Sorry Blender, this is my new compositor

today we'll transform this boring basement into a flooded basement i'll give a brief overview of how i created the cg elements in blender but we'll focus most of our time on learning the basics of compositing in davinci resolve fusion here is the final commercial i think we have some pickles downstairs oh [Music] honey got some good news and some bad news this commercial was created by the super awesome talented guys over at threefold they also made a really cool behind the scenes that shows you how they pulled off some of the practical water effects among other tips and tricks definitely check it out i'll link it in the description now in the interest of time here's a super quick overview of the blender part of this tutorial the guys at threefold supplied me with 8k raw footage i took this into davinci resolve and exported a 4k exr sequence since this is a static shot i used the program f-spy to match my camera perspective inside blender i started by adding in geometry to align with the wood posts stairs floors and walls i then projection mapped my footage onto this geometry i added a few more lights to match the lighting of the shot for the water i added a plane and some animated noise texture for the small rippling effect for the large ripples i roughly modeled and animated this foot i then made the water a dynamic paint canvas and set the foot to a dynamic paint brush if you set the canvas to wave mode and make sure you have enough subdivisions you get ripples cgmater has a great tutorial on this technique i then added in the boot pickle jar bike and these foamy patches for extra detail for rendering i first rendered out the water with only the jar and bike reflection i rendered this at 50 resolution so when i composite i'll just scale it up by two side note i learned that even visual effects for hollywood films are sometimes rendered at half resolution and then scaled up by two in in compositing and it's a huge time saver if you can get away with it next i rendered just the jar at a higher sample rate and then since the bike doesn't move i just rendered a high quality still frame that also included a layer with the bike shadow i've posted a longer breakdown of the blender part of this tutorial over on my patreon along with the breakdown i've provided all the files for this shot so you can dive in and learn even more on top of this i've been releasing other exclusive patreon tutorials including how to create hdris why blender's shadowcatcher is broken multipass compositing basics and more these tutorials are more frequent than my main channel tutorials because they're less scripted and easier to create so if you'd like to better your vfx skills and support me in the process that patreon page is the place to be also the render setup techniques i use here are the same as my previous tutorial i'll link that in the description now it's on to compositing in all my tutorials so far i've composited in blender and been happy with the results but fusion is also free and overall it has a lot more functionality than blender's compositor so let's dig in and check it out inside resolve i will simply import the exr sequence we made from the background footage and add this to a new timeline with this timeline open we can switch over to the fusion tab this is where the vfx magic happens as we go i'll explain the different parts of this interface and how they compare with blender first let's go to fusion fusion settings user interface and for zoom click ignore twice now we can zoom with just the scroll wheel for starters we can view our footage by selecting our footage node and hitting one or two this will load it in either viewer one or two and we can see these two dots represent the active viewer in blender this is the same thing as using the viewer node to keep things simple for this tutorial i'll hide viewer 2 by clicking this button let's go to our import tab to import the water jar and bike elements back in the composite tab we can open the media pool and drag these elements into our composite we can rename the nodes by hitting f2 let's close the media pool and if we hit 1 on our water element it shows in the viewport but if we check out our jar or bike we'll notice they turn red when we try to view them this is because we need to choose a render layer so here we'll select jar combined we'll need to do the same for the bike selecting bike combined and we'll also duplicate this for our bike shadow and select the bike shadow render layer one thing to note here is that in fusion the information for the selected node is located in this right panel in blender we're used to having the controls on the node itself if we look at any of these cg elements they look too dark this is because we rendered and saved these elements with linear gamma values now if you don't know what that means check out this video i made which explains the basics of color spaces and gamma but very basically we work with linear data because it creates more accurate calculations when compositing which makes for a more realistic composite as you can see by default linear images do not look good on displays this is where we can use something called a viewer lut let's go to the upper right hand corner click on this drop down go to vfx input output and select linear to srgb then let's turn this on this lut is taking anything we have in this viewer and applying the conversion to go from linear to srgb srgb is the color space and gamma that most computer monitors use which is why our linear renders now look correct inside blender this linear to srgb conversion is done automatically when the view transform is set to standard but you'll see if we change this to view the raw data we see the unmodified linear data like we saw in resolve [Music] to start we'll combine all of our cg elements to put the jar over the water let's add a merge node by either hitting shift spacebar and typing in merge or we can use this node shortcut up here the merge node is like the alpha over node in blender except it can do a few more things in fusion node inputs are marked by triangles and the output is marked by the gray square we'll put the water in the orange input since that's the background then we'll connect the jar to the green input for the foreground next we'll add another merge and merge our bike shadow on top of this and finally we'll merge the bike on top of all of this [Music] if we view our result it looks a bit weird because we have to add the resize node to scale up our water and jar since they were rendered at half resolution [Music] and now everything looks good and if we zoom out our viewer we can see that we are at the correct 4k resolution as far as graph organization goes i'm building mine from the top down since this is similar to how it's done in nuke the industry standard to do this i'll right click go to options build flow vertically and i'll also like to set arrange tools to connected so that the nodes snap into place nicely in blender we're used to building left to right as part of this vertical organization i always want my orange background inputs to flow vertically downward so let's merge our cg over our footage we'll connect our footage to the orange background input going downwards and our cg to the foreground input if we view this result you'll see that our composite now looks odd if we turn our viewer lut off we see that our raw footage looks correct but now our cg is incorrect so to solve this instead of using a viewer lut i want to actually apply a lut to our cg elements before they're merged over the footage to add a lut let's open this effects library and open the luts drop down and then we see our vfx i o inside we'll see our linear to srgb lut but i'm actually not going to choose this instead i'll choose linear to blackmagic film 4.6k long story short in some trial and error this most closely matches my raw footage so i'll drag this lut node right into my graph and close the library then we'll make sure to check pre-divide post multiply warning the whole color management approach to this project is probably not the best way to do things it worked for me which is why i'm sharing it with you but i realize it might be kind of hard to apply to your own specific situation so for now let's focus on the other aspects of compositing now that we've fixed our issue we can use our viewer lut to apply the final stylized lut provided by a threefold this gives us an easy way to preview the final look by the way this viewer lut is only for preview purposes it's never applied to our final composite so even though it shows here if we make sure our composite is connected to the media out node and we go back to our timeline tab you can see that the lut is not applied okay let's start to polish this composite first by masking out our wood poles i'm going to quickly make some space in our graph and then i'll turn off my bike shadow by selecting this merge and hitting control or command p to turn off the node let's then go to our water node and we'll add a mac control node let's also drag in this polygon node and if we right click the output of a node and drag it to another node we can see all the input options we want our polygon to be a garbage mask to cut out the parts of the water where the wood posts should show now with the polygon node still selected we can draw our mask right in the viewer this is a big reason i prefer fusion to blender since in blender you need to create masks in a separate window from the viewer back in fusion we need another mask for the back post so let's create another polygon node link it into the first one and i'll draw our mask if i look at this polygon node you can see i've just created these two masks and i'll add a slight amount of softening to the edges now for our front pole we need to cut out part of our footage and put it back on top after our cg elements we'll create another mac control node adding our footage as the background input then let's add a new polygon node and connect this as a garbage mat we can now draw our masks now if we look at our matte control node we'll see we need to invert this selection in the garbage matte settings and now we want to merge this back on top of our shot so we'll create another merge node and i can hold shift while i drag this node over the connection and it will slot in and i'll attach our masked post to the foreground input and just so you know you can remove nodes by holding shift and dragging them out of the graph next i'll add some overall color correction to get our cg elements matching our footage to help with this we'll turn on a color inspector in our viewer and let's add a color corrector node right before our lut first let's correct our black values if i mouse over the darkest areas of the footage i can see in our color inspector that over on the left here our values are around 0.19 and the darkest value is about 0.13 but our shoe is at point zero eight so we'll lift our black values a bit and then i'm going to increase our gamma a small amount also make sure you go into the options here and check pre-divide post multiply to clear up those edge issues if i now use our color inspector on the dark values of our shoe we'll see they're now matching the values of our footage now this area to the left is a little too bright to mask the color correction here i could create a polygon but an ellipse node will do the trick i'll connect this to our color corrector crank the softness up and change the ellipse size in the viewer one cool thing about most nodes in fusion is that if you hit this button you can create multiple versions of an effect i can then switch between versions to see which i like best next i'll make a few more color adjustments first i'll take down the saturation on the bike by adding a color corrector node to the bike element then i'll turn the bike shadow back on apply a color corrector node and add a slight amount of lift again make sure to check pre-divide post multiply on these nodes the colors are now looking pretty good and remember i can also turn this view roulette on and off to check my work now that we're adding more nodes we can tidy things up by using underlays shift spacebar and search underlay if i hold alt i can drag this behind a group of nodes press f2 to rename it and then right click and set a color i'll add an underlay to group each cg element and my footage and just so you know if you want to select multiple nodes and move them hold ctrl or command not shift if you hold shift you will detach the nodes from your graph yes it's a little frustrating to learn this now for some finishing touches first i want to add a blur to my bike as it's looking too sharp so let's select our bike shift spacebar search for blur hit enter and i'll set the blur to 0.4 for the final touch you'll notice our footage has this colored noise in it while our cg elements are very clean to change this we'll add a gray node right below our overall color correction we'll need to turn the power down quite a bit as you'll see in our footage noise tends to be a lot more visible in the darker areas than in the brighter areas so when matching noise it's best to start by matching the darkest areas of your footage and cg elements this left side works well for this in this shot as you can see our grain node gives us control to match each color channel so in our viewer we can toggle down this color menu and start with the red channel i'll up my red difference quite a bit then i'll switch to my green channel and then i'll switch to our blue channel we'll see we need to increase the blue slightly there are further controls for the softness size and spacing of the grain that you can play with to get closer to the footage finally in this spread tab we can modify this curve so that the noise is more visible in the darker areas than in the highlights just like our footage and now we have some really nice noise on my own time i tweak this shot a bit more but those really are most of the effects and techniques that i use to get my final composite i want to deliver this ungraded version to the guys at threefold and remember this viewer lut is not applied to our composite and we can see that this is true in our timeline tab so without the lut applied i can switch over to the export tab and here i'll export a 4k exr sequence i then gave this sequence to the threefold guys for their final edit if you want to apply a lut we can come to this color tab any coloring that's done here comes after the compositing just like the tabs are ordered to apply the lut i simply right click this node and go into the lut folder to find the lut they provided i can then head back to the export tab and create an h.264 file for faster previewing and feedback let me tell you a story once upon a time there was a boy who made youtube tutorials he recorded his audio using his phone inside a sock holding it rather awkwardly in his hand and many people noticed it some pointing and laughing others downright confused so one day the boy went to the town square and found some generous patrons he also brought some products with him put up a booth called it gum road and people also bought those as well because of the generosity of the people the boy was then able to purchase a proper microphone turning this boy into a man a man with two hands completely free to pray and give thanks seriously though your support whether it's on patreon or gum road goes into making these tutorials better for everyone so i really appreciate it if you can support me one way or the other and remember all patrons have access to all the project files and elements for this tutorial including the raw footage cg renders and blender and resolve files i've also released an in-depth blender breakdown of this shot and other exclusive tutorials already out waiting for you it's one heck of a package so head over and check it out the page is linked in the description other than that thanks for watching and learning with me i hope you enjoyed the sunset and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: InLightVFX

Views: 246,608

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Id: Gmh-6isghMA

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021