Nuke - Atmosphere and Dust Tutorial

hello Michael here with another nuke tutorial today we're gonna be having a look at how to create dust motes and create some extra atmosphere in your scenes like you're seeing on screen right now as I've done in some previous renders we're going to be doing it on a much more basic scene to get you started I recommend testing it out the workflow first on something more simple and then working on to something more complex like you've seen here so what I've got is a scene here with a couple of pieces of geometry and a light you can use any renderer for this method and the stipulation being that you will need the ability to either use crypto mats or mate IDs for your output passes I'm going to use render man in this example just so I can use crypt mats because it's a little bit quicker but you're free to use any other renderer that supports net IDs or quota mats same thing we're doing will work with those the reason for the crypt amounts is that this area here where the window is we want some something to be able to select a new to project some light through if you don't understand what that means right now don't worry we will get to that in a minute but for now just know that you you will want to be able to select this area where the light is coming through now you can do that a couple of different ways if you have nothing in there and you are using a crypt event then you could just invert your selection and nuke and again I just wait to we get to there if you don't understand you will understand once we do otherwise you could just create a polygon plane so when you render it that will be a separate piece of geometry to your room and you'll just need to make sure that that is not renderable so you will need to go down to render stats or depending on your renderer how you do this but you want to turn off primary and secondary visibility but basically turn off all this it's just going to be some geometry in the scene if you're using redshift you can just do it in here and go through and turn those off but also if you're using render manuscript ahmed's and we can just invert a selection so it's kind of easy so I'm not going to do that just for the sake of ease so first we're going to do is if you have a more complex scene just a didn't stand in geometry just something to block out where everything is going to be this geometry is not actually going to be rendered for nuke but we are going to export it so it's just going to give us an idea in nuke where everything should be so we need to combine it so combine that so it's one mesh and then we're going to export it as an FBX so select that export selection and then just go to where you were exporting it to and we'll call this Gio's and obviously make sure that you've got FBX selected that's fine now your light if you're using render man your light won't export out like you would expect it to so you will have to if you want to use your light to project the light through the window and simulate that you can put in a standin just there's like a mile light just like a directional light will do the trick and you'll just need to put in the same position as your existing light just obviously look at the transforms for each and line them up and then you can just export that as an FBX as well I'm not going to do that I do have one exported I'll show you how to do that but the way I'm going to do this we're not really going to bother too much with the light so much the camera is the last thing you need to do now the camera in this shot it's got a little pan as you can see so we will export this as an Olympic cash so it goes you cash with the camera selected and go to export selection to Olympic and then you just call this camera one call the same thing as the camera that using the Maya scene in case you're handing this off to a compositor so they know what the heck is going on so we've got our gos out we've got our camera out and if you did select I want to do your extra light you could do the light as well I'm just going to be illuminating there's a little bit more simply so in the scene we can now go to our render settings and if you're using render man and want to enable crypto maths it's under features you just right-click here and you add crypto mount create quick map and for our a Ovie's depending on what renderer you're using you'll want to add a Z pass in and I'm just I've just put that in the beauty pass so we can break that out once we're in nuke if you're using redshift or Arnold or anything like that it's just the same thing whether or not you have access to crypto mats I'm not sure what Arnold does pretty sure it does I haven't used in quite a while I know redshifts the most current version does have crypt mats as well okay so the shot if we have a look through the camera looks like this so we just have some light coming through the window there hitting the cube and casting a shadow and you know creating a little sort of spot light from the from the window frame there now I've already rendered this out so you don't have to sit through me rendering it out so we'll skip that part but for render man it is just a matter of going to make sure that your render settings are set to animation and that you have the correct camera selected and you've done all your a Ovie's as I did previously and then you've got a render man and batch render I have used denoising for this and I've used a very terribly low sample rate of 32 but it actually doesn't look too bad so let's jump into nuke and have a look at our outputs now okay so the first thing we're going to do here in nuke is import our render passes so what we've got here is the beauty pass the D noise view beauty pass the raw beauty pass I think we're just going to use the D noise version so we'll drop that out and the crypto map which we can't see anything on because we need a crypto matte node now I've got a separate tutorial on crypto matte so if you want to find out more about this then you can check that out for windham and specifically so you can see that the room here is all purple and in the area here which is black as the outside so we want to make that area selectable so what we're going to do is color picker ad hold control and select the room and then we're just going to create an invert color node and now we've got the inversion there so we can use that so we'll start building up a little bit of the 2d scene first so what we'll do is create a merge and we want the B pipe there and we want the a pipe to be connected to a constant Alice constant can be any color that you want if you wanted the light to be sort of instead of white you could you know make it purple or whatever you like it doesn't really matter but um we're just going to make it white for the sake of this tutorial and then we're going to create a volume ray and actually we want to set that to copy oh sorry and the B pipe is actually not being used we're using the masks or not the B pipe alright so now you can see the volume rate here is coming through the window so that's very clever and what we want to do is set the quality to very high so we get rid of those banding from the gradient there if your computer's not very powerful you might want to set it lower while you're working on it and then set it to very high once you start rendering we'll go and do some more settings to this later but for now that's probably going to be fine so you can see the the very basics of what we're doing here have I actually set it to white there we go you can see the very basics of what we're doing here with that geometry but we need actually bring the 3d scene and so we can create our dust motes just going to create a scene 3d node and we'll set up the particles first so there's going to be particle emitter and we're also going to use a particle a turbulence and then that's going to go into the scene you never need to be looking at that so much right now so get it out of the way and then we're going to do a regio and as you can probably guess that's going to be our geometry so I'm going to open the geometry up just do open that up there so now when we look at the scene you can see the geometry right there now the last thing we need to bring them is the camera which we will need to create a scanline a render node for and a camera 3d connect the camera output from the scanline into the camera and then in the camera we're going to go to file and we're going to read it from file and we'll open our camera one yes we want to do that so now we can see our camera and it should pan and the scene now why is it important to use the camera because we want the camera to move amongst the dust now we need to create the dust so the dust is pretty simple to do it took me a little bit to figure out how best to do this and this is one way of doing it there are a couple of other ways you could do it but this is pretty effective and I've seen I've seen shows do this effect and this is how I've worked out how to do it I don't know if it's the same way but it looks pretty close so what we'll do is we're going to create a cube geometry and we're going to I'm going to connect the emit to the cube and the cube we're gonna scale I shouldn't really be on some the view pool because I'm terrible at using the viewport in a Nuke but we're sort of getting it okay cool now we don't want it to be crazy big but we do want it to be on top of the camera and partway in the room and we're just going to make it so we don't have to look at this cube we'll just change it to wireframe so now we can see what's going on inside so basically we don't want really the cube to be going past anything that's got a back side to the camera so the cameras here we don't want particles rendering behind this cube because it's going to be layered on top of of we end up looking like it's on top of things that are actually deeper in perspective that doesn't quite make sense they all make sense in a little bit hopefully but we're just going to make it so it looks like there is it looks like there is dust in the scene and it will work if we just do this we just have a sort of where the camera is so the camera is amongst the dust the dust is continuing along the entire length of the room and it is in front of the cue or geometry that we have so and then the examples that I showed at the beginning that's this is the method that I've used to do it so I haven't actually put the dust throughout the entire view space now you could also mask the dusk dust render off using crypto mats and things like this but I'm just keeping it very simple for this one so that's the dust so now if we turn off that so we don't need to really see the cube anymore we can see that we've got dust here not really doing anything that dust would actually do so the first thing we need to do is go into our particle emitter and we need to change the emit from we need to change this to bounding box so it's going to use the cube as a bounding box so it's going to emit particles from somewhere within the cube not attached to the surface normals or anything like that of the cube so now it should look like it's just stuck within this sort of cube or it's being emitted from within the cube and obviously it looks crazy at the moment so we're gonna cheat here I'm just gonna use the settings I've used previously start at point is going to be negative 300 that's negative 300 frames it's going to calculate the dust to be emitted from so it's gonna pre sort of calculate before the first frame where the dust should be so by the time you get to the first frame there should already be a lot of dust on screen when we change the max a lifetime to 400 and the range to 400 the velocity we're going to make it very slow because it's dust and your use cases will vary depending on your scene size so you will have to interpret this and extrapolate it to what you are doing yourself but it will basically work if you kind of try this see if it goes and if it doesn't and you'll need to make some adjustments all right so now we should have some dust sort of floating around a bit simply yeah so you can see that's going nice and slow now unfortunately it's all going in the same direction essentially from what I can tell so we need to adjust our turbulence so again I'm going to use my existing settings so this is just a very low amount of turbulence the scale from memory is gonna make it the larger it is the slower it moves yeah so now we've got some nice slow moving and random dust so some of its going up and down and left and right and as you can see from where the camera would be which is roughly here you'll get it just make that bigger so we can actually see what's going on you get some nice dust sort of moving throughout the scene in front of you all right so dust isn't really square so we need to make some dust that is not square so we do in photoshop very quickly so what we're going to do is create a 10 the pixel by 10 pixel file we want to transparent background so to let your background layer and I'm just going to make the background black so you can see what I'm doing I'm just going to use the pencil so I can actually get a 1 pixel square and I'm gonna set it to white and then you just want to draw some Dustin you could use the paintbrush if you want and then that way you can get some fall-off then you just want to create some sort of random dusty shapes dust isn't going to always be just a circle that's not always going to be a square obviously either it's not always going to be a line I made 10 different ones already and I'll show you those in a moment but I want to get the point across that you can create them here in Photoshop simply create some little highlighted points as well you're not really going to see the dust you were going to be able to detect it's sort of subconsciously more than anything but no one is really going to be looking at what it looks like so this is a very simple method if you want to make it more detailed and realistic you could actually use three-dimensional geometry to do the dust it's going to cost you on render it's going to cost you on CPU the disadvantage of doing this way is that you can't make the dust obviously rotate in three-dimensional space because it's just a 2d plane so we'll get rid of the background and now you can't see the dust but it's there just because it's got a transparent backdrop and we're going to save this as a tiff like so you don't need layers I can't remember if I kept layers on or not I'll keep it on just for the sake of it and just save it as whatever you want and then save it out like so I'm not going to do that cuz I've already got ten mate already so let's import those all right so here is ten dust mites very messily place in the screen all right so what we're going to do is just connect all of these up to our particle emitter and this is a terrible nightmare that I've created here but I'm sorry about that but we're just going to roll that I'm just doing this sort of quickly so now you can see the dust is all sorts of different shapes it is also two-dimensional so no matter where I put the camera it doesn't have any depth or perspective but it will do the trick so now when we run this you know you can see that everything looks a little bit more interesting and it just creates that subtle bit of variation that will make your scene look a little bit better and I'm all about the subtlety subtlety is what makes images look interesting so at the moment if we rendered this out you wouldn't be able to see anything because we don't have a light so we need to create a light for the scene and connect that up now the light that we had was out here though what I've noticed about the lights in Anouk is that they're not very powerful and they don't tend to illuminate the scene very well when I've been trying to do this not all in all examples also the dust isn't actually where we're pretending it is it's not actually here in front of the window it's to this point here so it's not going to illuminate it very realistically if you sort of import your light from from Maya but I did want to show that cuz I thought it was important if you wanted to alter this method to work in a different way in a way that you might prefer so without light and the same we're just going to change the intensity to be very high and we're gonna make it so our geometry now does not render because we don't want to see it in the render we've already got our 2d image rendered out which I believe I showed you or anything I have this just so you know that's what the render is so we're going to create a reformat transform and the output from the scanline is going to go into the reformat so now when you look at the reformat and run that you're going to be able to see this movement of the camera passing through the dust now something I noticed after I did this render is that my camera is moving way way way way too quick so yeah so you don't actually see as much depth as I'd like but you can see how I've made this work better in my examples of the start of the tutorial which I'll show you again at the end something you might be considering is that the dust there's going to be everywhere it's going to be completely illuminated within the scene which is not very realistic because we should only really have yet to see the illumination where the lighters and not so much in the dark area so we're going to fix that first we're going to sort of finish off our 2d comp alright so we've got our volume race here we're going to create a merge node it's going to be into that and we're gonna make it a multiply and we're gonna create a noise and a grade and then that is going to be our a pipe so you can see what's happened there is that it's multiplying the noise by the volume race so our noise we're just going to make some adjustments - I'm going to key in and some animation and change the size of it as well because it's probably a little bit too small X Y size I want this to be pretty subtle it's gonna grade it so it's a little bit brighter at the moment and then the noise actually let's just fix this okay this is not so the problem I had there was for some reason my curtain mount was keyed on key to on frame - sorry so the first frame had no key on it so when the volume ray was emitting on the first frame it was emitting everywhere and then the second frame it found the key for the crypt event so if you have the same problem make sure you undo what I just did so yeah my crypt amount just make sure you're at set to frame one when you do your color picker before that so now that multiply should work nicely and noise at frame 1 we're gonna set to 0 and at frame 48 we're gonna sit to 0.25 so now we just get a very subtle a bit of sort of fog happening there you don't have to do this but kind of looks cool okay so let's continue to comp in the rest of our 2d scene so we need a credit on the merge node and I just realized that I'm mixing up my eyes and my bees really bad here but you like to forgive me this is not how I would normally do it but just to roll with it you can rearrange everything so it looks nice and tidy instead of this mess that I've done but it will work so just roll with me so we've got our merge risk indicator as a merge over and we are going to shuffle out our depth from our from our Beauty node so that looks like that to make it easier to see we can use a grade and we can just change it to 250 on the white point so you can actually see what's going on it will actually read the grade regardless of where you see at the white point or just have you'll change what you do when you work with us for the down but this is fine and then we'll create another marriage confusingly we will again soft these Finland I'm really sorry about this I didn't actually plan this out very well but it will work like I said so we'll change this the screen so now we've got this screen working here the screen is being multiplied by the z-depth though so the further away in space it gets the more opaque the height will be so we just want to change it so it's very subtle so that's what it looks like when it's off we just want to make a little adjustment there so things in their backgrounds that have become a little bit more look a little bit more like there's a lot of volume there now when you run that animation you can see the lights doing what it's doing and the z-depth is working as well what you will also notice is that the light currently does not really match up very well with the projected um spot and the shadows so we need to adjust our volume raise position so they do work correctly so we just we're going to basically eyeball this and this works just fine and allows you to decide your composition or your composition for the for the silhouette of the light race so you don't necessarily have to have it in the realistic position which you know might have been somewhere like that for example you can actually cut your your light and a bit higher if you want this sort of these are the options will help you compositionally for your final scene so we've got that we just basically want this line here to meet that point there of the of the highlight and then this can be basically wherever you want it just considering what else is going on your scene then we're just going to do a roto on our merge here so roto draw that's going to be on our mask select the route in the roto node options and we're just going to create busy a which starts there goes down there and it's going to be just a triangle like that and so basically what we're doing to a masking of the area where we don't want this to fall now we don't want the light to fall outside of the high light so we're just going to invert that so now you can see that's working nicely we will need a key our roto because obviously it's not gonna be the same once it gets to there so on the frame 48 I'm just gonna move that there and move that yeah and just a cue so now when we run through the animation we run through the animation I realize that I actually haven't keyed in the volume ray position either so just gonna bake that so it's lining up like so and I knew make sure that I actually set a key and set a key for the start as well sorry about that there so now that should animate correctly as you can see so my camera moves linearly it doesn't have any curves on the animation so this is very easy to carry out if your camera has got some acceleration on it you will need to adjust and your curve editor to compensate for that because around the middle it might need to be you know at a different point where would be at the end for this one the other thing you notice is that there is no cast shadow in the volume here which you should be saying so we're just going to add that in as well so back to our roto node and to our route and we're just going to create make sure we're at frame 1 actually we're gonna do this in Reverse because it's gonna be easy to see here so on the frame 48 we're going to create we want this to be at the bottom of the box so this top line should be lined up roughly with the volume raised like so so it's creating that sort of effect now obviously this is not incredibly scientific I'm just eyeballing it and like I sort of said earlier this method is a lot of eyeballing but it is effective and it is just meant to be subtle a subtle effect to improve the visual quality of your scene I'll we'll adjust this in a little bit just to get their values in the opacity right so now we'll get a frame 1 and I'm just turning the overlay on and off with a Q by the way and we'll just realign that okay so now you can go in and do your edges as you like you can make you know that sort of effect so you get a bit more blur there and you could also do this overall with your feathering so I just I don't really want too much further actually that using the using the handles for the feather has actually done a pretty good job so we're going to leave that as such but we are going to change the opacity so and you could do the opacity with even like a you could fill the opacity and with like a gradient or something like that but like I said gonna keep this simple so we want it to be slightly darker because it's casting a shadow in the atmosphere but we also have some atmosphere being illuminated between the camera and the shadow area so it shouldn't be 100 seen like this and it shouldn't be a hundred percent like this so somewhere somewhere around that will do and I probably don't have those angles lined up perfectly but that's gonna be okay so now when we run through the animation it is just a very subtle effect but it does make a big difference so even doing this without the dust mites is still pretty good but if we had the dust mites on they will look even better so let's do that now so here's our dust mites see you remember I'm gonna create a grade which will we use possibly later on and then we want to emerge multiply B is going to be our dust motes a is going to be a volume rays so basically what's going to happen is our volume rays are going to multiply our dust motes so you only get the area that is being in the volume rays in the dust motes that are in the volume rows that are gonna be multiplied and then we want to add those in the merge node down here and connect it up to our merge over here just just square that out a bit so now you can see the dust mites are only being impacted or only really visible where the lighters so you can actually see some of these dust mites that close to the camera because they're not illuminated by the by this light because the lights too far away is not intense enough they're a little bit darker and you can choose to keep that or not keep that adds up to you and obviously the scale there is improving the depth obviously on those now you may decide that you want more dust that you want it more subtle that you want to blend it less or more but you can see that this is basically the setup that I used the only other thing that you might want to go through and do is do some more masking here and here like we did for this because some of that dust is falling outside or into areas where it shouldn't be as illuminated because you know this is multiplied through here but I'll allow you to do that if you so choose so that is the basic setup and what we'll do now is we have a look at the shot that I showed at the beginning on one of the shots okay so here is my dusty seventies ish looking a room and you can see I've got some light dust motes in amongst everything right to the edge of the light that's spilling in through the window there and you can see that I've only made this very very subtle there is quite a lot of them and I've also got them affected by the ZD focus which is something else you can do so having a look at what I've done here in the comp you can see my 3d scene which is also see my missing one of the differences that I made here to my grade for example awfully to my Z death for example is that I multiplied and a yellow overlay and that is just lighting the scene slightly different off govern everything slightly yellow tint and then obviously with the Z did the ZD focus there I've also got a vignette and I've also got chromatic aberration there as well otherwise it's all set up very similarly I did it slightly different in this one because I didn't use a crypt amount I actually improved this method after doing this after doing this myself so hopefully your result to be slightly more simple to you do then mine but this what I did still worked basically the same way so that's essentially all there was to it and I would run this animation anouk but it will chug so I'll just run it in the video anyway over the top but as you can see it's only a two second shot but the dust is very subtle it's moving slightly it's fairly dense and it's only really being illuminated in where the light is spilling through the window I think I actually did a bit more masking in this one and you can do that like I said previously and that might improve your overall results but that's really all there is to it and you can see it in the other shots as well there it's it does help I give the shot up a bit more feel to it and obviously the scene is meant to look old but it's sort of homey afternoon light sort of coming home be gonna see the atmosphere in the room it's sort of like you're walking in on something that's been there for a long time and I wanted all those feelings and emotions tied to this shot so having this little bit of extra atmosphere just sort of plants that in the viewers mind it's not it's it's subtle it's meant to be subconscious to them they're not mean to really notice it but it just adds up overall so there's always little incremental things that add up overall to make the shot pop a little bit more so yeah that is the tutorial this was a very long one for me but I hope you were able to follow along with it if you have any questions check them in the comments below if you liked the tutorial and you thought it was useful make sure you click the like button and if you want to see more like this make sure you subscribe as I do tutorials on those weeks for things like nuke and other pretty software that's if you wanna check out more of my work at check out my Instagram or art station linked in the description that is all for now that I thank you very much for watching and happy your rendering

Channel: Small Robot Studio

Views: 38,488

Keywords: nuke, atmosphere, dust, volumes

Id: CL6BdLAZuSk

Length: 34min 41sec (2081 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 10 2019