Introduction to CG compositing in Nuke | BenQ Webinar

[Music] welcome to this event today we have a webinar basically brought to you by Bank u Europe and I would like to just spend a few minutes just introducing myself I am of course very happy to be here I want to thank thank you for inviting me to do this webinar and also I would like to thank the many people that have responded online on all social media platforms about this webinar thank you so much for your support and can't wait to share what I have today with you I can see that we have around a hundred and seventy-three people signed up right now so this is gonna be gonna be good and please feel free to ask whatever questions you want of course don't forget that we're gonna be answering the questions at the end so stick around we have a lot of cool stuff to show so definitely stick around well first of all for those of you who don't know me I am a director and a visual effects supervisor my name is you go getta and sorry about the silly photos I do a lot of travels and I always try to do silly photos all the time and I am from Portugal a very little tiny country in the south of Europe if you ever have the opportunity you should definitely visit I'm originally I was born in Porto very lovely city if you want to visit of course the city is mostly known by their amazing port of wine my experience I've been working for 20 years in the industry it's actually 20 years this year since I started in 99 I have worked at the BBC I've worked for the VC I've worked for Nexus for jellyfish I've worked for a long time for the mill in London and currently I'm working with fire dot smoke and also with you goes desk my own company majority of my time here in London I do live in London at the moment was working at the mill while I was at the mill I was the head of the nuke compositing department and I was also a visual effects supervisor where I be on set quite a lot of times and I supervised door leads almost 100 productions while I was there I was there for almost five years and I split my time between being on set supervising sometimes directing sometimes working with other directors as well I also film quite a lot of short films and film my own productions as well and of course it's always been the split between being on set and being on the machine working and compositing editing grading and so on and of course always scratching my head trying to figure out how to solve certain things on set I've worked lately I've kind of left the commercials industry and when I left the mill I started working with the games industry which always been my passion and I have done trailers or cinematics for all these companies so far and these are some of the games that I've worked in cinematics and trailers the two last ones being a live-action trailer for Warhammer vermintide 2 which is not out yet it will be out next month and the last one was a trailer for Far Cry New Dawn which I'm currently doing some disc instructions on my youtube channel I've also have a second life if teaching I usually teach on quite a few universities all over the world and a lot of online facilities as well ranging from the Norrish University of Arts to the animation workshop restart national film television school Skype foundry FX PhD so editor cm FX and campus site well then of course you goes desk as well and I also talked a lot maybe if you are going to be at MMX this year I will be presenting at FM X I have two presentations to do so if you want to join please come and say hello I will also be presenting at the view conference this year as well so if you or there please see if you can find me and say hello and you know so my life is kind of divided between visual effects and teaching and doing a lot of presentations like the webinar where I'm doing right now and also currently where I'm sitting is my my desk it's Hugo's desk which is basically my home studio my home studio is basically where I control all my productions and I have quite a lot of people working with me remotely all over the world I have a very robust remote pipeline in this in this studio I also have quite a lot of monitors from Bank you they've been a very good partner for me and and of course they helped me to produce the best content possible especially there are ten bit monitors I basically just to give you for all your geeky more geeky people out there these are the specs of my workstations I have a Mac Pro 6.1 completely SPECT out with you know m2 SS cache drives and basically call digit rate systems as well and of course I have to help me with I have three other Mac Pro's completely SPECT out as well to help me on the farm together with another two Mac Mini servers to help me on a render form and the other side of the you goes desk and this is a very important thing that I always like to share there's always another side which is all the books and references I always would recommend everyone to buy as much reference books as possible I have a huge collection of art of basically books of art films art of video games and a lot of books about visual effects a lot of books about really good directors of cinema and so I always try to keep a big big collection of that it's a huge expense per ation when I'm actually working and trying to figure out things that I need to do and also have my telly words there are upstair on the stage this is usually how I work of course not as lit as you saw there I usually tone down the lights quite a lot so that I can work in peace and have a lot more dark environments to do my final gradings and this is just me working as you can see I kind of use BenQ monitors for both desktop and reference so I usually tend to use a pv monitor from my desktop I tend to use an SW monitor for my reviewing especially if I need to do HDR and usually that's the the thing that I tend to do use them as reference monitors in 10-bit using a black magic card converting SDI to HDMI if anyone has a question about that we can definitely talk about that later and and for you to know like I that's what I mean like I use the P V series which is specifically created for the video post-production I use them for my desktop so that I can have a proper 10 bit rec sensor 9 display to use on da Vinci and nuke and Photoshop and After Effects and and all in all these applications I also use the SD UW the SW series photography series to both use in photography but also to review and preview HDR and also to preview wrecks and so 9 as well and srgb and currently I'm gonna do a little bit a little bit of a plug here if you check out my youtube channel i am currently reviewing the two new designer monitors that I have now that Bank you sent me to review so I'll be posting a review of the new PD 3 to 2-0 you which has really needed new really cool features like 100% srgb 95% p3 color space and HDR 10 content as well but enough of that let's just join in join in jump into the workshop and so this is what we're gonna talk about today we're gonna go with an intro which we just did then I'm gonna talk really briefly about caching we're gonna talk about a UV setup we're gonna talk about thinking like a tree the artist we're also going to talk about UV projections in geometry talk a bit about depth of field setups specular driven glows image based screen transparency wrapping up the thing and then do a keynote at the end please make sure to leave your questions inside the question so that I can read them and we can have a really nice Q&A at the end I would love for you to stay and stick around until the end of the show so that I can ask as mansur as many questions as possible really want to this to be an interactive session as much as we can so let's just jump in to nuke I'm gonna stop this keynote here and I'm basically gonna jump jump into nuke directly here so let me just do that so today we're gonna be talking about a specific shot this is from a cinematic trailer that I directed about almost two years now it's I think it's an hour a year and a half now and this was a cinematic for a game called Heroes arena and and these this is shot this is shot 590 and I do know that you are not seeing it in real time but you know I can stop in frame-by-frame did this shot that we're gonna be reviewing today is basically a shot where this main character called growl he basically is getting ready to jump against the camera so he's basically putting himself in a fighting pose and then there's a lot of rain as well to make it more dramatic and then of course as he gets ready to the battle it then flies off against the camera so this shot was completely rendered using redshift and I'm a big fan of redshift especially because redshift of course is basically redshift is like a gpu-accelerated and render engine which is really good because then if you have really fast Titan cards if you have really fast Quadro cards you can render them really quickly so this was rendered separately and I'm gonna just show you and this is something that I'm gonna start with really what I want to talk about and basically we tend to both at the mill and also at fire that smoke we tend to separate certain layers and of course um so I I would say that I would say that it's often good for you to separate layers in this case I have a background and I have a foreground and of course you're probably saying to yourself well why do you do that because why don't you just render the whole thing well the reason I have separate those layers first of all is because not always you can afford to do deep compositing but also sometimes it's much easier to control elements like edge blurring like lens flares like depth of field motion blur it's so much easier to have the actual layer separated like I have here I have the warrior completely separated from the background so that I can composite normally I always have all these layers as you see here I'm gonna just show you this is my beauty pass and I'm just gonna open this up a little bit and I also have my global illumination I'm just come up a little bit so I can show you and this is also another thing that I tend to do I always render out all the different passes a UVs that you have in CG the reason why I do this is because I'd like to have control and a lot of times I'm doing commercials or game cinematics or trailers short basically the pipelines are quite short time like we have very little time to do the trailers so often we try to have as much flexibility in comp as possible you know so the GI of course and this is where I want you to start thinking a bit like a 3d artist and this is really important that's why I'm doing this this presentation today I want you to start thinking about CG compositing like if you were through the artist and so the global illumination of course is something that is driven by the GI based render which in this case is all the light that is bouncing off of the environment in this case would be bouncing in out of this environment from the background then of course we have the refraction which in this situation is only the eyes because the eyes really on this monster is the only thing that is actually made of glass so anything that would be a refraction would show up on this layer we then have of course a reflection this is of course really useful because then you have all your screen reflections and all your image reflection of the environment and all the lights that you have and then of course have a specular pass which would be the highlights specular either specularity of the scene and this would be both for the character and also for the background I do have an emission and of course the emission in this situation would only be on the eyes and then I also have an emission that literally you can see it a bit later on on the beginning you have some windows on the background as well then I have a diffuse pass a diffuse pass of course being basically a caller pass that has no reflections or refractions this is a pass that only has color information in shadows in light you can also have the raw GI which is really basically every single information of your global bounce light in your scene without having any shadows or any lights interacting with it basically this is just the GI and it does not have the diffuse color so you're missing the texturing of the character so anything you've done in Mari would not show up here and this would be the same for the background as well then of course you have the diffuse raw which would be just the directional line so that means that in this commonly in big production houses you tend to separate those lights as well so this of course goes for the background in the foreground and then last but not least we have just the caller information this would be just the straight texture information from your CG that means whatever you've done in ZBrush we've done in Mari or in substance which show up here with no light no reflection no shadows nothing at all then of course you have some utility passes we have some depth passes we have some normal passes if you want to do some relighting we have some M&E occlusion which is a bit of a fake GI really we have also some ID passes to just help us with some color correction and of course these days this was a year and a half ago these days red shift the support basically um no now I forgot the name it basically supports multi IDs in one go and so crypto mad sorry it does support scriptum at these days so now I'm gonna start by just showing you how I would normally join all these renders together I'm gonna start by the main character and this is where really I wanna think make you think like a 3d artist so when you have this something like this you want to have the power of tweaking things you know normally if you look at the final render here the reflections the murder or merge the the specular or merge everything is merged which means you can really change things on the fly and of course I don't say that you should always change him sometimes you do want to go to 3d too to try to to tweak some some lighting but sometimes you don't have time sometimes you really have to do it in comp so I'm gonna start by by comping my CG and one of the things that I want to convey the idea here is that all these eyx ours were rendered separately so that means every a UV is 1ux are normally you also have the option to make one EXR with all the UVs inside if that was the case then he would not have to do what I'm just about to do but I tend to start by shuffling in all the passes I need and the reason I do that I use a basically a shuffle copy the reason I do that you're gonna see later that this is going to be so much more powerful for you actually shuffle in all the layers so that you can have access to them at all times and so this means that for example in this situation I would say our GBA would become in this situation would become my diffuse draw so I would make new and then I would say the hues raw and this would be my new pass so that means that what started as just this image here if I now go to my shuffle node you basically have a diffuse raw here so what I'm doing essentially here is I'm building up my XR just like if it was done with multi pass gxr of course you could have done that in the CG render but the reason why I would not really recommend this all the time is because if you don't have a really fast rate system if you have a slow Network you're gonna really suffer quite a lot by having multi pass hectares and especially if you have multiple a CX ARS that or you know with deep information these don't have deep information but it would become really with slow so I'm just gonna bring in everything that I need I don't need the G I don't need need the refraction need the emission need the diffuse and I do not don't need that if you know these two I don't need it for the moment I'm just going to like basically put all of them here line by line and of course after a while you start setting these up automatically you know you start making templates and you start basically making all this so you don't have to repeat this process and but I'm just gonna do it really quickly here so I can show you what I mean and I'm just like copying them all in and last last one now I started cropping in here so I'm just gonna zoom in so I can see so that would be my new spec so that would be my specular and then in here I would have my emission so this would be my emission sorry mission and then in here on the other shuffle I would have my this would be my reflection reflect and then refract and then in here last but not least I have my diffuse texture so that's just like the straight diffuse so that's the hues text which I'm also putting up here so now at the end of this thing as you can see here I not only have my RGB but I have also my emission my GI my specular so what I'm ultimately doing here is I'm constructing my multipath cxr and if I go page up page down you can kind of see that they're all here and this can be automated you can do this through peyten and and you can of course not spend the this amount of time that I did doing this once this is done and the reason I did this is because then I start shuffling to build my CG so I'm going to start shuffling everything that I need I'm gonna actually bring a shuffle here and I'm gonna have to like basically shuffle them one at a time so that I can build it up so I'm gonna start by shuffling out my raw gi I'm gonna start with that one and then I'm going to just shuffle again basically here and I'm going to go in here and I'm gonna shuffle my diffuse texture then I'm going to of course this would all be labeled if you would have been using em if you had the time you know you would have put backdrops and you would have done all those things I'm really not doing that because we don't really have a lot of time so as you can see here are my shuffles I'm outputting basically the GI raw to my RGB and I also have an alpha channel which is the alpha channel that comes with the layer and so the first thing you want to do is because these are raw passes you have your straight diffuse which is the diffuse text and then you have your diffuse draw which is this one here so what you want to do is you want to use a merge node and there are only two operations that you require to do multi pass compositing you just need either either a multiply or you need a plus operation these would only be the only two that you need so if you're handling raw passes then you want to use a multiply if you wanna if you are not using raw passes then you're using a plus so that's pretty much it so I'm going to start by multiplying basically my raw color diffuse with my raw light and that would give me my diffuse light and then I'm gonna do the same thing and basically what apply my raw GI with my raw color and that would give you my basic GI pass then I would have to plus these two together of course so that they would be ready for me to do it I'm gonna organize this a bit better so that we don't have we have a bit more space when we are gonna start doing that so that would be your first pass now remember these two layers that I left here so these two layers are left there I left them because these are the same you know so for example if I leave this one here and if I leave this one here you see that my GI pass I'm just gonna gama up down so you can kind of see it a bit better my GI pass is the same as multiplying my GI by the raw and of course my diffuse is the same as multiplying my raw diffuse my with my raw color so they would be the same the only reason I have them rendered both of them here is because I'm showing you this and of course I always want to have I want to always want to be sure about this so once I've done these I'm now gonna start shuffling the rest so I'm gonna now plus everything else that I'm missing here so I'm gonna basically go here and now I'm going to say okay I want to my reflections I also want my refractions here so if I go to my refractions here and again like I said if it's not a raw raw pass you are basically merging it with a plus now be aware that you need to make sure the B pipe is coming from the previous layer that you've comped and that means that you always doing B from the last thing that you've composite in this case it would be multiplying GI with diffuse multiplying diffused with light that gives you the total light of the scene and then you would plus the refraction you place the refraction so in this situation we are having here reflections we're having here refractions and then last but not least I'm just gonna start copying this up as well and I'm going to basically do this here so now I am blessing the last one which I've done refraction I'm also putting the specular as well and then last but not least is the omission that we are still missing as well so I would basically shuffle the omission here and where is the omission omission and then I would plus that one so now basically this is what I have so I started with my diffuse then I had my G I then I had my light they became together became two lights as well then I merged my reflection then I merged my refraction just double-check yet reflection refraction and then I merged my specular and then I merged my refraction so that's reflect refract and then this is emission so if I now look at my original render and I look at the result of my comp you see that I have a match this is what we call in the industry rebuilding the basically rebuilding the shader so this was the merged shader coming from Maya in redshift and this is now the rebuilds version of that shader now ultimately what this now allows you to do is it allows you to do adjustments per shader based and this is what I was telling you about if you for example want to think like a CG artist you kind of want to work if you for example want to do adjustments to light you go to the light pass if you want to do adjustments to the to the specular so you want to go to the specular pass so that's really what I want to convey here when I'm showing you this okay and so I'm gonna move on because we are of course stretch of time I'm already light but I'm going to now show you basically the final result of that merging so that I can kind of show you what I mean with this and basically just going to open up the next shot nevermind if you don't know what this is this is basically my own pipeline I have my own custom pipeline to organize my nuke scripts and so you won't find this of course in in Newquay PD or anything it was made just for my company but I'm just gonna open up the next script so that I can show you exactly what I mean while we're waiting for it to open I'm also going to just a second and the reason I open this up is because I just showed you how to actually comp the CG passes to match the Ovie's you know I want to kind of show you how this was actually done in for real so this is the actual script the production script as you see just like I did before this is what I start with I start by shuffling in all the passes one by one and this including the normals the IDs and everything and that means that if I look through this viewer here you can now see that I have every single pass just like if this was a multi pass EXR and that becomes really useful for later on for comping and this means that when I'm actually comping here and if you look in here I always come to the same way and you can kind of see that I have all of it labeled here so you can see here my GI is being multiplied by my diffuse my direct lightning multiplies by diffuse and that gives me of course the total light and as I go through my script here you see then I merge the refraction that I merge the reflection that emerged the specular and then I merge the emission and as you can see I because I have total control over this I tend to do things to it so this is what I'm conveying to you like if you want to work like a CG artist you want to kind of work this way so first of all the first thing also that you do here is you want promote the image and I'll show you that in a second but as you can see here for example for the emission I have the eyes here which are the emission I started with a bit of a grade then I have like a glow for just the eyes which are merged together then I also have like another glow for the eyes and as you can see by the end of it I started with a pretty pretty much dull eyes and now they have a subtle glowing diffuse and the same goes with the dis specular here's for example here you start with this kind of specular that you have here and then I kind of like graded it a little bit and did a bit of color correction to push the highlights and the cool thing about this but by having it all separated is that you now are not interfering with other passes that you might be interfering the past so this is what I mean when working like a 3d artist and this is really cool because then you can work with your 3d artists together you can actually work as a team so that means that if example he gives you the reflections and the reflections look like this and you for example start call the correcting the reflections which is in a way something that is incorrect because it's not scientifically correct for you to call the correct the reflections only but it always gives you a way for you to break the comp if you need to and then you're CG artist can go back and render certain adjustments that might have happened in comp not to mention of course that people a lot of times now comp 3d artists comp their own shots so that's also another reason why this is this become so important now if you look at all of this you can clearly see also that I have all these and pretty multiplications here and this is the cool thing about having the set up like this I'm gonna go back to my original setup that I was showing you and the reason I do that the reason you have to do that especially because of this so if you if you look at the edges of your character you can clearly see that they have been pre multiplied I know that they've been pre multiplied because you can kind of see a feathering on the edge so it often and often is very important for you to always keep the pre multiplication rules and so if you look at the Alpha channel you can clearly see that my beauty is actually been pre multiplied so it tends to be that it's important for you to not remember not forget to actually unpromoted I all my layers so that way if you put a none promote on everything here you can kind of extend those edges and by extending those edges that means now you can do any color correction to your cg without really breaking those edges and this would be for every single pass now the only exception would be certain passes that would be raw so for example here you see the diffuse also requires an unpromoted as you can see but if you look at for example the GI raw or the light the diffuse light raw you can kind of see that they are already bin and pre multiplied so you do not want to put another and pre multiply by putting another unpretty multiply what's gonna happen is that you basically gonna double pre multiply now let me show you why this is important I actually have a couple of examples here to show you so here's an example of a simple comp this is a comp from a shot that I did that the mill years ago so you have like a green screen a person this is actually a best way for you to to show you why promote applications or importance for cg compositing this is our alpha channel so this is just like a cg rcg scene and then we basically copy in the Alpha Channel and of course we do a bit of this bill and then we do a bit of color correction and then we promote that image and then we merge it against the background and as you can see here if you look at the smiie transparence because of course this lady has a lot of smiie transparent garden you can kind of see that the correct way of doing promote application which is to actually only promote at the end before and not put color corrections after you can kind of see the edges are perfect now if i show you the one on red here which is where we actually call a correct after the promote and this means that if i compare both of them you can clearly see here on one if you look at the edge of this me transparency here of the of the the woman you can see that on the wrong one we now have a black edge now you probably experienced this quite a lot in After Effects or even inside of nuke and this really tends to do tends to be a pre multiplication problem so you really want to make sure you always respect the pre multiplication error rules otherwise you get these kind of black edges everywhere and this is gonna happen all through your image I have another example here which is a CG example it's the kind of same thing you see here I have a character from a game as well a trailer I did yeah if you about last year and as you can see here I start by promoting that character and unpromoted of course brings back all my edges back into the thing then I do a lot of color correction all in a row and then I do a pre molten by doing a promote that means that I have now basically they're all Michael a correction contain between the pre multiplication in and pre multiplication that means that my Michael the correction did not affect the edge of the image and so now when I put it against my background you can clearly see that the the you know the the fur looks correct as opposed to the incorrect version so I'm just gonna show you the incorrect version which is this one here and I'm just gonna put it on the buffer too and then I put but for one on this one so you can see the wrong has a lot of highlights on the fur and a lot of whiteness on the fur the correct one has the correct edge of the fur the same goes even for other parts of the scene if you look at the edges even a bit later here so if I look at the sword for example you can also clearly see that the sword on the correct one has the correct edge but then on the other one it has the incorrect edge all these things are pre multiplication errors and this is why on my comps as you can see I always start by picking up an a layer and pre multiplying that layer merging all my other layers basically doing all my color correction and then by the end of it if you go in here you see you have multiple color Corrections all these color Corrections are basically color Corrections then with object IDs and once that's done you kind of like at the end then you finally because you see here the edge is actually wrought at a moment it's all not pre multiplied by the end of it you finally do a pre molt after you've done every single color correction and that's really recommended because then you do not have those situations where you have so many black edges so I hope you've understood that I'm sure we will do this more and more often on my youtube channel so we will we will see but now I want to like dive into something else since we we are of course rushing to time we only have 17 minutes left on this show so I want to show you just unfortunately it took a bit longer than I thought but I want to show you something else that I really like to do when I'm doing CG compositing and this is to have the actual geometry of the CG inside the scene now this can be done in several ways in this situation I'm using an Alembic cache so this is one thing you should know is that inside of Maya you kind of have to activate the Alembic caching because it doesn't show up automatically so as you can see having the Alembic cache means that you actually get the I'm just gonna change one thing here because this is wanna put texture so we can actually see it and that's gonna give you so as you can see this is the full geometry from Maya and it's also animated so if I play back this it is even texture than everything so I bring in always the full textured CG into nuke and I know it's a bit heavy and it becomes a bit heavy but there's a lot of them advantages of this first of all the biggest advantage is that you can now position in space to the layers that means you can put elements behind this character you can put elements in front of this character you can even attach elements to it imagine if you want to attach some smoke or attach some fire into this character now the way that this works usually is that I basically go and get my texture from substance this is a texture from substance this is what we call the UV and the UV this is a UV that is a sequence actually so if I go into frame one you can kind of see these are the UVs for the actual helmet if I go to frame two you'll see that those are the UVs for the rest of the armor if I go to frame three it's a bit heavy to read because there are really heavy guitars and if I go to frame four I have the rest of the armor if I go to the other frame here I have the rest of the armor as well so I have a bunch of textures that are from different parts of the character now the way I usually do this is that if you want to specifically paint or do something to this character and add it in post you can use this a UV and then basically use a frame hold like I have here as you can see I have a frame hold to give me that texture I have another frame hole to give me that texture another frame hold to get me that's texture and then I have of course the rest I think there is ten texture maps for this UV of this specific character as you can see it all is over with the end here so and this is really powerful because and of course then I use an UV tile to merge all the materials together now if I for example want to do something I'm just gonna test this it's not really gonna be exactly what you probably are going to do on this kind of project but I'm just gonna show you what I mean so if I now open up my rotopaint and the imagine that I want to actually write something in some parts of the texture I do so that now well actually not because I should have done a rotopaint answer about that so that should have been the one I should have opened just close the wrote on one here and and I'm actually gonna open up the roto so the cool thing about this is that now for example if I pick up my brush and I know this is a bit silly but I'm gonna put on all frames and if I now actually put like lines or I draw or I paint or even I can even do rotopaint thing I can do cloning I can do all sorts of things now this can be transferred into my texture that means that once I load it up into my texture if I now look at actually my texture mapping here you can kind of see that now I have those two lines on the actual geometry this means that now these two lines could be comped as a scanline render so for example if I do not want to have the UVs visible I just need to switch this on which is a great note that basically switches off the diffuses and just keeps me it keeps everything else or if you want you can also add other textures as well so for example imagine that you want to merge some textures on top or something that also would be possible as well so for example if I do this now and you basically could see it in the scan line so I'm just gonna go into my scan line here and I'm gonna switch to my scan line so that you can actually see the result of that render just give you a second it is a bit heavy so it's gonna take a while so maybe I have some settings let me just remove the ant Alizee ssin or yeah let me remove the sampling here so we don't have any high quality on the render so so you see this is of course the two things that I just wrote so you basically have the rotopaint node that I made here with the two awkward lines but I also have like a texture map here which is some scratches that I have here and what I did on the final project here actually I use this to create this and this is a render of that and this is basically just some scratches and you're probably asking to yourself well why didn't you just do this in 3d and yes it's true I could have done this in 3d but this allowed me to retexture certain parts of the cg whiteout without having to go back to 3d because sometimes it's too late sometimes you are in the last minutes of the production and you really cannot afford to go back to 3d anymore so that's what you have to kind of keep in mind and that's why I'm showing you this now if I go back to my actual final comp I can show you exactly where I place that so this was actually placed here this was done for all the shots so if I go in here I'm just gonna choose a frame that is not motion blur and so that we can see that don't forget to leave some questions if you do have some questions I would love to know more about them at the moment I I seem to not be able to see the questions myself but maybe I can find out someone that can probably help me with how I can see the questions but I can see that there's 15 questions asked but I don't see the actual questions in my window so maybe I don't have permission to see the questions but I do need to find out how to do that otherwise you're not gonna be and there won't be any answers so but maybe we'll figure that out okay cool yeah thank you is already taking care of that so so basically what happened what's happening here is that I had those that scratched and what I did is I do not call those scratches because you see these scratches are actually not lit they do not have any premultiplication they do not have any multiplication by light because remember your texture which is a raw texture does not have any light so what you want to do is you want to merge the scratches into your textures with not without any without any light so if i zoom in here you can clearly see that I basically have some scratches coming and I'm gonna exaggerate them a bit so that you can actually see them a bit more and so that you actually see them so I'm gonna basically just increase them here it's lagging a bit you know because I am of course using I'm recording my screen and doing all sorts of things so you see now I'm adding these these scratches this is why it's so important for you to separate to you your UVs and reconstruct them because I'm now screaming these scratches on just the diffuse and then once I multiply it with its light and I multiply it now you see that my scratches or now being correctly affected with light and so if I for example remove this screen operation here you can clearly see that the helmet has it's very clean there's no scratches whatsoever but if I activate this I can now activate some scratches on the helmet now if you look at the final result of the comp so if I go into my final script here that just gave me the ability to have a little bit more believability especially here if you look at here if you look at the final frame the CG looked pretty clean and so of course the scratches just gave it a bit more humph you know it just made it a bit more dirty and so of course this this goes without saying that you don't need to use this just with scratches you can also use this with textures you can do this with dirt I've used this technique with water as well you know so it is also possible to use it with water not just you can also use it with with particles you can use it with anything really that you want to that you want to project on the UVs of the CG and in fact I'm gonna actually load a script here in the background while we're waiting and I'm actually going to show you that what I mean and while we're waiting for that script I'm gonna move on to the next topic of hand because I quite I have quite a lot of things that I want to show you and but I'm actually going to talk a little bit about this which is what I call basically a specular specular glows but there are basically image based specular glows and the way that this works and would be if we pipe this in so I'm just gonna pipe this into my comp here so you see that's my that was my rebuild of the CG remember we did that I do of course have to put a promote here because I didn't do a promote of course the promote by the way needs to be with the with the proper Alpha Channel because my alpha channel at the moment if I switched away you can can see that the value of my alpha Channel is 6 and of course my edges which used to be very pretty and very beautiful are now very merged and broken the reason for that is because every single marginal here has merged the Alpha Channel as well you have two choices you can either copy in the raw alpha channel back into the stream from like like doing some like this or you can just remove all the Alpha Channel merging on these merge nodes and that will give you a proper pre-multiplication once I have the pre multiplication here I'm just gonna show you what I mean with these based specular glows what I tend to do is I tend to shuffle just the specular pass and so basically what I'm trying to do here in is basically achieving by expire by successfully out just the specular pass I use the specular plus to drive glows so this means that I have just the glow just by using the specular pass and and usually I do a pretty big glow of just highlights and then I have another glow which would be a much more smaller glow and then sometimes I even do even more glows like more pinpointing glows to the image and what this gives you basically is this by having separated glows by having a big like a big glow with specular passes with a smaller glow with specular passes and then yet even a really really pinpointed glow in this glow of course is using a very huge tolerance so I'm just really picking up just some highlights the same goes for this one which I have a tolerance of too what happens here you get this kind of effect that you tend to have with cars you know you tend to have like an effective light almost like you know when the Sun hits the chrome of a car and if you play this back you basically get those kind of highlights basically the specular pass would be used to provoke those highlights to exist I'm just gonna cash this real quick so that I can go and show you exactly what I mean when it plays back so now that it's caching and I can just like go frame by frame and as you can see here you see the highlight growing around it on the armor and these are driven by those go you know so if I start here by having just the image you see there's nothing there and then of course I start by having one glow that just gives it a little subtle diffuse I then have another glow that gives us even more highlights especially on these specks here you can clearly see that they kind of grow with light and then last but not least I pick up the larger glows and that's really a great way for you to have really nice pin glows and again only really possible if you separate the layers because you kind of want to only affect the specular on this you do not want to put it on other passes that might might not be important now we are running at a time unfortunately but I'm just gonna show you one last thing and that last thing is going to just be what I call imaged base transparency and I'm just gonna show you quickly because we don't have the time to actually construct ourselves unfortunately time flies always when you're having fun and so I'm just gonna show you really quickly what I mean here so on this shot we have a bunch of rain and the rain is actually down here so as you can see here we have some rain these are particles made in Maya and as you can see here basically just a huge amount of rain we also have the contact rain on top of the character as well basically the rain is being occluded by the character now one of the things that I don't like about this rain is that this rain does not pick up any color from the environment and the reason for that is because it was gonna be it was gonna take too long to render that so the CG artists on this project one Brockhaus told me like you know if I actually put light environment on the rain it's gonna just take forever to render so what I did here is I faked it so first of all I picked up my image which was the pre-comp which already had like the particles and then I blurred the hell out of it so basically it's a huge blur it's a blur of 200 and then I screen on top even more light from the particles so that I have a bigger source of light here once I do that I didn't gray the little bit I call a correct and I clamp the reason I clamp is because I want to keep the values in control this of course looks I know but then what you do is you pick up the rain that you got and you multiply it by that color blur and then of course you tone it down and as you can see by toning it down now what I have is I have rain just on the color information so now as you can see I have rain on the lamp of the background I have rain being colored by just the particles and I have low rain being colored by just the sword this is really a great way for you to actually caller your particles without having to actually render everything again and that that really will make a huge difference on your comp because if you look in here for example this would be how it looked originally so you see you have like a lamp here and you have the particles and as I put my rain on top you can now see that my rain looks more realistic because the rain is picking up some Reds it's picking up some oranges as well and then of course I still put the rain on top as well of course this is a bit too much but this is just a great way for you to pick up some blue on the rain from the environment and of course some green and some orange and that's really simple you just basically blur the hell out of the image and then just multiply that image by that the the lights background so that's kind of like that's kind of like how I I want to show this is the last thing I'm gonna show you although I do have another script here remember when I tell you that these this kind of UV thing could also be very handy to put rain so for example this is a shot I also did and as you can see here you can kind of see that there is some water drops going through the face this would be an incredible hard render to do in CG because we would have we we had a very we had a very limited budget so we couldn't really like spend so much money in doing proper simulation of water droplets on our face so what do you do this is lagging a bit so I'm just gonna like close this next script here for a moment because we we are it's a bit heavy recording the screen and having all these things open it's always a bit of a problem but so as you can see here these raindrops are base we done with the same principle so if I go in here you can kind of see where I've made them so the raindrops are made here so you see here I have my you've ease of her face so this is what I have and then when I start doing doing is I start merging the water in our face you see so I have like this one and I have then all these and if I now play this back you can kind of see that what I get is I get the water droplets going through the face and then this of course gets rendered and gets rendered to the same through the same UV tiling system like I showed you before and if you just wait the second I'm gonna show you the render made already so this is a premium this is a render made and so this is basically the raindrops and in here we have rain on her face we have rain in the armor and we have of course rain in also on the blouse as well and this layer then would be merged on top but of course it would be merged on top by multiplying it by a delight so we are really pretty much ran out of time so I'm gonna have to leave the nuke scripts for the moment and I am sorry about that it's always never enough time to show everything that I want to show but let's go back into this thing here and I just wanted to like wrap up my presentation with a little bit of a shameless promotion so if you guys want you guys and girls you can follow me on Twitter on you go see Guetta I don't forget that we still have the queue and I of course you can follow you go see get on Twitter you can also follow my you goes desc channel on YouTube that's you goes desc you can also support my channel in patreon if you want me to keep developing and making more free content for the internet please support me on patreon that would be very very good if you could do that with just $1 you can actually vote on the next videos I do so that's pretty much for me for the presentation that I had prepared today here and but now it's time to jump into the Q&A so the Q&A for that I'm going to basically as my Canberra on so that we can actually go through that a bit more easily I'm also going to base so now you should be seeing me as well I hope and I really hope so and and we're gonna go through the questions really quickly here so I have a lot of questions so this is gonna probably take a while so I'm going to open up the questions we have 55 questions Wow that's insane and okay so let's start with the first question so first question just says from Antonio t-shirt is just as allô allô there anton you as well and i have saline as well saying this gandalf intro intro is always cool thank you so much Celine thank you so much for everyone so I basically have a lot of people saying aloe which is great thank you so much Julian thank you so much Emiliano thank you so much saline and so I also have Moe asking me saying that he's been watching my videos for years thank you so much for that Moe I also have I'm sorry if I'm butchering anyone's name okay I really want to make sure that I'm trying to tell the names correctly but you need to understand that I I don't know the names as I don't know how to read them sometimes and so I also would like to say thanks to Jay hell and from Mumbai says hello Julian says the video is lagging I hope it was a bit better after I removed the webcam and Siva Reddy is asking where can I find footage for practicing compositing well you can find footage if you can find footage if you support me on patreon you actually have access to some of the footage that I have on my videos and so um so basically just go to my patreon and you can support there and then of course if you pay the $20 tier you actually have access to some of the footage and so I have a question here from Farhad really amazing info I learned I was wondering why my cg comps get heavy but rendering merge DX ours is easier less render setup it is true mur GX ours or easier but it just becomes it just becomes really heavy on the network you have to be careful with that and now also be aware that I did not have time to go to the caching system it's very important for you to make sure you have a really fast cache I would really recommend you having an m2 solid state for caching and so I just really want you to keep in mind that I usually have I have a dual m2 solid state so I can run about 2,000 frames per set 2,000 Meg's per sec on caching and if you don't know how to set up the caching in Nuuk you should definitely check out one of the last webinars from the foundry talked about that so you should definitely go there and I also have another question here from fahad is it is it a good way to merge e^x ours and then re render each passes separately XR for nuke and I guess so I guess that could be one way to go and so Mika is asking will be able to rewatch this webinar if it's it's done yes Bank you will be sharing the recording of this webinar I would probably think that it would probably be at some point tomorrow I'm not entirely sure when it will drop but it sure it will be dropping very soon and I have a question here from Telmo josie1 de Souza I'm sure yeah thank you tells me and they confirm that it will be tomorrow that they will be sharing this video so I have a question here from Telmo Jules you own D'Souza I'm sure he's Portuguese by his name he asks if it's not raw passes do you need to use the shuffle copy or you just merge plus the passes I think you misunderstood me Telmo I'm only using the shuffle so that I can include all the passes into my stream so you still have to merge the passes the only reason I did a shuffle copy is because this render that I have is not a multi pass XR so I'm basically building my own multi pass he acts are inside of nuke so that I can have access to all the passes and it's very important because if you have access to the passes then you can actually do call the question and call certain passes immediately you know that is actually the most important part of the whole thing like if example if you want to do some color correction in nuke you can then call the eye I pass or if you want to do some color correction that uses the only the specular pass then you can call the specular pass so always having a stream always helps you a lot now I also have if I had pretty pretty much by the same question and so - that ashen asks what is the crypto mat and how is it work crypto map basically is a special pass you render in CG that assigns automatically a specific color to every single object in texture inside the CG that means that you get not just the red green and blue image of the of the IDs but you do get a much bigger range and that means you can really be granular with your color correction and I have a question here from Ashish sometimes when we I used to project in any texture using UV tile on Alembic the mesh becomes transparent and nothing is visible in render when are you using FBX it works fine please help me out so basically hash Inns and Jean asked this it could be that your Alembic is coming in in your texture is coming in without an alpha Channel if you do not have an alpha channel inside the 3d system all your textures will be transparent keep that in mind and sha Shan Fontaine is asking why do you use frame holds on the UVs I'm using frame holes because the UVs that I have on this project run from frame 1 to front 10 and because they have the same names so that means that the frame 1 is one part of the texture frame 2 is another part of texture frame 3 is another part of the UV so that I have to put a frame hold so that I can select which part of the UV I want that's why I have to put a frame hold and Davide asks me would this be available on your YouTube channel not right now no the video will be shared by everyone that signed up to this stream it will be shared tomorrow by Ben cue the video will be available on the YouTube channel only later on but I don't have a timing for that just yet William is asking anyway to see more in-depth your pipeline tool yes definitely if you want to do that you can definitely support me on patreon I have done multiple videos in Q&A is about my pipeline in fact just last week we did a Q&A session in Skype where I showed my entire pipeline in detail so people could see the shot manager so William if you want to see my pipeline if you support me in patreon over 25 pounds dollars then you can see those videos or I can talk to you about my pipeline and emiliano is asking when or or when we are doing a chroma key must we do all the adjustments and then promote at the end yes definitely yes if you want to do a chroma key or doing any type of keying you want to make sure you build your alpha Channel as best as you can and also remove all the color information like spill suppression using spill suppression removing all the blues and greens from your image and you should only pre-multiply at the very end just like the example I showed you on the video with the premultiplication again I'm so sorry I'm not gonna be able to go through all these questions and there's there's so many question there's a hundred in three questions guys and girls come on you guys are you guys in girls are insane hundred four hundred five questions and so I'm gonna just jump around a little bit I am so sorry if I'm skipping some people and I'm also so sorry if I butchered your name I'm so sorry about that and so I'm gonna start I started by the beginning I'm gonna start by the end so I have a question here from Nick nicholae and they are asking when does one do green chromis shoot and when we do blue chromis shoot so that's an excellent question and blue screen tends to be when you have a lot of yellow on set so for example if you have a lot of people blond people on set you don't want to use green because Green is very close to yellow so if you have a blonde having green it's gonna be very different for you to pull a key so usually tends to be it has to do with the color of the hair green screen is much better for brunettes for people with dark hair or even with dark skin as well it's much better for that and blue is much better for lighter skinned people and for a lighter hair as well and that's usually why they make that decision and Andrea here as question hi from Ecuador hi Andrea I from a high from London thank you so much for calling from Ecuador could you please explain how to do magic things with UVs I'm sorry I don't really have any magic none of this is magic Andrea it's all just techniques but you should definitely check out my youtube channel I have a few videos about UV projections I will make more videos so if you subscribe to my youtube channel or if you want to support me on patreon you can always vote for a video like that or you can suggest my next video so I also have oh yeah William is just saying that he will look a look at that that's thank you so much William and I also have Jeff your Bravo here asking anouk supports you DM yes it does Xavier and that's why you did the frame holes yes that is correct this is an ood EMM workflow for UVs and that's why I had to put the frame holds and thank you so much for helping answering that as well and I have here a question from Y an aloe from bellcore Ecole France although they are hi France as well and she said love your videos question when we have big XR and the video begins to bug and such do you suggest a pre comp or what do you do so if you have a very large EXR you should definitely check out caching inside of nuke caching will allow you to actually precache the files into a faster harddrive so if you get an m2 solid state or if you get a really fast rate system you will be able to actually cache your files so that they are not read on a slow hard drive like imagine if you're reading them from a USB Drive or if you read them from a network drive that means you can read them really quick and then it will really improve your pipeline again I'm sorry that we didn't have to have time to talk about cashing today but I will make a video about that soon on my youtube channel and I do know that the foundry has made a webinar about that I think last week actually so I have Vinc Vicky here Vicky Jane asking how efficient is the rate render the raytracer render instead of the scanline so the Ray tracer render is quite effective especially if you want high quality motion blur as opposed to the scanline render that is not very good with motion blur as compared to the right tracer so I definitely would recommend to use the right tracer of course goes without saying the right tracer has one problem it is really heavy um and I'm just gonna choose a couple of more questions in the middle because unfortunately we kind of have to wrap up I think because we're already running for an hour already so we kind of have to wrap up so I'm nosing and I choose some questions here in the middle so I have just there here saying this was great intense but quick sorry about that is that and I also have a question let's see a question here I have a lot of people saying thank you so thank you so much for everyone that said thank you and so okay so I have a question here from XI J Peng how do you see G shot in live-action how to match grain so that's an excellent question for you to match the grain it tends to be that when you shoot the footage you tend to film a plate of grain so imagine if you pick up basically a chart for the grain and this actually have the Chartier actually have it here and I can even show you so if you use something like this which would be a great shot so this is a great shot through exposure and on the other side you have a great sharp so this is actually an excellent way for you to a match grain because you can film this on the set and you actually have a sample of the grain here and then once you have the sample of the grain you then can use that sampling to adds the grain to your CG this is one way of doing it the other way of course could be if you use the regrain node or if you want you can also you know do the grain by hand you can also make the grain using the grain node but I would not advise that much to that because it's not as good as using an actual sample you know and let's do just two more questions and then we wrap up a lot of people saying thank you so thank you so much through everyone I think because I have so many questions I might have to do a YouTube video with just about these questions I really think that would actually be very much appreciated if I go through a youtube video answering all of these so I have that lets since this is a bank you and Bank you sponsored event let's finish with a bank you question so I have a million asking would you suggest buying the bank you PV two-seven-zero so first of all Amelio I have not used the PV two-seven-zero yet but I definitely would always recommend to use a bank you monitor I'm not just saying this because we are of course on a sponsored stream by bank you but bank you has really high quality professional monitors you know most of their monitors run in 10-bit instead of 8-bit most of the monitors have a hundred percent RGB they have a hundred percent presence online some of their monitors even have 94% at Petri so they really have a huge gamut if you want to work in high quality grading or call the corrections so and so yeah I just wanted to like put that out there and of course do not forget that because you are viewing this this webinar you do have a 10% discount if you want to buy a bank you monitor and Bank you when they share with you the recording of this video they will share with you also a special code to give you 10% discount so don't forget that as well and so I'm gonna randomly choose the last question here and so let's just let's just just pick one last question I have a lot of people here saying hello from a lot of countries and again like I said I am going to answer all these things on my youtube channel I think you guys deserve that you guys and girls have been here watching everything and so let me finish off with Raphael Martin so he asks are you go thank you for the presentation thank you so much as well caffael my question is about to attach something to Gio like you said before maybe a fire plate or smoke do you use vertices for that can you just give a tip about that yes definitely I do use verses as yes there is a node in nuke you should investigate you can go to the help file to check so caffael there's an odin nuke called the geo select and also on the menu of nuke you have a little button that allows you to put the nuke displaying vertices or displaying faces when you select the vertices or you would select a face you can then select this node called Geo select and you press the button select and then you can attach the geometry to any kind of axis or any kind of geo transform node so yes literally that is the best way for you to attach geometry to vertices and things like that so I just wanted to like keep that that around so yeah so I think we're gonna wrap up since we've been going for an hour and 10 now unfortunately I think we are running a time I really would love to think I want to thank everyone for coming I was blown away by the amount of people that were online at some point we had almost 300 people at some point online thank you so much for being here thank you so much because the more people we get on these events the more we can make these events happen like I said on my posts I am my video channel is all about sharing information and knowledge professional knowledge without any paywalls I would wish that every knowledge would be free to share with everyone so because you were here because you've supported this event I'm sure we can repeat events like this and we can do much more so thank you so much I also would love to thank thank you for inviting me for this event I love to work with them as well and don't forget that tomorrow Bank U is going to share the video recording of this event together with a great discount for buying a bank you monitor so thank you so much and I hope to see you next time on a video at you guys desk bye-bye [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Hugo's Desk

Views: 49,651

Rating: 4.9348631 out of 5

Keywords: CG, Nuke, Foundry, Compositing, AOVs, VFX, CGI, 3D, Redshift, Renders, Workshop, Training, BenQ, Hugo's Desk, Hugo Guerra, The Mill

Id: ysgSwXy1D0s

Length: 70min 3sec (4203 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019