Lightning Power Effect // Nuke Compositing

today i'm going to show you how to make a really cool lightning power effect in the foundries nuke and using the nuke survival toolkit created by tony alliance check it out all right this is the nuke survival toolkit that you will need to install before you begin uh this is an amazing script um that adds a bunch of gizmos and templates and plugins for nuke for free and it's amazing it comes with some rad tools so go support tony lions and i'll leave the link in the description below at the github to go download this and i'll also put a link to his install video it's incredibly helpful and i absolutely love this toolkit i'm using it on every project it's amazing so now let's jump over into nuke okay so here's some footage that i took of myself trying to be cool and this was just shot in my office and the way i got these lights to flash is i own what's called quasar lights and they're basically light tubes and they can do different modes so i had two light tubes flashing um and giving a cool effect so um one thing i always suggest when people are trying to do effects on set is try to get things let me pause it so you don't have a seizure try to get as much lighting as you can onset correct so if i know i'm wanting to do a lightning effect rather than having let's say just a static light like this and then adding effects you can do it by using some flicker and some other things but actually filming like flickering effects and a bunch of other effects it will enhance the look of your visual effects so always try to do things practically as far as you can and then use visual effects so with that if you're new to nuke uh welcome and hang in there this is not going to be too bad um what i want to show you guys is some of the basic how i set this up and how easy you can make nuke so when you first open nuke there's a viewer down here which is the viewer is connected to our window so if i press one you see this little one down here that is just saying that it's connected to this window so if i press if i disconnect it we don't see anything and if i click on something i hit one it's now connected and to get video files in is you just need to import them and another word for importing is called reading so you can either right click to get to all the menu of all your tools and things like that and you can find things this way like image and you'll read so that's basically an import and write is an export or you can just hit r which you'll just start getting used to as you use it and then you hit w and it will create a write node which is to export so there you go so i'm going to try to keep this as basic as i can the first thing you need to do is set up your project you want to hit s and this will bring up your project window i have my um tabs floating normally they'll come in on the side so in here we can see i have my project set to one to um 180 frames but i cut mine down to 20 and you can see the format so if i double click this clip this will bring up the information about my clip so we can see it's one to 89 frames and i put the output color space to srgb which is uh how i exported it it is an exr and so good we see that this is all right and we see the format is 3654 by 1440 that's exactly what we want so we want to make sure this number matches our uh project scale so when you read something in okay that's correct and down here yep 3654 by 1440. so by default it's probably gonna be 1920 by 1080 it'll be something like this and so you just got to make sure you come down and when you import new stuff it'll find your latest dimension so make sure that's set up and we're going to set this to 20 frames because i don't need to render all of it out for this lesson and now color space by default it's going to be a new color like this but i changed mine to the ocio aces and my monitor is srgb and so i'm viewing this in the proper color space so um this isn't ace's lessons but aces will basically help you see uh more dynamic range your bright areas bit better they won't clip in the darker areas as well okay so our project is set up properly and the way nuke works is instead of layers and having layers and layers you basically work downward so this so we're going to work our way down and so now let's start introducing um some of the cool tools from the nuke survival toolkit so if you go up into filter there's a bunch of cool effects and the effect we're going to use today is this x tools x tesla this is an awesome tool so right off the bat you'll see a new node pops up and the properties for it but we can't see it so we have to just select it and then you hit one and boom now you can see it pretty easily now if i attach this top arrow into our footage it's going to be on top of our footage and it's going to look correct but i'm going to merge i'm going to put this on top of our footage a different way so i'm going to disconnect this and we can see our dimension our size is totally different it's not exactly what we want so i need to create for this particular gizmo i need to create what's called a constant so if you hit tab which is how you search for effects and you type constant now we have a constant and now here's the this node's uh properties and if i click on this one i hit one now i can view that so we just need to make sure this constant is set up to the format of our project and i'm going to just close this window and then i'm going to connect the tesla uh electric effect to that so now we can see it's formatted the proper way and if you're seeing that my number's different here and that's because i have up here what's called is proxy mode so see now it's the correct format but if i click right here now everything's going to be in a lower resolution like half resolution but it'll work faster so i like to work in half resolution for speed sake so now we have this effect and you can see if i move these points around cool these are that's great now how do we get this on top of our footage so it's very easy in nuke what you have to use is called merge nodes so you can either right click and search for a merge note or look for the merge node or you can hit m you can hit m and that will create a merge node and what this is saying is b is your background and a is what goes on top of it so we know we want a our electric effect to be on top of our background so we'll connect it like that now we're not seeing the effect yet and that is because we can see this dotted line connected to the viewer is not looking at the merge so click on our merge and hit one now you can see your effect on top of your background now we're going to change this so let me close the tesla properties and if we see this merge there's different operations and the operation we want to use you'll probably recognize these from after effects like comp modes composite modes we're going to set this to a screen or you could do a plus so you should be familiar with those after using after effects and then we're going to close it don't worry about anything down here yet we'll get into this maybe into some other lessons so now um our effect is properly on top of our footage so double click the tesla effect and now we want to just make some adjustments to our effect so i'm going to take this point one put it in this hand and we'll take the point two and put it in this hand and we're going to zoom in here and start looking at some of the parameters that we have available to us in this tesla effect so you have these different tabs up here and this gives us some different things we can do you can see it's made by and you can see all these other things so 0.1.2 you can add multiple bolts so if we wanted i don't know three bolts coming from here let's do that and you have this amplitude effect we have a soft start so it's a little uh closer together at the beginning we have a soft end so it's gonna make the ends a little bit closer as well then we have frequency effects so we can make it more jaggedy or less jaggedy same with this this is like even smaller frequencies which is gets a little crazy secondary so we have another one so just different layers of frequency that we can really play with and hone in we also have um nice width so i like to have this a little bit bigger and then end with so down at these this end how wide we want the end points to look like so i'm not going to turn that one up and then let's go into branches so these are like uh the branches that come off of it so if we add more you can see more so it's coming off there and then we can choose the direction if we want it really directional and we could turn down the turn up or down the randomization and the length or we can just have it all kind of be closer together i'm going to go back to the base and i'm actually just going to do two bolts like that okay then we come back in here and maybe turn down some of the length and we can play with the amplitude of that as well so there's all these really cool parameters that you can start playing with let's bring this what i'm trying to do right now is kind of make this closer to where my hands are um let's see if we can spread these out a little bit more too that's looking better okay and i'm going to bring this closer to the end like that and maybe the directional is there we go let's come back in here the frequency see if we can add a little bit more amplitude into this okay so that's looking pretty cool now what i like to do is animate the width so maybe it starts like zero and then it'll get super bright or it starts really big and then it goes smaller over time but we'll get to that a little bit later now we'll go into the animation and you can do what's uh retract so it's going to pull away so you could animate this going like forward which is another really cool effect so it looks like it's over time kind of growing there you go there's random seed so if we want to change it up that's a great way to just change things up get different looks so until we find one we like speed and now we're going to render so this render tab is really cool because they have so like saturation so we can make it a little more blue less blue the intensity of the glow that's a little too intense and i'm going to turn the ab the aberration which is the chromatic aberration it's just a little too intense for my taste and we could either turn up the sharpening so the edges of this are really sharp or turned down i'm going to keep mine a little bit lower so look a little bit more realistic and there's glow radius which we all love lots of glow or at least i do the intensity of that glow i'm gonna zoom out a little bit and then there's noise this is really cool so adds noise into your glow and that's another cool thing that you can have in here there we go so now i can turn this soft highlights on or i can keep that off just depending on what you're wanting to do i'm going to leave it as default i'm going to go back to the base and turn that first width down it just looks too intense but that's looking cool looks like i'm kind of shooting like a beam out and it's spreading out at the end and i think part of um the effect is this spread right here if we we could spread out the beginning if we want a little bit more all right that's looking great so let's talk a little bit about animation and how we can make this look nice so i'm going to go back and find the first frame where my hands are lit up so there we go so the frame before i'm going to come back into width and i'm going to turn it down to zero click on this little wiggly line and hit set key now we're going to next frame and we're going to turn this electricity back on and i'm also going to make a um what's it called a keyframe on the point 1 and a keyframe on point two so now we can move this point right there and we can move this point let me zoom in here we can move this wherever we want as well so now we're starting to animate this effect and let's go down so now it goes really dark right here so i'm not going to go fully tran gone but i'm going to make this thing go really small like almost like it's still kind of lingering because then it comes back and so i'm going to amp it up but not as much all while moving these points to get the effect that i want so let's do this again let's looks like my hand kind of comes back here and i'm maybe going to move this point up and maybe we'll have the frequency come down a little bit to give us like a little bit of flicker and then here i'm going to have it come way down and then we'll do one more frame and it'll be gone because you don't want it to be there that long so then let's see when uh it comes back on so i'm gonna just go to the next point where lights are on okay and right here i'm gonna set another keyframe and on here i'm going to turn it back on and then let's move these points like we did before so there's that one and let's move this one maybe even over here a bit more cool all right so now we have that set up oh let me just make sure that we did the rest of it so we're going to skip forward go to this frame so it looks like we could even go um i would almost want it to go brighter one frame and then we're gonna go way down right here because that looks kind of cool and then this one oh looks like it goes super bright again okay and we'll go down i just want to get to a point where it actually goes completely away okay there we go so now we go to 21 frames so let's um play this back and if you want to keep this properties windows up but you don't see these points hit q on your keyboard a couple times and you'll see it turns the overlay off so let's see if we can preview this and see exactly what we're getting and if it's looking pretty good that's kind of fun that's looking pretty good there's things we can do to make it look better all right so another thing is um if i had this much light coming out of my hands um i would definitely have some bright points where my hand are and right now it feels like the electricity is way brighter than my hand so i'm going to show you some tricks and some things to make it look like that so what i want to do is i want to create basically a mask right here that's that creates a bright spot so what i'm going to do is first hit my i'm going to look at just my footage hit one and hit g to create a grade tool so gray tool is uh pretty much turning things bright and contrasty which is exactly what i want to do so i'm going to have this be pretty dang bright and contrasty because you'd have really harsh shadows if you had a super bright source like this it wouldn't it wouldn't be flat it would be harsh like that that's much more accurate um okay so then so the gamma up and the gain up and in the gain i'm gonna push um a little bit of blue oh yeah and to get here see this little wheel hold control and click on that and if you expand it out you get this nice little color wheel so we can push things in different ways so we could warm it up or we could cool it down and i really want to cool it down so i'm going to cool it down about that much and i'm going to close my grade window so great now i have this grade on oh and to toggle things on and off so if you saw them clicked on the grade press d on your keyboard it's a super fast way to just check things out so now we need to mask this effect right where my hands are so i'm going to show you another tool that i really like and then we're going to use as a mask and hit tab and spot flare so you could create a roto mask but i want to show you i just want to use this instead so the spot flare let's click on it hit one and i'm going to hit q on my window so we can bring up our overlay so it's a really cool way of creating flares and it's just a really nice tool and mads i don't know how to say your full name but mr mads does great job on plugins for nuke amazing plugins so down here there's a cool effect that i found and it's the mask you turn it on and basically kind of makes like a volumetric spotlight and so what we can do is rotate it and we can turn the mask gain up so it's more spotted and soften the edges so i'm going to just do that it's such a nice looking effect i really like this effect and then i'm going to come back in and turn uh maybe our gain up but that shimmers a little too much so i'm going to turn the shimmer down so it's not as i want some of that but not a lot so now we're just creating this kind of spotlight and i'm going to use a spotlight as a way to mask out the bright areas of my hand so great so we could do one thing is hit m and merge this let me bring my spotlight over here let me organize this a little bit nicer for you guys as well there's also a good time to talk about organizing a nuke so here's that spot flare and i like to keep my on the right or the left side anything i'm merging on top a going over here and any masks are over here because this little arrow has a mask on it so again we're always working down but right now we're just going to look right here so we have now the spot flare on top of our footage so you can see there you go it's working and that's a great way if you wanted to create like a light coming out of my hand or something like that it works pretty dang well for that so but that's like not what we want to use it for uh we want to use this like i was saying earlier as a mask so how do we do that well let's look at the flare and if i hit a it's going to switch it to alpha mode so look up here you'll see the and that means alpha which is a transparency and you hit press a again and it is rgb rgb is your color and a is alpha and so we can see this doesn't have an alpha so we need to create an alpha from this and i'm just going to move my nodes up a little bit by selecting them so to create a alpha from this we can simply add what's called a keyer so hit tab and see search here now i'm going to hit a over my window again now we can see we have a black and white version which is our alpha and see i can crank the values of this up so anything that's pure white is going to be completely um is opaque and then all the black is transparent so now we just made this nice little um transparency and i hit again now you can see the rgb and alpha all right let's close this window so now that we have an alpha now if we look at the merge it doesn't really matter it doesn't see it made this weird blobby thing if i turn this on and off and that's because we're doing over now you could come in here and you could do a plus which now it looks just like a light effect coming on my hands but we're not masking out my hand so i'm actually going to disconnect this from and i'm going to delete that merge because i'm going to move this whole thing over to the other side and i'm going to connect the mask of the grade so this grade that we created i want to create i would connect this mask to that now you can see that i've created um i brightened my hand right there and maybe we did go too hard on the gamma so i'm going to bring it up because my shirt looks a little too dark but now it looks like there's a light on my hand so it's super helpful now let's go down and look at with the lightning and i'm going to toggle this on and off so i even feel like we could go brighter so i'm going to double click my grade again and i'm going to even bring up our multiply and i'm going to double click my spot flare and i'm going to see if i can eliminate some of the stuff way out here maybe it's coming too far away so we just want it closer to where my hand is great and we can see the edges of that so we need to play with the mask softness a little bit and the gain so i'm going to bring that in and soften it up so now it's like acting like a little spotlight on my hand which is pretty cool i think and if that's still too harsh the cool thing is you can click on the keyer that we created hit b for blur and we can turn on some blur to soften those edges even a little bit more great so now like a little spotlight coming on my hand that's kind of masked in a fun way but the reason why i did this is because i want to show you another cool trick and that is this so right now um if my hand moves away or i mean if my hand moves the spotlight is not going where our effect should be so we can connect these and i'm going to show you so open the x tesla and open the spot flare and what i'm going to do is i want to send the 0.1 to the position of where that spot flare needs to be and you hold ctrl and grab and bring it over here now we can see that turned blue and these should have the exact same values so let me close these windows and show you right over here in the nodes over here in the nodes i'm just going to hide the other window now you can see this green line saying hey we're connected which is awesome all right so looking back at our comp we can see now that little spot is exactly at the end of where our point is on there so wherever our um 0.1 is that's where our spot little flare is going to be now we'd have to animate the brightness of this but at least we have this and we don't have to animate that separately they're connected and that's one reason why i really really like nuke it's just the way nodes work super cool okay so now let's animate the brightness of the hand um i'm going to see if i can even get more um just a little bit more out of the spot flare so i'm going to open up the properties and maybe i need to go even more intense on the gain i don't know i'm going to just play with this just a little bit more let's just tell us on and on see it kind of adds like a little bit of spot flare and maybe we need to push more blue into my hands not that much there we go okay so let's animate um when my the spot flare should come on my hand so we're gonna double click the grade node and at the very bottom of the grade node there's a mix so we can just slide this from zero transparency or 100 so obviously right here we're just going to make a keyframe set a key and then we just animate this so i'm going to keep it on and then right here it's maybe super low see and i feel like again we're going to fix that spot flare it's too spread out again and then let's keep going so then it goes right here let's go full brightness and i'm going to blur this even more just so it has a little bit more fall off and then here we got to go zero okay so let's keep coming through here and adding where we need the spot flare to be so now let's uh play this back a little bit and see what we're what we're getting this this should look um even better now that we have like some interactive light happening on my hands that's looking far better than what we had before now we could do the same thing to the other hand and i'm going to show you a little trick so now that we've created the spot flare once i'm just going to take this one copy and paste it right here but we don't want it following that um first position we want to follow the second position so we could if it lines up to the second one we can just hit control and drag it onto this flare or that point and now we should have a new um spot flare on that side but we're not seeing it yet because this one's not merged into anything so i'm going to click on here and hit m create a merge and i'm going to drag it and connect it to our other spot flare so now if i look at just this we have two little spot flares but we need to rotate this one the other way so if i come down here and rotate it now it's facing that way and you know we could change it up however we want maybe this one's not as bright so i'm just gonna turn down the brightness of it and so then now we don't need to change anything because we have that alpha we have that blur and it's on the grade so there we go so let's see what the the effect so that's looking good um but it's not really hitting the right spot so i'm actually going to do no animation on this and this is a situation where um yes okay this is a situation where you would have to do it by hand just because there's so many different points for this lesson i'm not gonna do it to everything so i'm just gonna do a very generic one and put it on my hand and maybe we'll animate the position of it so double click again and hit set key okay now i'm going to play this back so you can see it's it's looks like there's something happening on my hands that even that where it's a little bit random looks really cool looks like there's contact hitting my hands so starting to look much much cooler now let's keep going and let's show you some other cool tools to make this look awesome um another thing you can do is we can create some cool flarage looking stuff coming off of this so i'm going to look at this and if i hit a you can see we have an alpha well we can use what's called a glint tool which is a really fun tool and i'm just going to go straight down from here and what the glint does and zoom in a little bit is it makes these streaks so if i turn this up to like 14 you get these lines really cool looking lines but obviously that doesn't look cool right now but we can do effect only now we're just seeing just the effect and we could rotate this 90 degrees so it's rotate this 90 degrees now we have too many streaks though and this is a problem we just want it in a couple places so whatever we put into this it's gonna it's gonna do so there's a tolerance slider and it will only find what you want so if i turn down the turn it up or down you'll see where we're going to get some of this effect still not enough so what we need to do is we need to add some variation into this into this uh alpha so what i'm going to do is create a noise effect and let's use the noise advanced noise and if i hit 1 you'll see how this noise pattern great i'm going to close this window for now so what i need to do is i need to take this and this and i need to multiply them so i'm going to hit m a merge node again we're going to a and b now they're together so we can see them both in the same thing but we want to do a multiply so now it's within that area but it has a noise inside of it and then all we have to do in the noise is really crank up like our grain and we need to just have a couple of spots where we're seeing this so by playing with the scale the size and a lot of things like this we're just trying to get a couple of spots we don't want a lot so i'm just going to keep playing with this until we find something that we like so maybe something like that where it only has a little bit a couple spots now if i plug this glint into what we just created and hit one now we're just getting streaks from exactly where we want and i'm gonna hit a there's our rgb and we need to play with uh obviously the gammonies be less and we need to play with the from color you tone this way down because we just want it subtle if you do two color would be like streaks but we just want this um very subtle let me look at what we multiplied so we probably need to adjust this even more so there we go now we have a couple like little streaks and we'll see that as this plays they'll pop in and out which is something we want we don't want it over the top now i'm going to hit m from the glint and we're going to come over here and we're going to merge this our glint on top of this so now we just plug the b into there and we can see we have a glint right there the problem is glint though is too digital looking so hit b for blur on the glint and we're gonna blur it it's funny that sometimes you can just do that and it will look way better and on this operation this merge we want to change it from over to plus this glint's a little too dark so i'm going to open up the glint parameters and see if we can get it a little bit brighter i'm also going to exaggerate the anamorphic-ness of it the length of it and see if we can get more from it we also need to turn there we go now we can see the effect coming through so it's super subtle um but i think that's okay but you'll see it kind of click in and you'll see a glint flash across every once in a while it's really subtle but again if you want to do more all you just have to come and do is come in here and uh play with some of your settings so there you go now we have way more and then on our plus if we want click on the double click on the merge and you can choose the mix level so it's just even less than that and we could colorize this glint as well so double click on the glint and on the from color do the control click on the wheel and let's push it into the blues so it matches a little bit better cool now i want to talk about working in a smart and convenient way so you see this dotted line that's coming out so basically it's saying my computer is processing everything not just within this window but everything outside of here and that's because our glint is stretched out or it could be from the noise or the tesla yeah i think it's the glint because you'll watch from here to here the glen has created more so when you merge things there's an operation that's called set to be box and right now it's it's union so it's connecting our a and our b so it's connecting this and this into this and so it has that dotted line and that box inside but we really just want to use the b because the b is that background so if you do that now it's not going to have to worry about anything outside of that and that will also just save your computer a little bit of processing speed now let's play this and see what this glint's looking like looking kind of cool that's fun cool and i'm actually thinking um that on some of this uh come back in here i want to have the brightness still on my hands pretty bright even when it goes darker it just looks cooler okay so now there's some other cool effects that we can do and one of those is a glow of course so let's add a glow and an exponential glow will come with the survival tool kit and this is just a really cool glow that does things very clean and nice so we can just crank this thing up so that's looking pretty sweet so again click on the glow and hit a b a b and i think that looks pretty rad so we could change the core color which i like white but the glow outside come in here and we could tell it to cool down there we go so i'm going to turn this on and off that definitely added and we can see the new bounding box and that's because the glow so if that happens you can always just do a crop and you can see it just re-cut it down and close that down so that happens sometimes with our especially with our glow effects it'll go outside the bounds cool so um understanding how to uh film and a bunch of uh how to make things look realistic is things are always way too sharp and cg land and they're not dirty and so that's why we like things like chromatic aberration um to dirty it up but another thing is adding in um what's called halation so i'm going to show you what halation is and there's different ways to get it the long way is to use what's like we've used before like using a keyer i'll show you the long way first so i'm going to go to the right i'm going to show you here and look at our alpha so that's our alpha and that's exactly what we just want the bright areas so if we take the bright areas and then we use what's called a pre-molt which will actually activate the um the alpha so now we can see this is only our bright area showing up that's all of our bright areas the rest of that black is transparent but then we add a blur node so hit blur and usually on a blur it's doing all the channels so we're blurring everything but if you actually go to rgb and you uncheck the red channel or the green channel see now we can get this effect and that effect is called halation which happens on cameras so basically it's um reflecting a red color back onto the sensor or onto the film with really bright areas so you'll see that happen a lot and then you would take this hit m and we would just merge it on top we wouldn't plus it so now before and after we're adding that that hellation on top so that's one way to do it that's the long way if you have the survival toolkit the new the yeah sorry tool kit you can just look up halation and they have a tool for it and so you could just do halation and plug it in and pretty much get the same result let's see if we can but we can look at the luma key so right now that's what it's going to luma key so we could do something like that that we'd want and then we could do the effect only so okay that's what the the red's gonna look like so we do want it red but we don't want the size to be that big so now i'm going to go to the final output so you'll see we have that effect in there and you'd have to play with the size and the intensity because right now that's the the amount is just too insane so yeah you probably want to do it something more like that so there's that one and here's mine um you decide which one looks better i don't know i'm gonna go with the way i did it but uh yeah that's how you get hellation it's a really cool effect again it's subtle but it's just the things that make it look more realistic so we also could add in some lens flares and there's optical flares and a bunch of other fun tools but another thing that you can do which is kind of a cheat is you can use images so let me bring over a lens image really quick i'm going to hit r for read so this is like a little lens element it's just an image and i can merge these over and then hit t for transform and we could scale this thing up put it wherever we want and then on our merge double click it we want to do plus and again we want to do over b so now i can move this thing kind of wherever i want and we're getting a cool lens uh effects happening and we can merge these in an interesting way and then we go double click on the merge and now we're going to have to manually animate the the mix so set a key kind of we've done before go down to zero zero i'm going backwards right now just because i want two and then right here i probably would have it go one put the frame before zero so now we've animated our um little lens effect over without having to buy another third-party effect like optical flares which i love and i have and i use quite a bit but just another quick way to get an effect like that in the lens if it's not moving this is a static camera so we're able to get away with a lot more so that's looking pretty cool all right and the next thing i would do is i would add in some film grain and some other things let's go and look at my grade i almost want to make this a little bit brighter i'm kind of wondering if i went too blue and it almost looks better if it's my skin tone a little bit just because it would be warm if it hit my skin so things like that you just kind of play with and see what looks best there we go okay so yeah the next thing i would do is i would add a i'll do some grading so we could have done some grading before um which i may do up here it just depends if how much i can get away with out ruining some of my other effects so that's not too bad i just did a slight curve up there and then down here um i want to add actually we need to do we need to do some um chroma aberration so a good way to do this is using god rays and then changing it from again we did this with hellation but the rgb and um changing the scale to like point 1.01 and you can see let me toggle this on and off this is always what i'm doing so you look at my hands that's way too intense and so we're going to do 0 0.1 and toggle this on and off we may only see okay that maybe been two not enough okay let's try this there we go that's still i don't like how intense that is so we're gonna go uh two okay that's subtle enough where i like it i don't like to i'm trying to resist the impulse of always overdoing chromatic aberration okay so now i'm going to add in film grain and i like to use another gizmo called luma grain it's all grained up and let's go to the beginning and play this through and see how this is looking that's looking pretty sweet i think there's some other things we can do to make it look even better so let's do it so now you can see our little node graph which is cool and i'm going to organize this even more it's nice to keep things really clean just in case someone else has to use your node graph so if i click on this bottom node and i hold control i can move the whole thing up and you can do that at any point which is nice if you want to spread things out a little bit if it starts feeling too cramped so i want to add i'm going to come back up the chain a little bit and i want to add some maybe smoke looking stuff around that it's just i want just a little bit more volumetric look to it so we can add some noise we're going to create that noise again the advanced noise and there's a merge node called so if you type in merge and it's called merge atmos this is a really cool way to merge atmospherics so we're going to take a the noise and b plug it right in here oops there we go and hit one to look at it so what this effect does this merge atmos is it can blur your background a little bit it can do lots of really cool things i'm just gonna create some noise uh create some cloud looking stuff and my mask is going to be interesting so what i want to pull my mask from is i only want to see the cloudy stuff whenever the lightning is going so i'm going to i'm going to use this and what we can do is in between we can create these little knuckles and by hitting period we can create a knuckle so i'm going to slide this thing over here i'm going to plug this into this knuckle and so we're looking at the tesla it's the same this is the same is the same is the same because it's coming off of that and so i'm gonna take the alpha and expand it um a bit more so what i'm going to do is first i'm going to actually look at this and i may do another keyer just to get some of use some of that outer glowy area and now if i hit alpha we see we get a little bit more out of that before it was just that now we get just a bit more and i'm going to add because we're this is a mask now i'm going to add another blur so hit b and it's on all's but you could if you want to just do alpha and crank the alpha up right there but i'm just going to do it all because it doesn't matter and then i'm going to plug our mask from our noise in there so now our noise is just within whenever the lightning is striking and this is just a really cool way of getting some organic effects so now we look over this merge atmos and i can toggle this on and off so you're getting some clouds in there some really pretty looking little clouds see we could crank up the game we don't want to do that um maybe the gamma we could colorize it too if we want and maybe we need to mess with the brightness of our alpha so you can add a grade node and change it just to the alpha and let's look at the alpha and so we really could make this much brighter now if we look over at this now it's going to be super cloudy but maybe that's what we want i don't know within this i'm going to add the noise a little bit of color so you can come over the color tab in this noise and i'm going to push some blue into it just a quick way to get some cool volumetric looking stuff and then with all the other glows and stuff it gets really intense i may make the size of this glow even bigger i don't know so there we go i'm going to turn this atmos on and off so you can see before and after it just adds a little bit more to it and let's go to the very bottom of our node graph now you can toggle it on and off i think that definitely gives it more life you can't see it as as well but we could play with that as well the mix you can either plus mix it or you can overall mix it depending on what you want it's good to do a little bit of both and yeah okay let's play this again and see what we're getting see it looks really nice when it gets a little bit darker you can see some of that those at atmospherics of the the uh noise that's looking pretty cool i think what do you guys think let me know in the comments below and again the cool thing is we're making all of this with uh you know you could have nuke indy and just get these gizmos boom plug them in and create some really cool looking stuff super fast like that's pretty rad awesome and i even think there's a free 1080p if you just are working in 1080p version you can get that as well um always go back and reassess some of my like the spotlights if i feel like this isn't um intense enough i'm gonna see if i can really hone it in the grade node may be a little too dark on this one okay okay let's take a look at the final uh product there's other things we could do other sweet tools that we could use um like particles we have like some particles hitting the wall sparking there are so many tools uh within nuke and so many things possibilities that you can have with the software it is truly amazing all right guys well i hope you enjoyed this uh tutorial and um have fun making your own little lightning effects and um powers and stuff love to see what you guys create share with me on instagram vfx under dash central and i'd love to see uh all of your new composites hopefully if you're new to nuke this was not too advanced and hopefully if you know nuke maybe had some fun and learned a couple little tips and tricks thank you guys so much for watching this video don't forget to like subscribe all that fun stuff and share this video on your favorite compositing facebook groups i would really appreciate that and it would really help me out also if you want to learn more about visual effects how to do visual effects if you're new go ahead and click on the links below where you can check out all of my courses and upcoming courses in the links below we'll see you guys later

Channel: VFX Central

Views: 13,558

Keywords: c4d, redshift tutorial c4d, redshiftc4d, c4d red shift, redshift tutorial cinema 4d, Redshift c4d, c4d redshift, Redshift for cinema 4d, how to use redshift, cinema 4d redshift, beginner redshift, redshift settings, redshift render, intro to redshift, redshift renderer, cinema4d, vfx, visualeffects, redshift, render, composting, filmmaking, Cinema 4D, Redshift, redshift tutorial, red shift, redshift3d, redshift quickstart, nuke, nuke compositing, nuke tutorial, nuke for beginners

Id: KylanohT1iA

Length: 52min 43sec (3163 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020