Rendering & Compositing an Opener // with Houdini, Karma & Nuke

foreign [Music] and welcome to another love effects tutorial in this tutorial I'm going to talk about the rendering and compositing of the opener from my new YouTube channel [Music] on my new YouTube channel I will be releasing videos about anything I'm interested in like software Hardware services or whatever I want to talk about that is why I needed to create a logo animation for my new channel which is also called an opener this is not a step-by-step tutorial in this video I will give you an overview of the workflow I used to create this opener if you want to watch an in-depth version of this tutorial and take a look at a reduced one frame long nuke script of one of the shots of my opener you can do that by becoming a gold supporter of my patreon page I'll leave the link to it in the description of this video the basis for the animation of the opener was the Houdini tutorial by J Nicholas donatelli which shows a very fast paced workflow to morph particles from one shape to another I'll leave the link to that tutorial in the description of this video now let's jump into Houdini so I can show you how I rendered my opener animation here we are at the object level where you can see all of the cameras and the geometry of the scene there are some blue particles which make up the biggest part of the scene some golden particles that are mixed in between the blue ones and some more blue particles that morph into the shape of my logo typo a bit faster which means that these two geonodes are for shot 10 and 20 and the third Geo node is for shot 30. now let's jump into Solaris I have to say that I really love to work with Houdini and Solaris because you can work on a structured way that is very similar to the way you can work a nuke the Solaris scene starts with the imported geometry after applying some materials to the geometry and merging them together I imported the cameras created some lights a dome light and a rectangular light and then I rendered this scene with karma in my eyes rendering a bit more complex scenes with Karma is still a pain but it's getting better and better because the teamed side effects listens to their users their customer support is awesome and every major release of Houdini is an event that you can look forward to and be excited about here are some of the settings I used to render the three shots for my opener I rendered everything in the Progressive image mode set my primary samples to 25 and rendered a multi-channel exr with a bunch of aovs the reason why it was so painful to render my opener with karma is because sometimes the renders just stop and I have no idea why that happens I hope it's my fault and that it doesn't happen when you do everything right but this was the second time I noticed these random render crashes on a personal project the good thing is that I didn't experience as many render crashes in this project as in the last one and I'm sure that side effects will continue to improve Karma to the point when it becomes a great alternative to render engines like Arnold or v-ray alright that was it for the rendering part in Houdini now let's jump into nuke so I can give you an overview of the comes from myopener okay here we are nuke normally I like to keep shots for personal projects in their own nuke Scripts but in this case having all three shots for my opener in one script made my whole work a bit easier and faster here are the three shots of my opener in each shot you can see the same particle animation from a different angle and at a different point in time and since the structure of these three shots is pretty much the same I will only walk you through one of these shots which is shot 020 as always I've put all of my footage at the top of the note Tree in my footage backdrop and next to it on the right side I have created a sunspot texture on a card that I'm using as the background in every one of these shots that brings us to the background backdrop which is the starting point of these three shots here you can see the color corrected Sunspot texture on a card in the next backdrop I created some background particles with the help of the snow rain tool set that you can find in the tool sets menu under 3D and particles most of the compositing for this shot happened in the backdrop for the Houdini particles here you can see the difference between the rendered particles and the comp particles just before the copy node which are much darker after the comp meant to look tinted by the Sunspot with this beige color at the top and on the sides and I created a noise-based mask that allowed me to make some parts of the particles glow with a bright blue light after the color correction part I defocused the particles with nuke's newly added bouquet node I have used this node many times in the past when it was still owned and sold by Peregrine labs and I'm really happy that Foundry acquired this tool because in my eyes this is the best depth of field plugin for nuke it can be used with deep data to render depth of field which can make the edges of your defocus 3D renders look much cleaner than with any other plugin I think in some cases it may be a bit Overkill to use bokeh and set up the ZD Focus node because in case we have Edge problems with your ZD Focus node you can modify the edges of your depth pass which can also give you an awesome result with a ZD Focus node I think bokeh really shines when you need to defocus very detailed features like small particles hair and so on let me show you what I mean here you can see the ZD Focus results compared to the result of bokeh you can clearly see that bokeh manages to defocus the particles way better while the ZD Focus node makes the particles look like a blurred particle soup the bouquet node manages to make the particles look like they were photographed but such a result comes with the price of long render times which again can be Overkill in some cases plus you need to have a deep render of your CG to get this sort of quality out of bouquet that costs a lot more time and energy the problem with this project was that Karma was really buggy when it came to rendering deep data it worked but only when I rendered deep data without any compression this one frame has the file size of 387 megabytes and any attempt to render the Deep data in a compressed format with Karma resulted in a file that nuke could not read and rendering these three shots as dpxrs would have resulted in an image sequence of about 190 gigabytes that was not an option for me instead I came up with a workaround that allowed me to use bokeh with custom-made deep data without using Karma to render it I just used the points to position node and the scanline render to generate the Deep data for bokeh and that gave me a very similar result compared to the uncompressed Deep data from Karma as you can see here of course this is not the same as getting 3D rendered deep data and I don't recommend you to ever use this workflow in production because it does not give you Pixel Perfect deep data and it will give you some artifacts with bokeh I could be wrong but I believe that this workflow is only giving you front deep data with artifacts but in my case it worked like a charm and I think it looks way better than the results of the ZD Focus node ok so after rendering the output of the bouquet node I added some motion blur and exponential glow and a light wrap to the particles from Houdini right before merging them over the background then I added some foreground particles a lens flare defocused lensch modes and some lens effects to the comp I wanted to mention that motion blurring and image sequence that has depth of field applied to it is not a workflow that I would recommend because you should not motion blur bokeh I think the better way would be to render your motion blur in 3D and apply your depth of field effect and comp afterwards but that is just my opinion all right that was it for this lovely effects tutorial I really hope you liked it if you want to see some more of these videos don't forget to subscribe and if you have any questions about my work feel free to post them in the comments if you want to watch an in-depth version of this tutorial and take a look at a reduced one frame long nuke script of one of the shots of my opener you can get access to it by becoming a gold supporter of my patreon page I'll leave the link to it in the description of this video thank you to all my patreon supporters your support is much appreciated thanks for watching and goodbye everybody [Music]

Channel: LoveVFX

Views: 5,075

Keywords: Lars Wemmje, Compositing, Nuke, Houdini, Foundry, LoveVFX, CGI, Tutorial, VFX, CG, 3D, V-Ray

Id: 85Jlx0aUKLw

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 27 2023