[FULL TUTORIAL] Mastering Nuke Vol 1

hi everyone I'm Florian Gerard's I'm a senior visual effect artists specialized in compositing some of my recent projects include Deadpool to Detective Picacho and spider-man far from home now welcome in this first course your first shots in Nuuk in this course you will learn how to assemble and finalize a full CG shots using nuke this will allow you to discover nuke the interface and it's powerful tools it's a great 101 introduction that will make you a compositor in just a few hours some of the key takeaways of discourse are understand the nuke interface discovered the logic of not all compositing assemble render layers with the merge node the basic of color correction nuke understand channels layers and alpha and inputs and export images with nuke all those steps will help you to build your first great shot in nuke and at the end of the course you'll be familiar with you you'll understand logic and you'll be able to start using it on your own shots alright I'm very excited to share those Noll ages with you guys so let's get started all right guys before starting let's see how you should follow this course well you can decide to just watch and listen but I will encourage you to follow by replicating steps on your side for each video I saved a new file the first videos will not have any new files because we will just explore the software's interface but if at any time you'd like to follow along specific parts you can open the new file corresponding to this name up there you will find this new file in the material folder coming with this course under the new folder now let's move on to the first video where you will discover the interface of nuke see you there hi everyone and welcome in Nuuk so if you never seen new before this interface may seem a little bit confusing for now but don't worry you'll get used to it pretty fast and it's actually pretty simple for now I just like to focus on the four main important panels and first here is the viewer and this is where your images are going to be displayed so images that you will import all the result of your comp you have a few control the timeline if you play buttons and a few options up there but we will see all that in a next video down here we have the node graph and this is where we are going to create and organize the different nodes to achieve our compositing the nodes we can use are all here in the toolbar and organized by category I will just create one node here just to show you that it appears in the node graph and as well to introduce you to the last very important panel which is the properties bit and this is where are going to be displayed all the controls and attributes of your notes and for example here this is a transfer notes I will be able to adjust the scale or the rotation but we'll see that a little bit later but for now this is it guys this is the four main important spaces of the interface of nuke the viewer the node graph the toolbar and the properties bin we do have as well menus up there and there is all the patterns the curve editor the dope sheets and there is hidden ones as well here but don't worry about all that for now we will go through a little bit later so for now let's go ahead and have a closer look to the node graph in the next video see you there in this clip we are going to have a closer look to the node graph and how node based compositing is working ok here is our node graph and it's here that everything will happen and before going any further I need to make a quick stop and have a quick explanation about what is node based compositing some of you may be familiar with layer-based compositing like in After Effects for example in After Effects you will have different layers on the top of each others and you will apply effects and corrections to each layers here it's it's a bit different we have little boxes like Legos for example that we call nodes which are connected to each other and this allows us to create a procedural script each node has a function for instance here I will have a color bar nodes and the color bar node will display a color bar and I will attach to the color bar node a blur nodes and the function of the blur node is to blur the node above and to that node I can apply a color correction and so on and so on if you come from layer-based compositing or editing you are used to timelines and layers well here we have the same thing in nuke it's just represented a little bit differently we have the timeline here our layers will be group of notes so I'm not here to tell you which is the best because both systems have their pros and cons but when it comes down to big full CG and VFX shots too comp neural compositing is pretty powerful and handy and you will understand why through this series of tutorials okay now let's see the different ways of creating notes well we do have actually four ways to create a note the first one is to select a node in the toolbar here and so they organized by category so for example if you leave your mouse over an icon you will you he'll have a little help appearing telling you what is the name of that category which is also basically true for a bit of everything in Nuuk if you leave your mouse on something for a little bit longer it will tell you a little bit what is this icon is about okay back to the notes for example over the color category here I will find the color correction notes let's take for example a car correct there you go the second way to create a node is by doing a right click on your node graph and then the same list of category will appear exactly the same way as up there and so for example I will be able here to create I don't know the focus there we go the third way of creating a node is by typing the tab key of your keyboard and then you will be able to type the node that you're looking for let's say I'm looking for a transform node so I will type transform and here in the list so we'll be able to select it and hit enter there we go and the last way of creating a node is by using shortcuts for example T for transform or be for blur and those shortcuts can be found in the menus because for example the transform is under that menu and you can see there's a little T on the side of the transform it means that T is the shortcut for transform and here for example the merge node will be M or if we go back to color correction G for grade or C for color correct so yeah so many ways of creating nodes um you will you will quickly find your habits you know I think that for now the tab key and the shortcuts may not be your favorites as you're discovering this software but as soon as you'll get used to it you'll see that this is a very very convenient way now to connect nodes between each other you will just have to grab the little input all the little outputs of a node and just drag and drop it onto an of nodes and in that way you will be able to connect nodes to move in the node graph you will simply have to hold down the Alt key and with the left mouse button of your mouse you just simply drag-and-drop to pan around or if you'd like to zoom or in zoom you can do that with the scroll button of your mouse okay this is it for the node graph and in the next video we are going to see how to import images in Nuuk see you there now we will import our first images in Nuuk let's create our first node together and we are going to create a read note the reno's is in the image category up there and here read when you create a renewed there is this window that pops up and you will be able to go and find the files that you'd like to import so I'm going to go in the coast material folder that comes with this tutorial and inside the material folder there is a source file and here are the different layers that we are going to use for this course and we will start right away by importing the hearth I will click here and select the hearth which is an image sequence so maybe on your side it looks like that there is many single files it's actually one image sequence so in order to be able to import the entire sequence at once I will come here and take that sequence option here and now you should just have one line here so you can select it and click on open perfect okay now the second technique to import images and to create a node is with the right click button and then in the same way I will go inside image read and I will come here and now import the earth clouds so maybe on your side you don't have that preview window well if you do not it's because it's closed and to open and close it there is this little black Harrow up here so see nothing and now when I click on it it's here depending of the version of nuke sometimes it could be here as well but well it's pretty handy allows you to preview real quick even you have here a little timeline you can scroll to see how the animation looks like a right perfect so we'll click on up and here came the third technique to create node is with the tab key so I will hit the tab key and now type Reid and I will come here hit enter and there I will create earth lights now boom perfect and of course with the shortcuts because the ring node is one of these nodes that has shortcuts here is the R key so will come in my node graph and hit the hotkey we will import the lens flare for example okay cool now there is another technique to import files in nuke and it's directly by drag-and-drop it's from the finder from your file browser directly into your node graph for example here let's import the ship so we'll simply select the entire folder because it's an image sequence inside so I will come back here and import the entire folder here and you can understand that this is an image sequence and we'll import it as a single read nodes I'm just doing that because if I was trying to import like for example this you will see that it will create and a read node for each single file which is not what we want here but for example you can as well take for example the sky and the lens flare and import those two folder at the same time and that will create your to read notes all right perfect and now that we'll have a bunch of read nodes inside our comp let's move on to the next video and see how to view them inside our viewer here see you there in this video we are going to have a closer look at the viewer okay right now we have a fury nodes in the node graph but none of them is displayed in the viewer and this is because none of them is connected to the viewer I don't know if you noticed but every time you create a new nuke instance there is always one node already here in the node graph and it's the viewer and this viewer needs to be connected to a node to display something ok let's try voila now we can see the ring knows now there is a shortcut for that I can select the node I'd like to see and press any of the numbered key of my keyboard for example the one boom my node is now connected to my viewer now the viewer can have multiple inputs for example let's select this red node and hit the number 2 key and voila this is now connected as well as you can see we have those multiple inputs in the node and it's great I can toggle using the gnome keys of my keyboard as you can see I'm toggling between the different inputs here and I can have more I can use all my number keys for example I will connect a couple more this is very useful if you need to compare versions work on a specific part of scripts and so on you will quickly find your own habits for example me when I'm working in the shots I always have the input 3 of my viewer plugged into my final outputs and I use the input 1 and 2 to work on specific parts of my comp you'll understand all that a little bit better when we'll have a more complex comp in chapter 4 for example now let's have a look to the viewer controls down here we have the timeline we can scroll through it and we have here the different play controls play stop one frame at a time next keyframe and jump to the end or jump to the beginning here yeah all those commands are in both directions you can use that as well to jump frames from example here from ten to ten but you can set up any number I don't know if you noticed but when we play the parts the frame on the timeline change color this means that the frames are now on the cache and can be played real time now up there we can adjust the gain and the gamma but be careful this is important the adjustment is just for the viewer it doesn't affect your comp and if you were to output your comp those changes wouldn't be taken okay let's reset those guys and to do that easily just hold down the ctrl alt on PC and command alt on Mac and click on the slider this shortcut will always reset a slider parameter in nuke and this is true for any slider in the properties bin for example so this is a pretty handy thing to remember control ads click on PC and command I'll click on Mac up there you have the layers as you can see we have different layers already and this is because we are working here with multi layers picks up files but I will talk about that in the next chapter so I won't say more for now here we have our different channels RGB a and more because of the multi-layer orissa here we have the lots that nuke is using to display the images but don't worry about that for now we will have a dedicated course talking about that here we have a few options and for now I just like to introduce you to this one the proxy this will toggle your read nodes to proxy this is true if you specify the proxy file for your read nodes and a proxy file is usually a lighter version of the file in our case it could be for example a lower resolution one for the read files well if you don't have proxies specified in your read then nuke will simply down res by half your current file that will allow you to work much faster for the rest of the icons will see them a little bit later now here you can set this menu to wipe and this will allow you to compare two inputs at the same time with this little gizmo you can move around and adjust the opacity here you can select the input by selecting any of the input connected to your viewer you can just wipe it as where are you currently doing or the stack mode and you have a few fusion modes but I'll leave you to discover that on your own this is useful for example to compare versions all to make sure that two layers for instance are actually lining up alright this is it for the viewer just enough to get you comping in the next clip we will have a quick overview at the project settings see you there in this video we are going to check the project settings to get ready for comping okay always when starting a shot you want to make sure that everything is right and it starts with the project settings we will go to them when you edit up there and click here on project settings the project settings are opening right here in the properties bin and we can see here different options but for now I just want to verify my frame range and size format first the frame range well it seems to be already corrects all my read nodes start at thousand one and finished at thousand nine so it's perfect for now I will leave it like that but if for any reason yours our difference please change it 2001-2009 a while it is already set well nuke will take the first reno you import and set the project settings accordingly but to be honest sometimes it's a bit weird I mean nukes that weird but if you don't pay attention maybe you've been importing another file and the frame range end up being wrong so better to double-check now let's adjust the size format it show it shot of its own specifications and it's important to set the right size because you'll see later that many nodes in Nuuk rely on that full size formats so here for this project I will set my size format to 1920 to 842 okay so my size format is set the frame range is correct here and I will leave the rest as it is to be honest it's pretty rare to have to adjust anything else here okay well I think we are ready to start comping okay maybe I'll just delete that lens flare read node that I have two times here so no needs and I will save my comp of course don't forget to save and so for that it's like in any software's file save and now I navigate to where you want to save your file and we'll save it in the material folder and create a new folder called nuke and now I will name my file C 1 V 6 for chapter 1 video six dot NK and boom saved okay now I think that we are ready to come for real I will meet you in the next chapter but before I invite you to get a little bit more familiar with nuke on your own and try to import and read your own files it can be video files images up to you try to understand probably how the renown is working and how to use the viewer to read all your files but if you're ready let's go in this chapter we are going to assemble our elements to create a first version of our comp that we also called a slab comp then in the next chapter we will refine it to obtain the final comp in this chapter you will discover the merge node how to do color Corrections and how to use the different layers of the exam files now in this video we are going to discover the merge node so we have all our elements loaded in to read notes now it's time to assemble them together so first let's organize them a little bit I like to position them depending of their super position different compares will have different habits but usually we will place the layers which harder further away from us at the very top of our comp and as we will go down the elements get closest to us you can do whatever you want but I can tell you that this method is widely used now to move nodes in the viewer you just have to select one or several nodes and drag and drop them wherever you want so here I will place my sky hub there and here I will place the planet layers and here the ship and finally I will have my lens flare I'll take care of that a little bit later but let's place it here for now okay and now let's merge the sky and the earth for that I need a merge nodes and the merge node is living here in the merge category it has as well the shortcut n that we will use after the merge node has two inputs a and B the a inputs will connect to the element in front and B to the element behind so to remember hit like B has behind our backgrounds it's up to you so let's connect the a to the earth and the B to the sky and now if we want to see the result of that we will need to connect the viewer to the merge node and voila we have an incredible compositing ok I will repeat the operation with the ship now I will create another merge node by using the hotkey M this time and connect the ship in a and the result of the previous merge in B and now we have the ship in the top of everything great ok now in the next clip let's discover how to use different vision modes with the merge node see you there in this video we will learn how to use the fission modes of a merge node on the top of the earth here I like to add their lights and for doing that well I will create another merge node and I will select the node first the rain node here and hit the M hotkey and as you can see when I select my node when I create a new node it's automatically connected to it with the merge node connect to the a inputs but with other nodes for example if I create a color correction it will simply connect to the only input there is alright I will delete that guy ok and now I need to connect that new merge node between the earth and the merge one here and this is very easy for that I just need to drag and drop that node on the link as you can see as I hover it it just changed color and so if I release my click it will simply connect the B pipe here so with the merge node it always work with the B pipe if you had the beep I connected and tried to drag and drop to connect the a pipe it wouldn't work ok now as you can see that new layer here is totally a quilting the earth layer and so I will need to go and change the fission mode of my merge free and for that this is the first time that we are going to go inside the properties panel to address things so I just like to make sure that we are going to add just the right note so it's pretty easy as you can see you have the name of the nose here so here's mirth 3 so it's here but sometimes let's get good habits and so when you have it tired of you if you want to work fast it's better to make sure that you are correcting the right note so what I like to do is really so go up there and click on that icon to close all the nodes open here and I will simply come here and double-click and I will open only the properties of the merge I want to modify this is just to make sure that I at just something I don't want ok now I will come over here in operation and click on it and as you can see there is many different vision modes you can choose and here I will use the plus and voila as you can see now we do have the seed lights on the top of the herd ok I will repeat the same process with the clouds now so I will make a little bit of space I will put that guy a bit up as well voila and I will select that guy and what I can do as well instead of creating a new merge node I can select that guy and do control C and control V and I will connect the a here and the be here there we go also for now it doesn't look perfect but we will adjust that a little bit later now I'd like to add another layer that we forgot to inputs in the previous chapter so we'll create a new read node with the our key and I will go into the material source folder and I want the earth atmosphere so click open perfect and I will create another merge node so same we can duplicate a node directly as well using the shortcut alt see there we go so I will connect that now that node here and up to the atmosphere okay another thing I'd like to show you here is if I double click here I can come here and with the mix so ok of course as I said earlier let's make sure we are on the right layer but merge 5 perfect and I can reduce the mix here just you have what I want now you can add several time the same layer so for example here I like to add another version of the atmosphere that I will put behind just to reinforce that tinny atmosphere line here what I'm gonna do is to create another merge node with the M key that time I will connect that guy here and here of course we need now to change the fission mode so merge six here I'll make sure I want I won't close all of them all the time it was just to show you first now like every time you create a new node or you double-click on it it always come up at the top of the properties bin so that's a good way to remember as well how it works okay now I will change the operation to under so what it gonna do is simply like instead of having that layer over the rest of it here it will place that layer under the rest of it so now same thing if it's a bit too intense I can reduce the mix intensity here perfect all right this is it for now we won't have the lens flare because I will keep that for the next chapter there is a few operation that we need to do on it now let's move on to the next video to see what is a multi layer or it's a file see you there in this video we will learn what is a multi-layer excel file what is a channel a layer and how to use them so before going any further and start adjusting my comp we need to make a quick stop and talk about an important thing in Nuuk the channels and the layers so let's start by talking about the channels so there are several ones and the three main ones you probably may know about it's the red the green and the blue channels that compose the color of the image we can access them by this little menu here red green and blue all by using the shortcut of the keyboard are for red G for green and B for blue hmm you say ah uh isn't that shortcut as well to create a renewed well this is another thing to know in Nuuk shortcuts are Pannell dependence if I use the shortcut are while I'm on the viewer I will toggle the red channel however if I'm using the same shortcut the shortcut ha while I'm on the node graph with my mouse I will create a Rin note so it's important to pay attention to where your mouse while using a shortcut in Nuuk okay back to the channels those three channels are grouped together in the layer and this layer here is called RGB okay let me represent that for you no need to do anything on your own and just watch okay we do have three Chinese red Green and blue okay and those three channels are grouped into a layer called RGB or whatever but it's called a lair and a lair can have three channels but it can have as well a little bit more and most of the time here you will see that the lair have as well another channel called the Alpha Channel for example here if you look at that Reno you can see that there is red green and blue and that white square here represent the Alpha Channel so what is the Alpha Channel well I will connect my viewer to it and I will come here to C alpha and we'll toggle on and off with the shortcut a and the Alpha Channel represents the transparency of the layer so white means opaque and black means transfers so for example if I were to marry merge the earth with the sky here as you can see the hearth is solid here and where it was black in our alpha Channel the stars are coming through if I were to modify the alpha channel of the hearth here you will see that the earth will become more or less transparent okay so here in my lair I can had another channel called half and so this layer will be basically our image file so most of the image files have only one layer for example a JPEG file will hardly have one layer whereas with the red green and blue channels a PNG file will have only one layers as well but will be able to carry as well the Alpha Channel so red green and blue and alpha but here in nuke and in this bhakti particular case which is the case in most of the production of visual effects and animation we are using excel files and the powerful thing with exact files is that they can carry multiple layers when you look at you node we have the red green blue and alpha channels but as well we have that little green square here and this means that there is more than one layer in that rain notes ok let's have a look how to see what there is in that layer so first thing first I will connect my viewer to the rain node and if I come here up here this is the layer menu so this is a bit confusing because it's called here channels but this is actually the layers you will have in your excel file and as you can see we do have the RGB a but with that we will have as well emission fill light key light rim lights for example I can preview only the fill lights okay I will go back to their RGB a for now and now I will come here in the merge menu and I will select the layer contact sheet here and I will connect the layer contact sheet to my Reed nodes and connect my viewer to it and click on show layer nodes and it seems that there is a little issue here reload ok perfect for some reason it was displaying a little bit some errors and as you can see here we don't have only one layer but we have a total of five layers we have their RGB a which is the the layer we usually have everywhere but we do have as well the emission the fill light the key light and the remote okay so if we go back to our demonstration here basically in the case of an excel file we will be able to have multiple layers within the same image and whatever we will do in Nuuk whatever the amount of layer we have it doesn't matter what we always will work on on our main comp is their RGB a channel so we may have like many layers but in order to use them we are going to have to extract them and to take them from the layer to the RGB a layer and so for doing that it's very simple we are going to go to product I just want to move that node around for now and make a little bit of space here we are going to go to the channel menu which is right here and we are going to grab the shuffle the shuffle node will allow us to shuffle a layer to the RGB a layer so what I'm gonna do here I will come to the in the of my shuffled in one and I will take the emission for example and by selecting that it will select the emission layer and transfer it to the RGB a layer it's you have to see that how it works like RGB from the emission layer going into the our GB of their RGB a layer alright if I plug my viewer to the shuffle I will see only the emission layer of coming out of my ship I will reproduce the operation one and here now I will shuffle the fill light if I plug my viewer you can see with your need to fill light and I will do it again for the other layers and we do have here now the key light let's see if it works perfect and another one the rim lights let's see perfect okay so now that we have extracted all those channels all those layers let's see in the next clip how to work with those shuffled layers see you there you in the previous video we extracted the lair from the ship read notes now let's see how to work with those different layers so first I'd like to organize myself a little bit in order to know what is what and for that I'd like to rename my nodes accordingly to the passes that I'm shuffling so let's start with the shuffle number one I will double click on the property on the node to open the properties here and I can see that this shuffle one is shuffling the emission layer so I will come here and I will rename my name my node emission now I need to as you can see here it doesn't change anything but if I click somewhere else it changed the name it's when you live in the box that it validates the name that you entered right here so now I do have my shuffle that's shuffle the emission layer okay I will do the same thing with the shuffle too so we'll double click on the shuffle - to open it and here is the fill light so I will type fill light and I can as well hit the end key there we go now I will do the shuffle 3 and the shuffle three is the key lights there is a shortcut to rename a node and it's the N key so I will hit the end key and now I will be able to type key lights ok and hit enter great and the last one is the room light so we'll do the same thing rim light and hit enter perfect now we have our phone knows renamed and we'll be able to know a little bit better what is what another useful thing we can use here is postage stamp and a postage stamp is like this thing here it's a little preview of the node and what is the image at that node of your comp so for that I will select my node and go to edit node and a postage stamp on our and here we have a little preview of our emission pass I can do that as well using the shortcut alt p on the selected nodes and here i have a little preview of my fill light key light sorry in lights this postage stamp thing work on any nodes in you and for example in that merge node i can select it and do i'll speak and I will have a postage stamp of the current stages of my comp at that nodes so this is very useful but remember that this is power consuming and this may considerably slow down nuke so I will be very careful by using it especially in the country before if it's for renown it's okay but like for a merge like that I wouldn't use it if I were you some compare will even prefer to disable the postage stamps of their read node just to speed up a little bit their script well it's up to you at least for me I'd like to keep it for my rain nodes because sometimes it becomes a little bit confusing so there we go perfect okay now in order to use those passes what I'd like to do first is to recreate my beauty so let me clarify a little bit all of that we will have an entire course focusing on working with render passes are also called a Ovie's but here is just an overview a good habit is to first recreate the beauty which is the RGB a of your original layer and most of the time the layer you will find in your RGB a will help you to recreate that beauty okay this is a little bit confusing why are we breaking down all those layer if it's for recreating the original render well you will understand that in a minute so here the lighter has been splitting the different lights into different in order to give us the possibility to adjust those light intensity and color separately and most of the time the random layer emerged with a plus operation so we are going to do that right here so I will come here and create a merge node by using the M key of my keyboard and I will connect the fill light in a and the emission in B it really doesn't matter what what is the order but let's do it that way okay and so I will double click on my merge node and I will come into the properties and I will change the operation for plus okay let's let's see the result of that merge node so right now we do have the emission here and the fill light and now we plus them to get okay cool let's repeat I will make a little bit of space here and make my viewer a little bit bigger okay I will repeat that thing and I will do a control C control V to create another merge node and when I create that merge node it automatically connects to the a input of my merge but a good habit to have here is always to connect the B input to the previous merge and the a input to the other shuffle so I'd like to invert those things so I could do it manually by disconnected that guy here and connect it here and like that but what I could do as well and I will do that with the next merge node and I will do control C control V is when it connects to one inputs and you like the other one to be connected we have a shortcuts that allow you to swap the different inputs and that shortcut is Shift X perfect as you can see shift X allows me to toggle between a and B okay I want it to be to be connected to my merge and the a to be connected to my rim lights okay perfect now let's compare our original beauty with the beauty will recreate it so I will make sure that the merge 9 here is connected to my viewer in the inputs number 1 so with the key one of your keyboard and I will select my ship up there and do the key number 2 of my keyboard to connect my viewer as well to the same viewer and I will zoom zoom on my ship a little bit and I will toggle between 1 & 2 1 & 2 and as you can see it's exactly the same thing it means that our CG breakdown this is what we call a CG breakdown works well alright for example let's say we forgot the rim lights I will select that node and disable it with the hotkey D okay now let's see as you can see we are missing something there is something that it's not there so I know that there is a problem in my cg breakdown alright we're really in a bulette node with the D key alright and now as you can see we do have exactly the same thing perfect oh I don't know why this thing good turn on okay one two one two one two as you can see it's the same thing perfect alright now you're gonna tell me okay why did we did we do all that cg breakdown if we just keep the same results well it's just important to make sure that everything is correct with the passes and now now that we know that everything is correct with those passes we are going to start tweaking them separately and adjusting them as we want okay in the previous video we've been splitting the different layers and reassemble them to recreate the beauty layer now let's connect that's CG breakdown to our main tree so we'll make a little bit of space here I don't need my layer contact sheet anymore I will delete it I don't need this thing neither and I will just make a little bit of space here okay perfect and now I will connect the merge of my main tree and instead of having it connected to the rim nodes I will connect it at the end of the ship tree here I'm using the word tree that's that's the word that we use usually for like a group of nodes all right so now this is connected here at the output of my merge nine and I will connect my viewer here and data here is the result and it doesn't look good what's going on well we've been focusing of recreating the beauty and we've been focusing of recreating the same thing in the RGB a channel in the color Channel but we didn't pay attention to the Alpha Channel and if I connect my viewer here and I come here to view my alpha Channel as you may remember from the previous clips where I was explaining that the Alpha Channel drive the transparency of your image we have here a very simple alpha channel here is the ship solid opaque and everything else is transparent now if I come at the end of my tree here and I connect my viewer as well we can see that we are still viewing the Alpha Channel but this doesn't look like the Alpha Channel we originally have in the beauty and so it's a problem it means that for example this thing is going to be opaque but all those shades of grey here is going to be more or less transparent and this is not what we want so it's another good thing to no it's important when doing a cg breakdown to check as well that our alpha channel is correct and what I like to do when doing a simple CG breakdown like that is to simply re-inject the alpha of my rim nodes at the end of my CG breakdown okay very simple follow me for that I will need a copy nodes and that copy node can be found in the channel menu here and copy and I will connect the inputs to my array node here and the B input to the pipe right after my last merge node and what this node is simply doing well it will take the Alpha channel of the inputs and injected to the B input we are replacing the alpha channel here with that copy node we can do a bunch of other stuff but I don't want to make it too complicated for now all right let's see voila if I disable that node we get that's weird alpha channel coming out of those things here but if I enable it we do have exactly the same alpha channel as our array nodes and now if we have a look at our merge two and toggle back to the RGB using the a key of your keyboard we can see that the result is now correct great all right I just like to organize a little bit my nose and so I will just drag and drop a little bit so there's something that's very useful to organize note is that when you hold down the control key on pc or linux or the command key on Mac you will have those little yellow dots appearing on your lines on your connections well if I click on one of those yellow dots I will create a physical dots that doesn't affect at all my link but I can use them to organize a little bit my comp so for example and we do that here and I will create another dot holding down the control key and I will create that guy like that's that and what I can do as well is for using those dots as well to make it's a little bit more square you may think that I'm a maniac of the organization but trust me this is very very very important and I can stress you enough about that this is a thing that will change your world if you work in the studio you need to keep your comb very clean for yourself because when you have a lot of nodes for now we have nothing so it's fine but when you have a lot of nodes it's easy to get lost but as well for you colleagues because sometimes you will have to adjust the compa phone of your colleague and all one other person will open your comp to be able to tweak things or or see what did you do so it's important to keep everything clean and organized all right this is not too bad for now let's move on to the next clip to do a little bit of color correction see you there all right now that we have a clean cg breakdown we are going to be able to color correct our receipt and the first thing I'd like to do here is to add just the rim light of our ship and this is very convenient because with this cg breakdown I will be able to come here insert some notes only right here to affect only the key light so for that I will come here in the column and you and I will select the color correct and note and I will insert that note right after my key light as you can see it's named color correct so it's probably your nose for color correction right all right here I will come here and increase the gain and as you can see as I tweak it I'm just affecting my key lights and this is why a cg breakdown is very powerful it allows us a lot of flexibility to adjust only the part the lights the the little thing that we want so this is very very handy so there we go I just adjusted the key lights of the ship if I'd like to adjust for example the emission as well I cool do it so I will select the shuffle node and come here and create a color correct there we go and for example I can come into the gain here and click on the little will to add just not only to gain the color of the game and like here for example I could change the color of the thirsty by adjusting the gain of my emission see it's pretty cool no okay I like them blue so I will just delete that colour correct node for now so you don't need to have a CG breakdown in order to color correct your comp colour correct node can be inserted anywhere in the comp and let's see that by adjusting a little bit the earth so right now I just like to change a little bit the visibility of my clouds I will create for that another color correction and another way to create a color correction is by selecting a node and hitting the C key of your keyboard which is the shortcut for the colour correct node and that known will come directly after the selected node okay I could use the contrast and reduce a little bit the contrast but I don't really like the effect of it personally I don't like too much that contrast slider what I prefer to do when trying to adjust the contrast is to work on the gamma and the gain so here I will increase a little bit the gamma with will which will increase a little bit the medium value of your image and because some places now are too bright I will now reduce the game great okay now let's go a little bit further with the color correct note and there is something very useful that you can do with that colour correct node is to add just only a certain range of values of your image and as you can see we do have the shadows mid-tones and highlights controls here that will allows us to adjust only the shadows the mid-tones are the highlights and let's do that because I think that here my my clouds are way too bright and it's kind of kind of weird so what I gonna do is first let's connect the viewer to the output of the color correct to here there we go and now what I can do is to come to the ranges here and if I click on tests I will have my colors mapped into three different regions the dark values will be in black and dark green the mid-tones will be in this medium gray and the highlights will be in those bright white things here and if I want with those curves I can adjust what is the eye light or what is the shadows part for ISM okay when I'm satisfied with that I can uncheck the test here and now if I come here I will be able to adjust only the highlights the medium or the dark and here what I want to do is just to reduce those very bright spot here so we'll come to the eye light and reduce the gain a little bit okay let's see at the end of my comp how it looks like yeah I think it's it's it's a it's a bit better all right so there is different things you can do and you can keep adjusting as you want one thing I like to do here is to change the color of my light of the lights of the city so we'll create another color correction after the earth lights with the C key and I will come to the gain here open the color wheel and turn the city lights a little bit more Orange okay if you don't if you if you think that it's not convenient for you to adjust with those tiny sliders or if the RGB values are not very handy for you what you can do you can maintain the comment button and click on the wheel and it will happen another color panel here that gonna allows you more control if you prefer to adjust using RGB or the HSV or the TMI you can have all those controls and that could be very useful as well as the color wheel so this is as you prefer most of the time the this little slider here is enough for me but sometimes having more control is very handy alright before finishing this video I'd like to add just a little bit the mix of the merge of my atmosphere just to reduce it a bit but we are going to keep adjusting colors and things in the next chapters alright for now let's meet in the next video for the homework assignment see you there alright before moving on to the next chapter I will suggest you to try to play around a little bit with what we've been learning in this chapter and mainly by trying to do your own version of your shots by for example changing the color Corrections by creating new color corrects or by adjusting the mix of the different merged notes you can as well try to play a little bit more with the different movies or you can as well try to create overall color Corrections by plugging for example a colour correct node at the end of your comp and creating some overall filters that can be cool well I think there is plenty of things you can explore and you'll see it's it's very it's very creative all those things you can do by only using merge nodes and color corrects alright when you're done with that I'll meet you in the shocked to see you there in this chapter you will discover the 2d transform controls and how to create basic interpolation animations you'll have another view of the curve editor and the dope sheet you will learn as well a bit more about formats and Bbox in this first video I will add the lens flare to my comp so previously we've been adding all the layers but the lens flare here and the reason I didn't add the lesser yet is because the lens flare has different formats than the rest of our comp if you see here our comp is 1920 by 842 and that Rin node here is a HD file of 1920 by 1080 now in order to merge it properly and to make sure that this lens flare will be in the right position what I will need to do is to reformat that image okay for that I will need a reformats nodes and the reformat node can be found in the transform menu here and here reformats okay I will plug that guy to my read nodes and now if I preview after the reformats if I put my viewer right here as you can see the format of the image changed to the 1920 by 842 so why nuke knew that we needed that file formats well because we asked here the reformat to go to the route format and I don't know if you remember but at the beginning of the course we went to the project settings before starting and we went here to the full size format and we set it up the full size format for our comp to make sure that this is the format that going to be used well the reform and node is one of these nodes that will come and grab that information to reformat automatically to the right dimension now here if you would like to adjust the format of that's Reno to any other you will be able here to choose to many different formats or even to create your new one if you'd like here you can choose to reformat to formats that you will choose here but you coul Haswell scale it I'll use a box where you will be able to type directly the dimension you'd like alright I revert back to format for now and now I will merge that guy to my comp so I will come to the merge menu and creates a merge node and that merge node I will connect it to my main pipe here and there we go and let's change the fusion mode as well and fold that guy I will use plus voila perfect maybe maybe actually I will use a screen mm so if you have doubts between two version mode and you like to experiment to see the difference after modifying the operation in the merge you can use the up and down arrow to pass through the difference fusion mode so for example here I think that the plus is bringing too much of the brightness here so the screen mode will be more what I'm looking for in that case alright so this is it for now and now let's meet in the next clip to talk about the bounding box see you there in this video we are going to talk about the bounding box what is the bounding box well we call it as well B box well the B box defines the limits of our image so here we have a five formats of 1920 by 842 but some of our layers actually bigger than that and even if we don't see it there is some informations outside and how do I know it well I do have this dotted line all around here and it means that here there is a bounding box a little bigger and this is the actual size of our bounding box up there and so why do I care well it means that even if I see only that part of my image nuke will still calculate those pixels out there and it means that my nuke is going to be slower and everything going to be slower and sometimes and we will see that through that entire curriculum having a B box is very important for some effects but in our case we don't need them and we don't need those extra information alright first let's see what is this actual B box so I will do a right-click on my viewer and I will select here show of the scan and here you can see well there is actually a few things coming out of that alright for now I will just like to crop all those things because I don't want those pixels to be here I don't want those pixel to be calculated I don't need to preview that for now so we'll simply do a right click again and disable the other scan here and I will create a crop note in order to disable those B box here the crop note can be found in to the transform menu and here crop alright and I will click that crop right here and boom as you can see that dirty box disappeared and now we do have a file format of 1920 by 842 steel and the B boxes oh why why it's 921 by 843 well this is just a little thing in Nuuk don't be worried about that but the answer is because the crop formats use that option the black outside and if you leave your mouse on the black outside side you will have the explanation you just add one pixel of bounding box to make sure that all further pixels outside will be black in this case we don't need that and we'd like our B box to be the exact same size our that our size format so we'll just untick that guy here B boxes can come from many different places for example if I didn't use the reformat here as you can see I will have merged the layer and it will have of course take the size format through that merge here the size format here but it will have to keep the information of all the extra pixels that I have here so the reformat node as well is always as well cropping your B box if you wanted to keep the B box you could come here and click on preserve B box alright also one thing and I don't want to make it too complicated this is the first cause of many's but it's better to get good habits right away I did put my crop notes right here but the best way to fix cropping and B box issues is by investigating where the B box is coming from so what I do is really is I hook up my viewer here for example and I try to figure out where is my baby box big baby box coming from so is it coming from the ship and I will hope my viewer know the bee box is perfect here so is it coming from here yeah perhaps so maybe it comes from the sky no the bee box is right so maybe it comes from Earth oh yeah it comes on the earth so the atmosphere may be here no here was fine so it means that my bee box issues come from this layer so let's see oh yes eventually this is this layer who does have a bigger bee box so in order to fix my bee box issue sometimes it's better to put directly the crop where the problem is coming from so we'll put a crop here I will remove the black outside and normally here it's fine ish I still have a little bit of bee box issue here so let's see where it comes from oh it seems that actually those layers have a teeny bit more b-bugs as well so just to be sure I will duplicate that crop here as well and here as well and here as well there we go now we are sure that nuke won't do useless operation and calculate useless pixels so now that I've done that I don't need that crap anymore so before deleted it let's just disable it to make sure that it works and yes as you can see it works so now can delete it and there we go we do have a clean cut all right in this very short video I would like to introduce you to do transform nodes the transform node can be found here in the transform menu and here transform it as well has the T shortcuts so we'll connect a transform node and I will plug it right after my read node here when I create a transform node you can see that little gizmo appearing on your viewer okay so some of you may not see it and there is possibly two reason for that the first thing your overlay option for the viewer is turned off and you can see it here by doing a right click and check overlay right now it's on but if it's off you won't see the gizmo and you will have that red thing here mentioning the G overlay is off the shortcut to toggle overlay on and off is the Q key and that's very useful because when you want to preview your image with all those graphic elements on the top like the bounding box the resolution and gizmos you can easily toggle on and off with the Q key while your mouse is under viewer the second thing that may affect the visibility at that gizmo is if the transform properties are closed in order to have the gizmo and modify the transform node you need that node to be open here in the properties bin okay now if I have my mouse on the top of that gizmo I can move that layer and here if I have it on the cycle I can scale it and if I have it on the little bar here I can up rotate it as well as you have skew control on the small bar here and here alright so now we will revert the revert back to rotation by holding down control else remember and the scale as well and I will just live to translate a little bit down to have a little bit more of the Flair inside my screen maybe it's a bit too much so I will type here half of it - 35 all right I think this is good so now all right cool I will close my transform here and let's move on to the next clip to see how to animate a transform node see you there all right between the previous video and this video I've been cashing my animation just to see how my shot is looking like with the animation and I think it's important to do it once in a while to know what's going on with the animation okay and I think that right now it looks pretty good but there is still a few things I'd like to do and in this video I'd like to increase the camera movement and we are going to be able to do that with the transform node and animation all right I will pause the video for now here and I will create a transform node right after my merge 10 here and for that I will use the shortcut T perfect and I will insert that node right here okay cool and now let's move a little bit dance so remember if you don't see that little gizmo it's because your overlay is off and to toggle on and off is the Q key or you can as well do a right click and select overlay here okay cool now I will need to increase a little bit the size of my image because if I start moving that guy around I will creating black bars and it's not what I'd like to do so I will come here in the scale and I will increase it by 10% so I will type one point one ten percent I think is a good threshold a good habit to have don't increase too much the scale of your images because you will lose a lot in quality sometimes it's okay sometimes it's not but I think that 10% it's a little bit personally it's a little bit my limit alright now that we've been increasing the side of the image as you can see we have a bounding box and those are all the extra pixels we are going to be able to use to create our fake camera animation on the top of our shots so now I will come to the first frame my first frame is the frame thousand one in my case alright and I will move that gizmo little bit to place it mm more or less like that you know you know you can do whatever you want but this is what I like to do to pan from left to right as the shot goes on okay perfect now that I position this thing I need to create an animation key and for that I will simply come in the properties bin here and I will click on that little menu here if you leave your mouse on top of it you can see animation menu so it's probably here that we're gonna find what we want I will click on that guy and I will click on set key and there we go we've been creating our first animation key keyframe and this is important to notice that here now those controls turned blue this means this parameter is animated and when it's blue like that it means that we are on the keyframe you can see as well that here on your timeline you have that frame which is blue and now and this means a we have a keyframe at the frame thousand one in order to see the keyframes you need to note which is animated to be open so if I close the transform properties here I don't see that blue keyframe anymore also another pretty handy feature in nuke now that have been created and he made it values inside the nodes I will have that little red tag with a on the top of my node that specified that this node is animated and it's handy because it's easy to forget which node has animated keys okay now we'll open the transform again as you can see we can see our blue keyframe here again now we created only one keyframe so nothing will happen but we are going to go at the end of our shots and we are going to create another animations so I will come to frame 10 89 and here as you can see it's not the same color anymore it's a dark gray versus like a pretty saturated cry here well it means that this far matter is animated but I'm currently not on the keyframe okay so I will come here and I will move my gizmo and now this turns blue like saturated blue and it means that we created a keyframe here so it's an important things to know in Nuuk when you've been animated and Natura beauts now this attribute is on auto key frame mode it means that if you go anywhere on your timeline and you modify that attribute in our case the translate here it will automatically create a keyframe all right so you need to be careful if you create a keyframe and you didn't want it well you can come here of course you need to be on the keyframe here and you can come to the animation menu and click on delete key and it will delete that keyframe okay so I've been placing a keyframe at the beginning of my shot and the keyframe at the end of my shot so now if I play it I will see that I have an interpolation between those two keyframe and this is perfectly what I wanted to have so with the Q key I called high D overlay to see a little bit better what's going on and you may have to type the Q key twice because now we can hide two things in the viewer we can hide of course the gizmo and the bounding box but as well this little thing here which is the representation of our interpolated vector okay I think I'm happy for now with the animation I will smooth it a little bit in the next video but before handing this video I'd like to show you another thing so for now I've been animated only to translate attributes of my transform nodes if I want to animate another pair matter for example the scale I can do it as well but I will have to create other keyframes for that which will be independent than the translate attributes so for example I can create a keyframe here and come here and create another keyframe and there we go okay obviously this is another what I want but you can do whatever you want all right I'd like to delete that animation I've been creating the scale so for that I will come to the animation menu and come here and click on no animation nuke will ask me if I'm sure so yes and voila no more animation of my scale parameter however be careful with one thing nuke will keep the value of that frame here and set it as the value as the new value of the scale so you may have to re-enter the correct value for your scale here which was 1.1 perfect okay now let's move on to the next clip where we are going to talk about the curve editor see you there all right in the previous video we've been creating a fake camera movements on the top of our shots now in this clip I like to smooth a little bit that movement and for that I will go inside the curve a derp if you don't have that panel here well you will have to click here and go into Windows and here you will find the curve editor so for now I don't have anything in the curve editor and this is because I don't have any node up and in the properties bin so we'll come into my node graph and double click on my transform node to open its properties and now if I come back in the curve editor I can see that I have the curve related to my transform nodes okay maybe you don't see exactly the same thing as I do so if you need to move inside your curve editor you can maintain the Alt key and with the left mouse button you can pan around always the wheel of your mouse you can zoom and and zoom and if you'd like to frame your animation within the space you have you can use the F key all right great so now what do we have here well for those of you who are used to animation this may look a little bit familiar to you otherwise for those who never seen that before well it's very simple here we have the time and here we have the values and here we have the curve related to the X transformation and here we have the curve for the Y transformation those little dots here are the keyframes that we created and in between that curve is the interpolation so with the curve editor it will be easy to actually modify the interpolation between two keyframes and this is what I'm going to do right now this is a Bezier curve and the basic curve can be adjusted with handles and here we have the little handles and if I click on it and grab it I will be able to kind of smooth my curve now my camera movements will start like more slowly and will speed up as we go through the shots I will do the same thing at the exit point so on my last keyframe and I will smooth my curve the other way now we have a shot a camera movement will start slow speed up and slow down at the end cool I will do exactly the same thing with the curve of Y so we'll smooth up a little bit here and a little bit here as well you can really do whatever you want this is for the example but okay this is perfect so we'll preview what's going on with that and there we go I think it looks pretty good cool there is other stuff that you can do with the curve editor but for now I just like to show you how you can actually add just a keyframe and this is very handy so for example you can address your keyframe directly in the curve editor and for that I just have to select a keyframe and here if I drag it up down I will adjust the value of that key frame or I can as well drag it on that direction and I will adjust where the keyframe here as you can see the keyframe here on my timeline is moving to indicate where is my keyframe now so I made a mistake in the previous clip by saying that I will go to the last frame of my clay 1089 the last frame of our clip is actually 1090 so we'll just drag my frame there as well to add just a keyframe you can do it by a drag and drop it but as well if I select my frame I can double click here and edit by typing the value I'd like so for example here we'll type 10 90 and hit enter and it will move my keyframe where I want it to be perfect okay let's now move on to the next video where we are going to talk about the dope sheet see you there in this video we are going to see how to use the dope sheets to add just animation keys all right I'd like to create another animation here and you don't have to animate a transform node any node can be animated for example the merge as long as you have this little animated animation menu here it means that the parameter can be animated right now I'd like to animate that color correction that we've done earlier in order to boost the key light I feel that at the end of the shot is great but when we are at the beginning of the shot it's too much so let's create a keyframe at the end of the shot where we think it's okay all right here for example I will come to the gain and I can click on that guy or I can do I'd click on the gain as well and click on set key okay perfect now I will come to the beginning of my shots I mean where the ship is entering the frame for example here and I will read use the gain and as I explained you earlier this is creating automatically a keyframe so perfect okay I think I can almost reduce it to all over to one ok cool and now we will have our gain interpolation in between perfect but what if I think that this frame could have been a little bit later well I could click and delete that frame and go a little bit further and recreate it oh well it's a it's a bit of work right like right now there's only two keyframe so it's fine but if you had more it will be a little bit of a headache well for that we have the dope sheet I will click here to go into the dope sheet and if you don't have it it's the same as the curve editor you will be able to find it by clicking here go into windows and here you will have the dough sheets so same as the curve editor the dope sheet won't display anything if your properties are closed for example I will need to go back to my no graph open the properties of my color correct in order to see those keyframes in my dough sheet so here I do have the keyframe of my game the first one and the last one so how it works here you will have the name of your node and then the attribute and email it ok and the cool thing here that I can easily select a frame and drag and drop it where I want the frame to be and I will be able for example to do the same thing here and now I can easily move around my different frames if you had several animated note opens for example a transform to as well you will be able to see your different notes all at once in the same dope sheet which is very nd when you have several things to be adjusted in function of each other all right this is the end of this chapter about animation transform nodes and formats but before going to the next chapter I will invite you to try to create your own camera movement using another transform node for example doing a pushing inside the shot and as well to animate different time errors for example you could animate the omission of the ship to have the thrusters go on and off as well as the brightness of the lens flare and when you're done I'll meet you in the next chapter see you there welcome in the last chapter of this course in this last part we are going to make a few tweaks to our image such as adding a glow the focus vignette will finally end this course by rendering the final results now let's start right away with the glow so I'd like to first add some glow to the thrusters of my ship here and for that I will simply come here after the emission because this is where the trustor light is and I will add a glow nodes so the glow node can be found in the blur menu here and here glow all right as you can see we now have a bit of glow around the thrusters let's try without Sun visible that node with the D key and rayna bullets and as you can see you can toggle on and off to see the difference all right for example I could adjust this a little bit by increasing the brightness of my glow and I call it just as well the size of how this glow is spreading I'll let you do a little bit what you want here I just wanted to show you that we do have a glow node that can be used in a pretty simple way you have other control for example here the saturation if you will have like a lot of information with the tolerance you could define what is going to glow and what is going not to glow by defining the threshold and if you want to add the tints to your glow you can do that here all right so the same fashion we cooled you as well a bit of glow out of those city light here so we'll select the color correct free hit the tab key and look for the glow that way I will select the glow and hit enter and the glow will be created right here so right now this is way too big so I like to reduce it a lot at least for the size and the brightness as well you like well it's almost nothing now right but still you can to go on and off to see the difference it can help a little bit you can do really what you want in this case you are the art director now I'd like to show you that a nuke one thing can be done in multiple ways and for that I would like to create a homemade glow and you'll see it's very simple basically I'd like to glow the entire earth here and just to to give it more presence and as well to create a bit more atmosphere on the top of it so for doing that what I will do first is to blur my image so to create a blur nodes I will go to the blur menu here and creates a blur you could have done that as well with the bt alright so we'll connect my blur right here and I will connect my viewer to the blur and now on my blur I will just I don't know put a value of thirty thirty-two whatever okay and now I will merge that version of my shot blur on the top of my image so I will create a merge node with the M key all right connect the B pipe of my merge here and connect my blur version of my hearth in the a pipe now let's connect the viewer to the merge and of course we are seeing only the blur version because the merge mode is over here so we'll come here and set the mode to plus and here we go we do have a home-made glow all right this is way too much so I will reduce the mix of my merge and I will just leave it a little bit not too much it's better to compare to see how it looks like with at least the sky and maybe everything so we'll connect the viewer at the hand of my comp there we go and to go on and off my bird homemade homemade glow burden I will just disable and enable the merge here and yeah I think it it adds quite a lot now if I want to tweak a little bit that homemade glow for example I could add like a blue tinge to it to represent a little bit better the atmosphere of the earth so for that I will had a color correction node between the blur and the merge so we'll go to the cur up the color correct menu and I could use the correct that we used before but I like to show you another node that we use the lots which is the great nodes so create the gray nodes and the green node is another color correction node that has approximately the same controls and allows you as well to tweak other things I won't go into details but season note that we are going to use a lot through this entire series of course now I will just tweak a little bit to gain here and put in a little bit more to out the blue there we go and we can toggle with the D key to enable a disabled grade to see how this gray node is affecting the things and yeah I think I I like it that way all right so we now have to kind of glow the glow that comes in a node like that and a homemade glow that we just did together now let's move on to the next video where we are going to apply a defocus to our image see you there in this video we are going to smooth out a little bit the edge of the earth as well as applying global the focus to our background so if you look at the earth right now you can see that the edge here is very earliest and shop and this is not nice not nice for the integration so I like to smooth that out a little bit and for that I will use an edge blur and the edge blur node can be found here into the filter blur menu and here we do have edge blur okay now the question is where am I going to place the edge blur well I call place it at the end of the earth tree which is all that path because this is all represents the earth yeah well let's try that I will put my edge blur here and now increase the size of it to see what's going on and well it doesn't seems to to work well I don't know what's going on actually I know who was going on but it doesn't work well here let's see why okay I will unplug the edge blur for now and now why it doesn't work well because the edge blur is taking in consideration the Alpha of my image and it will detect the edges in the Alpha and blur them for example if I plug the edge blur right after the earth here and I look at it I can see that the edge blur is working properly all right so if we place it there it doesn't work because we have here a smooth alpha coming out of the atmosphere as well as a smoother alpha coming out of the homemade glow that we've done so definitely if we want to smooth out that hard edge that we have here and here and here we will place that edge blur after those guys but before those smooth guys here all right so we'll disconnect the edge blur and place it here and now let's see what's going on hmm well it seems that we still have a problem well I told you that the edge blur is using the alpha of the image and here our alpha was good it was working fine and the problem here is coming from that merge where we are merging the RGB of the earth lights but we are aswell plussing the Alpha Channel and if I correct my viewer here and I over my mouse of the Alpha here I can see in the information down there that the alpha is 2 and this is not good an alpha channel always need to be between 0 and 1 when the alpha is above 1 you will start having problems when merging layers so we need to correct that and the simple thing to correct it is to come to you emerge node and to say okay you are going to take in consideration the RGB a of everything but I want you only to mix the RGB so in the output of my merge node I will say RGB and this is a bit confusing because even if you say RGB it will means that it will merge everything but it will just take the Alpha channel of the B input of your merge okay now if I hover my mouse on the viewer you can see that my alpha is 1 I couldn't have the same problem with that merge here but as you can see here my earth clouds layer doesn't have an alpha Channel so it won't add anything on the top of the previous Alpha Channel so I don't need to modify anything on my merge 4 but if I wanted to be sure as well it will come here and set my outputs to RGB now let's go back to my edge blur and I will shift back to the RGB color with the a key and as you can see it works perfect let's put a value of six I don't know I think it could be could be good and in order to judge the effects let's plug our viewer at the end of our code and let's struggle that's edge blur on enough to see the difference and yeah I think it's pretty cool all right now let's add a defocus to our background well now it's a little bit easier because we're gonna apply to the focus overall now we could have alpha issues as well so let's see how the Alpha is looking like after the merge one so we'll plug my viewer after the merge one and I will toggle to the alpha channel with the a key while my mouse is on the top of the viewer and I can see that I have a kind of weird alpha as well right so this is like above one and this is a little bit weird so I don't know what's going on but what I want to make sure is that my alpha is correct before applying another effect on it so what I can do here is to use a shuffle nodes that will help me so the same ship will know that we use here but you will see okay so we'll create a shuffle node with the tab key and by looking for the shuffle and I will place it after my merge here and now I will check my shuffle and I don't want to touch anything basically I want the shuffle no two outputs whatever it inputs so from energy ba to air GBA but I just like to set that here all my alpha is going to be one is going to be white and now if I go after my shuffle I can see that everything is white and everything is at one and we don't have like those black and white values and neither those values above one so it's perfect okay I will to go back to the RGB with the a key and I will now creates my defocus so same the defocus live in the filter blur menu here and right here the focus okay and I will plug that the focus after my shuffle and my viewer to it and let's see so zoom in and I can see that here it's the focus if I toggle on and off I can see the difference one more time in order to judge properly I need to connect my viewer at the end of my comp there we go and now I can go back here and to go on and off to see the difference and I think it's it's pretty good you can increase it as much as you want but I think that we just need a teeny teeny bit maybe like 1.5 in our case is enough so I think that there's two things that important to remember in this clip that you have different kind of blur that you can use like the defocused edge blur and we use as well the blur previously but as well as important you realize that most of the blur nodes are driven by the Alpha Channel so it's important when creating a blur nodes to be careful of how how is my alpha channel is everything is correct all right perfect now let's move on to the next clip where we are going to create a rudder shape to create a vignette to darken one side of the earth see you there in this clip we are going to draw a shape on our image in order to darken only a part of the earth in our case the left part and for doing that I will use a router note the rotor node can be found in the draw menu up there and here Arado you can as well use the shortcut okay when I create the rotor node you can see that there is new menus popping up on my viewer if I close the properties and reopen its you can see the difference and those things are the tools that will help us to draw shapes for example here I have the Bezier curve selected and I will be able for example to draw a mask around my ship in order to I don't know color corrected slightly okay this is just a garbage mask for the example and we don't need that of course because we have the ship on a separate layer but this is just for the example so how this will work well let's go after the ship here and I will create a correct node I don't know if you noticed but all the node in Nuuk got that little inputs on the right and if you drag and drag it like you can see that it says mask almost all the nodes in Nuuk have a mask input and what is it for well when you plug a mask to the mask input of a node you are defining the area of the image that will be affected by the note for example if I plug that cork right here and I plug it to my mask and I cut here and I modified that I need to plug my viewer here of course but like as you can see I'm affecting only which is in the mask so what does it work well if I look at my rotor note there is nothing here but if I check the Alpha channel using the a key I can see that whatever is inside a mask is white so basically the mask input of a node doesn't have to be roto it could be just an alpha and that node will use that alpha channel black and white to define which areas are affected by my note all right now let's do what we actually want to do so all that that thing and I will come here right after my defocus and I will create a fresh roto node using the shortcut and I will hold my click onto that icon and come here and select the ellipse now I will draw a big ellipse on my image and I will use that guy in order to create a vignette where I will darken the corners I will create a gray node with the og key or you can create it by going into the color menu and here great okay and I will connect my gray node after mine a focus and I will plug my mask inputs to the roto that I just created now if I come to migrate and gain down my image of course I need to plug my viewer after my grade all right now I can see what I'm doing so if I'm getting down my image I can see that whatever is inside my mask will be affected and outside no well in my case I like the opposite so how can I do well if you check in your grade node and that will be the same thing for any notes you will have the mask here that says okay out of my mask I will check the Alpha Channel and what I can do here I called invariance if I take that guy I invert my mask and perfect now it's great but it doesn't look good and I like to smooth out that mask so what I can do is by holding down the ctrl key or command key all night I can select a point and drag and drop it to create a fader then I will have something more smooth and I can adjust that guy so now if I want to adjust that guy it will move everything it will move the feeder as well but if I just like to reduce the feeder by addressing the other points I will have as well to maintain the control or command key down to to change a little bit how it is and perfect and now I'm creating that that mask out I want maybe it will feeder it here as well a little bit and maybe more like that and maybe more like that because I actually don't want it darkened the top here and neither at the bottom I'm not really creating a vignette right I'm just reading a mask here to to darken that part of the of the earth so same I don't want to affect this stuff so I will just make my shape a little bit bigger here okay cool maybe a little bit more like that and I can see my image without the rotor shape I couldn't close the properties but if I want to see my image without the rotor shape and having the properties open I can use the Q key to toggle on and up the overlay as we seen earlier in the previous chapters and now I have a better view of what's going on so maybe a cool darken down a little bit more and as I talk in there I realized that this mask even with the feather is still a bit shocked so what I usually do is to create a blur node with the B key and plug it after my rudder shape and put like a big value so undred or maybe like sometimes it's not because the slider is over that you can go over it so I will select that guy and type 200 and there we go I think it's a bit better okay cool maybe it teeny bit more darker well that's great and with the multiply here I will click on the color wheel and introduce a little bit of blue in my veneering cool let's see how it looks like at the end of my crop boom I think it looks pretty great okay this is it for this video now let's see how to enhance a little bit our image and we will do that in the next video see you there in this clip we are going to recreate chromatic aberration so chromatic aberration what it is well let's see a picture a real picture I took the other day well chromatic aberration is that thing that will occur quite often on the border of your image when you obtains that kind of fringing so you will have those small details and around you will get a little bit of the magenta shape or yellow so depending of your lands your camera it may change being like more or less visible or the color may change a little bit as well but basically it's a failure of the lens to superpose properly the colors due to the shape the spherical shape of the lens and if you toggle between the red green and blue channels of your image you can see that it's almost like my branches here we're moving and this happened a lot in the corner of the image but if I go to the center I can see that I don't have that thing because at the center usually it's more like sharp and we don't have much chromatic aberration and this is something I'd like to recreate on my CG shots because it will help a lot with the realism so depending on the movie you will work on or which company you will work for you may have very complicated tools some special nodes to recreate exactly the same camera aberration as the camera who shuts the movie but here I'd like to show you a little trick to fake very quickly chromatic aberration so what I want to do here is to create a transform node with the T key and I will plug that transform node at the very end of my comp so plug it after my transform to here and what I will do here I will scale up my image a little bit okay let's plug my viewer after the transform first and I will disable the overlay because with the Q key and I will close all of this there you go just to have my transform just because I want to make sure that the gizmo of my transform is in the center of the image and this is important because we are just going to scale up a little bit the image and it has to scale up from the center to recreate that chromatic aberration so here I'm scaling up the image just by 2% so I put the scale value at one point zero zero two and now we are going to create a copy node with the K key and I will copy from my transform free here to my transform to here okay right now if I plug my viewer nothing will happen and why because we are popping the Alpha Channel but now remember I told you like when I toggle between red green and blue I get the change so this is not the Alpha Channel that I need to modify it's actually the color channels so we'll copy here for example the red channel to the red Channel and now if i zoom in the stars here you can see that will have a chromatic shifting happening if I disable on and off we can see the thing and because I'm using a scale from the centre of the image if I go at the center of me of the image here and I took on and off I will have a little bit but not as much as the exterior right here so I accentuate a little bit transform just for you to see clearly what's going on but be careful we really don't want to put too much and this is something that we see a lot in visual effects Studios sometimes artists tend to put way too much romantic aberration and it becomes more fake than natural so I will reduce that to point zero zero one and maybe I could do even less like point zero five yeah this is more what I'm looking for well you can put the value you want but I really want to show you how to recreate that and as well to stress on the fact that don't push it too much now we've been shifting the red channel that gives us like red and blue a little bit of stereoscopic feeling but if we look at my image here in this case we mor have a magenta shifting and to create magenta well it's more that we need to shift red plus shifting blue so what I'm going to do I'm going to select those two nodes do control C control V and connect that guy here at the same spot connect that guy here and I will come here and I will shift as well the blue channel and I will find my window here and now let's have a look to those guys and now my fringing is more magenta and this is more what I want okay now I can just toggle on and off to see the difference and it's not much but really it's all those little imperfection that will really enhance your comp so for example here is the same it's nothing it's almost nothing but it's there and it helped blending the pixels a little bit and integrates everything together so this is a very quick things to do and that can be very very successful so there we go I'll see you now in the next clip to add another imperfection to your image see you there in this video we are going to add another imperfection to our image and this is the crane and you'll see is going to be very simple in our case we are going to go in the draw menu and select the grain here and I will add this at the very end of my comp because it's a full CG shot here and we really want to add the grain on the top of everything in some case if you add CG to a real plate maybe you want to keep the plate with the grain of the plates and add the grain only on the CG but we'll see that in another course for now I really want to just add my grain on top of everything as it's a full CG shot the grain node is one of these nodes that can be influenced by the Alpha that comes through it and we have here that's option that says apply only through alpha and I could uncheck it if I want to make sure that my grain will be applied to everything but what I usually prefer to do is to make sure my alpha is proper before applying grain and if I want to apply my grains you everything well usually I will just add a shuffle node before the grain node to shuffle the Alpha to 1 so for doing that I will hit the tab key and type shuffle I will select it hit hunter and place a shuffle node right before my grain and I will set that shuffle to RGB stay the same but I want the Alpha to be to tell you white then I will be sure that's my alpha is correct and my grain will be applied everywhere so of course with that absorption checked off it is fine as well it's just a method that's I really like to use because it gives me extra security and sometimes when you work fast and you have a lot of shot to do it's better to have an extra security like that ok perfect now migraine is a little bit too much here so let's see how we could tweak it so we'll double-click on the grain node to open the properties and here I will be able to add just a little bit of everything but first I do have here some presets that I can use and you can try different preset to see if one of them is fitting your needs so for example I really like that that guy here because it's very thin and I'm not saying that I'm gonna keep it like that but it's better to start tweaking your grain note from a base that more or less what you want to achieve that's from something which is totally different so here I think it's fine but maybe I'd like to reduce a little bit the size of the grain blue and as well as the green and the real reality is nice but you can just turn it down a little bit as well but mainly what I want to change is the intensity there is too much so I just wanna reduce the intensity of the red and the green and the blue as well because as you can see it's over the top here however the one and there you go and I just want to have a very subtle grain here that just gonna make our image look a little bit more sharp and realistic alright I think this is it for now and I will now meet you in the next video to output this shot to the hard drive see you there in this video I will render the shots to my hard drive yeah it means it's almost done well I don't know let's render the shot and see if everything is correct this is a fing nuke sometimes it's very heavy to cache the shot on the timeline here and to be able to play it real time to see that everything works so most of the time what we do is like we output the shots and we watch it and then if something is wrong we come back in nuke but before outputting it like I noticed between those two clips between the previous video and this one that I think that's my D focus for the background is a little bit too much so I will come back to my the focus node here and reduce it a little bit maybe to 0.5 I think it's it's better if it's a bit sharper all right that's it I'll close the focus for now and now I will go into the image folder here in the image menu problem and creates a write notes and the write node has well as the W shortcuts that's a shortcut that we use a lot okay I created a right note so what is the right note well the right note will allow us to write images or video on a hard drive so basically this is the node that will help us to render our shots so whatever you will put inside the write node will be rendered for example if I put the input of the right node here at the end of my cup and I put my viewer after I will simply render my entire shot if you just want to render a specific part of your script for example the ship here I could plug my write node here and our render only the ship okay in our case I want to render everything so we'll plug it here okay cool now what's up I just want to come here and click on render no unfortunately we have few other stuff to do before being able to render it's not big but bear with me okay I want to specify first where I want to render my file so I can click on that little icon here file and now I can navigate where I want to render my images so we'll come to material the folder that comes with this course and I will create a new folder by clicking on the little icon here and I will call it out put and click on OK now I will give a name to my file and I will call it my first shots and no that's a long name but at least we know what it is and now we need to specify the extension of that file what fine type we want to render so here I will do dot MOV if you on PC and you don't have the QuickTime codecs maybe you who will try to render with avi okay but in my case I will use MOV and will click on save now a few things changed as soon as we clicked unsaved and why well nuke automatically detects the extension we mentioned here and changed the file type here for MOV you have a few other files you could use surrender and if you'd like to choose another one just notice that by selecting a file type here won't change the extension on the file name here and you will have to come here and change it manually okay but now I will just use the MOV file type now when you choose a file type there is options coming with this file type and here is the MOV well you can choose the codec mainly so you can go ahead and choose the codec you prefer like here I think it will use the pro rs-422 for that case and here you can choose the frame range and if you have an audio file that comes with this article specified here unfortunately we don't have it and here if you know how to tweak your codec you could do it in the Advanced tab here but I don't want to touch anything now I will simply come here and click on render and no it's not done we need still to specify the frame range so sometimes when you click on render it will come here and set to input well be careful with the input frame range because sometimes it's a little bit messed up if you import it like recently another video file or image sequence that have a different frame range it could be the frame range of that last video file so what I like to do is to set it up to global because the global frame range will go and pick up the frame range that we specified in the project settings at the beginning of the course so it's a safe way to know that we are rendering the right frame range however if you'd like to render a specific frame range well you can come here select custom and write the frame range that you'd like to render okay I will go back to global make sure that my frame range is correct from thousand one two thousand ninety okay cool and I will click now on okay and the shots will render and I will cut the video and meet you when it's done to see the final result see you there okay so now I can have a look to my render all right I think it looks pretty good it looks pretty great for a shot that we made in less than two hours of course there are some areas that could be refined such as the clouds right here that I think are not white enough a little bit too gray right so we could boost them up and I don't know some areas of the earth here that are bit too bright but well it's your turn now and you can do whatever you'd like you are the art director so as a homework I will encourage you to try to analyze small chunks of your favorite VFX movies just to get more aware of what's going on and especially on some aspects of unperfect shion's for example the grain the lens flare the chromatic aberrations it's important to get used to those things to get used to see those things because to come properly you need as well to train your eyes to image details okay regarding I was shot here as well we could introduce a bit more of camera float movements and camera shake especially when the ship is entering on screen now I will let you experiment with that using the transform node or if you like you could try to understand how to use the camera shake nodes now this leads me to an important point in Nuuk now that you know the logic of the nodal compositing it all comes down to understand how nodes are working well nu has a very well-made help if you'd like to know how to use a node you can click on any question mark in the node properties and here you will have info regarding that specific nodes everything so I think it's a good thing as well try to create a few notes that you never used before and use them just by searching in the help how to use those notes now this is the end of that course and I hope that doing that shot helped you to understand the logic of nuke and that now you'll be able to experiment on your own shots we're really only so the tip of the iceberg here but we will build that more and more through the series of tutorial in the next course you will learn how to use the powerful 3d abilities of nuke to animate a matte painting I really hope to see you there if you have any questions any concern you can reach me at Florian dot Gerard's at gmail.com or connect with me on LinkedIn don't be shy also I encourage you to leave a review for this course this is important for me to get feedback to improve and to make sure I give you what you need that said it was a pleasure being with you for this introduction and I really hope to see you soon for more advanced comping see you guys

Channel: cgcircuitLLC

Views: 170,392

Keywords: nuke, the foundry, nuke compositing tutorial, nuke tutorial, compositing, how to learn nuke, ho to learn compositing, compositing tutorial, learning compositing, 3d compositing, visual effects, vfx tutorial, vfx, color space, nuke ui, render layers, nuke nodes, channels, alpha, aovs

Id: y_GfzLbXgwE

Length: 131min 40sec (7900 seconds)

Published: Mon May 04 2020