How To Create a Lightsaber Effect | Nuke Tutorial

Hello everyone Danasa here with ActionVFX in today's tutorial we will be learning how to create a lightsaber effects in Foundry's Nuke. we will cover one way to do a lightsaber effects using the roto node as well as compositing the sparks and the glow using our ActionVFX spark hits and icon lens flare collection and of course special thanks to our friend Christopher Clements from FXitinpost for lending us the plate assets from his amazing short film "Star Wars SC 38 Reimagined" which if you haven't seen it go check it out in the description below also we have our Summer Sale happening right now on our website where we have 50% off on our entire vfx library more info about that also in the description below and now without further ado let's get started okay so here we are in nuke here we have our original green screen plate of Darth Vader fighting Obi-Wan kenobi and then on the side here we have this note 3 off the plate that have been keyed out and composited on top of the background now we are not going to deal with the keying or compositing of this plate to the background we're just going to work on the lightsaber effects in this tutorial in order to do a lightsaber effects it is ideal for you to have the actual blade of the sword when you are shooting that way we can just trace this lightsaber prop using tool like rotor node to create a mat that we can later add glow effects on so because we need to see the blade in the shot we are going to do our lightsaber effects in this original green screen footage and once we are done doing the lightsaber we're going to move the effects to this script where we have the plate keyed out and composited so i want to do Darth Vader's lightsaber first and to do that we want to create a tracker node and we want to track each ends off the lightsaber blade so let's create a tracker point and let's track the edge of the hilt here and then we want to track this forward and then we want to track this backwards slowly and when our tracker goes off somewhere we just want to manually track it back into the hill next let's add another tracker we want to track the tip of the blade here we see that the tip is cropped by the frame of our shot here and that is fine we can just continue tracking by putting our tracker on the edge of the frame following the lightsaber blade great next we're going to set the reference frame for this tracker i'm going to set it to frame 90 here and then turn on the scale rotation and translate boxes and export this as match move next let's create a roto node and then merge it into the plate and then on the rotor node we're going to change the output to rgba and then we're going to click here and select an open spline and then we're going to draw a straight line using just two points and boom we have this thick white line to control the thickness of the spline we can go to the shape tab and increase the thickness until we cover the lightsaber blade of course we currently cannot see how much of our spline covers the blade so let's go to the merge here and reduce the mix for now so we can see a little bit of what's going on you can also change the thickness of each individual points by just playing around with the green handle now let's plug in our match move that we made earlier and now we have our spline already following the saber pretty well so what we're going to do now is to just scrub through the timeline and make sure the spline is always covering the lightsaber one of the problem that you may face with your lightsaber prop is it bends so what we don't want to do is to add a point to follow the curvature of the prop what we want is to always maintain the straightness of the lightsaber so here let's look at where the handle is pointing at and then we want the tip of the lightsaber to follow the direction of that handle don't worry about the prop not being covered because we will just mask those out later also during the motion blur we want to put our saber in the middle of the blur and increase the thickness of the tip now of course the problem is that we have a rounded edge instead of a flat smear blur like in the plate that is fine what we will do later is to chip the rounded tip using another roto sheet okay so here i have my lightsaber now let's get a merge and put in just before the match move and then we want to set it to stencil and then let's create another loader node and let's create another shape on the edge of the hilt to remove parts of the spline that is going over the handle of the lightsaber and then let's fix the motion blur here so here let's create another shape to shave off the rounded tip of the motion blur like i mentioned okay so now let's turn up the mix on the merge and this is what we have okay so everything is looking great except we want to mask out this part where we have the saber passing behind our talon passing behind ob1 here so we want to roto Obi-Wan's hoodie to make our lightsaber looks like it's behind it so i already have this rear note that i made earlier of the hoodie area so now what we're going to do is to just add another merge stencil below the match move and plug in our roto and this is what we have and now we finally want to add the glow effects so let's get glue and we want to set the tint to red and then let's increase the size a little bit but not too much basically we want to create a thin inner glow on our lightsaber and then we want to copy paste the glow and then on the bottom one we want to increase the size really big and reduce the brightness this sets as the outer glow of the lightsaber so now if we look at our saber that has been merged into the plate we can see that when the lightsaber is behind our talent here we have this inner red outline that serves as a lycra so what i want to do next is to repeat the same process that we just did to add another lightsaber for ob1 okay so here i already have the lightsaber for both of our characters and as i mentioned for the blue saber it is the same process i track the edges of the blade and then add the spline add some rotowork like before and then add a blue glow and then i merge the blue saber to our original red lightsaber together on a plus merge and then have them merged into the plate okay so now we have our lightsaber let's switch out our green screen plate with the keyed out plate nodes that we have earlier and here you can see that in this updated keyed out plate we have shaved off the lightsaber so we don't have to deal with the bendy tips so now if we replace our green screen plate with these three node this is what we have next we're going to add some spark effects so i'm going to use spark hit number 3 here and we want to add chronos node to speed up our footage so let's set the input range of the chronos the same as our spark and then we want to speed it up to 1.5 and then let's merge plus our spark into the plate and now we want to make sure that the timing of our spark is correct we want it to appear just when the two light sabers hit each other so let's get time offset and go to drop sheet and then let's offset our spark one frame backwards and then let's add a reformat to make the spark the same size as our project here and then we're going to get transform and then we want to move our spark here to the intersection of the lightsaber and now let's add a little bit of glow and then add hue shift and reduce the saturation a bit and this is what we have before we go further if you're enjoying this tutorial don't forget to subscribe and hit the bell icon so you will not miss out on more tutorials like this one and now let's continue next we're gonna add the flashing flare that comes from the lightsaber hitting each other to get that flash of light i want to use this lens flare from our ActionVFX icon lens flare collection so our flare is dim at the beginning here so i want to do is to get a time offset and we want to offset this by -50 that way we get rid of the beginning part where we don't have our lens flare and then let's add reformat to scale this to the same format size as our project or our plate and then we're going to create a roto shape and i want to create a circular mask because i want the flare to be more contained in the middle and then let's create a merge and mask the lens flare based on the roto and then we're going to add blur to blur out the roto a bit and then let's add transform and scale it up and then we want to much plus our flare to the plate so we want the flare to flash really bright when the saber first hit and then we want the flare to track on the saber for the rest of the shot so we want to do another motion tracking so let's get another tracker node and then we want to track the middle of this intersection of the lightsaber here and once that's done we only need the translate data and set the reference frame to the reference frame that we want and then we're going to select match move and generate the match move node and then we're going to plug in our transform match move into our lens flare node and perfect so next what we're going to do is to add a hue shift and we're going to rotate the shift until we have a yellowish green color on our flare and then we want to reduce the saturation just a little bit and then we're going to add multiply and by using multiply we're going to control the fade in as well as the brightness of our flare so let's go to the one frame just before the two light chamber touches and set the multiply to zero and then add keyframe on the multiply and then move one frame set it really bright and then move two frames forward and dial it down to something like 1.5 okay so we have our lens flare but currently it's looking a bit too static so what i want to do is to add a little bit of flicker on the flare and we can do that manually which is by just adding keyframe and then move one frame forward reduce the value of the multiply a little bit and then move one frame again and then bring it up again and we want to do this several times basically creating a back and forth on the value to create some flicker we could also add some flicker effects to the size of the flare to add a little bit more life to it so what i want to do is to get a transform node and then basically here when the flare is supposed to be covered by the hoodie we want to animate its scaling down and then scaling it back up when it comes back into view okay one last thing i did was i added this other spark hit footage to enhance the lightsaber clash a little bit more and that was how to create a simple lightsaber effects in nuke once again special thanks to our friend Chris for lending us this amazing shot to use for this tutorial he makes a bunch of really cool stuff on his youtube channel FXitinpost so check him out and give him some love and of course if you want to purchase the vfx stock footage that i used in this tutorial you can check out our website at actionvfx.com at actionvfx we provide high quality vfx assets for your vfx needs we have fire explosions energy and many many others you can also sign up for our ActionVFX subscription starting at the low cost of $14.99 a month this is the most affordable way to access our library and you can cancel any time no contract thank you so much for watching i encourage you to drop a like and let us know in the comment section below what you thought of this video or if you have other tutorial ideas that you would like us to cover most of all be sure to subscribe we are aiming for 100.000 subscribers by the end of the year and also there are a ton of other resources on our channel such as tutorials podcast vfx breakdowns and so much more that we think you'll find valuable this can be your home for visual effects content so see you next time bye

Channel: ActionVFX

Views: 7,023

Keywords: actionvfx, vfx, visual effects, star wars fan film, star wars lightsaber, lightsaber tutorial, how to make a lightsaber, lightsaber effect, how to make a lightsaber effect, nuke, nukex, obi-wan kenobi, obi-wan, star wars obi-wan kenobi, darth vader, a new hope, star wars sc 38 reimagined, scene 38, vfx breakdown, 4k stock footage, compositing, star wars vfx, obi-wan vfx, lightsaber tutorial for beginners, obi wan kenobi footage, darth vader vs obi wan, anakin skywalker

Id: dCf2bNdwqms

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Tue May 24 2022