#UE5 Series: Mastering UNREAL Engine to NUKE Workflow

hey there it's Resa and I'm thrilled to have you here on my channel in this tutorial by popular demand I'll be diving into the world of unreal reader plugging covering everything you need to know first up I'll guide you through the process of installing nuke server to establish a seamless connection between onreal editor and nuke next we will handpick our maps and sequences from unreal loading our render passes and exploring the Myriad properties offered by this remarkable plugging inside Foundry nuke but that's not all we're taking it a step further with a compelling case study where I will demonstrate how to integrate new elements inside nuke in our scene to elevate your final product to new heights I've packed a ton of valuable insights into this single tutorial so get ready to gear up and let's get started [Music] [Music] all right let's start by downloading the plugin from The Foundry website I'm using nuke 15 in this example you click on Windows on real engine read terms and conditions don't forget that and I agree once you download I'm just going to go and unzip the file and of course within that folder there is a Foundry folder which we need to copy so I'm going to go copy and then I'm going to go into program files in my C drive epic games Unreal Engine Engine and then plugins and just paste the folder right in there the hard part is done let's fire up Unreal Engine we need to load the plugin you can go either to file or settings plugin and type in Nuke nuke server shows up take that and of course we need to restart the engine and once that's done I'm going to close the plug-in window I'm going to go into windows and there we have our nuke server let's start with our onreal engine in the next chapter and work from there not long ago I did a tutorial on how to export object IDs motion wictor and depth pass using a render que from Unreal Engine into nuke and I went through all of these properties and attributes and I explained why and how we can tweak them for ideal result inside nuke now what we're going to explain is how to load our level into nuke instead so instead of going in there using exr bake everything into textures and bring it into nuke we're actually going to load this scene with our cameras into nuke and we are going to generate passes and tweak our scene inside Foundry nuke and all of these are possible using the reader plugin so that is extremely useful very exciting so we are not going to use these guys but please do check out uh that video because over there I I do explain the difference between full material actor folder and layout and it's kind of necessary to know what does what since we are going to use Crypt mat inside Foundry nuke now we don't need to use movie render Q I'm going to close it we're going to go straight into window into nuke server and we are going to um activate This Server right here all you need to be mindful of is the port number which by default mine is 9,000 it really doesn't matter whatever number you have here should match the server number or port number inside Foundry nuke so we remember 9,000 and we go start the server and if you do that too often you can always go start server automatically with that as soon as you run nuke server it starts connecting so I'm going to go start server and it's running one last tip before we switch to Nuke we go to edit we go to Project settings and in here we're just going to type in post processing under postprocessing you need to make sure that your custom depth stencil pass is enabled custom depth temporal is enabled and very important enable Alpha Channel support in postprocessing set to linear color space only that allows you to get Alpha channels that match your stencil passes we are going to talk about stencil passes but you must enable this settings in unreal to be able to use that inside Foundry nuke here I am inside nuke X remember you need to use nuke X X not just a typical nuke otherwise you can load the node but it's uh going to be gr out I am going to make sure that I'm in my node graph and I'm going to press Tab and I'm going to bring in unreal reader it's erroring out at the moment but we are going to connect because I need to connect to a server on the right hand side we've got the host name and the port number that you need to be mindful of same port number in onreal engine make sure you have that connect to server it's going to think and it should bring the scene now there are two problems first things first I should be able to see the scene I'm not seeing it and second issue the aspect ratio and output resolution is different so let's address those two really quickly 2350 1,000 because of course mine is uh the camera output resolution is Cinematic so I'm just going to go to Nuke s in the right hand side the property window I'm going to bring project setting and I'm going to add a new one 2350 to 1,000 and I'm going to call that airport it's necessary to name it of course I'm going to press okay the aspect ratio is fixed but why I don't see anything I'm going to double click and there is a project app that you always need to check if you deal with a simple scene with just one camera one location one set of maps then uh you will see the picture immediately but if you deal with a rather complex scene with multiple cameras multiple angles different folders for the textures different Maps then you need to set those up I've got project the path for the project is correct I've got map the map that I have if I really quickly go in there and bring in my content drawer I can get rid of that you can see I'm using terminal single I am going to pick terminal single and you can see I'm getting the result the sequence has been detected properly uh the sequencer that I'm using is called sequence sign and the idea is to sort of look at this sign and make some changes uh so that bit you need to be careful about output there's really not much here scene unit is set to Nuke render mode is set to full image so you can see the output there is another mode and that is stencil layer and that allows you to see uh your layers inside nuke let's say you have Crypt mat layer and you would like to visualize that uh you you go into stencil layer so you can preview your passes we will get to that and we will use that now the image format is already set to the right one you can always go and edit that or create a new one but since we are using the right one in the project settings it will read that automatically also we have a right section and that might bring some questions that well we have if I press W the good old right why do we need to write this from here this is actually called pre-rendering and that allows you to optimize the workflow and speed it up so I highly recommend you to use that and we will be using that actually throughout this tutorial now let's talk about render Tab and that allows you to select all the passes that you can think of from from this scene extract it and actually bring it into our unreal reader node now it is important not to overdo this so only select the passes that you actually need in our case study we would like to replace this frame with another sign so simply because this has been obscured by this tent right here we definitely need to bring some sort of a a masking pass to be able to uh create the hold out and of course Crypt mat does that for us beautifully so probably the most important one in this list would be Crypt mat of course uh since we're dealing with replacing or tweaking the existing scene we always want to bring World position and I would like to bring World depth as well simply because I believe I can just add to the scene using that and since we are using and I am going to just add path Tracer to the mix as well in case we need it for our case study now it doesn't update it automatically you need to go update channel list if I look at my layers we have just the main components RGB and Alpha and if I go update it will go through this and then if I go into here we we have our crypto passes we have our path Tracer World depth World position at our disposal alternatively for crypto mat if I go up here you can switch to stencil layer and then see the preview layer preview in order to see the crypto matat but we are going to just work with that for now now it's time to pre-render our scene and uh optimize the workflow why not I'm just going to go in there I'm going to define the path now defining the path is not going to cut it I'm just going to use with pre-render underscore terminal underscore and I'm going to specify the paddings 1 23 I've got only 100 and something frames so it's not going to be too long and you need to specify the extension I'm going to enter the file TP is already set to extension uh data type 16 bit we want uh High bat depth and compression set To None now we have create read node make sure that's enabled once we render everything then create read node is going to create the read node for us I'm going to go right we get an error which is normal because behind the scen Unreal Engine is actually rendering everything if I go to Unreal Engine you can see that it's actually rendering these frames we are going to wait for these renders to be finished and the animation is well underway it's just a subtle zoom in and once that's done we should be able to see the [Music] thumbnail now the render is done all I need to do is just to read from the file I'm going to plug that in here if it still doesn't show double click on the read note and reload and you should be able to see the image now we don't need to work with the plugin anymore we can just work away from here if I go to my layer you can see I've got these passes path Tracer is also included for us which is great world depth dep World position and all other layers that you may want to bring now um there are more into this so you can sort of uh go through the crypto mat and think about all right what type of crypto mat we want remember we talked about this in our object IDs in our Unreal Engine playlist so definitely check that out if you're not familiar with this I'm going to switch to material on this one there is no translucent object but if there is you can always take that if you bring any color correction or color management file Ocio in Unreal Engine you can definitely bring that here and switch just to show you where you can find it if you go into nuke server and bring that in there is open color configuration where you can actually nominate Ocio config so nuke actually knows what is what is going on and this is a relatively new section uh so beforehand we had to actually use uh Ocio converter and then use the disabled tone curve to tackle this issue back in Nuke 13 uh on real Engine 5 I'm using 5.3 and I'm using nuke 15 so that's really not an issue anymore you can enable and disable motion blur if you want and we are going to go into cameras and uh talk about cameras it's just playing a massive role in our case study and of course in this node you can just write a label and take it from there in variables tab you can write console variables which we're not going to use and that should really do the trick when it comes to covering the node itself now let's go to the next chapter where we actually start this as a case study to be able to tweak this [Music] scene okay I will be using the same shot for this uh particular case study um I've gone ahead and tweaked a few bits and pieces like putting a few Assets in the background Chang the direction of the light Chang the color of this tend moved some objects around um added Bloom nothing too special and uh nuk server is running so let's switch to Nuke here I am inside uh Foundry nuke and I've already gone ahead not to waste any time I took care of the pre-render Via here the path is established read file is on it's all ready to go and another thing I did inside the render tab I enabled Crypt mat I enabled path Tracer and I enabled World depth World normal and World position for what we're going to do it is necessary to have all three enabled now what exactly is the objective of this case study we would like to go ahead and change this sign so we replace this sign by this sign right here now there are few challenges namely this tent is obscuring this sign right here so we need to find a way to took care of the hold out and we also need to color correct that sign using all the nodes that are available to us inside Foundry nuke now what we have if I just switch the viewer to the read node let's go over the layers that we exported we have Crypt mat render pass we have the good old path Tracer and the reason I included path Tracer because I really don't like the look of this lit mode if I go into rgba you can see it's really dull it doesn't have any indirect illumination and I spent a good amount of time going over uh all right let's put some background here let's make the background a bit dramatic let's introduce a little bit of Bloom and lens flare so it would be a shame not to have the path Tracer and of course we have World depth World normal and World position we are going to move this guy over here and I press dot to create a DOT node another dot to move this down and we are going to shuffle some of the information that we have in our read node the beauty of using Shuffle node is if you ever want to pass along the information to another compositor everything is cleaner to read and of course that's a great way of extracting AC in information as a layer within a read node and pass it on to shuffle so you can use it in conjunction with other nodes so I'm just going to connect all three in here and it is very important to name them properly all right this is going to be my rgba so I'm not going to change anything and in the label I'm going to call that rgba so we know what we're dealing with and the label is here easy enough to read I tend not to rename the node itself but to add a label instead the second Shuffle node is going to be our world position input layer World position so we are actually bringing that layer into this Shuffle node and this Shuffle node is going to act as a container we can pass on the information to whatever node we're going to create afterwards all right I'm going to call that or World p and the second one is going to be our world normal and the good thing about world normal is you have control over the orientation of your points and everything is clear ready to go feel free to recolor rename but I'm not too really picky about that now we have this information how we'll be able to use that well World position allows you to actually extract information and put that into Point clouds and with the help of rgba you can color that and World normal is going to help you to fix the orientation if there is any issues the correct note to use that is position two points so I am going to create that uh and you will see very soon that actually World position does expect World position in our Shuffle node so I can go and connect the rgba to World position World position goes in here and you can see uh the node is smart enough to be able to identify this position right here and then we have normal and if I connect that you can actually see that it says Norm identifying this Shuffle node as a container that passes on normal this is fantastic I'm going to switch to rgba and I am going to plug the viewer in and instantly we are getting a 3D representation of our scene this might come as a Blobby object in your scene and if that's the case because of the point size I'm going to reduce this point size to something like 01 and it's much smaller if uh your computer can handle it I would also increase the point detail definitely not necessary all right so far so good how are we able to use this information then well if I go through the scene you can see I have actually access to the 3D position of this object so all I need to do is just to place a 3D card node and position it carefully and properly and we can make that switch this is really good so let's actually get to work I'm going to go in here and this is a time where we are going to sort of dive into more 3D nodes and I try to do my best to explain some of these nodes as we move forward if you already have experience in Nuke or perhaps watched my uh nuke Essentials playlist on YouTube there's a good chance that you may know all of these notes we're going to start with a card so I'm just going to go and press Tab and type in card geometry and load that in and if I press F hovering my mouse on the viewer and press F you can see the card in the 3D position now one way of doing it is to of course go in here and try to sort of position that object manually but before I get ahead of myself I'm just going to add to this card and then I have all the time in the world to position it properly so um every time you bring a 3D node and the indication is round corners 2D nodes are sharp and angular but in order to feed in multiple 3D nodes into a scene it's always a good practice to actually bring a scene node I'm going to plug that in and that allows you to if you have more cards if you want to incorporate or Implement more objects into this scene that allows you to do that now every time you bring a 3D node and plug it to a scene you need to find a way to render it and we are going to do that using a scan line renderer in Nuke 15 we have scan line renderer version two which is in beta mode and we have the classic one we are going to use the classic one and that expects your scene scn that is your scene you can potentially Define the resolution by putting it um or plugging it into any constant and that defines the resolution of this scene but remember if I press s in the properties editor we already Define the resolution so that is definitely not needed and I'm in general not in a big favor of plugging anything into background BG for background but also this expects a camera and we do not have the camera in the scene so how are we going to sort of view it through the lens which is the tricky part well that's where the power of this unreal reader note comes to play because there is a section that we did not cover in the first half of the tutorial and that is the camera you can actually extract the camera from unreal with animation and bring it into nuke and you get the exact same camera angle aspect ratio everything will be similar so with the link output tick I'm going to go ahead and create the camera there we have our camera and it comes with the expression saying that it's been linked I'm going to move it in here and this scan line that render expects the camera you plug the camera in two points if this line is getting under your skin you can always go into node and you can hide the input so if I click away you're not going to see that green line only you see it when you select it the second point is preferably when you use this method you want more or less to have everything at the Center but if and only if that is the issue and you there is no way for you to fix that you can use this camera node to somehow um find a solution for it I can duplicate in here and I can go and create transform Geo node and this expects an AIS an AIS is like a locator in uh Maya if if you are familiar with that is just a gizmo that allows you to connect two elements and the camera actually can follow the axis and the axis can follow your transform Geo and all you need to do just to bring that in and reorient your scene so this transform Geo comes with translate rotate scale and even skew which we probably don't want to use but this this will force axis to move and axis forces the camera to move in that case you're repositioning your scene but axis will bring along the camera with it so it's not going to reposition the scene and the camera will be left alone and then you have to bring and readjust the camera this is only if you have the scene on the side there's no way that you deal with it that's how you use use it I'm going to perhaps delete these guys because we're not going to use any of these just is the side information for you we have the camera we have the card let's actually make that connection using this read node a simple merge node and make that connection now before I do that I really would like to bring my also path Tracer pass into play so that would be a good time to just drop in another Shuffle node and extract our path Tracer plug that in I'm going to go and fetch my path Tracer and if I look into my path Tracer you can see I'm getting the correct result of course I am going to label it since we are dealing with too many Shuffle nodes I want to know exactly which one is which and then I can just drop in a merge node B always goes to the base and our base is our read node this is very very important and a goes into our scan line render so you can see now um I am getting the information for the path Tracer but I'm also have the option of using this card to be able to sort of move that around however I want reposition it and rescale it and put it into place this card note expects an image so let's drop in our image I am going to just drag and drop our image in here and I'm looking at the blue here and I'm looking at the color here um this is really bright now there are many ways of toning down the brightness but quick and easy way is to use multiply math noes so I'm just going to drop in multiply math bring that in and I don't know just maybe bring down the value to half and you can see these two are going to match now it's time I guess to comfortably go in there and reposition my card using translate rotate scale uniform scale and if you want to push this out and in you can use the Z since we are using all the necessary information inside nuke nuke can comfortably move this along the z-axis and bring it forward towards the camera or far away from the camera alternatively you can look at the position to point and interactively reposition your card [Music] all right I thought I would just use the position to point since we have the information why don't we use it all right the issue is right now of course the tent should be in front of the sign and that's really not the case at this stage and that's why we have our crypto mat pass so let's bring that to use I'm going to give myself a little bit of room move it away and let's bring in our Crypt matat there are many ways of using this Crypt matat one way is to use a copy Noe as a hold out which I explained in my uh how to use object IDs video in my Unreal Engine playlist and because of that I'm going to use the second method so there's an opportunity to learn something new uh in this tutorial so to see what's going on of course you need to connect that to your read note and view it and in here of course I explained this uh again in that video but let's go through that we can use the Picker to add I'm going to hold control click to add control shift click to add multiple objects and to remove pick a remove control and deselect and because I used material as my Crypt mat inside onreal reader then each object with different materials will get a different ID which is very very convenient so I'm going to hold down control select this guy and now this is in my Alpha how cool is that basically all I need to do is just to use merge mask in here here and in mask I'm just going to invert that's all you need to do and if I press one this is in place this is really cool I believe that my card possibly needs uh to have a much better position so I'm just going to view and see if I can ever so slightly reposition my card card double click on the card to bring out transformation gizmos and just going to align it ever so slightly maybe push that back a little bit yeah that should do the trick that's much better yeah so so far so good but um what I would like to do at this point is we used pretty much all of the passes um we used normal we used position and we used path Tracer the one that we didn't use is is World depth so let's bring that to use in case if you would like to add a little bit of drama into your scene again to extract we are going to use the good old Shuffle and we are going to connect that to our read note I'm going to move these two guys a little bit up and the flow has to be top to bottom with this guy we what we are going to pick is World depth I'm going to go into no rolled depth so we know what pass I'm dealing with I'm just going to drop in a Grade node because if I look into this world depth it's just really hard to translate we really don't know what we're dealing with and this grade node is going to help us to sort of tone down these values through the gain to be able to sort of translate that and what we usually do we're dealing with with very very small small value and you can see that I can just go in further with that but I honestly believe that what we have doesn't require too much atmospheric 05 should be good I'm going to sort of flatten the values pressing C on the keyboard to bring a color correct note and I'm going to just kill the saturation here view it and you can see we have the good old depth it this is a good time for you guys is to color your Haze or fog for sort of more dramatic effect using another color correct and feel free to label those as well for this one I actually am going to increase the saturation ever so slightly and I'm going to tone down the gamma just a little bit and with that I'm going to introduce a little bit of color and it's totally up to you if you want to sort of add a little bit of orange or add a little bit of blue to the scene and that gets added basically to your scene all right we have the package for our wall depth ready to go let's connect that drop in the merge node using M on the keyboard B goes to the base remember always to the base and a goes to our depth path plus I'm holding down control to Branch this out it's um going to be a lot cleaner if you Branch this out and right now if I look at it it's just way overblown one thing I can do if you feel like all right you've done some work in the background and it would be a shame not to see it you can always go to highlight in this particular case sometimes it's shadows and sometimes it midtones but for me it's the highlights that is just too hard too bright I can just lowerer down the gain ever so slightly to just gain some of the information that I had now from this point onward you can go ahead and use all the tricks in the books to intensify in here if I go I can use actually screen as my operation there's nothing wrong with that and take it from there once you're happy with everything and you feel like all right your work is ready to go you can just drop in a write node and write out your script there you have it a quick introduction on how to use some of these passes in a case study if you ever want to create Point clouds for further tweaks or introduce some elements you don't just need to replace an object you may want to bring an image with Alpha and put it in the background I could actually use some fire in there uh some elements that you may want to add into the scene with the help of this position pass you should be able to get that one done I will put this script on my patreon page in case if you would like to download it and test it and play around with it so it's easier to use all right that should wrap up this tutorial I hope you found this useful and use these techniques that you've learned in this tutorial in your projects definitely follow me on Instagram Reddit and X have a great rest of your day until the next tutorial see you guys later

Channel: SARKAMARI

Views: 1,392

Keywords: unreal nuke plugin, nuke unreal engine, nuke unreal reader, nuke unreal engine 5, ue cryptomatte, nuke position, nuke position to points, position to point nuke, path tracer unreal engine 5, unreal engine 5 tutorial, unreal engine 5, ue5 beginner tutorial, unreal compositing, ue compositing after effects, unreal to nuke workflow, unreal beginner tutorial, unreal beginner tutorial 2023, unreal beginner

Id: oagWdzyes8U

Length: 39min 8sec (2348 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024