How to Composite Unreal Renders in DaVinci Resolve Fusion - The Basics

Unreal Engine that's kind of that's pretty things are pretty crazy with that there are quite a few guides on YouTube on how to get nice cinematic renders out of Unreal Engine but I want to show you what to do with them after you have it rendered so here's how to composite unreal renders in Fusion we recently did a whole bunch of rendering with unreal we've been working with unreal for quite a bit now and you need a pretty strong computer to run something like Unreal Engine so we asked our friends over at Puget systems and they helped us out with an incredible machine these guys are the PC Pros they'll custom build you a machine that is designed for the stuff that you like to do like check this out you can go to their website and find a workstation that is perfect for whatever you're working with so like here's one for Unreal Engine these are designed and tested to be amazing at whatever you're working in and honestly even if you don't buy their system they have all this research and Hardware recommendations and stuff that is just so good these guys are Pros man so huge thanks to Puget systems for helping us out with that and if you're looking for a PC make sure to go and check them out here we are and DaVinci Resolve and I have a render here from our movie we have these kind of spaceships and this is rendered as an exr sequence so it's just a bunch of exr's in a folder a great way to get these into resolve is to go to your media page and navigate to where your renders are here in this media storage panel and you should be able to navigate to the folder with all of your Stills in it and it should show up like this if it doesn't show up as a sequence like this you can go to these three dots and under frame display mode make sure that you select sequence once you have them as a sequence you can take this and just drag it into your media pool down here and that will open it in your project now here in the edit page I can right click on this piece of media and select create new timeline using selected Clips that's going to add these to a timeline I'll hit create and now we can play this back and see what the render actually looks like but you may notice a couple things one is this is really dark and two what if we want to get kind of crazy with this well we can open this up in Fusion just by being over the clip in the timeline line and clicking on fusion and now we have all kinds of crazy abilities to do some fancy stuff here in the fusion page now the first thing that you'd probably notice uh is this is really dark and the reason for that is that exrs are rendered in linear color space a really simplified explanation of this is there is a lot of image and color data here kind of packed into this one file but it doesn't really look good on screen until we sort of unpack it now a lot of the time this will be rendered in Aces linear again there are a bunch of guides on how to render that kind of thing out of unreal but once you have it we're going to want to deal with it here in Fusion so after our media in I'm going to hit shift spacebar that'll bring up our select tool palette and I'll type in color space and we want color space transform this right here and that will add a node that will convert our color space and your settings are going to depend on your workflow but with a render from unreal in Aces you're going to want to pick Asus AP1 input gamma linear for output color space that's going to be whatever big wide color space you want to use kind of for your intermediate stuff for this one we'll just use DaVinci wide gamut and output color space will be DaVinci intermediate tone mapping let's turn to none and gamut mapping let's turn to none and what this is doing is it's taking our linear colors out of these exrs and it's putting it into sort of a log format an intermediate format and it acts kind of more like regular footage that you would shoot with a cinema camera or something like that so let's go ahead and rename this I'll hit F2 to rename it say CST Lin to DWG which is DaVinci wide gamut in this color space we actually want at the end of our node graph here and we're going to do anything fancy pretty much before this okay and the idea is that we can take this log image here and we can bring this into the color page and our color tools are going to treat this very nicely and it's going to act like regular footage and not some weird CG render but one thing that we'll want to do is preview this in a way that isn't kind of washed out like this and we can do that with a Lut I have a Lut here which I've made which is just a DaVinci wide gamut to rec 709 and now we can kind of preview this render and it looks really nice to make a Lut like this we can actually just make it with this render if we want to we can go over to the color page and all we have to do is do our color grade on this footage and then save it as a Lut now the way that we do that is actually really similar to what we did here with this color space transform but we can do that in the color page I'll just go up to effects scroll down to color space transform and drag that onto our first node here but this time we're going to go from DaVinci wide gamut in the input color space and Gamma and the output color space we'll say Rec 709 Rec 709 tone mapping method let's say luminance and gamut mapping will say saturation compression like that and what that's going to do is take our log footage that looks like this and it's going to make it look normal this is a great way to color grade anything that is shot in a log format so you could do this with your Sony footage you would just have to here under input color space do something like s gamut 3 that's game at 3 cine and your gamma might be something like s-log 3 but instead of using the camera format we're using this DaVinci wide gamma intermediate and we're just changing this to look good on our screen so this is just how color management works I do have a few videos on this in color grading so if you're not familiar with that definitely recommend checking it out but now that we have this kind of looking nice we can open up our Clips on Clips here and that'll open up these thumbnails here I can right click on any of these thumbnails and say generate Lut 65 point Cube and we can save this Lut to a folder we'll call this DWG to rec 709 like this and I'll hit save and if we go to DaVinci Resolve up here and go to preferences under General we have this part that says Lut locations we can add wherever we put that Lut so just navigate to whatever the folder is where you put that and select the folder and that'll add it to these locations right here you only have to do this once the very first time you do this once you have a Lut you can go up here in your viewer to this drop down and you can select that Lut so that you can preview what this will look like when it's color graded you always want to do your compositing and your effects and everything with this kind of viewer let on doing your compositing and everything while you're looking at this log footage isn't really a good idea because this isn't what it's going to look like when the people who watch your movie see it so we just turn on this Lut to kind of preview what this will look like when it's color graded so now that we have our color management set up we can get crazy the first thing that I would recommend is to actually replace this media in node if you Fusion can do a lot of really cool stuff with your render but it is a little bit happier using a node called a loader so I can hit shift spacebar and type load and it'll bring up a loader node and what we can do is just navigate to our exrs and select one of those and hit open and what this will do is it will bring up the same render but we have a few more options and we can make sure everything kind of came over just fine by taking the output of this and merging it over the output of our media in one like that and now there shouldn't be any difference here if I turn this off or on it should look exactly the same okay good that means we can just get rid of these two and we'll just replace this like this so now we have our loader coming in and there are ways in Unreal Engine to export multiple passes now a pass is kind of like other channels that you can use in your render to do fancy things it's sort of like a layer in Photoshop and so you could have a layer for instance that just shows the color color of something without any lighting or you can have a map of how far away things are there's a few different things that you can render but to access those what you really need to do is go to this exr file go to this loader and go over to format in the inspector and twirl down channels and here we can select the different channels that are embedded in the file so if I want to use just the base color I can say base color R base color G and base color B and so now we have a map of just the base colors which we can use for various things but that's miserable to do that every time just undo that wouldn't it be great if there was an automated way for us to just kind of get all of the different render passes the different render layers out so that we could use them all for different things well there actually is a way to do that but it's kind of an external plug-in thing it's an add-on for Fusion called reactor we'll put a link in the description here but basically you go to this site and you download the reactor script save it to something like your desktop and you drag this script into your node graph and it will ask you if you want to install so go ahead and hit install and launch and it will install I already have mine installed so I won't do that but after that's all installed and you've restarted resolve you can go up to workspace and down to scripts and here we have reactor I can go here and open reactor and it will open up the reactor window this looks kind of intimidating but it's really just a bunch of plugins that you can install for fusion and a lot of these are really really helpful these are the ones that I have installed if you want some recommendations but the one that we're really looking at here for these 3D renders is hos split exr Ultra this thing is the bomb here's what it does if you have an exr file like this and it has to be a loader not a media end but a loader you can right click on this and under script you can select hos split exr Ultra and look what happens this thing comes up you say run and close and it will make copies of this loader and it will set these channels for you to be just right and so now all of your render passes are their own nodes which is really great especially if you have a lot of render passes this actually works exactly the same with a render from blender or 3ds Max or whatever same thing if there's separate channels in the exr it will split them all out like this and now you can take each one of these and I can select this and hit one on the keyboard to load it here in the left viewer and depending on what it is you can take a look at all the different strange things it makes and that's how you would access those extra channels if you just need like one channel it's not that big a deal you know to copy and paste this go over to format and then switch these to you know something like depth red green blue Alpha right and that's the same thing that'll give us the depth pass but this is just a nice automated way to do it so now that we have all of these extra passes we can do fancy things with them what kind of fancy things do you ask well let's say we want to do something like lighten this ship it would be really nice if we had a way to automatically kind of isolate this ship trace it out or something like that well we can do that by generating a mat a mat is a black and white image that controls kind of the transparency of something we could also do something like trace this out ourselves but you know why so what we can do is take something like one of these actor hit proxy masks which by itself doesn't really make a whole lot of sense it doesn't even really look like it worked like what is this this is weird but we can run this through a little utility which is also in reactor called cryptomat right here this thing is amazing because what we've rendered here is actually a channel that is designed to work with cryptomat so we'll select this shift spacebar cryptomat once that's installed and I can hit one on the keyboard and now now it looks weird some more great it looks weird yay but with the crypto Matt selected we can grab this little Point selector thing here and we can put this over whatever we want to add to a mat so whatever we want to kind of isolate so I'll just put this over this kind of yellow part because I know this is part of our ship we can also just do it here on this right viewer just put this right here on the ship and here in our cryptomat Tools in our inspector I can just hit add and now we have this bright yellow and we can move this around and just continue to hit add until everything on our ship is yellow this if there's multiple different objects or multiple different materials you might have to do this a bunch if it's all one object or one material might not be that big of a deal just select all of these parts and just keep adding them to our mat and that looks pretty good now that we have these selected in their bright yellow we can go to the cryptomat here and here where it says View mode let's just go to matte and look at this we have a perfect matte white where we want to select and black where we don't want to select of our ship so we can use this mat to limit any kind of effects that we want to do for instance we could take this color corrector here I can just drag this down in between our ship and our color space transform normally if I made this pink it would make everything pink or green or yellow whatever it would affect the entire image but we'll take this cryptomat and we'll take the output of this and put it into the blue input of our color corrector and look what happens it limits it to only happen inside of this matte which happens to be just over our ship and now I can do something like add gain to our ship to make it brighter maybe just pump the contrast whatever I want to do and we can work on this just like it were on its own layer so that's a really nice way to adjust different parts of your image with this matte and the matte also moves along with our shot because this is animated so we don't have to move it or rotoscope it or anything like that it just automatically works really well this cryptomat is super helpful let's say we want to replace the sky I can do kind of a similar thing here I'll just copy and paste this cryptomat here like this and bring our hit proxy mask into our cryptomat and we'll just go ahead and reset our cryptomat bring this up in the first viewer this time I'll select the sky I'll hit add switch our View mode to matte and that's just going to select just the map for our sky and again we can use this as a mat to do something like I don't know maybe take these clouds and we'll merge the clouds over our background transform them to make sense here something like that and I can take this crypto Matt and bring this into the mask input for our merge and now it's going to limit our Sky to only show up where that white matte was which gives us a perfect Sky replacement this is a little strong so I'll take this merge and just blend this down a little bit we can even add a mask to our media in and feather that out a little bit so that it looks a little bit more natural I'll also add a crop because it's a little confusing when this kind of goes off the edge of the screen we'll just crop that like that and now we have this Sky replacement that was very little work because we're using this generated matte pretty cool stuff so if you can render a crypto mat you know a material or an object ID out of your 3D software that's a really really good tool to use inside a fusion it just makes adjusting things in posts so easy but I think that's enough diving deep here for today if you guys want a little bit more on this I can go over some other passes and things like that but that should get you started doing your Composites inside of fusion and again once the composite's done you can go over to the color page and you'll have this all put together in a log format which you can easily color grade and do all of your normal stuff too just like regular footage so a little bit more advanced tutorial for anybody who's working with unreal I hope you enjoyed this if you do want to get a little bit more into compositing and look at all the ins and outs of fusion we have a course for that it's called Pro compositing in Fusion make sure to check that out it's available now at groundcontrol.film and again thank you so much to Puget systems for helping us out if you're into 3D animation and compositing I definitely cannot recommend them enough when it comes to building a PC this was uh this was a long one but thank you thank you for hanging out to the end since you're here well why don't you tell me your favorite kind of milk I I don't know I was just I had oat milk the other day it was really good and so do you like oat milk too are you more of a two percent kind of person

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 15,802

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Id: rVMyktVYiI0

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023