Introduction to Compositing in Blender 2.8

hey guys hitting it morning from flip normals here and in today's video we are giving you a full introduction to compositing inside of blender we're going to be focusing on compositing guidelines talking about different kinds of passes covering the most basic nodes you'll use inside a blender and doing gainer general color grading adding effects importing external elements and finally exporting a really cool result so let's jump into blender and get started alright so let's jump right into it so just from the get-go just want to show you what we're actually creating here this is the final render and this has been taken through blender then composite it and you know just to compare with how it came out straight from blender without any comp and then what comp can actually do it's one of the things we've talked a lot about in the past the importance of comp and the importance of post-processing on top of your images especially in 3d because a lot of things can look pretty sterile straight out of a render so compositing or editing in Photoshop whatever it is can really take your images to the next level you should always comp your renders no matter what you do even if it's a little bit of color grading it will it will transform your art just to preface this I want to say that you should have some experience with blender we aren't going to be covering a lot of the settings this will be purely focused on the compositing part we've also included everything you need to follow along with this tutorial in the description there are links to everything including the project files as well as some useful hotkeys one very important thing you have to enable to actually follow along with a lot of this and also just to make your life easier when comping in general is enabling the node Wrangler most of you probably have this enabled but if you go to the Preferences search for node enable node Wrangler that's gonna be added that's what's gonna allow you to do or use some of the hotkey step that we'll be using in this video to start off with what I usually do is I just go to the compositing window and that that's basically where I make everything from and then you can start you can tweak it and customize it how you want but I try I tend to keep it fairly basic this is our node view down here we have our timeline for scrubbing through when we have footage that has animation sequences like the ones we have provided you for this video you can just use your own files but the ones that we've provided sort of like it helps guide you and and you can sort of I think more easily follow along by using the files that we've provided like the same kind of passes and you'll end up with hopefully the same kind of result the first thing you want to do is just click use notes this brings up our render layers this is the one whenever you do a render in blender it'll show this would be like a little preview here and then you have the composite node the composite node you basically never want to touch all it does is it just ensures that whenever you rerender an image this is then fed back into into your render view that's why you have the render result up here that'll be from the composite node so just before we move into the actual compositing just there just a few things that I need to take you through it's just to give you an overview of how you would actually render these things out it's not going to be super in-depth for just a quick quick rundown everything that you need you'll find within the passes palette this will change a little bit depending on if you're rendering with cycles or if you're rendering with et what we're doing for this project is essentially we've only enabled the mist pass and object under crypto mat so once you do that it'll actually add a new input and your output in your render layers so if you were to add something like the denoising data it would add the denoising passes or outputs from here which you can then plug in to a file output node and like with anything else in blender shift a gives you the prompt to add something and then you would just add a file output node and then you would start adding things to your file output so let's say we wanted to add that denoising clean over here in the settings you just hit the end key to bring that up we would add an input and let's call this D noise clean at that and then you would just drag it in there now this is what's gonna be out put it once you render out one thing to keep in mind is you've got basically two outputs inside a blender you have your comp output and you also have your your scene output basically so this is the scene outputs every time you render something in blender it'll put it in the temp folder now you notice these two are the same once you do your final outputs you want to change this path to I don't know like a project folder on your desktop or something like that and one thing I quickly wanted to mention was because we are going to be working with the Miss path if you want to do this for your own project first go to the world settings under mist pass you want to change these settings depending on your size the size of your scene basically so I'm working on a fairly large scene I'm adding a lot of depth essentially it'll be rendering further away from the camera with the mist pass just to give me some more depth but you kind of have to figure this out for yourself the sort of ways to preview something in in nuyk nuyk in blender Lucas what we've used before is like a popular compositing engine we're gonna set a new cloth we're gonna say a new glut to view this you basically hold down shift control and then you put your left mouse button you click something and that connects it to a viewer node if your node can also be created if you'd shift a and then search for viewer node so you'll have a viewing out there a lot of people will use the backdrop functionality to actually show it here I've disabled that because I never want my comp to show up here the way I display my comps is I drag out a new window and then I set it to something like the image editor and on this one here like your image whatever you want to display I set it to a viewer node like this way anything I shift control left mouse button click on will show up in my image viewer and I can easily manipulate it scale it around so that's how we'll be working with this for the most you I really want to be working what if you were node you very very much want to avoid using an actual backdrop that's gonna be held a confusing for you another quick thing I just want to take a look at is going to be using a xrs or float 1/2 float images vs. regular images this image here is an EXR image and this is a PNG so by default blender renders houses pngs obviously you can adjust the compression of this yourself and just a lot of the settings with the images you render out I see a lot of people render out straight a vis I would HIGHLY discourage that especially when you're doing compositing the reason for this is because there's a lot of compression in these things even even if you have avi it's like compression this format it only has a it has like a depth cap basically so you'll never reach the depth that you need what I mean by that is it's probably going to be easier if we just show you the differences so this is a render up PNG and this is a render out EXR there's an obvious color change which has to do with the color profiles we use but more importantly let's say we right-click here in the on the Sun here if you look down here so here you can see the red value is 0.9 right and four colors regular colors on the screen the maximum color would be a one and one would be a maximum basically however if we click on the EXR you can see the red value actually is set to five so it's beyond one that becomes important once you do compositing for depth for blurs for something like a glare node which we've serendipitously just ended up right next to where we need is how lucky so if we plug in the PNG into the glare node here and we've previewed you see nothing actually happens because our threshold is set to one this is just the default so any pixels that are brighter than this value they'll you know they won't be glowing so if we do the same thing with the XR which has a brighter value than one this actually starts to glow so obviously for for an example like this with the PNG image you could just you could change your threshold to be lower to accept like a lower number of lower lower intensity basically but once you start looking at something like compression you'll start noticing a lot of artifacts once you start you're grading whether it's crunching your values especially the whites and the blacks in your images once you start adding a lot more contrast you'll end up with a lot more noise in PNG images or JPEGs or whatever it is whereas with EAX ours are a lot more forgiving because they have a lot more data also when it comes to eat ours as well they contain far for more far far more depth for instance in the example we had here you might have a light which is overexposed and the PNG s but because you have so much active data in the XR we can always bring it back and on the point of using a vis as well like org rendering - like a like a video compressor or video file format one of the important things is but not doing that is let's say you have a thousand frames and it crashes after 900 you're not completely screwed you cannot get your data back but if the crisis also 900 frames of rendering in Tonique SAR then you're fine you just render the additional 100 frames and one last thing about the advantages of VX ours I mean one thing is they're they're just bigger files so that's a disadvantages I suppose but the reason for that is the extra data but when we're rendering out something like crypto mats the crypto mats is a mask format basically that we'll be using to isolate certain elements of our comp those require what's called a full float format so we that'll be a 32-bit EXR so you know you have your file output and the file outputs again if you had end to open up the options there it'll usually be set to PNG and these are the values you'll have and you can change the compression but whenever you're working with crypto mats it's important especially when you're saving them out that you're using the XRS and it's set to full float not half load which is it's a 16 bit so it's half of the value to be full float it's 32 bit it's otherwise crypto mats just won't work but all that is taken care of in the project file that you'll find in the description so in short use 16 bit X ours for most things and use 32-bit X ours for couple months okay so now let's for real actually get started so the first thing we want to do hit shift they get an input and find the image sequence so if you want to import just an image you're saying you're comping a still image you're not following along with the class provided you would just use an image and import that but we're going to do an image sequence this is our folder and in the folder there are a few things provided we have the Alpha there's the crypto mats there's three three of those that you need there's the image and there's the missed pass so let's I'm not gonna worry about the Alpha for now it's if you want to experiment you can't import that of one so I'll just start with the first crypto map you can click any of these by the way like it doesn't have to be the first number in in the sequence if you like number nine or whatever you import the sequence like that it'll just import it and then we'll just go ahead and do that for the rest one thing I like to do especially for passes that I don't really care that much about it I don't need that often that I want to look at is if you click this little arrow you can just minimize them essentially keeps it a little more tidy because as you go along comps will become they will look complicated because it's sort of like an evolving thing it becomes more and more complex a little note here is on the image sequence input this will read your files automatically so it'll see okay you have 100 frames and it starts at frame 1 now it'll always say it'll start from frame 1 but you might have rendered from frame 0 I know you can see it actually goes away so if you did render from frame 0 you can just offset this by minus 1 and it'll say it'll it'll do the correct frame range basically so from before we can view this file if we hit shift ctrl and left click on it now it's in the backdrop I don't like this personally so I always turn it off and as before I'll drag out a new window set it to image editor and set it to viewer node and here I have I feel like I have more control over it and I can sort of resize it the way I want I just personally like it out here you might like it better in the node editor that's kind of up to you so one of the things that you'll notice with this one is I rendered this out without a background you see it's pnt or like it's not PNG is just transparent so there's no background color because I wanted to add this in in comp basically in order to do this we're going to be using something called a texture node so let's get our image home here shift a and we'll search for texture I think you should start getting familiar or become familiar with the search function instead of having to go through menus and remembering where things are the search menu just makes everything a lot easier then we actually need some kind of color in it as well so if you go to the texture palette you can add a new texture and by default it'll say image or movie I want to add this gradient from top to bottom so I'll change it to a blend if you see there's a gradient from left to right we'll change it to vertical and now we have that we also want to add a little bit of color to it so open up the color palette choose color ramp and they'll just give you a standard color ramp now by default the left-hand color will be on transparent as indicated by this so you just click the color and drag out the Alpha you left actually have a solid color now we need to merge these two together and you'll become pretty familiar with this process the more you do compositing so it's just about like a mindset of how things work if you used to Photoshop it kind of works a little bit like that where you know one thing on top of each other one thing you have to keep in mind though is alphas alphas are anything in an image if you click this little thing here where you have a black and white basically a black and white map that represents where you will have opaque and transparent elements within your image and this can be a gradient as well it doesn't have to be a clear cut like this so sisters back to color and alpha and it'll show us basically what it looks like if we just set it to color it wouldn't actually show this you can see we have some jagged edges here this is oh this is where it gets annoying this is because our image is currently on premultiplied it's one of those annoying things on promoting and promoting and compositing that you'll run into a lot in order to merge these two together we need to use a another node normally when you're merging things together in comp you would use a mix node so a mix node just takes two inputs and merges them together basically so in this case we have this will set it to texture and now you can see we have the black and white texture so if we take the color of this and add it to an input now one little bit of confusing thing about the mix note is that whatever's at the bottom will appear at the top so this is our top element and the image will be our bottom element now and then again shift control left mouse button we'll click it there you go you can see because this already has transparency built into it it'll actually only put the color where there is opaque values which is not what we want you can switch these inputs and they'll switch that now it puts our image on top but it doesn't actually display the the color that we want so in this instance we could just click the alpha button next to words this mix this will automatically include the Alpha from our second input which in this case is the beauty render which is for the sake of this example I'm going to do it a little more a little bit more complicated this time around just to show you the power of compositing and I guess not just using the first and easiest option that that you have at hand we'll start with something called an alpha over which takes two inputs from two images basically so first we'll take our beauty image put it at the bottom and then we'll take our texture and we'll put that on top of it preview that and now we have our background behind it then we change the color of this this is just to get an initial color grading such so we know where we're working with so we can see the red is down there and the blue is up higher and this is also really where you can see that comp is a creative thing you're not just doing comp - technically please something you're doing this to properly make your images beautiful and take to the next level yeah it's it's one of those things where I guess if you were hoping for a a 2b tutorial on this is exactly how you do stuff that's not what comp really is about it's an iterative process back and forth back and forth all the time that's also why I like making a nuke script sorry blender script the blenders get the blender comp isn't just a 2b and you're done it it takes some time and it takes playing around with because it is like it is a creative process yeah as a compositor or as a hobby compositor it's is very much a creative process okay so something like that so now we have background color the reason for this again we use the Alpha over it's because we we have an image that already has an alpha and then we want to merge that combine that with an image that doesn't have an alpha so we just put those on top of each other and there we go the only real difference between using an alpha over node and just clicking the Alpha button is that with the alpha over node you get a I guess secondary input in the form of you know it has to image inputs one you can use for either just a straight color or you could pipe something else into it so it's just a lot more powerful and it gives you more flexibility now next up we wanted to go through some effects and some color correction that's really I think when a lot of people people think about compositing that's what they think about they think about like adding smoke elements adding glue and lotion to all these other stuff all the all the extra bits which makes it realistic which is really hard to do in CG so you're often combining it with like video elements or maybe particles from Houdini or something like that so first up let's let's try to add a Eclair for example that's like a you can use that for glow so if we add that to this just take our input you can drag it over just left mouse button drag it over and this is what we showed before as well in the previous comp where you know we'll have this it'll glow on elements that exceed this threshold basically so one cool thing you can do is depending on obviously depending on your threshold and depending on the colors that you have you can really start to get very specific it's very specific with what elements actually start to glow so let's lower this threshold a bit and keep everything there you can really start to play around with it I wanted to have this sci-fi look to the scene and so adding these kind of I guess very unnatural streaks of light the problem with this now is that I don't want it to affect everything you know even though things have different intensities and stuff it it actually affects the entire image you can see this gets streaks this gets streaks and these elements I just want to isolate it to these parts only and the best way to do that is to mask things out and it's it's kind of a similar process as to when were using the Alpha channel before but we can make our own masks that's what we have the crypto mats that we supply it before if you want to I guess more in depth video on this we have a whole video on how to set up crypto mats and what they actually do but for our purposes here we're just going to be referring to them as just standard masks yeah we'll put a link to that in the description so first off to work with crypto mats week search for crypto mat and crypto mat takes four inputs it takes an image input which is the image input isn't strictly necessary let me show you what I mean and then we just plug these in this is also the reason for collapsing these before 0 1 & 2 just they don't take up that much space she have control left mouse button click on this and if you do you need you notice this has 3 inputs you can shift control left mouse button to toggle through the inputs basically until we get to the pic now the pic it's like it sounds you have to pick the colors that you want to mask out so in my case here I just want to pick out these two suns so we say add pick that and now if we toggle through it again you can see it's picked out that part of the image and if you look at the mask this is what it looks like so we'll add this one as well and then we can sort of go through the image and if we go through the animation sequence you can see is sort of just animates back and forth and we've only taken out these elements now now we want to use this similar technique in with the Alpha over that we use before because again now we have an image that has an alpha Channel and so let's add an alpha over and just add that in between here and the viewer node now one thing you'll notice is that one of the inputs here actually has a color depending on which input is is empty basically let's take this and we'll put it down into the bottom input which leaves us remember whatever's at the top here is actually the background and this is the foreground so here we have a white color we want to change that to black then you see we're still actually seeing this part of the image which we wouldn't really expect if we go into the image what you see okay has an alpha Channel but actually it's more of a visual thing once you add an alpha over that part of the information carries over then what we need to do is we need to pre multiply the image now pre multiplying simply let's use the free lack of better word stamp out what is in the Alpha Channel yeah it's like if you when you have an alpha channel alpha an alpha channel doesn't mean that you've actually masked it out it just means that you have an alpha channel so you can have you can have a beauty render and you can have now an alpha Channel and you can still see everything there but by promoting it now it is like Mortimer saying you were like stamping it out you're like room you're actually removing the data you're you're like applying the mask to it whenever you hear Premal just think that it's been masked why don't I just use metaphors more than how we're talking about before it's like before recording it's kind of like you've you've cut like a hole in in like a desk do you would like a table saw but not you haven't actually hammered it out promoting is kind of like hammering out the hole yeah so here you can see the Alpha actually exists in the image but we're not using it for anything visually it looks like it because we're appearing color with alpha but this is still what the image looks like then once we go over to our alpha over and we actually pre multiply it we cut out that part which is black in in the Alpha so now we have our clear note which we want to put up there one thing you one way you can do that is by disconnecting it and putting it up there you can hold down control and right mouse button and cutting this go drag it up there and now you can see it only really effects well whatever is in the image and our case it's just the two little sons that we that we had created and one thing you can do just to play around with this is like the the mixed value it'll go between sort of like mixing the original and mixing it fully explained like a fully glowing image basically okay and we'll disconnect from the viewer you'll see me doing this a lot sort of like where I've connected to something and control right mouse button disconnecting just because it becomes a little bit easier sometimes when you have a lot of nodes and there's a viewer node that goes in between or across all of them it can start looking a little bit confusing so now we're going to go to one of the passes that we kind of left alone for a bit which is the missed pass now the missed pass is great for adding depth to your image again remember this spoke to your scene I believe we added a depth of 500 meters just because this is a big scene if you're working on a different project you have to adjust this for yourself so we have this part now which has the background color and we have the mist pass we want to merge these two together and this time because we're not really interested we don't have images that have pre or premultiplied alpha s on them like this beauty pass does so we don't have to use this alpha over node now we can use the mix note that I mentioned before so this takes three inputs technically two images and it has this factorial value which is your opacity so you can pluck out masks into this like animated masks if you want to but for most of what we're doing we're just gonna be concerned with the image inputs and again whatever's on the bottom will go at the top which is going to be our beauty render and whatever is on top goes on the bottom so confusing a little every time it gets me so here you can see if we play with the factorial we can sort of like make the mist come in and out but it doesn't really serve that much of a purpose when it's done like this because we can't really see what we're doing so instead we want to change the blending mode I'll change it to add this way we preserve the lightness in the image and and anything that's pure black in the image will basically be left alone again it's not super interesting this way so we can add a color ramp in between these inputs and then we can actually start to colorize our the mist in here so we just view this now and we change our wiped to something purpley something like that so this is basically remapping everything which was white to this this white this purpley yep and there we go now you have something purple on top but this can be adjusted as well so because we have the ramp like ending is saying we can remap it we can sort of define where our plane lives you see just by changing the color we can actually change sort of overall intensity of where things are in the image yes a little art correction tip as well try to avoid pure black and pure white yes that's that makes it very dirty so even if you do have something like a mist pass here or depth pass whatever you want to call it try to try to add a little bit of color into it so now you can see this has been put on top again if we go back to the mix for example that's what it looks like go back to add just adds it on top just like so and one cool thing you can do is if you want to preview this without the top element which is the bottom element so remember the mist pass goes on top so it's at the bottom you can select your node and press m to mute it basically and now you can see this is the change that it's doing just this subtle little thing that adds a little bit of depth to the image this is really useful I think M is probably one of the most useful hotkeys because you you will often be toggling this on and off just to see the change that you've just done yeah this just unifies it quite a lot just adding little mist pass and we'll take those select them hit G to move them a little bit and then we'll start going into organizing our scene a little bit as we go along often I like to minimize the the notes that I won't really be using much more most of these I'll leave open when I come because it's easier for me to go and just tweak the values and then next up this is really what a lot of the companies especially when you're grading is will add another mix node and now we'll focus on getting the glare that we made earlier on to onto this part that has the background image and the mist so it will take our glare which is our top element it'll go at the bottom and we'll take our bottom element which is the beauty image it'll go on the top so you control right mouse button and view it and then here again we'll use the add function to add it on top and this just adds the bright elements and any black elements will basically be left out and sort of cut out from from from the image you're using add is is essentially technically not like using screen but it's but it's kind of like using screen it's like using a more mathematically correct version of screen so if you look at screen now that's super messed up math and stuff when it comes to screen let's look at an element over here you can see how screen doesn't actually preserve the brightness whereas edie does it like it adds the brightness on top that's usually how I like to think of it sometimes screen can be useful but with AD you you ensure that you see our brightness values it stays the same and actually adds it on top after this there was another glow element I actually wanted to put on top just because this is this here was meant as a sure like Sun streak sci-fi glow so I mean you can unless that's the beauty of this you can chain as many of these together as you want so we'll add another flare on top here this time well we'll use some different settings so before we just left it up to default streaks there's also one called fog glow a fog low just that's like a soft glow to everything it basically blurs the entire image and then just kind of like a screen or add on top so you just get these nice elements depending on the threshold basically so I'll lower the threshold a bit I don't point one or something you can also use this even if you aren't going for something this stylized everything has some level of glow to it that's just you know a bloom effect you might have so it just makes it it just makes it a little bit more realistic though you might not go as crazy as Morton physically yeah this is I'm going a little bit over the top one for emphasis but maybe also because I just think it looks cool yeah so something like that you know there's some pretty basic stuff just to get started here I know the beginning here is a little bit complicated but also it takes a while before you actually get I guess get used to working with this but once you're comfortable you can do it you can start to do really really powerful things with this sort of setup okay now let's get into a little bit of grading so what I like to use for this is the RGB curves node so if we add that in between here just adding the node and itself doesn't really do anything but we can start playing with these curves by default when it's a straight curve like this it doesn't do anything this is the brights this is the darks if you pull the brights down like this and we actually view it you see it actually pulls down the brightness of the image same thing if you pull this up this is the darks it'll it'll take everything that's sort of black and it'll just pull it up a bit so playing around with your curves here can have a big impact on what your image actually looks like for this scene I'm just basically I'm taking the bright and the dark values and I'm putting them closer together making more contrast in the image not a lot it's just a little bit and that's I guess that's the name of the game with compositing a lot of the time another thing you can do is let's say this element over here we didn't like the hue of it or the color of what it looked like so you can use something called a hue correct and a hue correct gives you the spectrum of color that makes it really easy to manipulate what colors do what in your image so this HSV is use saturation value I always forget I don't know I always forget the H in this it's like I know what it does but I always forget yeah we were talking about it's like four times today but and every time like any what's the a chicken it's for Henning anyway our color spectrum you know we have the the Reds you if you're in doubt you can always check this by going over here to see what's the dominant color of your image here you see this can't this son here it lends a little bit from red green and from blue but the mid I guess the dominant one would be in the red color so we can take this and drop it down just a little bit you can see B we get more of a a white looking value or a white color because we're dropping down the saturation of it then in the value we'll take the same color spectrum here and we'll pull it up a little bit and and you can keep going with this kind of correction forever if you just hit shift a and go under color you'll find a lot of different ways to adjust your image whether it's at a simple brightness contrast they can be a color balance where you have more control over each individual color a gamma node where you can adjust adjust the brightness as well hue correct which we just used an invert node this is often useful for masking and we will use this later on so there's a lot of different things you can do within the the color palette they're basically another comp element that you often see will be even yet been getting is the sort of dark hello that happens around the edges of the screen this is only really related to physical cameras but we've taken that into film and into the digital world to try to make digital images look more realistic and these are pretty easy to make if you start by using a ellipse mask I just search for masks you've control left mouse button to view this you get this and we'll just it's just a little sphere that we'll adjust to our image something like this like none of this is gonna be like specific I'll use it's just kind of like what what do you think looks good and this like with anything else we can merge these two together so just use a mix node now for this one we want to use just the black elements all the white elements we want to be cut out for that we use a multiply node so we take the mask here and we put it in to the image this is going to be our foreground element so it goes on the bottom and for this we go with this and we change this to multiply view the image and now we have a vignette obviously this is a terrible vignette because it's just like perfectly sharp so we can search and add a blur node put that in between the two notes and oh I'm like 500 is probably good it blurs everything and there we go now we have this like dark vignette around again if you want to preview with and without hit em on the on the node and it'll show you before and after maybe a little bit too much something like this so now it's just like there's a subtle gradient especially in the brighter Suns which just gives I guess it gives more dimensionality to to the image then we'll do a color overlay just to show you how you sort of get a full image on top of everything so again we'll use a texture node just like we used before cut that away because it's a little confusing now and let's just duplicate our texture pull this overlay nice you forgot to name the other texture but it doesn't really matter say use the overlay and for this I want to use some different colors I want to use some sci-fi colors here and of course cypher coves are properly established and this is this is the standard of sci-fi colors it's always like this you can't invent anything else when it comes to sci-fi color space no boy it's like sci-fi which is also mixed with like blade around 1980s little bit of Miami Vice one good thing to notice under these is the progression now you have different kinds of interpolation you can see the linear each pixel is like a perfect you know progression from from red to blue basically use something like quadratic you'll have a different fall-off I don't know the math behind any of these I just know they give you a different look you're it favors the bottom color more I suppose and I think that then I could look quite cool so again go in with a mix note and then we'll add these two together so we have our original multiplied element there which goes at the bottom then the color remember to use the color not the value I think this is one of the few notes where the color input isn't actually at the top but just so you're aware and we'll add those two together now obviously this is not gonna look great this is meant for like this is meant for like a subtle effect so I don't know it's your point zero one or something just something really subtle it does we don't want it to take too much focus we turn it off you just see it just takes up the complete blacks just a little bit just so it's not as dull yeah that's what we talked about before try to avoid using pure blacks and pure whites yeah just have a little bit of color in them your mind's ear to look at instead something like that okay cool now we are gonna talk about external elements so for this we're using what we're using like the video copilot lens lens flare yeah exactly you can you can find images of like a lens crime everywhere if you sim research list so for individual images I find it easiest to just drag and drop them into my scene basically then and there there you can of course add an input add an image and then find the image but I don't know for me this is just this is the easier way to to go about it I think and here I mean literally drag and drop it from the Windows Explorer yeah yeah so for these elements oftentimes these kinds of elements will have a black background which again we can use screen to clip out the black and use the whites so we'll just do this super basic for the mix note for now and then we'll sort of build on this just to show you what it would normally look like when when we work you know you don't really want to start with making the finished look of how you expect this to be you want to just add it into your your stream into your notes to begin with just to get a general sense of okay that just looks crazy you know so obviously we don't want that then we can go back to our node here and then we can say okay what what would be a logical thing to do here we would want to mask and maybe we would want to move it a little bit because we want to get rid of these edges so we can use a transform node and pipe that in there you that and then maybe we want to scale this up or something like that transform is fantastic because you can do exactly that you can transform your notes you can move them around scale them around or rotate them so maybe something like that that way we have something here on the sides and it's been scaled up a little bit again you can also just use these to see what it looks like with end to end without basically then just as before with the vignette we're actually going to make a mask with the ellipse mask can you that and we'll just sort of adjust this to maybe something like that and now we already know okay we want to add a blur node because otherwise we'll just have like a hard crop which probably won't look very good so what do you see is we keep using the same nodes over and over again I keep keep it simple when it comes to to compositing it's not about knowing every single node it's about knowing like a handful of nodes and keep and reuse them over and over again yeah essentially so now we have a bit of an issue here right because we have an element here which is black and white which is our mask or our alpha and we have an element which doesn't really have an alpha so we need to find a way to actually merge these two like merge the alpha of this into the image so for that we want to use the set alpha node now the set alpha node takes two inputs it takes an image and it takes an alpha super simple we just take the image of the Alpha here and we take our transform node if the lens flare we take that there then we can take this one and we can and put it into our screen note from before you see nothing really happens this is because we've set the Alpha but we haven't actually set told the node to do anything specific with it yet what you can do is over here on the input you can actually tell it to use the Alpha from the image this will just cut it out if you don't like using this there's another way to do it with the Alpha convert node these basically do the same thing with this you're just changing it from a straight or unpromoted light image to a premultiplied image which is exactly the same as this button does so you can save yourself a node or you can I guess keep it cleaner with the node depending on on how you like to work basically you were talking about now like we said before you are talking about just activating the mosque you're talking about turning the Alpha into a mosque we do have an issue though I don't want it to be old Splatt Splatt blasted all over the screen I actually want it just in on the edges where the vignette is so for that I can use the invert I'll just pipe that in between these two and if I view the invert now it'll cut out the part in here and it'll leave the sides so again let's view this part out here see what it looks like pretty crazy but now we have something here which is just on the sides it's obviously a little too strong and we don't want to go too overboard with this so let's increase the size of our mask a little bit go back to this and then we probably want to adjust the intensity of this a little bit just so it doesn't take over the image completely and here you can clearly see the advantage of using that node-based compositor light blender or using nuke or whatever might be because here you can just change the shape if you're changing this in Photoshop you will have to go in and repaint the mask and it's a lively mess well now you just change some settings on a node another thing that I thought I wanted to show you here which i think is pretty cool we're come we're closing towards the end now here is we're doing the sci-fi scene and we're already going pretty crazy when it comes to lights right so I want to add some lens distortion into all this and there's luckily a note for that so search you go lens distortion and I'll show you what I mean now adding things in between your comp is kind of like this back and forth that we talked about you kind of have to figure out where do you want it where does it make sense so for a lens distortion I wanted to be added after we have all the cool glow elements like this this glare element here but I wanted to take place before the grading so it also gets that on top so we'll add it in between these two elements here and this is completely up to you it really depends on what you want out of your image so it could be before it could be after it can be even earlier maybe it just depends on what you're actually comping for this we'll just worry about the dispersion that's the point 1c okay that's pretty crazy you can see what it does it breaks it out into individual channels like blue and red channels and it just sort of like shifts them a little bit like if I do this even more like 0.5 you'll see it even go even more crazy like this you could really I mean really go crazy with this but we'll just do a little bit here something like that nothing too crazy and have that element in there and let's let's see what this looks like so we go to the end element here and once you have all these elements it takes a little while for it to actually composite them on top of each other and there we go so that's where we are now and for the final element here I guess to tie everything together one of the things you often see in comping is film green and this is something that especially for real-world footage you often need film grain to integrate your CG footage with your reel like your live-action footage because all live-action footage has noise Ct footage doesn't necessarily unless you're using a lot of low samples but by adding a film grain you have finer control over the noise in your image and the easiest way to add this is not by doing it yourself I'm actually using a film green node from they have a youtube channel called CG virus will link their github down below where you can download it so if you just hit f4 you can append it so once you've downloaded that the film green from their github you'll find this in the zip file and just pin the film green append and go to the node tree and hit film green then just like any other node you just search for it you just search for grain like that and now the grain it's like Oh unfortunately you can't just plug it in like any other node but we can fix that with a standard mixed node then we take our film grain and we add it at the bottom because it's the top element and we have the other one that's the bottom element and we view that and now it's gonna be pretty crazy it's just gonna be lots of noise so for this image you can do a few things when it comes to noise like this see it's just a bunch of random color values the I guess the default way to add this would be with an overlay honest add it to an overlay and you can see it like it favors these like gray areas anything that's completely black or completely white doesn't get as much noise so what I want here I'm actually going to switch to the color dodge its wait for it to update and it'll look like it goes super crazy so it'll be a little more even here but then we'll a chat will adjust the opacity a little bit 0.5 see what that looks like and you know then it favors some of these lighter elements but it'll also put them in some of the darker elements you can play around with this a lot too to get a better feel for what your look what the look is you're after in your comp but just adding a little bit of film grain like this I think really adds a lot to your image so in order to get your final composited image or image sequence out of blender you can if you're just using one image like if you just if you're not actually copying a sequence you know you can go to image save as but that's not really going to be helpful for the people that are doing sequences so here we can add a file output node just like we showed you in the beginning when you're rendering out passes this is exactly the same thing we'll take our last input or last output and plug it into the file output node then I like to cut this just because it's slow because then it's actually compositing all the time don't worry everything is still working the way it's it should be now what we mentioned before as well is this part here needs to be different compared to your scene output like if these are both set to temp these will override each other when you're rendering out and I think you'll just end up with black images or no images at all actually so let's just go to the properties for this and here I would still recommend that you don't render out as like a video file even anything you can can you yeah do don't do like a meme format like avi when I'm rendering out something like this let's say this is for final output I'll usually render it out as a PNG and let's say of a final folder whoops it's already populated but don't worry about that so this will be our new file path right so it's set to desktop enter to comp and then output final then we have our image now this you can name whatever you want you mean the final render and that's all this will be or your image sequence now because it's set to PNG by default so if you want to tweak this like right now it'll be final render 0 0 1 dot PNG what you can do is you can add a oops final render you can add a dot and then add what are these called they work or pound or hashes so naming it something like this final render you you can see you have control over you will have a dot between the numbers you could say I actually I want four numbers that will be 0 0 0 1 it's really up to you this sequence won't be more than a thousand frames anyway it'll only be a hundred you add that and then you hit ctrl f12 and basically render animation and it'll render to your final output folder and now the question is why did we render out of blender as as EXR files and why did we render out off of final blend out of the comp as PNG files and the reason is because when you're doing comp on it you need to actually have a lot more data like all the grading you're doing you need just a lot more bit depth but when you're rendering out now you're not gonna be grading this further with done with all the grading and now it's time to basically flatten out a comp and still not have any compression on what we're doing for now for in so you can bring this into premiere and you can keep editing on it but we're done with all the heavy color work so then we don't need the additional data one final thing before we wrap up I just quickly want to cover organization within your comp so right now and everything kind of looks like a mess and it's split up everywhere so it's just first good just move these out of the way what you can do is you can add frames to specific nodes or specific points in your comp I sort of like a background to help you keep it organized and visually see what's actually going on so as an example let's just mark all these and then press shift P this will add and interact the frame around the nodes that are in this now and if you come over to your settings you can expand the color change the color and then give it a label like for example these would be all of our inputs that just keeps it pretty organized and it's easy for us to define example this part up here could be our glare give it a different color we could call this our glare this here where we're putting the background together actually let's drag this input in here this was our mist so we'll just shift P on this give it a different color again pull this mist and here smart these shift P give them a different color again I mean you can do the same color if you want to it's just it's easier visually to keep an eye on what's actually happening so I'm gonna call these effects / color correction up here we have our vignette so mark those if P all that and yet here we have a color overlay which I want to keep separate from the actual color correction because this is just like an image that goes on top it's called overlay yeah something different or this this is our Lin's crime again shift P [Music] some kind of color [Music] and just the end here do this and save film green there you go so this is sort of a way to keep everything organized within your comp not just for you but especially also if you're handing this comp over to someone else to later pick up it'll be a lot easier for them for them to actually see what's happening if you've labeled everything that way they know which notes do exactly what and what part of the comp are are they're part of and I think that about just does it for everything we wanted to show you for I guess introducing you to the world of compositing inside a blender yeah thank you so much for watching it this has been a lot of fun and we are very interested in doing more in compositor and blender and doing all this rendering stuff it's such a powerful software and it's a fun area to explore so thank you guys for watching and we'll see you in the next video if you're looking for training or high quality assets make sure to stop by the flip normals marketplace and if you're interested in supporting us by buying our merchandise you can check that out in the description below

Channel: FlippedNormals

Views: 61,645

Keywords: Blender, blender 2.8, blender2.9, introduction to compositing, compositing inblender, basics of compositing, blending modes, mist pass, premult, unpremult, blender compositing, mix node, blender nodes, nodes, alpha channel, how to composit, blender vs nuke, blender 3d, blender, blender tutorial, blender for beginners, beginners guide to compositing, compositing in blender

Id: bF7RV1My41s

Length: 58min 23sec (3503 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 09 2020