Getting Started with Supercomp | Red Giant VFX Suite

hey this is to match wits and I'm here to talk to you about super comp super comp is the flagship plugin from the VFX suite from red giant and I'm really excited to show it to you if you've heard tutorials from me before you know anything about me you know that my background is in visual effects and over the years I've learned a lot of tricks for making composites look great I've used these tricks in noddle compositing systems like fusion and nuke and I've used them in After Effects and when people see how I set them up in After Effects sometimes they are shocked because these kinds of things where layers interact with each other are typically thought to be kind of complicated for After Effects so you have to do a lot of pre comping and everybody hates pre comping I still love After Effects for doing creative compositing work but I was frustrated by the difficulty of setting up highly technical layer interactions and this is why I created super comp so I've got a composite here of a robot in front of Angel Island and this is kind of a fun little setup here because the background is literally just something I shot off of Faerie when I was heading to Angel Island one day for a little family picnic and I were just laughing looking at the shot thinking gosh it would be really funny if we could just put King Kong right there and you may have even seen on Instagram actually posted a shot of King Kong sitting there and I started to do all of the work that a person would do to integrate him into this highly atmospheric scene and well things got a little bit out of hand so rather than King Kong I thought it would be fun to put a robot in the scene and of course he's just a toy stupidly enough also shot on my iPhone and I've got a little mist layer here and then just to make things a little more dramatic about this fire so this is kind of my basic composite and as you can see it looks terrible there's a lot of work left to be done here to make this look good I've got to integrate here I've got to color correct him there's probably a hundred things I need to do with this fire element to try to get it to look not so transparent so I'm gonna select my four layers here I'm gonna go to effect RGV effects Super Comp now what has happened here is that in fact none of those layers that I selected initially have any effects on them what we've done is we've created a new solid named super comp and we've got the super comp effect applied to it and the only button available in that effect is this one right here open panel but I don't even need to press it because the panel is already open this is the Super Comp panel it's just like any other After Effects panel you can dock it wherever you want I could dock it in with the rest of the effects and resize it to taste and you can see that I've got the layers that I had selected already added to my Super Comp composite and that is this object right here I can select each layer and see it individually in the preview up here and what we are seeing here in our After Effects comm preview is now actually not the After Effects composite of these four layers and I can show you that by even turning their eyeballs off what we are seeing is the way they are composited by Super Comp rendered on to this solid now let's talk about light wrap if you've heard the term light wrap before you know that it is a trick for integrating layers together in a composite for basically letting light and color from the background of the composite wrap around a foreground layer there are plenty of ways to do this in After Effects you can do it manually or you can do it by applying an effect and selecting a background the problem with that is that in After Effects you can only select one layer to contribute to the light wrap but what you really want is for that light wrap to be based on all of the combined layers below it but before we get too far ahead of ourselves here let's just take a real quick look at what light wrap is so here's a shot from the original Star Wars Star Wars was shot in 1976 and 1977 using Panavision lenses on 35 millimeter film and the stuff on Tatooine was actually shot with a little bit of diffusion on the lens and so you can kind of see that when Luke runs from behind this building to in front of the sky you can see some of the sky color kind of wrapping on to him but it's hard to see because you know it doesn't look surprising it just looks right what you could do is you could actually cut Luke out and take Luke from this frame and let's just say put him on to this frame and when you do that you see the trim this difference between Luke in front of the building and Luke in front of the sky what has happened is the light from the sky has bounced around through the diffusion filter on the lens bounced around inside the lens and has polluted the silhouette of Luke with bright blue sky so if we were gonna add some computer graphics into the shot which no one should ever do we would need to simulate that or our computer-generated images or even a live action element would look artificial and guess what one day in 1996 that exact task was my job I had to composite a computer-generated Jabba the Hutt and a blue screen element of Boba Fett into a shot from the original Star Wars and I have to tell you I spent a lot of time figuring out how to get it to work now even if you have a shot with a much cleaner lens still I feel like obviously this robot just looks terribly cut out so I want to put light wrap on him but I want to do it right and I also want the flexibility to be able to reorder layers and experiment with different ideas like for instance I've got King Kong maybe King Kong belongs in the shot like I had originally thought or I've got this other robot maybe he belongs in the shot so I want to experiment with them later and I don't want to have to do too much juggling every time I reimagine how these layers are stacked so this is where Super Comp can help because with Super Comp you apply effects to layers but they are all rendered once together in an integrated stack where all the layers can talk to each other and all the effects can see the right things about not only the layers below them but the combined total of the layers below them so that things like light wrap happen automatically and correctly by just applying them to the layer that you want to work with so let's start with Mazinger himself you'll notice that he is automatically identified as a normal mode layer we also have additive layers the fire came in as an additive layer and the reason for that is that the fire was originally a screen layer and after effects and when we applied Super Comp to it Super Comp automatically added the layer to the Super Comp composite recognized the screen mode and converted that to Super Comp version of screen and ad which is just called additive what I can do here is I can just turn these layers back on below the super comp composite and if I turn off Super Comp you can see what the after-effects comp looks like you can see that the difference is subtle but apparent the reason is that the Super Comp composite is color managed gamma managed and is happening in 32-bit floating point even though this is an 8-bit After Effects project for now I'm going to turn off the fire and just focus on the robot and you can see that layers in Super Comp have their own on-off eyeballs just like layers and after effects so without having to worry about whether the layers are on or off and after effects you can just turn them off up here so I'm going to turn off the fire in the mist we're just going to focus on Mazinger so let's apply an effect how do we do that well there's this big plus here if I click on it we get this radial menu of all of the effects that we can apply to a normal mode layer there's color correction edge road haze all kinds of cool stuff but you'll notice that one of them is light round so let's just start with light wrap first of all you'll probably notice that not a ton happened here and that's just me trying to encourage you to use good taste light wrap is you know sort of like seasoning you don't want to taste the seasoning you just want to taste the dish and with light wrap you don't want to see the light wrap you just want to see the layer seem to be composited well that's why the default amount for light wrap up here is 10% but just for the sake of seeing what light wrap is doing let's crank it up to 100% and you'll notice that as I adjusted it I got a real-time update here in the Super Comp panel preview and then when I mouse up I saw the results over here so let's turn it down to maybe around 50 60 % okay so we're definitely seeing the light rap for the record that means that's too much light rap but I'm gonna leave it here for a bit because I just want to show it to you and talk about it so there you go there's Mazinger with light rap on them and you're probably thinking this is not yet something that I feel like I need a giant cool plug-in to do I know how to do this in After Effects but let me show you something magic I'm going to add a solid to this composite make it kind of orange a color that's very different than the background now you'll see that the solid was born on top of our Super Comp solid so it's visible but it's also available up here in the source layers in the Super Comp panel so I'm going to drag it into my composite and for starters I'll put it above Mazinger a lot just happened in order for this solid not to appearance at all but let's now grab the orange solid and move it below Mazinger and you will see that now mazinger's light rap is interacting with both the background and the orange solid his orange background is wrapping onto his hand and the blue sky is wrapping onto this hand the reason that we leave the solids eyeball turned on down here is that if we turned it off you would no longer see the grab handles up here I want you to still see the grab handles up here because I want you to know that you can grab this layer and move it so here I'm gonna grab this layer and move it around behind Mazinger and you can see that as I move watches legs here they're getting light wrapped with Blue Island E sky color here grab the solid move it down now they're getting light wrapped with orange now I've been living with this for two years as we've been working on super calm but when I show this to people who have been compositing and After Effects for their entire lives they kind of lose their minds and I've brushed past a few things here you saw that when I selected the layer I got the layer preview when I selected the effect I got a preview of just that effect so I can see just the light wrap on Mazinger up here I've got control of the size as well as the amount I've got blend modes for light wrap normal add multiply color color light wrap is super useful you can just blend just the hue and saturation of the background over the foreground very subtle effect I like to keep it in normal mode though but ad also works really well there's also two different modes called diffusion and encroachment diffusion light wrap simulates that exact kind of star wars light wrap where the reason we're seeing light wrapping is that there is a diffusion filter of some kind on the lens whether it's just dirt or in this case you know some sort of stocking material whereas over here this isn't so much about diffusion this is maybe more about just light feeling like it's kind of sneaking in around the corners just because that's what light does even if you had a perfect lens you would still see a little bit of blue color wrapping around him for that kind of light wrap I would choose encroachment and you'll just have to experiment with this and see which one works best for which shot but encroachment is a little more organic the size of the blur is variable depending on the amount of detail in the four ground the last thing I want to say about light rap is that light rap has this cool control called highlights only now if you saw my tutorial on optical glow you're familiar with highlights only it's basically a nice soft and easy threshold control what sometimes happens is that we want light things to wrap but not dark things to wrap watch the light wrap around his belly versus the light wrap around his head as I increase it you can see I can keep the light wrap happening on the brighter parts like by the sky but not have it happen in the darker parts now in this particular shot it's a very hazy shot I'm not really trying to isolate the light wrap too much so I'm gonna leave this at zero but that's a very powerful control again for making your light wrap more subtle and that's a common thing that you'll see in a lot of the controls in Super Comp is controls to try to make things subtle now light wrap alone is not gonna make this shot look right and in fact we've got way too much of it so I'm gonna dial the amount back to something safe like 15 and I want to direct your attention to the scopes over here because they're actually telling a really important story about this shot the way I've placed Mazinger is that he's basically at the same distance as kind of these shrubs and trees here on this outcropping of the island and what you can see in the scopes is that this part of the island the black levels are hovering right around here that's right down here the blackest black over here is still above 25% whereas the blackest black in my little toy that was shot six inches away from an iPhone lens you know they're down to zero so we need to lift his black levels and there's a few different ways to do that a great way would be with color correction I can just grab the color correction effect and I can go to the black point and start lifting it up like this and even maybe tint it a little bit blue and little by little I could get the color to match really well this is actually a wonderful color corrector it's based loosely on what's in color ista but it's got its own unique visual effects properties including the fact that the black level is considered kind of sacrosanct nothing else you do including color temperature adjustments are going to affect that black level so even though I've warmed up the color temperature I preserved that bluish black level here so the color corrector is great but in this particular case and in many cases I want the things that I do to Mazinger to be reactive to the background if something big interesting happens in the background I want Mazinger to respond to it and the color correction settings will I'd have to animate that by hand what I really want to do is I want to govern his black levels by the colors that are present in the background behind him and we have an effect that does that and it's called haze so I'm gonna grab the haze effect and throw it on and you can immediately see that at the default amount of only 5% his black levels have gone from zero to about I don't know ten percent or so so let's turn off the haze effect this toggle switch lets me turn it off and you can see his black levels go back to rich and dark let's turn it back on and now you can see the effect of the haze so we could even crank this up a little bit and really get him hazed out and what's happening here is that haze is being generated by blurring the background so again if I were to turn on that crazy orange solid the same rules apply the haze has an orange e tint around the solid and doesn't has a bluish tint around the sky areas here and if I were to grab that solid to move it I know you've seen this before but I just can't help I got to keep doing it the haze responds to what I do with the solid ok stop playing around with the solids do and show off how to do an actual composite ok ok let's take a moment to just hit play I want to talk about rendering so even though we're doing all this compositing and floating point we're also doing it in the GPU so everything is blazing fast so now I've got the black levels matched a little bit better there's more that I could do with the haze effect though I notice for example that the black levels on this side of the mountain are brighter than the ones on this side of the mountain and that's because the mountain is casting its own shadow into the hazy atmosphere of the scene and so there's actually controls for that inside of haze there's a thing called the haze shadow and it's a little hard to see so I'm gonna crank it up to 100% in fact you know what I'll do I'll crank the haze up also to almost a hundred percent and now you can see that if I turn the haze shadow to zero he's almost completely disappearing into the background and as I turn up the haze shadow he's got this little dark shadow of himself and what's really cool here is that you can reposition the shadow so I can offset it a little bit off to the right and even down a little bit and now if I turn the haze back down to that 10% now I've got a much more complex kind of a haze crank it up a little bit more now because he's getting a little bit darkened by the shadow so now I've got a more believable kind of haze effect on him where you can see that this arm is brighter than this arm because it's like his body is casting a little shadow on him there at any point by the way I can select the layer and hit this switch and I can preview what the layer looks like with all of the effects turned off areas before and there he is after so we're really getting somewhere with integrating him into the shot I'm really liking this another effect that I did on Jabba the Hutt was that I wanted to simulate the fact that well if the background was shot with a diffusion filter then the foreground really should as well so we also have a diffusion effect in Supercop it's right here and if you apply it it basically contributes a blurred version of the foreground over itself and that blurred version extends past the edges it's a little bit like taking every part of your foreground and light wrapping it with every other part of your foreground again I can crank it up a lot so you can see what it looks like it looks kind of like the you know Captain Kirk falling in love with the alien lady filter so again you don't want to use too much of this but it's doing this nice thing where it's taking his bright sword and glowing some of the light onto the background so that's pretty cool I like that but I don't know if I love how much it's affecting him I'm just gonna leave this in at 5% if I miss some of that effect of that sword contributing to the background there's another effect that I might use and that's called reverse light wrap reverse light wrap takes the foreground and blurs it and blends it into the background it has a lot of the same controls that regular light wrap has including the blend modes it has the highlights only size and amount again if I crank it up enough you can see in the preview how the Mazinger colors are starting to pollute the background a little bit turn it off turn it on again again this is the kind of thing where maybe at about 5% this feels right all right he's starting to really sit in there there's one more thing I want to take a look at though and that's his edge Mazinger was shot on an iphone with not the best color sampling and he has a little bit of an outline and I could have maybe tweaked that with some you know keying tools and things like that but I've got a really nice effect here called edger Road an edger Road can be used either subtly in a small amount to control the edge of a hard-edged layer like this or it can be used in a much more interesting creative way I'm going to show you both ways so let's take edger road here and let's put the amount at 100 and the size 1 and I can just shave a little bit off of Mazinger here I'm gonna put the size at 0.5 and the amount 50 try that it's looking a little bit better I don't really want to kill all of the detail in mazinger's so that's that's looking pretty cool so that's edger Road on the robot but I've also got this mist layer that we haven't looked at in a little bit let's get that going here so here's the mist layer the mists layer is tricky because first of all it's obviously too bright and it has a very hard job to do it's it's there to kind of give him scale and try to kind of hide the contact point with the ground and just kind of make it look I don't know like maybe he just took a step or I don't know you know this is all about trying to get him to be a little more integrated so let's apply edger Road to the mist and in this case let's use a very large size and then start to increase the amount what you can see here is that edger Road can make this layer more transparent but just on the edges and that's pretty cool the more transparent this mist is the more realistic the mist itself looks but it's not really doing the right thing as far as its job as mist kind of hiding the contact point you know what is the miss like the mist is what's it doing with the light there's this bright light back here you got to imagine that that light would be kind of scattering through the mist there's got to be a better way to handle that and there sure is in Super Comp it's called blur behind and blur behind is a super cool effect that basically takes the background and blurs it wherever the foreground is opaque so let's crank up the amount on blur behind here in fact let's go all the way to a hundred percent and then let's go even past a hundred percent even to a hundred and fifty percent we can start to see that the the bright light of the colors back here are starting to diffuse through the mist a little bit let's increase the size as well and then let's turn blur behind off and on again and maybe let's dial back the amount of edge erode here you know what else I'd like to do I'd like the coloration of the mist to be more in line with the color of the scene behind it I think you already know how to do that you do that with Hayes right so let's take the Hayes effect let's actually turn that up to a lot let's try like 60% and maybe cuz why not a bit of light rap just to get that background color to really ramp around the foreground here so we've really thrown the book at this one we really want this layer to feel integrated and I think we're starting to get there it's starting to feel like the mist is really an object in the scene that is responding to and contributing to the light that is both behind it and in front of it again I could take the layer here turn all of the effects off and then back on again or you know what a fun way to kind of sense for yourself how these effects are happening again it's just grab the layer just grab it and move it because as I move the mist around you can see how it interacts with all the colors behind it you've always got this as an option with super comp when you want to kind of check your work and make sure that things are working all right so now I've got Mazinger and is mist working pretty well here layers in super comp have their own opacity just select the layer itself not the effect with the layer and you can dial down the opacity and what's nice about the way this works is since super comp is rendering the opacity all of the effects get reduced and modulated as they should all the way down to zero opacity it's a much more complex thing than just mixing out the layer the effects are gracefully mixing out as well and again I just can't help myself I really want to turn on this orange solid again and just grab it and move it around and put it behind the mist and watch that mist turn orange all right you know it's doing this orange saw just stop it all right just have it stopped okay let's go back to the robot real quick and let's talk about his edges I still think your edges need a little bit work and I'm gonna fix it with edge blend so what edge blend does you can see right here it isolates just the edges of the layer that you apply it to and it does a little softening around the edge there so what you have control over is just one simple thing just the radius obviously 2.4 is too much but maybe 0.75 is just right there it is off and there it is on super subtle like everything but this will save you in certain cases it's just like because if you were in Photoshop and you ran the smudge brush around the edge of your foreground layer and again just realize the power that because it isn't just blurring the foreground its blurring the foreground with the background so even though the effect is applied to Mazinger it's really much more like an adjustment layer in the sense that it is mixing the foreground and background colors together and it would require a pre comp in after-effects because you need a mat for the edge of your foreground so if you imagine how many pre comps deep you would be in after-effects right now if you had these kinds of interactions manually strung together or even built up with effects for just two layers and then knowing that in super comp at any point you could just reorder those layers to re-imagine you know how your composite is working and see now okay now the light wrap that's on Mazinger is wrapping light from the mist whereas really of course we want it vice-versa you start to see how super comp is gonna save you a ton of time when putting together realistic composites and we've only just started oh my gosh all right you got to speed this up come on okay Mazinger I love you I want to give you the very best fog you can have and so even though I think that haze effect is working out just fine let's grab haze here I'm gonna turn it off for just a second or you know let's never turn anything off let's just turn it down to 5% and let's take another close look just turn you off for a second here let's take another close look at this shot and notice that probably the reason in the first place that I picked up my phone and shot this background shot was how cool the interactive light is on these trees there's actually kind of like reverse God rays happening or what I've heard called crepuscular rays shadows cutting through the fog basically the reason we make movies is to point cameras that you know shafts of light that's just me Blade Runner I don't know I didn't think I was gonna get this in it's called volume fog and volume fog is awesome volume fog it takes the background and turns it into God rays and lays it over the foreground but it also does the same in the background in the inverse so you've got let's turn it off you've got fog color from the background creeping over the foreground and then darkness in the Ray shape affecting the background now obviously the direction is not right here and I could sit here and fuss with my center points here moving left moving up but you know truly what I'm probably going to want to do in addition to be able to adjust this visually because I'm gonna want to animate it because I've got this shot tracked and I know that the parallax should basically be kind of going back to infinity kind of somewhere above his head so let's grab the center and let's click this stopwatch and notice that what's happened here is that a new parameter has been created for this effect and it's called Mazinger VF for volume fog Center and if I go back to the effects controls you can see that now whereas before we had no controls here we now have that one effect with an animatable position controller here and I can grab it just as I would in After Effects and position it or I can interactively move it around in the cop preview oh you'll just have to forgive me if I just sit and do this for a little while I love this so much all right all right Stuart come on get it together let's put this in the right spot okay so I'm gonna give myself a little room here and I'm gonna put this way way up here and kind of try to get the Rays to line up with what I think I'm seeing in terms of where the Rays are in the shot you'll notice when I drag that way up to the top like that what started to happen here is that the color from the sky is raying down over him and it's actually spoiling a bit of the effect well volume fog is one of the effects that comes off the truck a little hot and so you know what like this is up to you to use some good taste here the default amount is 50% most shots even a very foggy shot like that is not gonna work at 50% but let's just say we wanted it to we can tint the fog and this is important because the fog isn't always going to be exactly the right color on its own so let's tint the fog towards this kind of powdery blue sky color here and that's gonna look much better it's still too much it's still too much let's bring it down to like 20% then let's bring it down to 15% in the world of visual effects probably the most popular phrase for a visual effects supervisor to utter is hey let's split the difference you're gonna do a take with this at 50% you're gonna do a take with this at 30% and the visual effects supervisor is gonna say hey let's split the difference and you're gonna do it at 40 this is why you always write down what numbers you used and then never do anything by the numbers always just do it visually when the visual effects supervisor says split the difference and you did it at 50 and you did 30 don't just do it in 40 and say I did my job look halfway in between because the numbers are not right your eyeball is right okay that's your visual effects tirade for the day from Stu let's talk a little bit more about volume fog you've got control over the depth that's the length of the Rays you can see here previewed in the volume fog Matt you've got fogging the foreground only that's probably what you want to do if you turn this down to zero you're fogging the whole scene including the background you probably don't want to do that unless you do in which case you're stoked my favorite control here is diffusion if your shot isn't like this one where the Rays are crispy crunchy straight and perfect like this you can blur them and they're gonna blur more when they're farther away from the robot than when they're close to it that's what diffusion does it diffuses the light rays so crank it up a little bit you can see that we're still getting this nice sense of volumetric fog but it no longer looks like self-conscious godrays in fact it's looking a little bit more like fog with the fog shadow but just a little more subtle I'm gonna split the difference I'm gonna go somewhere in between I'm gonna go like 18 on this I want to break up the Rays a little bit but I still want a sense there they're still too much in stride 10 okay always toggling on and off to check to see if I like it you're probably wondering how you control this kind of shadow that the robot is casting through the fog well that's down here in the shadow amount can dial that down as well now we've got a robot he's hazed he's light wrapped he's reverse light wrapped he's edge eroded he's edge blended he's diffused and he's got volumetric fog and he's rendering at full res in an HD comp and I'm just gonna hit go and this is the render speed it's maybe about half real-time oh she was faster but are you kidding me that's crazy fast oh my gosh all right let's do you're saying where's the orange solid what is the orange solid have to say about this okay fine you know what I knew you wanted to know let's let's check out the orange solid yep the orange solid participates in the volume fog he does it all it's just endlessly fun to do this stop it stop it okay let's talk about glows we've got a couple elements that we haven't used here yet I've got a little element for his eyeballs it's really a cute little element and I've got his sword and then we haven't even gone to the fire yet my goodness you guys are so patient thank you thank you let's let's throw his eyeballs in here I think I just made this with a couple little tracked rota masks here I want to throw glow-on here and boy do we have some glows but let's take a look here you'll notice a slightly different array of effects here I've got color correction familiar I've got optical glow and layer glow with optical glow and layer glow alright let's just jump right to those guys I mean optical glow sounds like something cool that I would want let's let's apply it and what's happening here is optical glow I love optical glow and it makes his eyeballs look super cool right off the bat maybe I'll just cut down on the size a little bit and maybe I'll just go here to colorize and just make it a little more ready ready orange all right that's probably good for the eyes but there's something else in the shot that needs to glow you know what it is I mean this is Mazinger after all let's throw a sword in here so this is just the world's simplest stupidest little mat here I just wrote it out just the shape of his sword it's really stupid let's make it look not stupid I could just go and apply optical glow to it or layer glow let's talk about the difference between those for a second they are two great tastes that work great together if you look at optical glow you can see it's got all the controls it just looks so good right off the bat I just want to make it a color let's do it okay amount size fall-off highlights only eye light roll off just like the optical glow stand-alone effect you've got colorized inner tint outer tint you will find all of those same controls in layer glow and now you see I've applied them both but maybe it's time that we took a closer look at these cute little icons that are representing all these various effects here so if you look closely at the optical glow icon you can see that it's a highlighted circle behind this foreground dark circle and it's little glowy outline here wraps around the foreground circle whereas in layer glow it is occluded by the foreground circle now I'm gonna need the help of another layer here so I'm gonna delete layer glow just select it and hit delete I'm gonna go back to my project I'm gonna grab this other robot and throw him into this party just just for fun he's really meant to be used instead of missing earth but he's gonna do a great job of helping show off the difference between optical glow and layer glow so let's grab destroyed and I'm gonna throw him in front of Mazinger sword and I want you to take a look at what just happened the robot just went from being composited by After Effects in front of the super comp solid to being placed behind the super comp solid and being composited now by the super comp compositing engine and if we look at our layers here destroyed is in front Mazinger sword and yet the glow is wrapping around him this is my favorite thing in the world let's grab destroyed here and you can see that the optical glow is wrapping around the layer in front of it the effect is applied to the sword but because of the way the super comp render engine works the glow is occluded by layers in front of it and rendered after and composited separately again if you're used to using After Effects your mind just kind of collapsed in on itself with the thought of how many pre comps that would require especially if you wanted to be able to interact it really grab the layer and move it or reorder it because at any time of course I can just take destroyed and put him behind Mazinger sword or take Mazinger sword and put him behind everybody and then grab it move it around watch it interact watch it affect the light wrap the volume fog the diffusion the haze oh my gosh you can see it actually casting raised through the volume fog I'm just gonna move it up here look at it look at it effect sorry I was meant to be compositing I'm supposed to be compositing alright so let's get alright let's get this back what am I doing here I'm still gonna leave this other ridiculous robot here because I want to talk about the difference between optical glow and layer glow that's why we were here right we're gonna turn off your optical glow and I'm gonna apply layer glow okay so layer glow creates glow just in the space of the layer does not wrap around the foreground so you have a choice of which you want to use and a really cool thing to do is to use both so you could have a really big broad layer glow remember this is our beautiful optical glow algorithm that does the true inverse square fall-off of light but with this nice big size it creates this lovely sense that like you know his sword is kind of fiery glowing and creating like a an illumination in the atmosphere do we need the destroy to be talking about this maybe not alright so we'll take well back off on the amount but we'll crank up the size and then we'll use optical glow to create kind of like the tight core glow so we'll maybe leave the amount higher maybe not that high and reduce the size and now I've got like the tight core kind of light saber glow and then the big broad you know it's affecting the air around it glow and what's so neat now is if go back and turn on the robot who doesn't belong there you see they're both working together so the the airy kind of atmospheric glow the glow that's there in the scene but not happening in the camera you know is happening on the layers plane but then the optical glow is still wrapping around the foreground so really powerful way to use both of those together but you know what I'm still not perfectly happy with how that sword looks you're out of here destroyed so I want to shop around for some different looks we have not yet talked about a really important feature in Super Comp which is presets that's right you can composite using presets I promise I won't tell anybody ok grab the plus and select presets and these layer presets appear over here and there's a whole category called glow so let's start playing with them and you'll notice as I mouse over them here the preview appears above so this is just like Magic Bullet Looks but for visual effects compositing so I've got big glow big highlight glow bigger glow blaster beam and as I go down some of these that are called blade they've got colors built in so of course at anytime I can click on it it will apply the effects and appear over here in the composite but the nice thing is long before I click on them and you know what long before your client sees them show up on the monitor you get to experiment with them over here so here's ruby blade here's sapphire blade tight red glow topaz blade I'm like in topaz blade I'm gonna select that one now you know what I think our robot I hate to say it he might be done for the time being he's looking pretty awesome he's got a lot of integration he's got a beautiful sword he's got some glowing red eyes kind of digging this dude right now let's get back to that fire what's wrong with this fire the thing about fire is that fire is kind of in this no-man's land between being an additive thing and an opaque thing so often we get these fire elements that were shot against black in any attempt to kind of generate an alpha channel for them is is basically just based on their brightness and what we're trying to do by making them more opaque is not really make them appear to be an opaque object we're actually just trying to get them to look fiery in a way that if we were to look at reference we'd realize has a lot more to do with fire kind of filtering the light behind it instead of occluding it so because the fire is an additive layer it's got the additive effects and the two that I want to talk to you about our blur and core Matt these are your two tools for compositing all kinds of hot fiery elements although you might use them on all kinds of stuff not just fire so let's apply heat blur and right off the bat you can see something cool is happening here actually you know what before we do that I mean just for fun I know we're gonna I'm gonna go through all these effects I'm going to show you how to do it but wouldn't it be crazy if we could just apply a preset to this let's just try some of the presets so we've got blending and we've got glows but there's this section down here called pyrotechnics and there's this one called bonfire and that's looking pretty cool I've got this one called explosion core that doesn't feel quite right flames I mean these are flames flames should work prismatic heat I don't even know what that means but it sounds awesome with this one big fire hmm kind of like that let's try that oh man well that's cool as hell let's hit play on that okay what have we done to deserve something that's cool what is even going on here we've got heat ripples we've got Distortion we've got the glow distorted by the heat we've got this beautiful way that the sword emerges out of the fire and yet is partially occluded by it and all that with these three effects so let's just go through them one at a time I turn off core Matt and turn off optical glow and we're just gonna take a look at what heat blur is doing and you can see it's doing a lot with core Matt turned off the fires gone back to looking kind of transparent so it's kind of spoiler alert for what core Matt probably does but what's happening here it's kind of magic is that in the areas where the fire is the background is blurry let's delete this heat blur and start with a fresh one so you can see it as it comes off the truck and this is where you're probably able to guess what's going on here we're taking just the luminance of this additive mode layer and we're using it to do a compound blur on the background behind it so where the luminance is brighter the background is blurrier and we've got a blur size which we can crank up this trick I've been doing since I've been working on Star Wars movies and I love it love it love it compound blur the background through the luminance of the foreground again something that an After Effects requires at least one or two pre comps but here we're just doing it all for free and we've got that super fun thing we can do which is that we can just grab fire element and move it around and see how that affects all this stuff those of you who have been paying super close attention will notice that if I crank up this blur what's happening is the element of the sword is actually getting this same compound blur effect applied to it before the glow element is generated in fact even if I take the robot and put it in front of the fire the optical glow still wraps or apps around it even though it's been displaced by the fire it's crazy yeah let's talk about displacement sorry I I buried the lead there there's displacement built into here in fact there's a lot of very powerful displacement built into here if you saw my tutorial on our chromatic displacement effect all of the control of chromatic displacement is built into heat blur so when you generate this luminance layer up here you can use it to blur the background but you can also use it to displace it displacement defaults to zero you can crank it up a little bit and you can start to push those background pixels around based on the contours of the luminance of the foreground the problem with that though is that if you crank it up too much it just kind of looks like a ripple glass effect for both the blurring and the displacement we wanted to find a way to add some more texture to this element so we just added a thing called add texture and then we figured out what it should do if you start cranking this up watch the preview what you'll see is that we're basically kind of kaleidos coping out the luminance of the layer into multiple copies of itself sort of like an insect I filter and just by doing that it makes this amazing kind of I mean this is over the top but you get the idea here this crazy kind of heat ripple that is a hundred percent generated by the details in your layer but that extends beyond the boundaries of the layer in a realistic way now it does extend beyond the boundaries by default but if you want to confine it to the boundaries you can so just crank up confined texture and will reintroduce the original layer boundaries to keep this profile of this under control but if you leave confined texture down here and the lower ranges then the blur and displacement can actually extend beyond the boundaries of the foreground which is kind of neat so let's turn the displacement back down and now you're starting to see kind of how we arrived at the level of detail that we had in that big fire preset because we've got a lot of interesting displacement going on we could even turn up the spread a little bit and turn up the spread chroma and you'll start to see that we've got that chromatic quality to the displacement the chromatic displacement is famous for but this mean the effects we're gonna we're gonna choose subtlety we'll just do 10 okay so now we've got the heat of the fire kind of affecting the background but the fire is still not opaque enough and so that's what core Matt is here for core Matt takes that same kind of idea of using the luminance to do a cool trick and what we're doing here is we're basically just blurring that luminance and letting you kind of crunch the black levels and the white levels to create what in the visual effects world we call a holdout mat which is just an area where we darken the background before we add the foreground on top of it so without core Matt and with and there's some neat presets for a core Matt for instance there's is one called unmalted melt does it really just uses the luminance one-to-one you can see many of the controls here are zeroed out and this is almost just like a nun multa fact so here it is without and here it is with so if you really just want to get some of that orangie opacity back in your fire element you can use this unmold preset fork or mat but the real magic starts to happen when you soften this luminance thing and then grow it by crushing the black levels and then erode it by crushing the white levels and then you wind up with just opacity in the areas kind of near the core of the fire and that is gonna vary over time in a really interesting way so where the edges of the fire are it's purely additive because there's no dark matte here but where the fire kind of accumulates into some density it starts to behave in a more opaque way and in the early part of the shot that's gonna actually mean that the fire can occlude some of this bright sword that's behind it and I want to point something out about that bright sword if I switch my project over to 32 bits per channel you can see visually nothing changed about the render but now if I go to the After Effects exposure control and darken it you'll see there's actually still detail left in that sword so these super bright pixel values are all preserved we're doing true floating point HDR compositing but we don't require you to have your project and After Effects at the 32 bit this saves you a ton of processing time ram overhead in your compositing if you know that you can do the bulk of your meaningful compositing and super comp you can run an 8 or 16 bit and let super comp be kind of an enclosed box of 32-bit floating-point awesomeness let's have this mat just be a little darker and you can see this effect is getting a little coarse here you can kind of almost see the soft blob of blackness behind here and that's why we have the control to bring back a little detail in this mat and that just basically is looking back to that luminance and reintroducing those details so now we're still getting these blobs but the blobs are informed by the higher frequency detail and lastly we've got a density control so if this is a hundred percent here where this mat is black we can just take the whole thing and just kind of back it off and you can see that like the sword popped out in front of the effect when we did that so the magic of these two things working together core mat this is core mat on its own and then heat blur is that the fire gets to feel very present and colorful and and almost opaque in its denser areas but wispy and transparent in its kind of edges but also it gets to feel really hot because you can actually see that the air is getting displaced and distorted through it you've got this nice big glow for the fire just huge big radius eight hundred radius you know which is scaled based on the width of the composite by the way the same numbers mean the same thing visually regardless of what resolution you're working at what's just crazy about this is that if I grab this fire element here now and move it around so here I can put this sort of opaque part of the fire in front of the sword and you get that nice sense of opacity there and yet the sword sticks out from behind it and just to show you how crazy things can be not that you would necessarily do this here but I can just grab this fire element and slip it down behind the robot and now all of the god rays and everything are based on the fire plus the background and everything else is working just fine but let's undo that I want to show you one more important thing here you may be looking at these effects here and think well whereas you know lens blur wears corner pin where's all these other effects like I want to live in super comp but I don't see any of the good old After Effects effects in here like twirl wears twirl well we don't have to rewrite twirl because we're not trying to rewrite after-effects here we're just trying to cooperate with it and do the things that are a little bit harder and After Effects make them a little easier for you so let's apply twirl so here we are in real time moving the twirl effect around because this is exactly what you would do in real life uh-hum no but you know things like lens blur things that you would actually use twirl is just fun you can see its rear-end during every frame of my ridiculous twirling through all of the crazy god rays all of the heat blur of the optical glow all of that stuff now there's one last thing we got to talk about guys it's a serious issue and I'm sorry to have to bring it up but we have to talk about grain never forget that at any point you can select an effect it's like the layer and you have controls for the layer like it's color space here under gamma its opacity no look its grain every layer can have grain so if you need to add grain to the layer you can but the effects are all automatically contributing to the grain all the time but where do you control the grain well that's what these little sliders right here for the whole Super Comp unit itself has these settings and by the way it has a really important one that we haven't talked about yet which is its gamma every layer has a gamma the default is video but we also have log and we also have linear so if you're working in truly in your light we've got you covered but maybe most importantly let's just say you've got a log background and you've got some cool muzzle flash elements from Video Copilot or something like that they're in video color space and you want to composite the two of them together well it's now easy because you can specify that the background is log leave the muzzle flash element alone it's in video but then you can go to super comp and select log as the output format and now you're doing gamma manage compositing in the correct linear colour space internally but you've got log output that fits right back in your timeline just the way it belongs anyway back to grain our shot is all in video so we're gonna leave output gamma to video but what we want to do is figure out our master grain you know how I'm gonna do it I hate to tell you this I'm gonna I'm gonna get that orange solid back here again and I'm gonna apply haze to the orange solid and I'm gonna put it at 100% the orange solid is completely now covered with blurred background color and I'm just gonna maybe grab it and rotate it so we have a full range of values from Bright to dark here and what you can see especially in the shadowy areas here is a little bit of funky noise in the trees and so we're just going to start get up green and we'll see grain be added to this foreground layer here so I'm just adding kind of a good visual match to the amount of grain that I kind of think is lurking back there but I'm gonna also increase the size of the grain and if I step through the channels here it looks to me like there's a little more grain in the blue channel so I'll go to blue amount and crank it up a little higher than 100% and in tonal range want more in the shadow and less in the mid-tones that's that's my kind of weird trick for getting the grain matched in and you can see as I continue to move that layer you can see it's moving under the grain so now what that means is indeed we have added grain in all the proper places including into the rendering of the shadow and all throughout all of this light wrap and even in the glows and the heat blur and the blur behind optical glow turn grain amount to zero you can see the grain go away let's trim grain amount to 50 and you can see what too much grain looks like by the way this grain the reason we have such a nice control over it this is the grain from renoise err Magic Bullet renoise err so this is what I've long considered to be the best grain I know how to make as one more important thing I got to show you and it's a third layer type that we have so this guy he's got these like this big heat sink in the back of him and I've got an element for that here called destroyed heat these are some cool particles that I made in particular and if you saw my tutorial on chromatic displacement you can probably tell where I'm going with this I want to kind of use this particle layer to displace the background so let's get the destroyed centered up here and same with the heat and actually I'm going to expose the parent and link column here and I'm gonna take the heat and parent it to the destroyed and now if I grab the destroyed and move it the heat comes along but remember this is an After Effects rendering this this is super comp rendering it uh so we're taking on the transformations and honoring them as well as the parenting let's take that heat layer and let's go up to layer type and we're gonna choose displacement and what you will notice is something really cool and fun I know this isn't right to stack these two robots on top of each other like this but you can already tell what's going on so this layers turned purple to indicate that it's a displacement layer already has one effect on it there's only one effect you can add and there's a bunch of presets you can choose from in fact let's just look at the presets here he triples well that's probably what we want right let's just give that a go and what that does is that changes the settings on this displacement effect and these should be familiar to you if you've taken a look at chromatic displacement it's exactly the same effect you've got the ability to soften the displacement map you've got spread and spread chroma which control how chromatic the displacement looks and here you can see a preview of just the displacement effect which actually we could look at over here if we just turn the robot off and what you'll see that's kind of neat is that the displacement is affecting the sword behind it and yet the optical glow is still happening after the displacement so let's turn off the displacement layer and turn it back on and you're seeing that crazy displacement effect here I will turn the robot back on and they're working together you know would be fun I this is kind of ridiculous but it'd be great if the robot looked a little more integrated I don't know why we're not putting them in the shot but let's just really quick go over here to Mazinger and I'm just gonna right click and I'm gonna say copy all effects and go home to the robot in here destroyed and paste effects and just like that he's got the godrays haze the light wrap all the stuff so now we've really got an impressive amount of manipulation going on here in fact maybe we could just put them all behind the fire and put them next to each other how about that maybe the fire isn't helping to saying what was turned off for now okay so this isn't the shot but I just couldn't end without showing u displacement layers they're very important and super handy there's one last crazy thing I want to show you because everything including the way that this robot is integrated into the shop behind him is driven by those background pixels if I apply the color correction effect to the background and just go down here to the temperature control and just crank it up to orange you can see that the shot stays realistic because the color of the robot the color of the mist is all driven by effects that are reactive to the colors behind them in fact if I did something crazy here and cranked up the exposure of the background it even still looks correct and that is Super Comp something that I've been dreaming about for years and have wanted to share with you for a long time a powerful fun and easy way to do realistic integrated visual effects compositing Supercop is part of the new VFX suite from red giant I'm Stu mash wits and I hope you've had as much fun watching this as I've had making it thanks everybody [Music] you

Channel: Red Giant

Views: 241,094

Rating: 4.9645901 out of 5

Keywords: Red giant, visual effects, vfx, motion graphics, filmmaking, color correction, compositing, tutorial, after effects, adobe, movies, video, training, ilm, vlog, blogger, content, youtube, creator, mograph, software, plugin, postproduction, post production, vfx suite, red giant vfx, visual effect suite, supercomp, super comp, composite, red giant supercomp

Id: Lkx1_x62Znc

Length: 51min 27sec (3087 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/earthsworld]

Not exactly retouching, but a tool retouchers wish they had. It's really unfortunate that Ps doesn't allow for this type of plugin. I could only imagine how different my retouching life would be if we had access to these sort of tools.

[u/chucktheonewhobutles]

His passion is SO infectious! I legitimately had a blast watching this.

[u/BMWbill]

Well that was a great way to waist 45 minutes at work.

I took an After effects college class once about 20 years ago. My mind is jello right now.