How to use NUKE for Blender projects (compositing)

hello today i'll be showing you how to introduce nuke into your blender workflow so first of all why nuke well nuke is the industry standard compositing program and it is used on almost every movie you can think of such as the lego movies the things i try to recreate and it gives you so much power but there aren't any really really good tutorials on how to set up nuke for blender properly today i'll be showing you how to set up your blender file for perfect compatibility in nuke and same thing with your nuke settings i'll also be showing off my basic nuke script that i would do a script by the way is a node tree which is what they call it in nuke so some of the main effects will be teaching how to use in nuke from your blender file and how to set it all up is adding your mispass adding in depth of field inside of nuke instead of blender so that blender doesn't denoise it and make it look smudgy auto lens flares similar to how the lego batman movie did it adding chromatic aberration color correction and vignetting and also changing the color space into aces so let's get right into it so the first thing is that you should download nuke now when you go to the nuke website you will find that it is very expensive and there is a workaround you may see this and think oh my god i cannot pay for this it's not worth it i can just use any alternative but if you scroll down far enough on their page you can find nuke non-commercial you can click find out more and in here it has a page where you can get nuke non-commercial so if you scroll down on the page you'll find button that says get new non-commercial from here it'll bring you to a page where you have to fill all this information about what you do and what you use it for so that you are qualified to use it and then you'll be able to download it you can download it from this page and you download for whatever you have i have a windows computer but if you have a mac get the mac one if you have a linux get the linux one so this tutorial will be using the windows one just click on that and it should download so once it's done downloading should we download it as a zip as you can see right here what you gotta do is you can click extract all and it will extract it into a folder like this now in this folder you can double click it and basically you just do all this you say yes next next x and then install i have already got it installed so that won't be a problem now once it's done downloading you can find it show up nuke you may see a million shortcuts on your desktop but if you go in here you also may sign a million of them you're gonna have to look for the non-commercial one so nuke 13.1 v3 whatever version is out at the time you're watching this tutorial and it says non-commercial that's the one you're going to need make sure it does not say nuke x or anything weird so when you open it it will start opening you start off with this don't close that leave it open and you see here it is in so now when you first open nuke it should ask you for a license for me i already have it in and if i recall correctly you either have to log in or you just have to find the subscription id so for example make sure you have a foundry account here you can just go to your top right my account go to my products go to nuke show contents view your entitlement so from here you can find the subscription id if you need it so hopefully it all worked out maybe you might have to wait or dare to until you can activate it i know some people have had some problems with it but just do some troubleshooting search up online for some ways to fix it so we now have nuke downloaded and opened so there's no need right now for us to have nuke open here so i recommend pinning nuke to your taskbar so you know which version you need and just close it good job you've just installed new the next step is now to open whatever blender file you have that you want to test out for this tutorial i'll be using a work in progress scene i've been working on for a new video don't ask what it is i don't want to spoil it for anyone so i'm just going to choose a good shot for an example i'll be using this shot right here so let's show you how to set up your blender file there's not much you have to do apart from these few things so first thing you got to do to set up your blender file for nuke is go to your output properties and switch the file format to open exr multi layer don't worry it won't be that big of a file if you follow these few steps so please listen carefully make sure to choose whatever color you need for this one i already have a sky hdri so there's no need for me to switch it to rgba so i just said it's rgb rgba is if you want transparency in the background if you already set it up here in film color depth i just left leave it to default and this is the important part switch the codec to dwaa it is lossy and it is a lossy codec now don't be worried you don't even notice a single difference at least i have never noticed a difference between this and with none and with that you should be all good now as you see here it's a multi-layer so if you go to your view layer properties right here this is where you can enable different view layers the few we need for sure to have is the combined and the zed the zed is so we can enable depth of field later on so basically if you have volume metrics i recommend turning them off if you want them on make a separate render pass in eevee where you will then later combine the zed pass and the miss pass from the eevee into your cycles pass in nuke so you can probably use a nuke with it as a volumetrics with cycles x now break the z pass at least that's what i've noticed so i'm gonna have the volume metrics off and yeah so if you want missed make sure to enable mist right here and also i recommend having denoising it really matters on your case if you really have time for a lot of samples but i use open image denoise albedo and normal and accurate and also with this if you use it you also get a pass that will say noisy in nuke so just in case you want that you can use it so with all that we can now hit render and i'll come back after it's done and we'll show you what to do with nuke also this might be an issue i've had recently with cycles x and my mecarix workflow is that they totally break the mist channel so that's something you'd have to use evie to create and hopefully it didn't break the depth channel so now you have your finished render if unless you're using the render animation you have to manually go to save and then you gotta save it to wherever you need it i'll be saving it in this folder called tutorial we'll call it based great i'm just gonna keep this here so that we can compare it later now do your first job here which was opening up nuke once again and there we go all right great so now you see this right here this automatically makes you a new file so you'll be all good to go also one important thing about the non-commercial version of nuke is that there's a limit of 90 20 by 1080p of the resolution of your output one way to get around it is you can make different tiles that you can combine later in any editing software you do or if you want to do a portrait video you can rotate and nuke and then rotate it back in your editing software just some quick ways to get around it apart from that the non-commercial version nuke shouldn't cause you any problems so first thing you gotta do in nuke is go to edit project settings we're gonna be setting up a few main things so set the full size format to the size of your render so here it is 1920 by 1080p just to just make things easier later on if anything weird happens oh so one main thing is i like to use aces you don't need aces in blender you only need aces in nuke it's because we're getting a linear color space output from blender so that means that it's linear and we just got to convert it to a proper color space so i recommend using aces because it can handle everything really well according to the lego movie it's because it handles saturation really well i watch a like an hour long video that one of the guys who worked on it talked about why they use aces so it handles high saturation stuff really well so switch your color management to oci o up here and then ocio config to aces 1.1 and everything else if it looks the same like this on your end it should be good and you can just close this project settings right here and if you have any troubles using nuke recommend searching up some basic tutorials there aren't many but just try to find one that's good if i find one i'll put in the description below okay now just save your nuke project file by clicking ctrl s it's a pretty bad file explorer here but you can figure it out like going to home and get to your desktop through here and if i can find the tutorial folder i'll put in here and name it click enter and it should save it there so now if you want to know if you save nuke or not since the last time you did you can just check up here right now we know it's it's been saved since last time but if i do anything like that and it now says modified click ctrl s to save it will now be all good so we're going to start off by getting in our render okay so you gotta locate your render here it's it's a single exr file but if it's an animation what you gotta do is find the folder and drag the folder into nuke like that and it will automatically import it the animation but for here we can just open here and import the exr by dragging it in like so and it imports it automatically now it will automatically handle the file format itself with scene linear which is correct now first step is to plug this into your viewer and you see that there's nothing visible don't worry it will be all good just give me a second so we got the exr file in here and it's working all good but why don't we see anything well because we have to add a shuffle node to specify which channel will you want to see from the exr file as its multi-layer so a quick way to search for a node is click tab and we're going to be searching for the shuffle node and you can type in the name of whatever node you need to get so for this instance we need to get the shuffle node so you click on that and automatically put it here if you have the read node selected all right great i added a shuffle though but i don't see anything yet well you gotta do a little bit more so now you have to go up here to the shuffle properties if you don't see the properties panel of the node that you need to edit up here any time the tutorial just double click on the node inside your little node graph so i double click on it here and now it's up here because if i close it i can double click on it and now it's up there to make it as well switch your input layer to view layer combined and there we go we can see what we saw in blender with a team bit different color because it's fully linear inside of nuke you can move around in here with your middle mouse click and zoom in with scroll and click middle mouse click to reset it and you also drag these panels like this now we gotta make it work properly the colors seem a little off and it's not converted to aces yet it's the only linear color space so to make it into the asus color space we're gonna add in a node called the ocio color space node it'll allow you to convert the color space into whatever you want to be from whatever it is so for this instance we're going to add it in here by clicking tab type in ocio color space click enter and it should put it in now double click on it if it isn't up there so we gotta specify what we're inputting and what we're outputting still since we know it's from blender we know it's an srgb linear color space so to find that go to go to here the input drop down switch it to utility and find utility linear srgb and now you can choose the output color space so to choose one go to color spaces and go to aces and choose one of these the ones are actually good or at least that work well are aces 20 65 1 which i use for my show i'm working on called dice quest there's cc do not use cc i've seen it looks like that do not use cct it looks like that do not use proxy it looks like that and you can use aces cg for today we're going to be using asus cg like they did in the lego batman movie let's see it already looks pretty nice which is mostly carried by my lighting but let's see what we can do now so now i'm going to be setting up a note so you can actually output the composite that you make in nuke just in case you don't want to do anything else to it so simply click tab and add in a write node now if you weren't selected on the ocio color space you can just drag the right node into here and this write node will give you the ability to write it to anywhere you want so now you can make sure it's double clicked on go to the properties and see file click on this right here and go to where the file is located or at least wherever you want to export it to i'm putting it to where the folder is of this project and you can name it right here you can name it to basic no compositing we're going to be making a b and g so add in.png right here all the settings were almost perfectly chosen apart from the output transform you have to switch that to color spaces output srgb to convert it back to what a normal image will be like and just like that you can click a render and click ok and it will render it let's go to our folder and find it as you can see right here we got the image working all nicely you can see here we know everything's working properly great we now have a basic nuke script for blender workflows so we're gonna be showing you how to do a few things we're gonna be starting off by doing basic effects like adding in a mispass so let's add that first thing is we gotta get our mist layer from our image and the way we do that is by adding in another shuffle node click tab shuffle and there we go the way you can plug in the image is by grabbing the b from the shuffle here drag it into the image node and to keep everything organized you can click control you see these yellow points you can click on one and create a new point on one of these connections and you can organize it much better i recommend keeping your scripts organized or also become a mess very quickly and hard to understand i recommend closing other properties of other notes to make it easier for you to deal with so yeah we're gonna double click on this and we're going to switch the input layer to mist and we're going to be plugging this into the red you can switch this but just make this simple for everyone we're going to just keep it as rgba and just plug into the bread channel but say you want to preview it it you don't want to manually drag that in but hey you can't even see it well all you gotta do is select the node you want to see and click one on it it will automatically connect it to the viewer node and also if you want to deactivate a node you can click d on it and it would be activated and as you can see already activating the color space so we're gonna go back over here to the shuffle node and we're gonna be showing you how to add a basic merge node so we're gonna actually go down here to underneath the ocao color space and click tab search for the merge node add that in and place it roughly here and there we go we now have a merge node you'll see two inputs we have a a and a b and also over on the side here will be a input that's unnamed so you pull it out called mass with a smile drag that into the shuffle too so we're going to preview the right note again so we can see what's happening in the tree and we're going to double click on the merge node so that we can switch some settings so first things first we know our shuffle node puts the mist into the red channel so in our merge node properties switch the mask right here the drop down to rgba.red just like that you can see it's mixing it properly but i don't think this is what you want the mist should be happening back there not on the things you want in focus so the way these merge nodes work is that b is the main layer in a is what's effect again so we're going to unplug the a by pulling on it like so and grabbing the b and plugging that into it and just like that you can see this this is now putting this on the base and now it may look like nothing's happening so now we've got to figure out a way to put something in the a input so we can actually merge something so what we're gonna do here is get a node called constant a constant here is a node that allows us to choose a color so we're gonna switch down to rgba and we gotta choose a color this isn't the easiest way to switch colors and also to see the color you can see it right here and click one on it so switching colors here it doesn't seem so easy but there's a simple little button on the right this color wheel you can click on and open up this so it's a customer's color wheel you can use right click on the inside of it move it to the left or right to change the value setting so you can make it really bright and it can go over the one setting because it's using your color space so we're going to be setting up a color that will look nice like this and we also can hold left click in here and change the saturation and the hue by rotating it around like so but what i would do for this is just use it for saturation use this little knob right here for the hue and just change saturation like that so yeah i'm going to choose something that's a dark blue color to plug it into it make sure that alpha here is set to one to avoid any problem so we're going to grab this a little arrow and plug into the constant and then we'll click on one on the right again to see it we can see it's working so if we select the merge node and click d see how it's affecting it and also if you want to change how powerful it is you can use a slider right here that says mix and i'm going to switch it to 0.5 so you can also see it how it is with 0 one point five is good for me it blends the ground pretty nicely as i don't have a lego ground yet so just like that you have a miss pass combined with it you also by the way can just make it white but i'm just gonna use this color because usually mist is white but i like to use it stylistically now we're going to be moving on into a more advanced part of this that you can do is depth of field so we can avoid the denoiser smudging all of our nice bokeh and doing it all in nuke instead so we have a clean denoised image with no bokeh and then nuke began to bokeh now first things first when you rendered make sure you didn't have depth of field on your camera enabled or else you just can't do this as it breaks completely so to do this make sure we still have a write node of honor view and click tab on our merge node and search for z defocus that's the node that will do all the nice stuff for us as you see here it's not really doing any nice things yet so we've got a few things we gotta do for it so what you gotta do is switch the channels to rgb we have to switch the depth channel to the view layer depth dot zed and with that we can switch the math to depth and we can drag this little focal point right here you see into where we want it we're going to focus on our little guy over here and see it is working we have this out of focus and this guy is in focus so there's some more settings we can look at we're going to switch this output here so we can see what we're doing into focal plane setup right here means it's in focus and if we change the depth of fields we'll see that we can change how much is in focus so if you want to make even bigger you can set to 10 or to five you can just put in numbers by yourself to make it bigger but here green is even more in focus i believe because if you zoom in here you already see little green buffy up the depth of field that's our little transition so i'm gonna have it on his face turn up the depth of field to have him fully in focus so we avoid any issues that could happen so this is an issue that can happen and the way to fix this is just by creating an eevee render pass for the zed and that one should have no problems unlike this this won't be too visible though switch the output back to result if you're happy with you have here so back to results and you can see this now it's focused properly you got all of them in focus and this boy is blurred out also one thing is blur inside the thing is to help smoothen the transition i recommend unchecking it unless it's something noticeable that you might see that might affect the feel of it so i recommend just having blur inside off all right so now we can change the size of the depth of field but to do that switch the maximum to max to like 100 and you can change the size of your depth of field right here so you can just change it to something high and if you want make it bigger you can change the number in here i'm going to set it like 30 just for a more dramatic focus okay so now that looks pretty good but i want to put in a custom bokeh to give it some realism so to do that so find a bokeh lens but basically once you have it you're going to drag it into here so right here i have mine right here this is called boquet 12 and what you can do is set input transform to matte paint so that's what we got that's we're going to be plugging into our cfd focus into a filter right here and to actually set his bokeh switch the filter type to image and click use input channels switch the image filtered impulse and that should be all good now so with this we can see it here a little bit and now if you want to make it anamorphic bokeh all you gotta simply do is add in a transform node right here if you click one on it you can specify you can see just this you can click on this tube beside the scale and set the height to two just like that it should create a stretched up one it works and you can see it we can scale it up a little bit and there we go we got some anamorphic bokeh right there so that's how you add in depth of field i'm gonna be now showing you how to add in some lens flares also known as autoflare you find the description below and it's based off of the lego batman movies auto flare node and go to the drive link all you gotta do select all this text so take a little bit and ctrl c and go to your nuke and make sure you're nothing selected and click ctrl v just like that it will paste it in a note that's not even from nuke it's pretty awesome so now we're going to show you how to set it up first things first grab the source arrow put it to the cd focus and that will be the main part you need to do we're going to be dragging these down a little bit i'm going to add in a new merge node and in this merge node plug it in right here and you see it automatically put that in the b and we're going to grab this a and put it into the auto flare just like that we have some weird looking uh flares why does it look so weird you may be asking well let me just solve that after we do this click control and there we go and that looks nice so go to the merge you gotta change something very important such as operation two plus just like that it is now properly being added to your image make sure to remove the transform property so that you can take away that weird thing that weird circle saving the focal point closer to zero focus and you can see here you can change the mix right here and you can change how effective they are so i'm going to set this for like two point do and you can just do that change it and that's how you add in some lens flares it looks really nice and i recommend using it especially with the lego stuff also i'm going to show you how to change the exposure realistically so click tab search for the exposure node add that in and we're going to put it in after the ocio color space right here and double click on it with this node to use it switch the adjust in to stops and now you're all good so let's test it out i recommend not having auto flares on when doing compositing same thing depth of field at least but you can change the exposure it is actually very realistically done especially with aces you can see when it turns up it looks really good still and doesn't make it look bad because if we remove our aces the color space transfer it looks like that and my god i've never seen something look so bad like it does not make sense it's just so weird so that's why we put it on it really makes a lot more sense to it so for this i'm gonna just leave it to zero i don't need it for this shot and you can disable it as well so i'm gonna do that we're gonna get back to where we were by re-enabling depth of field enabling the lens flares after all that can be adding in some color grading uh this is what i end up using i mess with the white point here because it's the cleanest one to mess with in the gain to change color so i click on the color wheel beside those two and you can change the color the white point so we can really just mess with the colors and then change the gain color and just like that you can just totally change the feel of your image now it feels like the matrix or something similar all right so next up i'm just going to disable that because i don't want to mess with that i'll be showing you how to add chromatic aberration so the way we do it's pretty simple we'll be separating the rfg and b channels and then recombining rgb channels but what we're going to do is we're going to distort one of the channels so that when we combine them again you have a cool colored edge around the edges of the screen so to do that i'm going to be adding in the shuffle node and just copy it and then under select it and just paste two of them over here make sure you unselect every time so you don't put it into accident and then you can just plug them both in here or what i would like to do to organize this is to make one right here and just plug these into that one and create points here and a point here and we have a good thing going on here so now double click on the first one and unplug everything apart from the red and the alpha then the second one unblock everything but the green and alpha and the last one unplug everything but the blue and alpha and just like that we have these separate passes of each color and then we're gonna just create some more shuffle notes to combine them all again so shuffle and then another shuffle node underneath that one which we're going to combine here so we're going to put in b which would be this one then a will be this one and we're going to close all these other ones we don't get lost and inside of this first one we're gonna be plugging in so in a rgb a so we're gonna unplug all these and just plug in the green into the green from this make sure the alpha is also plugged in and the red and then for the next one we're gonna do the same thing but plug this one into the a switch this to a rgba plug in the blue in there boom boom and we get it all combined again as you can test it by boom boom they're the same so boom boom so i'm just going to organize that and now we're going to do the main part for the whole chromatic albertan set we actually see a difference and what we're going to do we're going to click on the first one on the left which is the red one and click tab and add in a lens distortion node i'm going to drag that down here double click on it what i did for mine was i used default settings they should be all good and just switch the denominator here to what you like so make sure it goes to a negative and just like that we have a really strong chromatic albarration and finally we're going to be showing you how to add a vegan yet to all this go to the description below we're going to go here so we can see what it can do and we're going to click this open this page and just click plain text copy it all which we'll c go back to new control v you navigate node drag it right here and just like that it works double click on it and you can change some stuff here if you go to project settings and your size format is not the same as the actual output or at least your render then the vignette will be weird see here it does that which we don't want at least i don't think you do so just make sure it's the same as your render you can click preview you can preview it look like and just change it to your desired look here right now it's just like a circle so i'm gonna add in some squash to point like five softness and if you disable preview boom and switch to mix here you can turn it down or up i set to 0.6 and there we go we have a final composite and if you want with color and don't forget you can just render right here so now we're done and we're just going to change the name to to just compositing and also if it's an animation you can switch this to input and it will set the timeline to the bright range so the range of your image sequence and if we open the image this is before that's after it's such a beautiful change and also the reminder is what it looked like in blender and this is what it looks like now so i hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you're interested i recommend searching out more about it so you can learn more you can do so many amazing things in it this is just a start and just the basic setup for blender stuff so i wish you good luck and i look forward to more people using nuke in their blender workflow so make sure to subscribe if this helped thanks for watching see ya also a big thank you to all my patreons especially my mvp patreon planet

Channel: Citrine's Animations

Views: 86,400

Keywords: Nuke, blender, tutorial, flares, lens flares, compositing, lego, animation

Id: p5cWuFXReco

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022