobble around and with the rotation we will need to scale this up just a little bit more we're getting a little black edge there to be safe I'm just gonna say a hundred and five now earlier I mentioned that I needed to pull the camera out a little bit further because I knew that I was gonna have to scale in and always make sure that you don't have your subject touching the edges of the composition so you can always crop a little bit of the plate okay so I think that's gonna look pretty good when we render it now with a camera shake we are actually moving all of these layers and anytime you move anything in a perfects you need to add motion blur so we are going to select all of these layers and then we need to select the motion blur switch which is going to be this button here so we just line it up and then make sure that this switch is enabled for the cop this allows motion blur to be enabled everywhere and close that and we have one final adjustment to make going to go into layer new adjustment layer and we're going to add some film grain grain needs to go underneath your color correction and we're looking for an add grain effect by default you get this little preview window so you need to change the viewing mode to be final output and the default grain is is quite hideous so on the intensity we need to change the intensities it's something like 0.1 and then the size also down to something like 0.1 this is supposed to be a very very subtle effect but in areas where there's shadow like in the intakes and in the cockpit cameras will always have even a little bit of grain and if everything in your plate is super clean this is going to look a little bit unrealistic so we're gonna maybe drop that down to point zero five and that looks that looks a bit better alright so now the only thing that we have to do is render out a higher quality version of just the plane so after adding the camera lens blur and adding the grain I think the quality of the plate is fine so we don't need to go ahead and render that out again so we need to pop back over to Maya I don't actually need to render bloom so I'm going to turn that off if you do render bloom you can do it as I separate pass and then you can choose to use it if you want to close this down I up version this diversion for I'm going to go into our render settings do the same for our version label here then go into the V write tab and change the max render time up to one minute now this is going to be dependent on your PC's hardware so one minute on a supercomputer is going to be very different to one minute on a laptop it will be a lot better than just a six second render so a full minute is going to be it's going to produce a much cleaner image we only need to render the plane there that's selected everything else looks fine and then we can go ahead and render this out I made one slight error here this plane bloom layer needs to be underneath our depth of field layer otherwise it's not going to blur in the same way but now we can go ahead and load playing version for place the footage of the new plane version when a version Arkoff as well - version 4 and now we're ready to render the preview let's go over and rename our composition name composition settings this is now version 4 whatever this is would be your file name then we're going to go up to composition add to Adobe Media encoder queue this will launch the media encoder it might take a few seconds maybe even up to a minute to transfer this depending on the speed of your PC and if you have used the encoder before so if this doesn't load up right away don't panic next we're gonna click on h.264 and again this process can take us several seconds here you can change the format to something else but we're gonna leave that on h.264 gonna leave the output name the same all of these basic video settings these are going to be taken from the After Effects composition so if something is incorrect here you need to go back to After Effects fix it there and then send it back over we are going to render at maximum depth and for the bitrate we are going to use a variable bit rate or VBR one pass there's not a huge amount of size difference between one pass and to pass but a to pass does take twice as long so on the target bitrate we're going to say 20 and then for the maximum we're gonna say 25 if you're rendering in 4k you would probably need to boost this the target should be around 40 and maybe the maximum around 50 but for 1080 this is fine then we're going to use the maximum render quality as well click OK and then click the green start button and I'll come and show you the final result here's the pretty be rendered out and this would be appropriate to send off for a client review I also have an alternate version of this I did a few years ago so you've got the wingman in there got a different HDR and the slightly different animation alright guys thank you so much for watching if you made it through all the videos I really really appreciate it the series took a lot of time and effort to put together so hope you guys think it's worthwhile or at least you learned something didn't before right so if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I'll get back to you as soon as possible otherwise I'll catch you in the next video peace

Channel: CGStirk

Views: 4,662

Keywords: visual effects tutorial, after effects tutorial, animation, composite passes, composite EXR, EXR passes, Maya passes rendering, vray render passes tutorial, vfx after effects, vfx tutorial, maya vray passes, V-Ray, render passes in maya vray, vray render passes, maya, vfx, visual effects, batch rendering, t-38, exr, openexr, color correction, passes, lumetri color, white balance, clipping, hdr highlight compression, atmospheric perspective, dof, depth of field, media encoder

Id: HZLRLE__qKQ

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020