How I did heat vision VFX for Superman & Lois | Nuke Compositing Tutorial

[Music] I did the heat vision effects for all these shots from Superman and Lois and I'm going to show you how you can recreate this iconic Superman effect yourself first I needed a subject so I decided to use this guy Smokey my girlfriend's dog I set up a very lowbudget recording studio in my living room and then I uh spent 3 hours trying to get Smokey to uh act using french fries as payment eventually I got two shots that seemed to work and could motivate a super heat vision effect I'm going to be using the industry standard compositing software nuke but the free version nuke non-commercial if you'd like to follow along I have the source material including the plate and the 3D particles rendered and you can download it from my gumroad for a small price here's my completed comp I was inspired by the Man of Steel heat vision effects because it was so visceral and Powerful looking this effect is simple at its core starting with a roto shape and then I'm cutting it out with some noise that is animated and then I'm distorting it with other noise to create um some broken up edges finally I'm merging over uh solid Beam on top so the center never gets cut out the real magic is the glow you just glow it a lot and blow it out um and then I wanted a little extra Secret Sauce so I created some particles with blender simulation nodes to be a more detailed like 3d effect on the outside and then of course we've got some heat Distortion at the end and it wouldn't be complete without a bunch of camera shake the key of this effect is intensity so let's get into it nuke is great but ncpedia has a lot of extra tools that make your effects look cooler the first one is a glow by default nuke's glow looks like this the one from ncpedia is an exponential glow much looks much more photographic and great I also downloaded expression wave generator that adds the ability to do random flickering effects and and X distort is an awesome tool that allows you to do really cool looking Distortion effects and add chromatic aberration to get these tools just follow the links in the description and download to install the Gizmo all you have to do is go into your nuke folder which usually lives on your C drive users username nuke put those Gizmo files inside the nuke folder and then inside of nuke go over to this icon and in all plugins click update if they still don't show up just go back in here all plugins and you can find them in this list all right I'm in Nuke and I've got my plate and the first thing I want to do is grade it to just give it a little more punchiness I got a little trick here make a log to Lin node and change it to Lind to log and then make a sharpen node copy the log to Lin underneath and switch it back so you're sharpening in this flat color space and then if you just change the size to something very large like 100 and turn the amount down maybe we turn the size down a little bit to 50 that just gives you a little extra punch the first step for making these beams is to track the eyes so let's make a Tracker node plug that into the plate and then I'm going to control alt click to make a Tracker and then I'm going to expand the search region because there's some a lot of movement in this plate and then I'm going to hit Z to track backwards seems to be working fine and then I'm going to hit V to track forwards just watch it to see if it loses the track but it seems to be doing pretty good oh it lost it there so if we just go to this frame maybe expand the search region a little more and hit C to track forward doesn't want to track so I'm just going to manually drag it over to line it up and then keep tracking one by one till we get to the end all right I'm going to name my tracker real quick and then I'm going to go to an earlier frame when he's looking off to the left side and I'm going going to make my roto shape so let's collapse this tracker I'm going to hit o for Roto and then change this output to rgba and then I'm going to left click hold and create an open spline here it'll just have two points on it so just click on the center of the eye and then we'll get our angle that we want there we go we've got a beam already and then this green one will expand the size of the beam so let's get some perspective in there and the start of the beam can just stay pretty small oh one thing it don't click until you go back to this cursor and then you can change the scale of the start of the beam to be a little smaller clicking on the track I'm just going to go to the transform Tab and set the reference frame to the current frame that means the transform node will not move anything on this Frame it will be in the same position so we're going to do transform match move down here and Export that transform node drop that in and if we merge this over our plate we should have a roto that attaches to his eyeball there's a couple issues here obviously um for one it's getting cut off at the edge if you go back into the Roto node change clip to from format to no clip now it's just a little cre creative animating so I want when he turns towards us I need this to change shape and look like it's coming towards us sometimes I do this in 3D but in this case it's almost as easy to do it in 2D and you have more control anyway so I'm going to set a key frame here by clicking on one of these control points and then I'm going to go forward in time till he's looking at us and he stops turning his head and I'm just going to put this over here and I'm going to scale this way up cuz it's supposed to be coming like straight towards us almost and maybe we'll put it off to that side because we're going to add another one over here in the end and then this Center one maybe it can come down a little bit to cover up his eye a little bit more so now we've got a bit of an animation here and in the middle we have a problem where it's coming into the screen I'm just going to pull that off scale it up a little bit more and that seems to be working and then at the end he looks off to the side so next I'm going to make the noise that I'll use to add detail to this beam so make a noise node and I want this to phase over time which would be the Z value so right click in here add expression and we're going to make a simple expression which will be frame / 10 and now it should be phasing the higher value you divide it by the slower it will phase now I want it to move to the left so if we go into the transform tab that would Bex and we're going to use the same expression in here to do that so right click edit expressions and we're going to type frame except multiplied by 150 now we've got some noise that's going to the left and phasing I'm going to use this noise to distort this um rodo and the node for that is I distort I distort uses a UV Channel which means red values distort the pixels up and down and green values distort them left and right I believe so we need both red and green noise so let's make a shuffle node and we're going to shuffle everything into just the red Channel and then I'm going to make another Shuffle node and Shuffle everything into just the green Channel now if we put a time offset in here and offset it by like 10 frames we get some noise that's totally different maybe 20 frames just to be safe we get some green noise that's different than the red noise and we can merge it over now we've got our red and green noise and I'm going to make a shuffle copy node plug that in plug one into the noise and then we're just going to check these boxes here and in this channel this is the channel we're shuffling it into I'm just going to click new and I'm I'm going to call this noise and the rgba channels are what we want so if we just hit okay we have now shuffled the noise into a new channel and in ID distort I'm just going to grab that channel in UV channels so select the noise and then if we turn up the UV scale we get some Distortion effects here now it's all offsetting because this noise all the values are above zero so what we need to do is grade this and offset it so some values are negative we offset it to three or so it tends to work pretty good we go back here and then it's distorting pretty evenly in both directions now I'm going to mess with the scale of the noise overall to get a tighter tighter breakup here something like that and then you can adjust ey distort to be a little stronger if you'd like um this doesn't look very good so I need to make a mask that will limit the noise amount near his eyes so just make that [Music] mask just a big one and I'm going to feather it out along this distance and then I'm going to mask or I'm going to stencil the noise with it so if we just uh change this to stencil we now no longer have so much Distortion there in fact we have none and let's move this match move down below all this noise so everything gets tracked in together you may have to go through and key frame this falloff mask so it still works when it points towards us but that should be pretty easy so I would just just you know get this working here drag that down cuz there should be more Distortion cuz it's closer to us at this point and then at the end we'd have to adjust it again now we've got our noise and it's starting to take shape one thing I want to do is make the noise look a little I don't know cooler it doesn't quite look like fire yet and one thing we can do is use the the X distort uh modifier that we downloaded so if we go to the main noise and just uh make the X distort node by default it's just going to use the luminance value of the source for Distortion which works great for me because we get this swirly effect so if we go back into our I distort if we go back here and we turn on the X distort it just makes like a more directional noise and I'm going to adjust this so it doesn't distort too much you can blur this Source map a little bit to give more fall off to this Distortion and then it becomes a more even swarly effect I just want like a direction for the noise so turn that up to 100 and maybe turn up the Distortion as well the next step is to duplicate this noise and I want to vary the brightness of this Beam with some noise as well so I'm just going to get rid of all this stuff I'm going to make the noise a bit larger and then I'm going to contrast it up a bit and if we go here I just want to stencil it out of this so let's copy this stencil node and we get this maybe I make it a little bit bigger something like that I want the core of this to stay totally solid though so I'm going to use a filter erode node don't make the just the don't make just aod make erode filter and then plug that into the Roto I'm going to change channels to rgba and then going to just erode it in a few pixels and then duplicate the node and I'm going to change the filter type to goian and erode it in some more that just does a soft like feather on your Alpha which is great in this situation one thing I don't want is I don't want to erad this part so much so I'm going to take my uh falloff mask and just copy it over here and mask this effect with that and I just need to invert it though make an invert and now we've got an erode that is limited by this we can maybe make this fall off a little smoother if we change this to smooth or smooth zero and now we've got this which after these this I distort I'm going just going to merge it over to rebuild that core I also want these edges to not be quite as sharp so what I'm going to do is I'm going to do another erode filter up here change it to gsan and I'm going to erode it just a few pixels so this fire make sure you're selecting rgba so these fire edges start to have a little softness let's move all this stuff up to make space and I'm going to make our glowing node that we downloaded just going to drop that in there and take a look at that glow that's cool the first one I want it to be really tight just very small glow and I'm just going to merge that over the result there's some weird stuff happening here um I only wanted to brighten the result so I'm just going to do a plus that will just add to the original I'm going to turn up the clip black amount so it's not glowing everything entirely and then I'm going to turn down the brightness a bit so it's just brightening that stuff up a little bit um one thing I need to do here is everything is just getting clipped out so I need to multiply down my source so I can make it brighter without blowing it it out so I'm going to make a multiply up here before I'm merging my core back over to just drop down the brightness of the outer Flames a little bit to like 08 and then I'm going to copy that multiply down you can make a DOT down here separate that out and also drop down the entire thing a little bit and now we have more room to play with our glows and I can turn up the power a little bit and make that core nice and bright and then maybe I won't clip black as much I'm also going to set my white point at this point so just make a gray node in the main pipe and change it to be uh whoops wrong color turn up the red turn up the green and you turn down the blue and get yourself a nice orangey color maybe this glow is still too strong so let me just turn it down and then I'm going to make a second glowing node plug that into the main pipe and this one's going to be super bright and super broad I wanted to cover the whole screen so something like that that's good um and then I'm going to turn up the fall off for the red channel so we get this nice red wash over everything and then just merge that over your original glow I'm going to crank up the red and this uh I'm going to drag the slider and just intensify the colors a bit one problem I'm having is the plate is so bright already this isn't standing out so one thing I did and you can do is let's plug this into our sharpened plate and what I want to do is grade down the Highlight so I'm going to make a grade node and I'm just going to gain it down to like 7 I'm going to make a key node and limit it to the highlights so now we're just gaining down our highlights and suddenly you can see that beam a lot better one thing I want to do is soften this Edge a little bit so I'm just going to drop my fil my core into this fil a road so it gets a little softening as well now this second glow I think is not bright enough Crank that up a bit that's starting to look good and then we'll just make it more red like the fall off just let it be more red and put a little green in there too that's starting to look good now we're really blowing this out and one thing we can do to fix that is to just clip or compress the highlights so make a color lookup node drop that in there and go to the master curve's make this bigger and I'm just going to make a handle at 08 or so and I'm just going to drop the Highlight down and make sure that you're not affecting the Shadows At All by adjusting this back and now where it was once blown out you can still see just a little bit of detail just a little bit um I think I might be compressing it too much so I'm just going to drag this all up until we get our white Hots back and now you're just affecting it just a little bit it's a subtle thing but it makes it look a little more photographic at this point I'm going to complete these steps for the other eye so I get a second beam and then I can just apply the all the same stuff to the second beam you also need to rot of the snout to put it behind at the beginning and then if you just stencil that one beam out next I'm going to show you the expression wave generator this just makes a a wave form an animation and you can choose what type we're going to use noise a wavelength of two and we're going to do the Min value of 0.5 and a max value of two so that will just make uh the brightness fluctuate between 2 and 0.5 so what I want to do is make a multiply node and I'm just going to hook these together so with the result control click and drag this up to the value of the multiply and then if you drop this multiply below the glows then we can see that it is now making the glows fluctuate this is where I'm going to add my heat vision effects that I rendered out of blender I'm just going to grade them to match the color of everything and I'm going to add some extra fake blur to it and then that just gets merged over and it adds just that extra little touch of detail now for heat Distortion I'm going to use the same setup that I used to distort the beams so I'm just going to copy this whole noise setup here and the shuffle copy and I distort and move that to the end of my comp now I can just rearrange these so I can plug them in and we've got ourselves a ton of distortion over the comp that's of course being limited by this Roto I also want to limit it to the area around round this uh effect so I'm going to take my glow and I'm going to make a postage stamp plug that in there and I'm going to call this to [Music] glowing and then I just like to hide the input I'm going to move that over here and do a key to Luma key this and I'm going to drop down the side so we don't get heat Distortion everywhere and I'm just going to blur this by like 100 pixels that'll be our mat and then if we just make a merge node we can mask it out using that and now we have heat Distortion over this area I do want want I do want it expanded a little bit so I'm going to Crunch up the highlights of my key to get that fall off to come out here I'll show you what it's doing I'm just going to Crunch that out so we get a wider fall off of um heat Distortion it's a little strong and I think the noise might be a little large so I'm just going to make the noise a little smaller and then I'm going to turn down the heat Distortion to like maybe 7 5 or something see how that looks yeah still a little strong so maybe like 50 uh and then with the noise I don't want it animating to the left so fast I just want it kind of rising up so let's go to this transform edit Expressions I'm going to copy this to the Y and instead of multiplying it by 150 I just multiply the Y by the X X by 20 and the Y by 50 let's see what that does oh it's going down so maybe not 50 positive 50 and now we've got heat Distortion rising up that's a lot faster than I thought so maybe just 10 so we've got our heat Distortion we've got our glows but there's still a few missing elements we need to add camera Shake because this does not look very intense just yet so nuke has a built-in camera Shake node it's going to drop that in and I'm going to put it on I'm going to view it over my original plate because it is a bit slow so I'm just going to turn the amplitude way up to like maybe 55 and see what it does that seems good I think I want my free frequency down a little bit the lower the frequency the more uh larger movements there will be higher frequency means it'll just be jittering all over the place so maybe 37 or something will do the job I am going to punch in on this plate a little bit so turn the fixed scale up to like 0.005 you're just looking for this bounding box to not go inside of here it means the edges of your plate are you're running out of plate and then I'll just move this camera shake to the end I'm going to make some space at the beginning because we need to do the glowing eye effect which is actually not that hard so I'm going to copy my match move for my right eyeball make another Roto change it to rgba and then merge this over now just grab the ellipse tool and control click to make a perfect sphere about the size of the center of his eye and then you'll have to go through and make sure it stays centered in there because our track might not be perfect disclaimer um and then we're going to use our glow Gizmo glowing and then I'm going to steal my grade from my fire to make that reddish and maybe I'll just crank up the red just like oops and maybe I'll just crank up the red a bit crank up the saturation on that yeah something like that it's great and then this glow effect I feel like maybe it's too bright something like that no that's good maybe the size is just a little bit smaller and and then I want a bit of a flare there's a horizontal blue flare that I use every time so to make that in an easy way I'm just going to use a regular glow node plug that into here and I'm going to increase the size except I want to increase the width only so I'm going to increase the width a ton we're going to make this horizontal glow and then the brightness just increase and then if we merge that over we get this horizontal glow effect we don't want it to be orange so I'm just going to grade it to be more bluish maybe add a little green in there drop the red all right and then I'm going to duplicate this glow and just broaden it a bit on the height as well as the width and then uh drop the brightness so you just fake that exponential fall off a little bit and then the first glow I think could just be a little brighter I think I need one more and this first glow is going to be uh very tight and we'll drop the brightness of that one first glow will be very harsh and bright second glow softer I need to calibrate this all right brightness up and then soften it and so on and there we go I think I want a little more saturation out of this so I'm just going to crank that blue up and maybe uh uh plus will work better there we go another thing I want to do is some interactive Lighting on his face so if I just make a grade node and I copy this key luminance setup here oh that posted stamp won't stay connected plug that back into the glow and then um use that as the mask for to grade the plate with I can just gain up this area and I'm going to multiply it to make it uh more red and then I just want to affect his face I don't really want to affect the background cuz that won't help with the whole contrast thing so I'm just going to make a rough Roto around his face and then that still doesn't quite work but what you can do is use another Luma key on your plate and this Luma key will only key the highlights fortunately he's darker than the sky so this should work and then if we just stencil this out of our mask then we should be looking good and we're just affecting his face and of course the that uh Edge is a problem if you adjust the mask you can get a more subtle fallof and then it comes down to just maybe limiting this area a bit more and then hopefully you don't really see that edge once everything happens should be hidden great and then this Alpha it I'm just going to use my same tracker transform to track that in great now with that uh interactive lighting it looks a lot more Dynamic that's great and uh we just need to do the other eye real quick so we can get the glow on the other eye and I'm also using the snout Roto to cut out that eye and make sure he doesn't look wonky in the end but you don't really see much at a certain point great and then for the eye glow I want to take the same multiply that's controlled by the expression wave generator and drop that below so you get flickering on the eyes as well now I'm going to animate this effect to come on when his ears come up I want the effect to start so there's some buildup here at the beginning his ears come up it starts so maybe on frame 10 we have our beam start so I'm going to make another multiply node up here and on frame 10 I'm going to set a key frame and make it a value of two because I want it to be extra bright when it starts and then on frame nine I'm just going to have it be gone and then uh five or so frames later I'm going to animate this back down to one so it sort of gets bright and and then Fades back down and then I'm going to copy this multiply and use it for the eye glow as well and just offset it by one frame so the eyeg glow starts and then the heat vision comes I want the camera shake to start at frame 10 as well so on frame 10 or actually let's have the camera Shake fade on over like a couple frames so at frame 9 set a key frame it'll be zero and then at 11 will make it 55 and then I'm also going to do a slight push in on this over time so on our fix scale set a key at frame n value of one and then at frame and then at frame 11 make it a value of 1.05 so we're going to do just this little push in when it happens I also need to animate this effect to uh go off as well so I actually want this to appear one frame before the main heat fion effect cuz it looks pretty cool so I'm going to take the same multiplier for the eyes and just paste that there so now we get that but I don't want it to go to two I'm just going to make it one or maybe like0 five so it's like a little precursor blast also the eyes I want them to be on part of the way at the beginning so maybe like point 6 and then they flash brighter right before so maybe three or four they flash brighter and then they go back down to two so we've got this effect then I'm just going to add some grain I'm going to do grain draw and that'll just add some randomized grain it's kind of large and stuff so I'm going to just scale it down a little bit and then just slightly less intensity so going to drop these values a little bit as well and then just reformat at the end so your bounding box is contained and then I'm going to render this out one final tweak I want to do is just turn down this very wide glow a bit because we're kind of losing definition in that beam and I want to see those crisp edges so I'm just going to turn that way down till we see that see that beam edge [Music] better

Channel: Graphical Ninja

Views: 8,343

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Id: 4yyl6bDK8v0

Length: 36min 36sec (2196 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 04 2023