Essential Compositing Techniques in Nuke (Free Webinar / Updated)

what is up everybody i hope you're all having a wonderful morning or evening uh today we're hosting another very excited live webinar uh this time we'll be talking to oh actually we're going to be talking about compositing and today we are joined by the man nick chamberlain uh nick uh welcome to the stream thanks for having me looking forward to it awesome so before we start uh i would just like to know and if you can tell us a bit more about yourself what drives you as a as an artist what draws you to compositing in cg in general sure currently i'm a compositing supervisor i've been doing that for about six years and i've just always really been attracted to kind of visuals striking beautiful images i went to film school and when i was directing i would stop listening to what the actors were saying and just focus on the visuals so i wasn't a good director but i felt i felt pretty in tune with that and that kind of led me to visual effects and kind of creating new worlds because it's always fresh and i also love how much there is to learn because really it's an unending amount of knowledge and so i feel like i'm always trying to learn more and more and i love doing that and i'm hoping in this webinar i can kind of spread some of the tips tricks and techniques that i've learned so yeah i love it yeah i also have the same feeling it's it never ends every time every time i learn something i either forget it i have to relearn it or there's a new thing that comes out and yeah you always kind of have to learn so if you went back in time and see baby nick opening nuke for the first time uh what advice would you give him i think the main advice i would have really is honestly just do it as much as you can and find someone who you creatively trust who you can grow with because even now kind of as a working professional when you really start diving into shots and you're looking at them for too long you kind of get blinders on and it's hard to see some of the flaws that are in it and when you have someone who you can really trust creatively and be brutally honest with not like critical but just honest with how it looks i think that's really the most i've grown is just having that really just invaluable feedback yeah feedback mentorship and somebody to maybe guide you a bit mm-hmm yeah i i mean obviously we're a bit biased because you know this is a rev-away webinar but yeah that is pretty much what we do at rebelway we tend to guide people we try to steer them in the right direction it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or you know a seasoned kind of uh veteran of the vfx fx industry cg industry we still you know try to help as much as we can all right so to everybody watching live uh hello again we will be monitoring and checking the chat and answering your questions live so uh please you know ask away we will be gathering the best questions and then nick will be we're gonna do a q a at the end with nick where nick is going to be answering all of your questions and uh we will be also giving away a couple of free nuke projects uh nick you can probably explain what are in the what are we going to be giving away actually yeah so what we're going to be giving away is a couple different things the first is a completed nuke file with a cg render it has sticky notes in it that's kind of commenting out what's going on there's a gizmo pack of some of my favorite kind of custom plugins that i've either made or found as well as some test projects and test renders that test footage rather where you can kind of take what you've learned from that project and apply it to a new shot so that's what we'll be giving away today awesome well if you don't mind uh i don't have anything else i think we can dive into the presentation so you know rock on take it away nick let's go ahead and get started so can you see my screen right here just want to make sure before i start talking yeah i i do see it yep all right wonderful so hello everyone and we're going to talk about compositing in nick today like we said earlier my name is nick chamberlain and i'm a compositing supervisor at barnstorm vfx where i work with some very talented people these are some of the shots just for contacts that i've worked on in the past two years either directly supervising or doing the shots myself and i've actually worked before rebelway was a thing this sequence in particular right here i worked with the rebel wave founders on where we destroyed the statue of liberty for man in the high castle and we were fortunate enough to get eminent evie emmy nominated for it and ves nominations and so that was really fun so i work with a lot of cg kind of effects in television and occasionally we do feature films but it's largely tv and so my approach to compositing is kind of doing it in a way that not only looks really good but is very flexible and fast because tv has incredibly tight turnarounds so you need to make really kind of efficient compositing setups so that everything can get done nice and quickly but still look good and so that is kind of what i do for studio work and i believe right now we're going to play i also teach the compositing course at rebelway i think we're going to play a little trailer for that right now [Music] [Music] so like i said i teach that compositing course and rebelway is traditionally known for teaching effects and houdini but rebelway isn't just about effects that is largely what we're teaching but ultimately it's about creating beautiful striking images that's really what interests me and compositing is such a huge part of that because you can see in these raw renders they don't necessarily look realistic right off the bat but they have the solid groundwork that you need to really take them to the next level because it's not that these renders are wrong it's just that you need to juice them a little bit to really bring them up to their full potential and so that's what we have here all the raw renders the finish renders that we kind of saw in that trailer all right so compositing really there's two things that you need to do it and the first is incredibly incredibly obvious and you need some sort of tool to do that you need a program to composite in kind of no matter what they're using if you give say an oscar-winning cinematographer roger deakins an iphone and a film student the nicest camera that exists it's pretty clear who's going to have the better image so ultimately it's about the art and artistry behind it and that's really going to be the main focus of what i'm talking about today we're going to be talking about a lot of compositing theory what makes shots look real and then we're going to go ahead dive into nuke and show kind of the shot process and how we apply that theory so let's go ahead and start looking at that and so if creating effects is based on your understanding of physics and kind of the motion and how things work compositing is ultimately ultimately really based on the understanding of photography and how elements in your scene live together why is it that everything that comes through the lens looks real and i've kind of put together throughout my years of composing just a mental list of things to look for and based off of everything that i've learned and the great mentors who have taught me these are kind of the eight fundamental principles that i think make a shot look real when it comes to compositing and this is by no means a comprehensive list if you hit all eight of these and then show how they're applied in context of a real shot so let's go ahead and hop right in because we have plenty to get through here all right so then your scene it needs to match otherwise your shot's never gonna look real in this example we have kind of a split screen where we have two separate plates and you can see that on the right side this plate does not even remotely track it's bouncing around like a beach ball at a nickelback concert but on the left side it sticks in very nicely and it looks pretty darn real and so let's take a look because that's honestly a pretty obvious example when tracking is incorrect that was bouncing around very obviously and just for context i want to show you what these two plates look like on their own just so it's a little clearer so i'm going to hit play right here and you can see we have this blank plate right there and then we have a static plate of this actor walking up through these bushes and so when it comes to tracking it can be pretty difficult to see when tracks are slipping in this example when you're looking at it right off the bat maybe this doesn't really look too bad but this is actually slipping pretty heavily towards the beginning of the shot and the best way to track your shots i can't stress this enough is to stabilize your work the inverse of a track is a stabilize and that will allow you to see any mistakes much much easier now this may be hard to see over the stream so i have a blown up version of this stabilize we can take a look at but if you look right here at this portion of the shop that's stabilized you can see that this plate is sliding in and it's not sticking and once you kind of see this in the stabilized view you can go back to your shot and look at that area and you'll start to notice that it is sliding all the way through the salient point is that stabilizing is the best way to check your tracks to make sure everything is sticking when they're not super obvious kind of like this example and to talk about tracks a little further there's generally when you're comping there's three different types of tracks and the first one is the 2d track that's basically when the camera is just shifting around a little bit there's a little up down motion maybe some left right rotation slight scaling it's definitely the fastest way to get an object to stick in your scene and it is kind of limited if your camera's doing any sort of 3d movement it's probably not going to work it really depends on how much parallax you see in these objects and then moving up from that you start to have 2.5 d tracks which is when you have sort of a 3d movement of the object that you're sticking but it's a flat plane these are also known as corner pin tracks planar tracks and they kind of fake 3d perspective on flat planes and so you're basically tracking the four corners of these flat surfaces and this is very common for monitor burn-ins phone burn-ins all of that sort of stuff when you're doing uh green screen monitors and so 2.5 d tracks are super handy and then by far the most complex type of track is a 3d track and that is when your 3d camera movement is causing a ton of parallax on not flat planes or even this we would never be able to get a 2.5 d track to stick the way that these are right here and this is by far the most time consuming track that you can get but it will also kind of allow you to stick objects anywhere in your scene and have them automatically stick and so these are kind of the three types of tracks that compositors have in their tool belts not every copper is a 3d tracker that's kind of an extra skill and just by looking at a shot you ate you should be able to narrow it down to which of these two you're gonna end up using and so they get slower as you move from 2d track to a 2.5 d to 3d and so keeping what type of track you're doing in mind is very important when you're compositing as well as it's not just about the track at the end of the day i have this little example here you can have the most perfect track in the world but if your motion blur is not correct your element is never going to look like it sits within your scene and this is kind of going into photography and what i'm talking about there because based on the shutter settings of your camera it may shift one way or the other you need to make sure that you're matching that motion blur and so that's kind of what i wanted to talk about for tracking let's go ahead and move on to our second fundamental which is levels so levels is kind of a catch-all for color balancing your image the composited elements you're adding need to match or fit the overall color tone and contrast level of the shot and so in this kind of more obvious example here we have this spaceship where everything feels nice and balanced and then on the right side this is obviously much too bright it's very green and it doesn't quite fit within the context of our shot and so levels is kind of made up of three main subjects your luminance color tone and your saturation so let's go ahead and dive into nuke quickly and take a look at these guys all right so we have a couple different variations of incorrect levels that we're going to take a look at and so the first one i want to look at is our luminance right here and so our luminance is very important to get correct right here we have highlights which are way too bright they don't really blend in with the rest of the scene you can see how nuclear bright nuclearly bright this hot spot is here and even the shadow side compared to our original is just catching way too much light so you want to make sure your highlights or your white points some people call them are lined up within your scene and then kind of at the opposite spectrum of that you have your black levels you can see down here that there's kind of a disparity between the shadow side of our space shuttle and the ground i'm just going to gain up our viewer here and i'm doing that because in a similar way to stabilizing our shot to check our work gaining our viewer up and down will allow us to be more precise as we're working and see our work really in the most unfavorable environment possible so we can work that much more precisely so i gained up our viewer a bit and you can see that the black levels do not match between these there's no reason for the shadow of the bottom of our spaceship to be so much darker than the shadow of these rocks over here so you need to make sure that you're matching your shadows and then the final component to luminance is your overall kind of contrast level your mid-tones because looking at this honestly it doesn't look that wrong your black levels down here are correct your highlights are correct but it just feels a little flat and washed out and when you have the proper amount of mid-tone contrast in there just kind of makes your image pop it sits in much more nicely and again this technically isn't wrong but i think it could be much more improved by just adding some mid-tone contrast and so these three make up our luminance and next let's go ahead and talk a little bit about our color tone so we're going to go ahead first we're going to talk overall color kind of like the example that we saw there you want to make sure everything is fitting within your scene there's no reason for the spaceship to be this kind of sickly green color here because nothing else in our scene really has that tint because this is kind of uniformly changing everything our shadows no longer match our mid tones don't match our highlights are a little too green and so you want to make sure that your overall color tones match your footage but not just your overall color tones because sometimes it can just be specific areas if we take a look right here a bean again this is pretty subtle if you really start to zoom in here you can see that the shadows of our spaceship are way too blue the luminance of them is correct but the color tone is off it needs to match this kind of rocky color here your shadows typically will be very uniform in color so you want to make sure we are matching those closely and then again there's always kind of three components to both the luminance and the color tone you want to make sure that your highlight colors are also matched this one's a more obvious example no reason for the highlights to be so kind of neon yellow green here compared to our ground and that kind of makes up color tone and the final one here is saturation so we'll take a look at that we have this spaceship here that is way too saturated this looks very stylized and overly done and it's very strange that this really kind of black front of the spaceship is more orange than this kind of brown rocky color it doesn't really make a ton of sense it's a very stylized look and if that's the style you're going for then more power to you but i'm trying to blend everything and make it look real and so this is overly saturated and you can also run into the opposite problems if we take this lower our saturation down a bit it's very easy to also kind of under saturate your color tones a bit and you don't quite catch any of the warmth that's hitting here or some of these maybe bluer shades that are in the shadows so you need to make sure your saturation is balanced and in the right kind of levels overall and then finally we have bad specific saturation where just certain parts of your element are overly saturated this isn't an overall problem it's more specific to the orange and you see this kind of color saturation problem a lot actually when you're doing keen and you have spill because you don't want that kind of green reflection of the green screen on your character to come through so you would need to do a specific saturation key on that to kind of neutralize all the green and so that's pretty much what makes up the levels fundamental and the next one we're going to talk about here is noise and grain so this is probably going to be a little bit of a trickier one to show through the live stream just because grain is honestly a very subtle detail but it is very important especially in night shots and if you're working on feature films this grain is going to be pretty large when it's projected on a theater screen so it's important to make sure that you're matching it correctly so how does grain really affect us as compositors well in a couple different ways the first is that the elements that we're adding into our shot needs to have grain that matches our original footage especially during night shots where it's overly grainy if you have a perfectly clean image it's never going to look real unless you apply the same type of grain to it that's in your base footage and then another way it affects us is that it may need to be removed while we're working because if you're merging two different pieces of footage together from two different cameras they're gonna have wildly different grain structures and they need to be uniform between them and also removing grain as we're working will allow us to work with more precision precision especially when we are keen let's take a look at this example right here so this is a little key that we have set up and as you can see on the right side this is so much more noisy and this is the exact same key on both sides and we would end up seeing this chatter in our composite and it just wouldn't look very good where it's very clean on the left side and so you definitely want to remove grain in my opinion at least when you're working on footage when you do that typically you lose a little bit of detail so you have to go through some tricks to reintroduce the original grain back in at the end to not soften the image overall but it's definitely good to know you should largely be working with degrained plates when you're doing keys and so that's a little bit about working with grain and i'm also just going to very briefly talk about characteristics to matching grain there's way too much here to dive in and be very specific but the typical grain characteristics you need to match is the intensity the overall amount of the grain needs to be consistent and then you have the luminance curve because grain is not just uniformly applied across the image based on the camera whether it's digital or film we'll talk about digital for an example uh digital typically has very very heavy grain in the blacks especially especially in the blue channel and very very light grain in the highlights and the amount of grain will vary per channel red green and blue and it varies based on the luminance and that's kind of where that luminance curve is it's very closely tied into intensity and then there's the overall kind of visual characteristics of the grain how big are the individual specs the sharpness and softness of the little specks and how regular is the pattern or shape of the grain so those are just kind of what you need to keep in mind when it comes to grain i'm not sure if over the stream will be able to see this but you can see at the top this is a very overly grainy image there's no luminance curve applied and it just doesn't look very realistic compared to down here where you have some nice subtle grain in these midtones and shadows and not much at all in the highlights and so that may be a little hard to see but i thought i'd give it a the old college try and so that is grain let's go ahead and move on to edge detail this is such an important skill for compositors to have this is where keen and rotoscoping comes in but all the elements that you're layering into your shots that's ultimately what compositing is all the elements need to maintain proper edge detail as you're laying them and so you can see our footage here all of this nice crisp detail where on the right this key is very soft it doesn't have much detail in it at all and once you fix that up it starts looking very crisp and very nice and you can just see the big difference between these two and so i kind of want to go through these steps when you're doing keys or rotoscoping that you should kind of mentally go through when you're checking edges and so we're going to go through one at a time we're going to actually dive into nuke and look at practical examples of these so the first step is to extract the edges so they match your original footage in detail and in shape so i have this example right here of these guys cheers into the vaccine finally working i guess uh hopefully this whole thing will be over soon but anyways we have these characters and what we want to do here is remove the lower half of this window so let's take a look at these steps in action we have this painted out background right here and we want to merge them over so again the first step is to extract our edges so they match the original footage in detail and in shape and so as we zoom in here and we ap you can see that these edges line up pretty darn closely but you also probably spied that there's quite a bit of a halo on the outside but if we really zoom in you can see that these kind of darker pixels of a shoulder are going pretty far out and they're going out pretty much just as far as this shape is and that doesn't mean our edge is wrong our alpha here is actually correct what that ends up meaning is that we need to modify our edge color to fit with the new background because these semi-transparent pixels will always maintain a little bit of the information of what's originally behind them especially when you're rotoscoping keyers have some algorithms to try to neutralize this but when you're rotoscoping there's always going to be a little bit of the original background left behind and so then what you need to start doing let's go ahead and zoom in here is you need to modify the edge color and so we can see this is starting to look much nicer than what we had previously we're kind of blending the edges we're not changing the alpha again we're just changing the color of them and it's starting to sit much much more nicely especially when compared to the original you can see it still lines up pretty darn closely here and so then the third step and this is an optional step is you can modify the edge position and softness to fit within the new background if necessary so what exactly do i mean by that well let's take a look at the practical footage right here so as you can see we have a great reference you should always reference your footage when you're trying to figure these things out we have a great reference of what this jacket would look like over a dark background because what happens when you have a super bright background like this is it starts to eat through your semi-transparent edges you can see it in his glasses here look how thin those get compared to when it's over his dark face and so you want to make sure that you're kind of being conscious of what you're replacing the background with because right here we've maintained our original edges very very closely but it still doesn't necessarily look real and that's because we need to soften them further to match what these edges would look like if this was actually shot with the camera and we can see that that means they would be softer and so let's go ahead and see what that would look like and we can see suddenly this feels much much nicer and more natural because we're no longer getting that kind of bled through image we've kind of rebuilt the glasses so they work over this background we've added some highlights back in that weren't necessarily in the original now this is looking pretty darn nice if you ask me so those are really the three steps you go through when it comes to extracting elements you can also use blending modes that's kind of a different topic what i want to talk about but that is kind of the key to matte extraction so we're going to go ahead and move on here and start talking about focus again photography we're keeping that in mind it's very very important so let me just click on this all right so defocus so the composited elements need to match the lens blur inherent in the shot and it needs to be photographically sound so in this example right here we have a singular focus plane it almost feels like a miniature but everything in this scene is in alignment with what the focus of the shot is where on this right side we can see there's actually two focus planes we can see super far in the background here this is tack sharp it gets very blurry and then again kind of in our foreground it gets sharp again unless you have a very specific piece of glass in front of your lens this is physically impossible and so it's not good focus and so there's a couple things that we need to match when we're dealing with focus and the first is the focus amount depending on where you're placing your element in the footage you need to make sure you're matching the intensity of the blur in this example if you're placing an element on the foreground we wouldn't really need to blur it at all if it was right here but if we were placing say birds in this deep background they would need to be super out of focus and matching the amount of blur is not the only important part but you also need to match the style shape and texture of the blur and what exactly do i mean by that let's take a look this is a dot that is being defocused in two very different ways we have a generic blur if you just made a blur note and nuke it look like this and then we have a lens bokeh texture and just even put over a noise pattern you can see which one feels more photographic because every lens will have slightly different bokeh effects based on what is in front of the camera if there's any filters the lens and you need to make sure when you're defocusing elements that the amount of defocus is not only correct but you're matching the texture because if we look here for example we can see just how different this one texture is from our example and we would need to make sure that we're matching this very closely and the cool thing is with shots like this you can actually extract the exact bokeh texture you need and then kind of copy that to the elements that you're blurring and matching the shape also depending on the camera there can be a little bit more trickiness to it and one of those is the cat eye effect as we look right here we can see in the center of our frame that there's a nice big circular bokeh shape but then as you start moving to the outside it starts to turn into a little bit more of a football and so if we were replacing part of this background we would need to match this kind of horizontal like bunching in of our bokeh shape and so that's something that's very important to keep in mind and when we're talking about defocus we should also be talking about depth of field because it's something that we all inherently have seen enough photography and films to really understand depth of field and the information it conveys to us and so what exactly is depth of field it's the areas of your shot that are considered to be acceptably in focus in other words depth of field determines exactly how defocused a given object should be based on the distance to the lens and the camera's aperture and so it also of course depends on the focus plane but the depth of field is determined by a few factors and it really informs us of quite a lot of things it tells us a lot about scale in particular in this film ant-man we can see this looks and feels like it's very small and the main contributing factor to that is the depth of field of course there's these giant shoes and belts and whatnot but a huge factor to that is the depth of field because it conveys scale so if you're adding your own depth of field to cg shots you want to make sure that you're doing it in a physically accurate way so that the proper scale is communicated and you can use this trick in the inverse way as well with tilt shift lenses they pull a couple tricks to make things feel like miniatures but one of the biggest ones is adding a very shallow depth of field this is a real location but it feels like a miniature because of how shallow this depth of field is and so we understand a lot more about focus inherently than we may originally think we do and then closely aligned to defocus is our lens effects and so lens effects there's a lot of them we're going to go over the big ones today but they are imperfections in lenses that we see in footage that we need to match if we're using real footage or imitate if we're creating a completely cg shot so let's take a look at some of the more common lens effects right here and so if anyone has seen a jj abrams movie they're very familiar with lens flares and so when you are compositing with lens flares say we wanted to add an object say we wanted to add a dog sitting in her lap we need to make sure that these lens flare elements were over that dog maybe the dog jumps up and interferes with this light we would need to match this light characteristic as it was going in front at that point maybe we just painted out but regardless you need to be on the lookout for lens flares and if you're doing a completely cg shot as well you need to make sure that your lens flare is based on reality look up reference of what real lens flares look like in the style you're going for and try to match that as closely as possible don't just wing it and choose a random lens flare preset because you think it looks cool because it very well may look cool but who knows if that was based on reality and the more and more that you base things on real photography the more real your shot is just naturally going to look and so that is lens flares and next we're going to talk about one that trips me up a lot and it trips up a lot of beginning compositors and that is glow and light wrap and so it's very easy to overdo glow and i think the reason so many kind of beginning compositors do that is because glow just kind of inherently makes everything sit together which is really what we're trying to do when we're compositing but a lot of the time it's not really based on anything photographic it's just kind of a cheat that's thrown over and so you always again like lens flares you need to reference the photography to see what the right amount of glow is we can see in this window here we have a subtle amount of glow kind of leaking out onto this color chart leaking out onto her and you need to make sure that we're matching this and not overdoing it because some people would want to add glow to the seat to different areas and highlights that wouldn't necessarily have it and so glow is very very dangerous i find myself overglowing quite a bit and really you need to reference the photography i'm just going to keep keep saying that because if this was your base footage and you're replacing the background there's no reason to add an insane amount of glow and light wrap like this this is a meme that's kind of over exaggerating the issue at hand but i do think it's a very poignant one where it's just reference what it should actually look like and so since i personally kind of struggle with glow myself around the office we call this the glowed in rule and that is to dial in our glow to the amount where we think it looks correct then we cut it in half now we finally have the correct amount of glow this is saved me time and time again because i'll get cocky thinking i've finally dialed in the glow correctly only to get the note that it's way too much so i personally follow the gloadin rule if you are talented enough to just dial in the glow on the first try kudos to you but for those of you who struggle like me this is a pretty decent rule to follow and so we'll keep moving on here let's talk a little bit about chromatic aberration and so that is kind of slight shifts and imperfections in the lens you see it a lot over bright spots halation this can be called a couple different things and also apparently spelled a couple different ways as well i don't think that's spelled correctly but you can see the slight purple fringing that's happening over here and if we were adding an element in front of this window we would need to make sure that we have that same sort of fringing and so you see it a lot of the times over very bright objects and then you also see it this is a super close up of one of the shots from my class but there's a subtle little green and red split excuse me that is happening over the footage here and these are cg elements that we've matched to the practical footage down here it's very subtle depending on the lens sometimes older lenses have a lot of chromatic aberration it's just another thing that you want to make sure you are matching and so then we're coming up onto lens distortion next lens distortion is more imperfections in the lens that cause objects to bend this isn't the wonkiest shelf ever built this is actually straight across but because of how much the lens is bending it it looks like it is curved and so this really plays into tracking if we were adding an element in here we'd want to make sure that it bent accordingly and you can shoot lens grids to get this we'll take a look at that a little bit later but matching lens distortion is very important for tracking for adding elements into your scene and similarly related to lens distortion is lens breathing and so when lenses rack focus you can see this is a very extreme example this is an anamorphic lens but you can see how much that this lens breeze and that's the kind of squishing of this background based on where the focus plane is so again that kind of plays into tracking it's something to be aware of and you need to definitely account for it if it is in your shot and then finally i want to take a look at a little bit more of a stylized subjective lens effect and that's when there's kind of grime on your lens when there's a very bright source that's illuminating dirt and sparks because i see on a lot of cg shots or when explosions go off it'll illuminate and then specs on the lens will appear or maybe someone will get shot and a little bit of blood will land on the lens or if you're under water you get little defocus bubbles when you come out from under it and this is all subjective it's stylized and it's just something to be aware of i'm personally not a huge fan of it but it's subjective if you're into it more power to you and so that is lens effects and we're going to move on to what i think is one of the trickiest things to learn when you're first starting compositing and that is understanding perspective now perspective is basically saying that the composited elements need to fit the optical optical perspective of our shot and that consists of the kind of angle and position of our camera and the field of view so a very obvious example that is incorrect is if we were to try to composite these two images together say this was our base footage and we wanted to add a city back here there's no way we would ever be able to get this image to work because our perspective is wrong this is very high up it's tilted down this is a longer lens here we could probably zoom in to match the field of view but the angle makes these just naturally incompatible so let's talk a little more about perspective so it's all about matching how an element spatially or optically sits within your shot and it's determined by a few things it's determined by your focal length your camera sensor size and the camera position tilt slash pan so what exactly these actually feed into that is the lens compression for your focal length and sensor size so what is lens compression well let's take a look right here so what we have here are various lenses that are keeping the foreground subject in place and you can see just how much the lens compression changes our background because as we get wider obviously we can see more on top of these elements back here all of these features are elongated and as we start zooming in the angle and how much on top of these elements we can see suddenly starts to flatten out and maybe flatten out isn't the best way of saying that they start to all become more consistent because we get a very large wide variety of angles when we're super wide we can see super on top here and it's very flat back here but when we zoom in really we're only getting one kind of more flat angle and so matching the lens compression is very important because again we've seen so much media we've seen so much tv and films that we inherently know when lens compression is kind of wrong you can't take this foreground plate right here and say we just took this still frame and we tried to take this background frame and put it behind him we know just because of how elongated his face is that something would look really weird and perspective is very difficult to tell when it's off when you're starting sometimes it's just like a gut feeling that something doesn't quite look correct and once you end up fixing it slide it into place suddenly it becomes very very obvious so lens compression is the first part of lining up your perspective and then the next part is lining up your vanishing point slash horizon line and that's where the camera position slash rotation really feeds into so let's take a look at that real quick here and so we're assuming in this image that all of these angles that we're drawing are perfectly perpendicular to each other that this is all lined up correctly you can't always assume that but it's generally a good guide and so we can see that all of these angles right here are receding to the exact same point and same for this red one the point is a little off camera here but you can see all the receding angles line up and these are our vanishing points and so if we were to add a cube into here we would want to make sure that these receding angles all lined up and a good way to check if your vanishing point is correct let me just draw really quick i'm going to draw a mask right at the center of our vanishing point and if we check any of these receding lines we'll be able to see that they all line up and that's how you know where your vanishing point is and so you want to make sure that that is aligned correctly it's a little off here again we were assuming this is a perfect 90 degrees this is pretty darn close everywhere else it lines up very very closely and so our little vanishing points here end up making our horizon line if we connect them and you want to make sure that the tilt of your camera which is kind of establishing where the horizon is is the same between your shots and so you can kind of tell how much your camera is tilted based on the receding lines and so as we can see here when the camera height is perfectly in line with the horizon when it's looking perfectly flat there's actually no horizon line no receding lines excuse me right here it's perfectly flat and in line with our horizon but when we're looking up the receding lines go down obviously we can see underneath our object and when we are below we can see on top of it and the receding lines are going up and so kind of getting a feel for how much above us should we really be seen in this element or how much below where's the horizon line is a huge part of perspective and i could talk for an hour on perspective and just aligning it but we have a lot to get through so i'm going to keep moving on but perspective is definitely something to keep in mind make sure your lens compression and your vanishing points slash horizon lines are nice and lined up so then finally we're going to go ahead and move on to our last compositing fundamental and that is lighting all right so our composited elements need to live in the exact same lighting environment as their location within the shot so over here we have this green screen clip with matched lighting and you can see it sits pretty nicely i think this looks pretty real but then when you take the exact same key and drop it into a different shot suddenly this looks pretty phony and the main reason for that is because of our lighting right here you can see on the front of their faces that they have this very harsh hit that we're not quite getting with our actor here and that's making this immediately jump out as wrong and so let's take a look what exactly do we need to match when it comes to lighting well we need to match the light direction the light quality and the light intensity so right here we have this little example and this is what i consider the correct lighting for the shot if you look at our rock shadows here we can see that our statue shadows are nice and lined up so the shadow in the back that the statue in the back that's disappearing but ignore that the only other difference is the lighting here and lighting when it's super wrong is pretty obvious but when it's subtly wrong it can be a little harder to tell because at first glance this might not seem like it's too off the quality of the lights correct the intensity but again compare to your footage and you can see the shadow direction is 100 backwards and this just is not correct when you compare to our correct example you can see the big difference between the two of them and so light direction is very important to match here's one where it's hitting directly in the front of our statue here again this doesn't look super often maybe if our statue was more off on the right where everything's getting a little more front lit because of the quality so light quality is all about the softness of our shadows and that's determined mainly by two factors the first is the size of our light source so if you look at these shadows right here you can see how much softer they get as the square of light scales up and as it goes down our shadows get much much sharper and so kind of matching the quality of light is very important to getting your shots to feel real and the other thing that feeds into your light quality is the distance of the light we have the exact same light right here and when it's very close to our object you can see how soft the shadows are but as we move away its relative size is actually kind of shrinking and so the shadows are very very harsh like i was saying light quality it depends on the size of our light and the relative distance and that's kind of why the shadows from the sun are so harsh when you're getting hit by direct sunlight because most scientists agree that the sun is pretty large but the shadows from it are incredibly incredibly sharp and that is because of how far away it is its relative size is actually pretty small and that's why uh when you have well you may be thinking well what about when the shadows are very soft well that's when you start to get overcast shadows and the clouds actually kind of become the light source and it scatters it and relatively the clouds are much closer to us and they're covering a much larger relative area and so that's why those shadows start to get soft if the sun was super close to us here on earth not only would we all get incinerated but our shadows would also be incredibly soft so distance makes a huge huge impact in light quality let's take a look at how that kind of affects our comp here and so you can see just by changing the quality of the light this starts to feel pretty phony and artificial and so you want to make sure that we're keeping that same shadow softness right here and that'll just make everything look much much nicer now those are kind of the trickier aspects of lighting to match the final one light intensity is pretty closely associated with levels and that's just to make sure that the brightness of your light is correct here we have one that is overly bright one that's too dark this is just like levels it's pretty obvious that they're off and you just need to brighten or darken the light and then assuming that your direction and quality are correct then you'll be good to go i wanted to take a look at a couple of examples from shows where i think the lighting is kind of where the shots fail and i want to be clear here that i'm not ragging on the artists or people who did this shot because i know that there are external production kind of things that come up that are really outside of artist control i've certainly been there i've put out shots that i know have issues that have made it to air so i'm not ragging on the artists who have done this at all i just want to point out where i think these shots could be improved and so in this image from the walking dead among what i think is a perspective issue i think the largest issue in this shot is the lighting excuse me and so as you can see in the background here we have a very harsh light coming from the back right part of screen we can see these sharp shadows here but our main character is being very front lit is a little bit of a specular hit here looks like he's a backlight coming from over here as well and that's making the shot feel very very artificial and this made it to air this happens on big productions more often than artists hope it would i it's it's very kind of tough to bear with your artistic soul when you have to get stuff out very quickly and there's kind of weird pressures put on you so i i feel for the person who had to get this out but uh it definitely happens from time to time and it's good to be aware of these issues and another example is from the classic film the room again amongst other issues one of the big ones here is the light quality that is wrong the light direction is wrong the levels really all three of our lighting characteristics are off here you can see there's a harshly lit background right here coming from the right side of screen and you can see how dark the shadow side is here and he's getting softly lit from the left side he's not nearly as dark as kind of these areas and so this doesn't necessarily look real not only because of the perspective but also the lighting and so those are the eight compositing fundamentals and again this isn't a comprehensive list of everything that's going to make your shot look 100 real but this is a great platform to launch off of to make sure that the very basic ground level aspects of your shot work and so yeah we have tracking levels grain edge detail focus lens effects perspective and lighting all right so now that we kind of know the theory behind compositing let's go ahead and stop just talking about it and look a little bit more closely at how it's actually applied in our shots so we're going to go ahead dive into nuke again we're going to take a look at one of the fully cg shots in my class and see first how it's constructed and then how we can apply our theory all right so we have this shot right here with all of these cool explosions going on and let's take a look at how we went through the process of making this shot and then we'll run through all of those theories and make sure that they're being properly used here so the raw renders for this look a little something like this here so when it comes to cg compositing there are some advantages and disadvantages and when i say cg compositing i mean fully cg shots because there's really a great advantage to them and that is that you can do whatever you want there's no baseline that we have to match we can be very creative we can make a lot of stylized choices and really make this look however we want and that advantage of not having any footage to match to you is also a huge disadvantage because we're not inherently forced by the footage to make our shots look more realistic and so what is the solution to that the solution is to base everything you're doing off your real references reference reality always and it's gonna just help you so much and so when it came to this shot the first thing i wanted to do was figure out how can i get the lighting environment to look a little more real and a little bit more like what i have in my head so i went through i searched some references i used real photography to try to figure out exactly what colors are used this is probably of the effect shot so i'm referencing fake reality already but i really like the color palette of it these are some of the references i grabbed here and now it's like okay i know kind of what color i want these overall tones to be i know what color i want my orange lights to be and they're very much based in reality so let's go ahead and start kind of look having this and making this look like what we want and so something i see a lot of artists do is they'll just be like all right let's go ahead and split out all of our light passes here if we just do a quick contact sheet we'll be able to see that this render here has a ton of light passes for us to have a lot of fun with and be very creative so what a lot of beginning compositors will do is like okay we'll take this first render we have i think there are five total and let's split all of these lights out so i kind of have this little preset made for this webinar because no one wants to see me create this that would take way too long all right so we have our split out here ready to go these are our individual lights that are all getting merged together and if we check the end of our split out we see that it's exactly the same as the front you always want to make sure that these line up with each other and so now we can start being really creative in matching our reference and say our reference had a sweet blue light right here but we're like nah let's let's see i have a different reference that's green maybe we'll make it this color all right so now we have this green light right here awesome so we've done all of our color corrections we see we have our green light and then the artist will go all right sweet i'll take that now i want to apply that to my explosion we'll copy and paste this in over here then we'll take my atmosphere we'll copy and paste this in right here so that our fog light is also very green down here then we can take our cranes be like okay i want to make sure that this is green too paste that in pretty soon your comp is very big and then you get a note that says actually i think that green light should be purple well you could expression link your color corrects together that would take some time you can go through and change this so that it's purple that would take some time then you have to go here make sure they're the same and the thing is as you're doing your look development this is going to take a very long time and it's going to be kind of hard to dial things in quickly and so this is definitely not the best way to work and so what you want to do is you want to kind of merge all of these underlying light passes together and then split them out into one master split out and i've done a little setup here this is based on merging all layers together and so once you do that you can go ahead and get just one of these splits all the way at the bottom of your screen so let's look right here and we can see now we have our explosion in this rgba skypass instead of just our background we have our atmosphere we have our cranes in it and suddenly now we're super super flexible if we wanted to change that same blue light or just shut it off entirely and we want to make it brighter we can do that right here it's suddenly very very easy to control all the aspects of this shot we split it out in this way where all of our warm lights are together so we could do some color correction we could desat it we could look at our reference to match those and it's suddenly a very flexible setup and so what i did i'm not going to do it in front of us here because that would take quite a bit i go over this for maybe an hour in my class and we go through and we start lining up our shot to our reference and now we have this nice little color correction happening here and let's just take a look compared to our refs and so you can see this is starting to line up pretty closely to this footage right there we have those kind of blue tones so then typically with fully cg shots the next thing i try to do is just look through it and try to figure out what all we can improve and so whenever something feels kind of strange to me the first thing i start doing is digging up references and in this shot in particular i noticed we had quite a bit of a blank spot over here it's like well we don't want that to just be a empty diffused texture let's try to get it to look more real let's add some realistic textures to our floor here and let's see what given what we know about this environment what would we add in there and so i ended up looking up a bunch of references because i saw the cranes and it's like what sort of markings on the ground do we have in here that we could add to the shot and so i i compiled i think i have like 20 or so references here and reference reality reference reality and i was like okay i really like how these look i grabbed bits of this from alien and so i set out to make a little bit of a matte painting here and let's just take a look at that really quickly and so we took this and we just added some nice texture over here we added little details and we set that through a camera with a card so we have the correct perspective and tracking if nuke will kind of work with me here it's always a good time to freeze when you're showing people something and so we kind of have this little matte painting that we set up and we set it up in a way where it is going to blend with our light passes this is still feeding through everything and we have complete and total control we can still turn this off if we wanted to and so we did a little bit of a 3d setup there we have a camera feeding into that so that it's going to automatically track with our shot and then once that matte painting was set up i was like okay this isn't as empty as it once was i think that looks pretty good but the rest of our scene still feels pretty dead and so i started referencing our scene because i wanted it to have a consistent kind of creative direction and i was like well we need some lights in here there's lights everywhere else in our scene and so what i did is i went in i just did a little freeze frame of our lights and i started adding them all over our scene i have another little 3d projection setup in here that is in line with our geometry so it tracks and we just started adding lights in here and all these little things just started bringing this to life so let's go ahead and turn that on and you can see it's honestly pretty subtle but i think it goes a long way in getting this to feel a lot more cohesive and then it was time to start looking at the explosion off the bat because i think this explosion looked really nice it was adding kind of some optical effects playing with how intense this interactive light was and again you probably knew what i was going to say i checked reference i looked for explosions at night to see just how glowy these were and try to match that i have some animated color corrects going on here to match the intensity kind of of this reference we have this explosion illumination right here which is getting significantly brightened it's three times brighter than it originally was and just trying to make everything feel as realistic as possible so then i took all that and those were the three main steps honestly this comp isn't really that complex and it ended up looking pretty nice i think and once i did all of that i was like maybe we could take this even a step further because i realized in my favorite reference there's some beautiful texture in the sky right here and so i started looking up spotlights and fog trying to get a feel for what it looks like and there's some really really great texture in here and so what i did there is i took some noise patterns and i applied that to our fog i played with the beams a bit it just added a nice overall texture that matched that reference and i think that was kind of the cherry on top that really made this work for me personally and so just always referencing reality to see how we can improve the shot and i applied some lens effects and some grain in it and that ended up getting us the final version right here and so i play this this is kind of the result of all of those steps we just talked about so how exactly does this shot apply our compositing fundamentals well let's go ahead and go back through them so first tracking well since this is a fully cg shot we actually didn't really have to do any tracking ourselves we have a 3d camera in here let me just find this really quick so we have our 3d camera and using our 3d position to points pass we can actually see where our camera is looking and our camera is just going to automatically track all of these elements for us and so we use the position to points pass here to correctly align all of those elements we looked at earlier if i pull this up really quickly you can see all the lights and cards we have perfectly aligned so that they track correctly we have motion blur on our scan line that aligns with our render and so that's kind of how we did tracking and then levels the nice thing about cg shots is the levels are inherently pretty darn consistent with each other and by doing this intelligent light split out we ensure that they are consistent as long as we want them to be i do think in this for the atmosphere i kind of broke the technical physical accuracy of it but i did do that with the knowledge that i was doing this and it's technically probably not realistic but it will help the shot overall feel more real so you have to know the rules in order to kind of break them a little bit but as far as grain and getting realistic grain in here what we're actually doing is extracting grain from practically shot footage this is the week two footage of my class and we took this grain we analyzed the luminance curve let's look at that really quick here's our little luminance curve so that it's following the same basic principles if we look here at our adapted grain you can see that we have some very intense blue grain in the shadows kind of like how i mentioned earlier and it's applying it in a realistic way to our footage right here and so use real grain when you can because it will always look the best all right so then let's go ahead and move on edge detail this is a fully cg shot so there's not a lot of edge detail in here admittedly we did end up using some masks for this we have a mask for our ground that was incredibly handy this would have been a giant pain without it but we were able to use these procedurally generated mats from cg to kind of lay in our matte painting here we were able to mask it off and that was a great help in getting this to sit in there nicely and it has the correct motion blur baked in and the underlying colors were close enough where we didn't really need to color the edges too much and so then moving on to defocus so defocus we don't have practical footage to match to so we can kind of decide what we want it to be and so again depth of field conveys scale and i wanted to make sure that we got the scale of everything correct in here so let's go ahead and look at our depth mat here we have a little depth pass let me just see z i'm just going to turn this way down so we can actually see what we're talking about right here all right so we can actually tell exactly how far away some of these objects are and we can see these cranes right now they're about 73 meters away and the ground is a hundred our focus plane is probably about 170 so you can actually use online tools let me just open that up really quick i threw in our camera sensor size our focal length and our subject distance and you can actually figure out exactly what areas would be in focus and what we discovered here was that anything that was further away than 40 meters is going to be perfectly tack sharp and since our cranes were about 70 meters away we didn't really need to apply any focus aside from some maybe slight overall blur because no lens is perfectly sharp but we actually didn't apply any z defocus to the shot because that would have made it unrealistic so that is defocus let's go ahead and move on to our lens effects so we added a couple in here we added some vignetting on the outside of our shot a little shadowing of the lens we added some very very subtle chromatic aberration here and again this was based on practical footage that we matched to this isn't just thrown in here and then we added some lens distortion to help give this lens a little bit more realism and how we did that is i actually shot with a similar sensor size focal length kind of conversion that i did i shot a lens grid and this exact same lens distortion here was used to undistort it make this line nice and sharp and so we were able to apply the inverse of that to our shot to get a little bit more of a real lens effect and then finally of course we have our glow and as always i dialed it down to half of where i thought it would be i tried to compare it to our ref explosion to make sure that it was accurate in the beginning and something while we're on this frame that i want to talk about is i feel like in cg shots a lot of people are kind of afraid to blow out highlights or keep things very dark in the shadows but real cameras don't have an infinite dynamic range it's photographically correct if things get overexposed and i think that needs to be leaned into a little bit more when it comes to cg compositing that's just kind of a tangent i went on but it's something to keep in mind that it is photographic and real if very bright elements kind of clip and you can't see detail in them and so those are the lens effects that we applied here perspective we kind of touched on this a little bit but by using the correct 3d camera and keeping our scene nice and aligned to where our 3d scene was our perspective was automatically going to align with the 3d of these out so that we could control whatever we wanted to very easily nice and consistently so we can get a nice looking look dev on our shot and those are how we applied the compositing fundamentals to that nuke script here and that's really all i have to talk about again we're giving away some cool free stuff uh this statue project i have a new script with some details on how it was constructed in here i'm including these two footage elements for you to try it on your own right there and right there and also some alternate statue renders and so we're giving those away uh i'm not entirely sure urban do you know how we're giving that out could you remind me uh i think we're gonna send it through a link it's gonna be a dropbox link but i'm not sure if we're gonna add it in the chat or maybe that's gonna come later via email as well sure so then yeah we're gonna give that away i think it'll be great to first see how a shot is constructed and maybe try a variation of it on your own if you thought this was interesting this is kind of a brief overview of some of the topics i go over in my class there's a discount code nuke 25 for all rebelway courses so if you're interested in any of those go ahead and do that and i figured while we're here i just want to kind of show some of the student work from my class because these are very well done projects and they did a really really great job with these and i think the nice thing about some of these shots is you can kind of take them and make them your own because really depending on your backgrounds and keys and what your references you can kind of make them into your own thing this one for example is very very well done and i kind of like the look of this it has a little bit of different style than i originally went for some more green screen keen here and yeah i just think these are all very well done we have the spaceship shot coming up right here and then we have a cool cold alternate of the spaceship shot and so all really well done projects that were done in mostly the first class session but i think there's also one or two in there from the most recent that's currently going on and so that's all i have currently and so i think question time is that right i did write down a couple of questions that were popping up uh one of them was how do you if you're a complete beginner how do you start like when you're even afraid of the ui and you're even afraid to even dive into nuke and compositing how do you start i think really well it's kind of tricky is i i admittedly i started from after effects i think nuke is a little bit more of an intimidating program to get into i did as well yeah and and i think after effects kind of prepared me because the nice thing about adobe products is that they try to help you but that's also the worst part about adobe products is that sometimes they help you in the wrong way or it is very much a kind of black box do-it-yourself anything and i think the best thing to do honestly what i did when i was learning nuke is i went to like four different tutorial sites and i watched all their beginner content and then i kind of pitted them against each other and was like does this kind of make logical sense to me because i think there's so much great nuke content out there that it can be kind of hard to find the right ones but i i'd say just dive into beginner classes and really the key thing is to just do it don't just watch tutorials and follow them make your own personal projects that are maybe inspired by the techniques of a tutorial because something i also do at my job is i interview compositors and tutorials to me really more so show that you can follow instructions and not necessarily that you can apply the concepts from those tutorials and that's not ragging on them because i love tutorials i consume them constantly but i think being able to apply the concepts outside of that specific scenario is so important so i'd say find beginner tutorials and then take what you've learned from them and do it on your own awesome yeah i think that was a very thorough answer i have a bunch of them so i'll just go through them and sure yeah let's just bang them out how much time do you usually get per shot and how do you collaborate with other departments oh that is such a good question because really and it's going to have such an annoying answer and that is it really depends on the shot because some big cg set extension shots i've worked on just the creative process takes a good 60 to 70 hours of actual working time to get it done but other times you may have a monitor green screen and that should be done pretty darn well in about three to four hours so it all depends on the complexity of what the shot is and i've found that the more creative a shot is the more kind of revisions it's gonna go through and so anything with cg typically will take much longer i think a big big cg shot is somewhere between like 40 to 60 hours of solid working on it and that's not including render time which adds who knows how many hours of kind of waiting in between iterations and then as far as working with other departments i work incredibly closely with the 3d department to talk about what i need to get shots done because typically they'll do kind of a lower res first pass it'll say okay i think it's faster if i fix this but you guys can fix this and give me the pass and we kind of figure out the fastest way to work together so collaboration really with everyone is really important i work with the production department a lot to make sure everything is going according to a schedule because it's ever changing with tv and so i think i just try to keep clear open communication with everyone uh as well as i can yeah so sounds about right uh in the in the webinar you were comparing a lot of well referencing a lot of real live footage and you were also showing us you know different tests from different lenses and cameras how important is it to uh well the first question is do you do photography and video yourself and how important is it to know the fundamentals of photography uh when you're compositing sure yes i i do do photography myself i love shooting creating images in general and i think i think honestly it's probably the most helpful thing you can do when you're learning compositing is understand photography because it will not only train your mind aesthetically you start to know all of the little nuances that go into it because when there are compositors who don't necessarily understand photography they'll see something weird in the footage and be like i don't know what to do what is this where the compositors who understand photography will say oh that is because there's lens distortion there's rolling shutter their iso is too high and i think that knowledge is i would say paramount to being a great compositor yep yeah i agree uh i would pretty much say the same thing without like you need a really good eye in photography and videography i think even if you're just doing effects or if you're doing 3d in general like you need to know the basics of photography it's going to help you tremendously actually i don't think if you can i don't think you can do 3d or compositing without that knowledge it definitely it it will definitely limit you i think yeah there's a cool question about deep compositing so mirko was asking he asked how do i get a good depth of field and motion blur with deep compositing because i always render the dof in 3d because in comp it is not the same quality it's depth of field is very tricky and deep is also i i think a lot of people and at one point i was one of these people as well look at deep as this kind of flawless solution where every problem it solves it creates like five new ones in terms of speed your ability to work with it and honestly sometimes the best thing to do is render with depth of field into your render it's all contextual and depends on the shot if you have very opaque objects not like smoke or any atmosphere but if you have opaque objects i think deep works really well you need a specific plug-in to do depth of field with that pg bokeh works i think it's the only one that works with deep data but that will do a really good job with the depth of field and get that to work but honestly depth of field is a giant pain typically what we'll do is kind of render it in layers and apply individual zd focuses to make sure everything blends together yeah i do i never render with depth of field because it's too slow depth of field is just uh it's it's very tricky to do and it's kind of a her situation what is the best approach because sometimes it's deep sometimes it's split it out and when neither of those are necessarily an option sometimes it's like we gotta bite the bullet and do it and render 100 uh what's the difference between color grade and color correction and in what order do you do them so they do very similar things i go over this a little bit in my class but the primary function of both is the same the grade node is there mainly so you can match your black point and white point very specifically and then the controls after that are the exact same as your color correct master controls where color correct is more based on specific areas of your footage you want to color because there's a saturation slider in color correct and what you can do is isolate specific areas and say i only want these sliders to affect my highlights these only affect my mid tones these only affect my shadows so color correct is a little bit more of a precise tool and it has a saturation slider where grade is more about getting your overall luminance correct you can do pretty much the same thing with both of them though awesome uh there's an interesting question like the debate between removing chromatic copper aberration versus adding it and the same question for lens distortion when would you would you rather fix the lens distortion or add it to like cg plates or anything you would add in comp i typically [Music] the the rule of thumb i always follow is match the plate and so i never remove chromatic aberration i will when i'm keen but then i'll add it back in at the back end and lens distortion if it's in the plate i always keep it there as far as for fully cg shots that's a bit more of a creative choice that you need to consciously make i'm always a fan of add those imperfections in because all of those subtle effects will really add up to making your shot feel more photographic just make sure you don't overdo them to try to be more photographic because i think it's very easy to sway in the opposite direction as well yeah and i think the same goes for when i come from the videography slash filmmaking world and people were always trying to remove chromatic aberration to remove any kind of imperfections and when i switched to 3d and vfx it's the opposite we tried to add all of the items back in which is quite funny uh i remember you mentioned roger deakins and i i i know him quite like he's one of my top at least three favorite cinematographers uh he was always saying that he doesn't like lens flares because to to him he feels that it's an imperfection and he doesn't want to see them i think he almost said that it almost like breaks the illusion somehow yeah definitely but i do like lens flares especially yeah yeah our friends jj abrams it's uh actually i just found one of my favorite um let me try to share this really quick i don't mean to like distract with memes on this webinar but this this i think is a good summation of a lot of the weird things you see in comp because if it's in the play you have a permit to do it yeah people can ask you to go outside of that but it needs to be a conscious choice so i think this is very poignant and i love showing this to people at work yeah love it uh that's almost all the questions i have let me see if i have any more uh shot tracking when you have that much of lens breathing i think when you were showing the anamorphic lens and the lens the breathing it was having how would you track a shot like that if let's say they were you know doing a rack focus mid shot so when it comes to and i do either a 2.5 d planar track because that can catch the squish and skew of the image if it's simple enough or you can just do a planar track that typically will work pretty well if it's a fully 3d move i'm personally not a good enough 3d tracker to track that i use a little bit of synthesize but that is beyond my skill set um i would definitely say though if it's if it's flat to the camera you can get away with the planer tracker for it okay so you're saying that for more advanced tracks you have specific departments that exactly that type of thing yeah in the workshop because it's quite an extensive workshop do you start with you know more beginner stuff introductionary stuff and then build it up to essentially the question is how beginner do you start and how advanced do you finish i i start assuming you know nothing about nuke and nothing about compositing i'll assume you know a couple of basic vfx terms i'll use you know plate foreground background that sort of stuff we start from nothing and build all the way up to what you see in the last week and i will admit it does get pretty dense during it but i'm trying to really pack everything in there so that you can really grow as much as possible because i figure if the content's a little dense and maybe you need to watch it certain videos one or two times that's definitely better than feeling like you're not learning enough so yeah start start from the ground level and by the end you have everything you need to complete those shots yeah i think that's the best way to go where a workshop actually covers everything so it's suitable for beginners and maybe even medium to advanced compositors so everybody can get uh some knowledge out of it yeah okay so i think the last question uh then we're gonna have to wrap it up how do you deal with large-scale ocean comps especially dealing with foam and spray and then you also have fog um i'm not sure i'm trying to think because i i'm not sure the process for me at least has really changed when it comes to ocean comps it's it's kind of the same thing you can certainly do with some big effects based shots a lot of it is built into the effects and you can't change textures and whatnot but i don't think my approach would largely differ from what we kind of went over i would sit back and kind of see what do i think looks kind of off with this i'd go through my fundamentals and then either see if it's something i can fix or 3d can fix but i don't think there's any specific like compositing workflow i go through that's necessarily different so it's pretty much it's very much similar to the other kind of you you essentially use this uh similar compositing workflows even when you're dealing with uh water shots and and such yeah definitely because it's all you know it's all context dependent every shot and that's why i love this so much is that every shot is going to provide new challenges that you need to find creative technical ways to overcome awesome i think that's it uh yeah i think that's it next it was a it was a pleasure it was super cool listening to uh all of the nuke tips and tricks i'm pretty sure everybody in the audience enjoyed it as well uh do you have any any last words um go make stuff make your own personal projects that's the best way to learn yeah i i completely agree and with those words i think we're gonna wrap this up uh thanks everybody for watching and see you guys in the next webinar bye you

Channel: Rebelway

Views: 28,710

Rating: 4.97996 out of 5

Keywords: Nuke, Nuke Tutorial, VFX, FX, VFX Industry, Special Effects, Visual Effects, Hollywood, Simulation, VFX Tutorial, VFX Tutorials, Nuke Webinar, Compositing, Compositing Techniques, Nuke Tips, Nuke Compositing, Nick Chamberlain, Nuke Tutorials, How to Composite, Compositing Tips, Compositing Webinar, Compositor, The Foundry

Id: R6PXUyErtVI

Length: 91min 37sec (5497 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020