Original subtitles

if your goal is to step up from

short films up to feature film level visual effects

then stick around for this video

because this video is designed for you

if you're like me starting out in visual effects

you're probably an after effects user

you've probably done some Andrew Kramer tutorials

the OG and maybe some of your own short films

this is where I started visual effects as well

if you want to go professionally

have to transition to new

when I was younger

I was always going out in

shooting films with my friends

the process of coming up with shooting story

filming and adding visual effects

I had a green screen

I had to hang on the back of a garage

key it out and add some effects

or enter small competitions

at the time I didn't even know what the term compositor

was however

once I Learned about nuke

I was hooked once I saw the potential

so this is a clip from way back in high school

a little short film with lightsabers and after effects

and then

a shot I did on The Rise with Skywalker with nuke

so this video is aimed towards my prior self

people out there who want to transition from

aftereffects and work on feature films

so if you stick around for this tutorial

this will be the first shot that we comp and nuke

we're just gonna be working with still images here

so I'm gonna give you guys a few images to work with

and we'll start to see

how this node based workflow is actually working

and I'll compare it against after effects

and show you guys how we can take

a very basic composite that isn't really finalized

and then we can kind of add those

creative adjustments

to get something that looks a bit more polished

so

the first thing you're going to want to do is download

Nukenot Commercial

it is free for non commercial use

you can use it for all your personal projects

your demo reel

it's a pretty good deal

and there's very few limitations

you can render up to HD and there's no problem

so the link for that is in the description

and you'll want to make sure you launch nukex

it comes with two versions when you

download it and one says X on it

it just has like all the features when you launch the

X versus the non

x version so that's all you really need to know

so just make sure you launch that when you start

so if you download the project files if that's

included in the description as well

you'll get a few images here that you can drag into

after effects the way you normally start in

after effects

so I'm just going to compare the two interfaces real

quick and then we'll kind of explain

more of the nukes interface after that

so we'll make some comparisons along

the way

just so you can transfer your knowledge really quickly

but after effects if we start here

the normal you have your images on your

sort of media

project file over here

and when you drag one in

it will create a new composition

and when you create a composition in the composition

settings you see it's automatically

grabbing the format so nuke is a little bit different

if we open up nuke

this is what it's gonna look like

and if we drag it an image

the same way we

just in after effects

we can take an image and just drag it in

and we get a little node down here

which is a read node

now by default we don't see anything

so what you actually have to do is

click the node and hit 1 on your keyboard

and this is gonna create

a yellow line and there's this little

node here called viewer so if I

just move it up here so I can see it

we see this little viewer node

and the way you can navigate this little

node graph is by holding your middle mouse on your

keyboard and you can

click and drag these nodes around

and you'll see

this connection

so whatever this viewer is connected to

is what we're going to see

in our window here

so that's a bit different in after effects

whenever you just

put all your toggles

on your visibility layers

which are these eyeballs here

it's kind of like that in nuke but whenever

we want to turn something off

we just look at the layer we want to look at

so we'll just grab another image here

we'll go here

we'll grab the soldier image and we'll bring it in

and then we have two images

so if we select the other one and we hit one

we'll see we're looking at that image now

so we can swap between the two by hitting one

you can also hit one and then click on this one hit two

so you can hit one and two on your keyboard and

switch between them easily

so that's kind of useful if you're working on

different parts of your composite

so in after effects if we were to do the same thing

we can bring in our guy

we can put it on top

and automatically they start being layered together

and nuke is a little bit different

this is where people start to get tripped up

in nuke there's two places that

people

start to get confused and overwhelmed right away

and it's actually

really not as complicated as it seems

but

it's just something that's coming from after effects

you don't understand the purpose of why it's doing this

so if we want to merge this guy over this background

we just need to do a merge node

but there is one extra node that we have to do

and we're going to explain it in just a second

but if we just click this and we hit m

we can say merge and then we say a over B

so we work from top to bottom in nuke we don't work

bottom up so here

the bottom layer would be the background that we work

upwards it's just opposite in nuke

and so

the way you could think of it is each one of these

images coming in

a over B is a new layer

so you could have many layers for or to select these

hit control C control V

it's going to be built out like this

so we always be going down

you'll always see that your B pipe is pointing down

you'll see these layers coming in over

and it's kind of like a painting

so background the foreground the same as after effects

except we're just working in a tree

now the only thing is where people get tripped up

here is if you view this node

so we hit one

again to look at the node that we want to see

you'll see that we're not actually seeing

this guy over the background

and this is a PNG

so it does have an alpha

but nuke doesn't automatically apply

the alpha to the image in some cases

and this is where people get confused and

you're like it's a PNG

it has an alpha

why is it not just merging over like after effects

there's one node you have to put

and it's called premult

so if you hit tab on your keyboard

and you type premult

that's how you can get a pre molt node

and that will automatically

make this work

so essentially what's happening if we just

compare the idea to Photoshop real quickly is

the same as in Photoshop

if you have an image

and you want to apply a mask

we can create a little mask layer here

you see that there's an alpha

but it's separated from the RGB

so there's the

colors of the image

and then there's an alpha of the image

and it's really important to always

think of these things as

two different things

and all that pre malt node does is apply

the stored alpha in the image

so if we look at the image and we hover our mouse over

the viewer and hit a

we can actually see that

there's an alpha stored in the image

and so it's just taking that and multiplying that

against the colors of the image

in other words it's applying the cut out

just as it did in Photoshop we just saw

so afterfx automatically does that nuke it doesn't

and later on that's actually really

really useful that it doesn't do that

but we don't need to talk about it really in this

tutorial so this is a beginner tutorial

so before we continue further

I'm just going to explain the layout a little bit more

and we'll also compare to aftereffects to see

where the similar

effects will be and those type of things

so over here on the right side is your properties panel

and this allows you to control

different effects and different nodes

so if you want to create a node

again we kind of did it real quick

but if you click down here and hit tab and you type

something it will open this window

and you can access all your notes here

so there's a lot of nodes that we'll use

and it's good to start to memorize them

but you also have

this panel over here where you can access them

so these are all the nodes that you can use in nuke

and you can click in here and find them

a lot of them you're not going to know what to do

at the start

so we'll just talk about a few by typing them

so we hit tab and we'll say blur

and then we can create a blur node

and so the control for the blur node would be here

and if we take the blur and we plug it into the layer

or sorry the image we can view it

so we want to make sure we're viewing it

if we're not viewing it

we're not going to see anything happen

so make sure we click it and hit 1

and then we can just start to increase that

and you'll see that the image starts to get blurred

and you see that I've put it off to the side here

so we can have different composites going in different

directions here

which is what's interesting about nuke

and you'll see

how that becomes really beneficial later on

but if we view here we have this blurred image

if we view here we just have our normal composite

so to go over a few other just quick

shortcut keys and things you'll need to know

we have up here some sliders

this will kind of adjust your viewer brightness

so it's not going to permanently affect the image

just if we want to

kind of brighten it to see some details

like maybe we're working the shadow area for example

this is the gamma control so

gamma and gain are a little bit different

this is gain and this is gamma this one right here

and you see that when we bring this one up

it looks a little bit foggier

it's a little bit different

and if we bring it down it gets more contrast

and so

we'll explain that later on in some more advanced

tutorials if you're interested in

the actual curves and why that's doing that behavior

but just to know that those are there is

brightness and

gamma which looks a little bit different

so also you can move around by holding middle mouse

drag by zooming in and out

so you can hold middle mouse and

you can zoom in with middle mouse or you can click and

click your middle mouse in and drag it around like that

you can also hit f on your keyboard to frame up

your shot so we're not going to have to use z or any

shortcut key like that in after effects

we can just use them in a mouse all the time

the other thing I did here

I just brought in a video file

if you have a video file you can just drag it in

this is an image sequence actually but if I view this

and they will hit f by

holding my mouse over to frame it up

you can see there's some video of embers here

if we drag on this timeline that's how you play

so it's a little bit different than after

effects where it's

sort of a timeline

this is just showing the frame number

and if we switch the input

it'll switch to the frame range of the video

and if we switch to global

it'll switch to the project settings

of the frame range

and if you want to access your project

settings to set the frame range or the resolution

for example

in after effects when we create a new composite

in the composition settings

you see it's automatically

grabbing the width and height

of the image that we dragged in

and nuke is not doing that

so if we go here and we hover hover over the mouse

sorry the no graph area and we hit s

that will access your

project settings and

you know we'll want to make sure that we're working

the format that the image is set to

so if we go back to our image here and click 1

we can see the image is this size 1456 by 816

and all the images we're working with

in this specific project

are that size

so you want to make sure your

your format is set to that

and if you drag in an image

it'll actually create these

additional formats down

here at the bottom where you see that that

format is there

so we have some standard formats like

if you're working on YouTube maybe 1920 by 1080

something like that would be which you render out

and maybe we work in

but if we're working with

something that's not standard if we drag it into nuke

it'll appear down here

and we can just

click that and set a project to that resolution

so that's another place that

people will get tripped up a little bit

is with formats

because

aftereffects is automatically handling that for you

so now we're just going to talk about the color

channels real quick and the alpha channel again

just to make sure that we get the concept

and we'll do a little bit of a roto just to do that

because it's a very common process and you're probably

familiar with doing it in aftereffects

so to see different color channels

and maybe you're not even familiar with what

color channels are

but the color channels just represent each

amount of color in each channel so

image is made up of red green and blue

and so we can look at those channels independently

so if we look at this merge node I mean

we click over our viewer and hit R

we'll see that the areas that are the most red

will become it'll kind of be a black

and white representation

but the areas that have the most red will be the

brightest areas

so you see like this area that's more blue

you know is going to be a little bit darker

so if we go to the green channel or the blue channel

like if we say the blue channel for example we hit B

you see the areas that are yellow are getting darker

but the areas that are

blue are staying bright so we know there is more blue

in this area

we can also hit alpha which again is just our guy

but if we want to create a mask for this guy

how would we do it

so in after effects you would just go to your layer

you would go to your pen tool and you would just

click around the head here

and we would just

hit this and it would automatically cut that out

and nuke it's a little bit different

we need to cut out

this guy and his alpha by another alpha

so how we do that is we create a roto nodes

we can hit tab and hit type roto

and you get the roto node

the other way you can do it is hit 0 on your keyboard

if we double click that Roto node

we'll have the properties here

and we'll have this little panel on the side

so if we hit Q on our keyboard

when your mouse is pointing over the viewer

and you'll see that we keep having to do

the keyboard shortcuts where your mouse is pointing

it's important you're doing that

so pointing over here

make sure Q is on

you'll say overlay on

and you'll see the little format here

if we click around we can do the same effect

and we close the curve here

so that's how you can create new curves

you can just draw them and hit enter

and then you'll see that they stack up here

and if we are viewing that roto node

so let's go to the view

and hit a we'll see that those two are stored there

so we can view something else

even though we're not working on it

see how the rotode node is not connected to anything

but we can be viewing the soldier

so if I hit one I'm viewing the soldier

we see the overlay from the rotode node

even though it's not even connected

so that's just something

that you can keep in mind is like

the overlay can be

sort of from a different layer

but right now it's not doing anything

because you see that these nodes are not connected

and so how do we connect these nodes

if I view this and hit a

we do have an alpha but we want to cut this out

by this

so all we do is we create a merge node by hitting m

and we can say a

overbeat but we don't want it to be over

because we don't want to merge something over

we want to mask it so if we switch this to mask

you'll see that

this Roto alpha is now masking the layer

that's been connected with here

so we have that result and if we merge it over

a overbeat we have the result that we're expecting

so that's the difference between

after effects is just that

the nodes are kind of separated

and this is actually pretty useful because you can say

what's cool about is you can maft different layers

because it's a tree

so you could do another merge node and you could say

we could take that roto

and we could mask the background

and we could switch it to mask right and so

you could see how that could

start to be interesting when you have many

many layers and it might not click yet

but when you start doing with 10

20 30 layers it's really useful to have things

displayed in a tree like this

another thing I just did it but you can press space

to full screen different areas

if you're pointing over

if you just want to see everything

laid out you can also hit space on

this area hit f to just get it bigger

so those are just some extra shortcut keys there

I'm gonna delete this now

because we don't need it but that's just how you can

apply a rotor shape really quickly

on a layer that has an alpha already

so so just to mention some other things real quick

if you wanted to do the opposite

we'll just do it real quick anyway

so I'll just create a rotor node

and I'm just going to

do a stencil instead of a mask so operation

set the stencil

and then same thing so if we click around

it would just stencil it out

so that's just useful to know

that's kind of how you would invert it

and that's a useful thing to see

otherwise you can have it set the mask

and you could use an invert node

so you could hit tab and type invert

I wouldn't do it that way

but just to know that that node is there

is pretty useful

one other thing

and just do I know I'm going fast

but there's a lot of things to cover so

if we want to

if we wanted to make this Roto node have color in it

because right now it only has an alpha right

it says Roto and it says alpha

and one thing to know

is if you want to know what's coming out of a node

you can look at these little colorful boxes here

so this one has red green and blue and an alpha

so we have the colors of the image and the alpha

a little white box

but we see here it's only giving us a white box

so how could we

if we wanted this to just be a solid

like we want to create a solid

and after effects

we go here we do new solid

and we would pull this over

and then we would just select the color

and we'd have a solid here but doesn't have an alpha

so we would go here and kind of

mask it out like that's how we would create

this red block over this image

if we wanted to do the same thing

we need to give this some color

so if we

switch the Roto note instead of just outputing alpha

we just switch it to RGB and a

so it'll give us colors and an alpha

and so if we switch that you'll see now that in our red

green blue channels we need RG and B

you'll see that white is there

and we can give it some color

so we could go over to our

shape by clicking it

so we click the layer first

and then we go to the shape tab

and then we can just adjust the colors that

is coming out of this

and if we were to merge this now so we hit

click it hit m

a over B

now we can see that that is being merged over so

you see it's a little bit semi transparent

because in our shape

I did affect the alpha so we have red

green blue and an alpha is at.81

so that means it's gonna be a little bit

transparent so if I would want that solid I would just

push that up so it's completely solid

so that's just why

you know when you start to look at these nodes you see

all of these things as this RGBA

or just alpha

and so again

remembering to always think of these things different

like in Photoshop if we just think of the color

and the alpha as something that's separate

we can control them separately

and that's going to help us a lot

to further emphasize that example we could blur this

by hitting B on our keyboard

and then we could blur just that

specific element and then is being merged over

and so wherever you're placing these effects are

it's only going to affect the nodes that are before it

so let's just delete all of this and do it again so

if we wanted to blur just the background

we could put a blur node

and then we put it in between

these nodes that are connecting

and we just blur it like this

if we wanted to just blur the guy

so you can hit delete and delete it

put a blur node here

and we'll just blur the guy like this

and we are only blurring our guy

if you want to blur them together

we put it after those

nodes and we just blur it together

and so that's how we can construct

our image and how the

tree and the order of things matters

so now that we saw how the order things matter

what is it

compared to aftereffects and the pre comp workflow

so in aftereffects if we wanted to blur these layers

together I mean there would be two ways to do it

you could use an adjustment layer

I'll just delete this

you could use an adjustment layer to

affect everything

which you know

we don't need to do it in nuke

because you saw that if I want to do everything

I just put it after

but the other way to do it would be to

merge things together and make them like a pre comp

so I'm gonna take

these two things I'm gonna bring in this mist here

I'm gonna put it over

our image I'm just gonna drag it in

and I'm just going to scale down

I'm not going to make it transparent or anything

I'm just going to put these two layers together

so if you wanted to blur the guy and the smoke together

normally what you have to do

is you select those two layers by hitting shift

and you would go to layer and you would pre compose it

we pre compost 2 together

and now we would apply the effect to that layer

because they're now merged together

so we could say

we go here we could put a gouge and blur

and then we would drag it to our pre comp

and then we would just blur the pre comp

so you can see these are blurring together

now in nuke we don't need to actually precomp anything

we can do renders and precomping layers

we don't need to talk about it necessarily in this case

but if we bring in a smoke element here

so I'll go here I'll grab our mist I'll drag it in

and then we will

merge them together

just like how we did in after effects

so you see one thing real quick

you'll see that it is a JPEG

so there's no alpha

so it's gonna get a little bit confused here

so you'll watch

so we'll take this and we'll merge it over

and you'll see that it comes in like semi transparent

right it's like

it's kind of like a plus

whereas here you see when we merged over

it's a black square

so what we want to do to

just make it solid because it doesn't have an alpha

it doesn't know what should be solid and what

shouldn't be so that's the thing with nuke that again

beginners will be a little bit tripped up on

it's just like

you have to think of the alpha separately

so if it doesn't have an alpha

we just want to give it one

so to give it a solid alpha

just so that this will be black

and this will be

white like how it is

we want to do a shuffle note so we type shuffle

and then what we're gonna do

is we're gonna hit this little white button here

so without having to explain this whole shuffle node

this isn't really necessary for beginners

again don't get overwhelmed

it actually is really easy but

all we need to do is

if we press up a little white button and we hit a

you'll see that there's a solid

alpha now and when you merge it over

it's gonna block the other image

kind of like how we would expect

so the other thing we want to do is we want to

scale this down

so we can do the same as what we did in after effects

so we kind of scale it down and put it next to the guy

so how we can scale images in

nuke is to create a transform node

so we'll hit after it hit t

on the keyboard or type transform

and then we could just scale it down

so you'll have the controls for the

for the node if it's double clicked and you have Q

so your overlay is on

we have our little transform controls

you know after effects

we can just click the different layers and scale them

but in nuke

we got to double click the node that we want

to control here

so I'm going to put it here

and next to the guy like this

and so

we don't need to precomp these layers now

it's already done

if we wanted to blur these layers together

we just put the blur between these nodes here

so we put the blur here

and then we just blur

and you see that those two layers

are being blurred together

so just the order of our nodes and the way we

design this tree

is going to be essentially

it's sort of like a logic

of the way things are flowing

and the effects are always in between

where the merges are

so one other thing to

mention is if you do put a transform node after

an image that doesn't have an alpha

it will actually automatically create an alpha as well

so you see that the little white thing is appearing

so if we merge it over

it will do the same result

so if I merge it over hit Q

take the scale scale down a little bit

it is doing that effect and if I disable that

you see it sets transparent

so that's

again just like a little quirk of nuke that

when you're starting out you're like well

if I just merge it over

why is it semi transparent but if I scale it down

then suddenly it becomes solid

it's just adding an alpha there because it thinks that

you're probably trying to merge an image over another

image so

that's why I explained it with the shuffle node first

and then the transform

but you actually don't need the shuffle node

you can just do it and it's gonna automatically create

it so

if you ever see a problem

where it's like doing stuff that you don't expect

you probably don't have an alpha

that's probably what's happening

so just keep that in mind

so I want to go over a few merge operations that are

present in after effects you might be familiar with

so if I just go over

into our project and bring in our mist

again

you might be familiar when with if you hit F4

you can switch between these modes here

and then

these are all your kind of blending operations

similar to

Photoshop

and so add is going to make it kind of add over the top

we could do a multiply

we could do a screen

there's different ones that we can do here

multiply would be another big one

so you get this type of effect

it's the same in nuke with our merge operations

so it's got

that knowledge is really going to transfer over

if you're familiar

so if we do a merge node and we do a

over B at the beginning and we switch it to plus

right now it's not going to do anything because again

it doesn't have an alpha

but if it had an alpha

so let's give it an alpha by hitting transform

and we'll move it around a little bit

so if it's set to over and it has an alpha

it's just gonna be like

a merge like we just saw

but if we switch it to plus

it's gonna be that

kind of that transparenty

result where it's adding over the top

and multiply it's going to sort of

cut through like this so you can see

the same effect that we just saw in after effects

if we want to compare color correction in

after effects versus nuke I'm gonna do a grade note

so I'm gonna hit G

on my keyboard or you can hit tab and type grade

so this is the most common grade note

the other one that you might

be kind of familiar with if you're coming from after

effects is the curve tool

but it's called Color Lookup

so if you type the Color Lookup and you plug this in

and you click on the master right here

you'll recognize this curve

probably

if you're coming from Photoshop and stuff like that

the grade node does the same thing

it's just in a different way

it's actually faster

I actually prefer this

versus using a color lookup all the time most people

once you use this

you're not going to actually

want to go back and have to use

curve every single time

because you can do the majority

with

basically these two sliders the gain and the gamma

that's what you're gonna use the most often

so if we just use the grade note I plug it in

I'm just gonna gamma down a tiny bit

and you'll see that

we're adding contrast overall to the scene

and if we were to go in after

effects and try the same thing

we could go let's create an adjustment layer

so we do it to everything

so we'll create an adjustment layer

and then we'll just do a curve

we'll plug it in

and we'll just pull down the center here

and you see we're adding contrast

so it's the same thing

we can adjust the white point here

so we can grab the top corner

we can push it over

and if you want to adjust

sort of like this in

nuke you can do the same

so let's bring the gamma back up and we can

push up like this and that's going to

brighten like that

so if we wanted to do that in after effects

let's bring that back up and then

I'll just get rid of the center point here actually

so we'll just create a new curve

and then we would just pull up towards the top

and you see that that's visually the same

so we're doing a gain

and that's how that effect is happening so

on that curve we're just doing it in a different way

so again gamma that's a very common

s curve so

what you're doing is you're adding contrast and you're

bringing up the highlights

so in after effects

you might be familiar with doing that

so you would bring it up like this

and then you pull it down like this

and that's why it's called an s curve

because it's creating something that looks like an s

but it gives you that sort of film

grade that is very common

so you can push it too far

it's a little bit too far for the shot

but that's just to know what we're doing so

it's good to know though

that a gamma is sort of in the center of the curve

and the multiply is when

not when we have the second point here

but when we pull up

this point here that's kind of what we're doing

now if you want to go further

and we want to adjust different colors

we can put a new grade node here

obviously the old one outlet the little color wheel

we can split into the colors and we can

adjust the colors this way

so we want to take red out of the image we can do that

if we take green out of the image

we want to take blue out

and so that's the same thing as going into your

curves here and going to your different color channels

and basically just manipulating those there

so you can do the same thing

the other way you can do it

I don't really do it this way but you could

disable these and then just start pulling down

like you just affect only the red channel for example

so you can Gam it down only in the red channel

I don't typically work like that

but you can get some interesting effects by just

disabling the color channels

I prefer to just work with the color wheels

with all the channels enabled

for the most part

but

that's pretty much it for the basic cover correction

and we can continue on

so one last thing I'm going to mention is

node cloning

and so if you're familiar with the pickwhip in

after effects that's something that

might confuse you if you're transitioning over

and you want to make things move together

and you're not exactly sure

how to do that if they're on different layers

so let's say we have a mist and we bring it in here

and let's say we want these two to move together

but we don't want

to precomp them together for some reason

like maybe there's just a reason

we want to do that and removing this guy around

we want that to move with it

we would go here and we would grab the pick whip and we

drag it to our guy and then they'll move together

and so there is a way to do that in nuke

so you can create a transform node and merge this over

again so we have an alpha and we can scale down

and we'll put it behind and then we'll view

when there merge over

so how could we get those

two layers to have a relationship

to each other

what you can actually do is create

another transform node

and you can stack transform nodes like this

and what we want to do is press Alt K

I would be option K on Mac if you do

on Mac

and you'll see this little orange line between the two

nodes here

we can drag it and put it on the other layer

so it means that these are

basically doing the same transform

so if we double click that

make sure that we're doing the

the right layer here because

if we still have this one open you might get confused

so make sure the last one that you double

click will be the one that's

being controlled in your

sort of viewer here

so I'm going to

close the other one just so it's not confusing

and if we double click it and we move it

you'll see that both layers move together now

so these nodes are a clone

and that's how you could make them move together

alternatively

like we mentioned earlier

you could just have them on the same layer like so

and then we can put a node after

and then they would move together like this as well

so that's just a different way

for some reason

your node tree needs to be in a different order

maybe

there's some effects being applied to the background

but not the foreground

but they move together for example

so that's just to know

if you're

trying to do a pick whip or a parent essentially

that is the way you would do it

so the next thing we will

mention is to merge different images that are different

size over each other

this is where again beginners get tripped up

it's always the pre malt thing

it's always this and it's always

the two different size of image

but once you get past those two

a little bit of confusion versus after effects

I promise you

there's no other huge hurdle of understanding

it's just those really simple things

so here we have this 1456 by 816 and then we have

this thing that was filmed on iPhone vertically

and so if I want to merge this over the other one

remember there's no alpha

so we're going to see

the semi transparent weird result by default

so again if we hit t it's going to create an alpha

through that transform though

and then it's going to be merged over

but you see that it's not sized to the

project size and after effects we do the same thing

it would be kind of scaled off of your video

so what we can do is take the transform

and just scale it down

and we could bring it in like that

and so that would be a perfectly fun way of

bringing in an image

and making it fit

the other way we could do it if you wanted it just to

automatically fit to this

project size 1456

would be to put a reformat node

and so

reformat node allows you to change the size of a node

and so by default

if you set your project size correctly

if you hit s which I believe

it'll be delivered like this to you automatically

so your project size should be this 1456

if that is set by default

the node will reformat whatever this thing is

to the project size

so this thing is coming in as 1080 by 1920

it's going to automatically go to the project size

but you see that the way if you view it

you see that the way it's reformatting it

it's just cropping off the top and the bottom

which maybe that's not what you want

so there's different resized type here

and so you can switch it to height

so to take this vertical video

it'll shrink it down

into that rectangle format that we're working in

and it'll create this weird stretch pixel effect

and the reason it's doing that is because this

dotted line is the pixels that are being calculated

so it's only calculating the pixels inside your

bounding box that's what this is called

it's called a bounding box these dotted line

and essentially what you could do is just

press this little button here that says black outside

and it will just get rid of everything out there

the reason it does that is just because the edge

it's not calculating it

beyond that and it's just stretching the color

because it doesn't know what to do

so you just

click the black outside button and it fixes it

the other way you could do it is if you leave it off

and you hit t

and you create the Alpha

it'll automatically just discard everything

that's not being calculated

outside of the bounding box

so if you merge it over

same result it's fitting perfectly to a video

and that's good to go

the other thing to note is if you scale this up

and you see that

that dotted line is going beyond your frame

again our bounding box is going beyond the frame

but the term for that

it's important to know

because when you're talking about it

if you don't know what the term is

it's called overscan

so any pixels that are outside of

the frame are called overscan

and sometimes you want

some pixels to be outside of the frame because

let's say you want to animate this

clip moving into the frame right

you want to have some data that's out there

so that's just important to know

overscan

pixels are outside of the frame that we can see

the reason that can be useful as well

is if we blur this image

so we put a blur node and we'll just blur it

so that blur is taking the average of all the colors

and so if there was no pixels outside of this frame

it would just be pulling in black here

so for example to show to kind of show that

let's just disable the blur for a second

and we'll use another node that's very common

it's called the crop node

and we'll crop it and the crop will automatically

cut the pixels to the edge of the video

and so

now you see that that dotted line if I hit disable

if you press the node hit d

it'll disable the effect

you see that

the pixels that are outside there are getting

cut off because our dotted

frame is no longer showing that overscan

and so if we were to blur it now

you'll see that the edge

there's nothing for it to

pull in there's no colors for it to pull in so

that's why it's useful to have some overscan sometimes

but at the same time

if you have a really big bounty box

and let's say you've scaled up this image

you know we've let's say we brought in this

Ember video and we've scaled it and we've rotated it

and we put it like this

and we have like all this giant

pixels out here

every frame is calculating all this

stuff that we actually don't see

and so if we were to like take this and then we

blur it it's blurring the pixels in here

but it's also blurring all the pixels out here

so it's gonna slow down your computer if it's

wasting that processing power to blur all these pixels

and so this is where the crop node would be useful

but again we just said that we can't crop it because

sorry

we can't crop it because there's not pixels to pull in

but we can crop it and then double click the crop node

and then just there's actually a little

line here if we hit Q

make sure overlays on we just expand it

so we give it enough overscan

so that it doesn't have that blurring issue

but at the same time

we're not processing all of the pixels that are like

way way outside of the video frame

that's where the crop node comes in

it becomes an optimization issue when you have like

things that you've massively scaled up

and then you know it's just wasting processing

and it will happen

that's like a media issue that people run into

you scale two images that don't fit together

and then your computer starts slowing down

if you start having some really slow stuff or

something like that

zoom out

check this little dotted line that's most often

the issue that beginners run into it's very very common

even to make that mistake just working so

definitely check your bounding box

is something that I would recommend

and so this is good and we could switch this video

clip here to a

and then we could

you know see instead of having it over black

we have some of those like

Embers Blunt of the video

we're gonna make this look better

this is just a quick example

that's just kind of a quick and dirty example but

yeah that is something

to know with merging images that are different

sizes over each other

so next we're going to talk

about how to take this image and

bring it into a composite

that is sort of more final

so I'm going to give you guys my full node tree here

one of the best ways to learn nuke is to learn

from other people's scripts

so I provided you guys my simple script here

you'll be able to step down

one really good way to learn is take the viewer node

and just look at each layer to

understand what the person's logic was

and that's a really really

good way to follow and understand what the

decisions were

to kind of make the composite work

and so I can step down this comp

and I can look at every

single layer every single

color correction that's being done here

and you can see exactly how it's done

so that is available for you guys

we're gonna rebuild this from scratch in this video

so not to worry but that is there

I'll leave it in the script

on this side here

so this viewer nodes here

this is the example we just did

and I'll start building it from here

again we'll have our elements

and I also provided you guys

one extra node called Exponential Glow

the way you can save this is a custom node

but you can save it by pressing this little thing

little kind of a wrench here and hitting create

and then if you just type a name

it'll save this in your

nodes that you can search later so just say X glow

X glow like this and hit enter

whenever you hit tab

you can type that and you'll actually get that node

and so all this node is is just a better

glow than the normal glow

there's a normal glow in new called glow

this one just looks a little bit better because if we

put it on something to show you

if we create a radial node

which is just a circle

I'll just turn the softness to zero

and then I'll plug the glow into the radio

you see what the normal glow looks like

and then if we put

an exponential glow and switch our viewer

it's a little bit better

it just kind of falls off nicer and

that's something you'll learn about as time goes on

exponential glow and

quadratic fall off and those type of things

we're not going to go deep in those

concepts in this video

but it is better

so save it and it'll make your stuff look

better so

with that in mind we'll start building this composite

so now we're going to start the composite

one thing to

mention is we want to look at our pictures first

so we have all of our pictures laid out here

and we have the basic startup for our script which is

well give you guys to

set up and

also to keep your script organized

you can add these little elbows these little dot

nodes by holding

Ctrl and then

clicking on these pipes in between the nodes

and that just helps you keep these straight lines

I always give a little bit of space and usually I

will always add the nodes vertically

and then we just connect it over to the right

and that's really good

way to keep your scripts organized

so first thing we want to do is look at our images

we can see here that he's a little bit

out of focus on his back

arm and shoulder and he's in focus towards the camera

so what we want to actually do to make this look

kind of cool is make it look like a long focal length

lens so a longer

lens is gonna have a shallower depth of field

depth of field is where

you have a certain

portion of your frame that's in focus

and the rest is out of focus

and you get a bouquet background

so some of you guys might know what that is

some might not

but just speaking broadly here

that's what we're gonna do so basically we need to do

reframe the background and make it look out of focus

so I'm gonna put a transform though by hitting t

I'm gonna scale it up

and I'm going to start to position it in a place that

makes sense he's lit from the top left

so I want to have something that sort of

justifies that kind of lighting

and I'll just play with the position here to get

something along those lines

move it into place

and make it look like these mountains are

the trees are pretty far behind him

so something like this

would be good

I'm gonna have it more on the left as well because

I do want to add a smoke element back there

so if I put just you know white

it's gonna be hard to see any

additional layers of

elements and that wouldn't be as interesting

so something like this is gonna work

it doesn't matter that our

image is really low RES because

we're gonna make it out of focus anyways

so

one thing we want to do before we add the defocus is

remember our good habits

as soon as we scale that picture up

we're gonna have a really really big boundary box

and we don't really want to do that

because if we add a defocus node

and this is kind of like a blur

but it acts more like a camera defocus

it's gonna defocus all these pixels that are out here

and that's gonna waste a lot of computer

memory so we're gonna do is add a crop node

after the transform

and then just pull that a little bit outside the

edges so that we

don't run into the issue that we talked about earlier

now if we add the defocus double click it

and we can increase that amount

we'll start to see that

that looks like a camera defocus

so let's look at the result of the merge by pressing 1

and we can get something interesting like that

so we could scale that up and down

now one thing to note visual

as a visual difference

is if you plug in the blur node and we blur it

and we compare to the focus I press

1 and look at this and press 1 and look at this

they actually do a different thing

so you see that we get these sharp

circular bouquet highlights

and that's what a camera does when it's defocused

image versus blur which is not as photorealistic

so it is better to use this in this type of scenario

it's a good thing to

understand visually that there is a difference there

so if we look at our guy

there's a few things we got to fix on him as well

because this was cut out just roughly Photoshop

the edge is not matching the focus

if we look at him

you see that we have like a dark and sharp edge

where

it should just be kind of out of focus on that edge

so what we can do is just add a simple edge blur

so we can add edge blur node

and this will just blur around the edge

and we can crease this amount until it

matches the defocus

and the way to match it is to look at the highlights

try to find

circular highlights is even better to look for

but even just the edges

and you can see how wide the

edges are and try to match that

we could do some more advanced

edge fixes and edge extends

but I'm not going to get into it in this tutorial

just to not overcomplicate things for beginners

so this is perfectly fine for what we're doing

and what we can do is we can isolate this effect

because we're doing an edge blur

what it's doing is it blurs the edge all the way around

but no we don't want to blur this side

so we want to isolate it

so we press 0

and we can plug in this little mask input

so let many nodes

even the grade node for example this little side arrow

has a mask input

and it will isolate the effect through

that roto shape

so if we take the roto shape we double click

we turn our overlay on and we just draw a roto

around this area

and then we view this node

make sure we're looking at it

you'll see if I zoom in here that

the edge blur is only being applied within the alpha

and so that's good but we don't want to have a sharp

you know cut off where that effect ends

so what we can do with your roto points is hold

control and just

soften them off a little bit

and that's gonna be good enough for what we're doing

so that's a good result

and now we can look at this

and it looks like he's fading back out of focus

we could brighten the edge slightly

but like I said we won't

nitpick too much on this comp

one of the reasons I moved this down

like we said was to get the smoke element in there

because we didn't want to put it over

something really bright

so let's go grab our smoke element and we can put some

just an additional layer of contrast between them

and that will give it a little bit more interest

so we grab this guy I'll hit Ctrl V

so we leave the original up there and just control

C control V rather

and we'll put a transform node and we'll merge it over

so of course this is not what we want

we want that to be

kind of

transparent one mistake that you will make

probably is doing this operation

and in some cases this kind of technically works but

it's actually

you're gonna get slapped on the wrist if you

ever do this in the Visual

Effect studio

because it's not actually what you're supposed to do

with smoke over black it works

but if you do it over

things that have any kind of light

this is actually incorrect because smoke should not

brighten something that is behind

so you should never be plussing a smoke over

and even though

you may have Learned to do it this way at after

effects or Photoshop

there's tutorials out there to show this

the technically correct way is slightly different

so I'm gonna teach you guys this

early on just so you have a good habit

so we're gonna keep it as an over

but what we're gonna do

is we're gonna give this an alpha

and so right now it doesn't have an alpha

but what we can do is create an alpha

from the luminance or the brightness of the image

so we're gonna use a key or node

what this node does is it looks at the

brightness of the image

it creates an alpha channel so if you hit a

we see that there's now an alpha channel

if I hit d on the keyword disable it

you see it's no longer there

so it's creating that alpha channel

which if we do over

you see that it's doing a similar effect now

so if I disable the key here

and enable you see that's doing that

there's a slight difference visually though so if we

take the two I'll just show you to compare

I'll make this one a plus

same thing as we had before

and you see if we look real close

it's brightening what's behind

and then this one is actually

occluding what's behind

so smoke occludes it doesn't brighten

and so that's an interesting

thing to keep in mind

now what we can do as well is we can

grade this a little bit

to get it in the color tones that our image is in

so I'm

just going to move it into a more interesting place

real quick

and maybe we'll just flip it over

so I can grab these little things and just

flip it like this

so we could use maybe the bottom half or you know

scale it in different ways

we could even create another transform

and just kind of play around with the position

so maybe something like that

I'll just keep playing with it to get

something that looks interesting

maybe something like this

and it's also gonna look kind of weird because

like I said the cars aren't matching

so I'm gonna put a great note before the key here

that would affect the key here slightly

but we're not gonna worry about it right now

because I don't want to

worry about the

there's a workflow called unpremote premote

we're not gonna get into it in this video

we're just gonna keep simple

so what we're gonna do is go to the multiply

and we're just gonna put a little bit of blue into it

so if you notice

everything is kind of neutral

it's pretty neutral but with a slight

kind of blue color in there

we don't want to be this reddish color

we just want to get those tones feel slightly similar

and also we could make it a little bit more transparent

and we also need to defocus it

so again what we want to do is

we're going to copy this defocus

and we're going to paste it on here

now what we're going to do is take that

defocus and just reduce it a tiny bit

so we'll kind of pretend that that's a little bit

closer to us and so

it would be a little bit less out of focus

and that's why we're not using the same defocus

the other way we could

do it if you wanted to keep it the same

you could have one defocus note after

and it would just defocus everything

so this will be fine what we can also do is

take the alpha here and we will

reduce it

so there's different ways we can do that

one way we'll just do it through the merge node for now

to keep it simple

there's a mix

option so if I double click this merge node

we can just

bring the mix down and we can make it a little bit more

see through that way so there's a few ways to do it

if you continue down the path of learning nuke

we'll learn some different ways

but this is keeping it simple

and we'll just tweak the color

a tiny bit more on the smoke

I realize it's slightly too blue

versus a little bit of this kind of greenish tint there

so all we can do is just take this and just pull over

a tiny bit and we'll see that that

start to match a tiny bit better

so we just need to make sure we have that those

colors a little bit closer there

and that's pretty good so the colors can be pretty

small differences but when you look close

you want to make sure that

those are matching

so continuing forward here

we're gonna add some

fire back here and we're also gonna

start to match the contrast inside a bit

so if you notice how bright his armor is and how

bright the sky that's reflecting is

we have some bright sky

but if you look at the value of the sky

it could be a lot brighter

just to make it feel like that punchy contrast

and that's what we want to add first

so we'll just after the defocus note

before the smoke will add a grade

and we'll just start to increase the gain a bit

and then we can just bring down the gamma a tiny bit

and that's just gonna help our image

feel a bit more punchier

and that's gonna help that blend together

so that's a good starting point

another thing we can do now is grab that fire element

so we'll copy and paste so copy it

paste control C control V

and we'll merge it over

it doesn't have an alpha in this case so we're going to

plus it

and by the way if it's an over

without an alpha

it's already a plus but just to know that

and then I'm going to position this so it's not

so intense

I just want it to be kind of something subtle

and in the background

so I'll just kind of move it off to the side here

and we'll just use maybe the bottom corner of it

just to just do a hint that something is going on

back here we're thinking about the story

we're trying to think about

why is there light on his right side

maybe there's a fire right in front of him

that he's standing in front of

and we're gonna add some embers and stuff like that

but maybe the forest behind him is on fire

so we can kind of justify that

and play with the position here until we get something

that you like

one thing is just like a pattern

so part of being a composer is designing shots with

either the matte painting or the

elements themselves and trying to just

find areas that you think

look cool and it doesn't conflict too much with your

eye and where you're looking

and so

I usually spend like a few minutes playing around with

the position of things

if I were to go up and grab the position I already did

and paste it here

I'll just use that position

so this is what I picked before

and I think this was a pretty good position

now we can mask this

off and we also

have to do some color matching here

because it's really

really red

if you notice it's kind of very red compared to him

and right now it feels a bit disconnected

so we need to kind of roto off some pieces

so we don't have just

you know things that are distracting

if you notice here it's kind of pulling your eye

you know we don't want to look straight to there

we want to be looking at him

and also make the colors better

so let's do the colors first

we'll do a great note

and what we want to do is

we want to reduce some of the red

to make it a bit more yellowish

so we're going to go into the colors here

we're going to reduce a bit of the red

and that's going to

bring it to

something less red and will also reduce the blue

if you reduce blue what do you get

on the opposite side of the color reel is yellow

so if you actually reduce blue

you're going to get more yellow in the image

and so you can do it that way

and then what we can do is add some contrast to it

so the colors are feeling more correct

but it feels very flat

and it doesn't feel

punchy like this

so what we can do is another grade note

close everything else we'll gain it up a bit

and we'll gamble it down

just to add that punchiness to it

and that's something that's a little bit closer

so let's look at it just

before the defocus to see what we have

so that's kind of interesting

we want to make it look like fire

so looking at it before the defocus can help

and then the other thing we can do is another trick so

another trick that

after defocus

you know you see these little circles that come

from the bokia highlights

we can actually add

more of those by

targeting

the highlights and boosting them just a tiny bit

so if you take a key or node

and you plug it in

remember we said the key here creates an alpha

based off of the brightness

so we're gonna

use this alpha not as an alpha that we're using

but as a just as a control

to target and grade just the highlights

so if we view this

and we hit a we can see this

and if you pull this bar over

you'll see that it kind of

crunches down towards the

brightest areas of your image

so we're gonna crunch it down a tiny bit like that

and this alpha is what we're going to use to

color grade

so we plug it in

another grade

and then use the little mask input

and plug it into this alpha

so if we view here

and now we use these controllers we say

you can see here it says mask RGBA Alpha

so it's using the alpha that's created here

and if we view it there's the alpha

and now if we gain up it will only boost through there

so if you look real close

you can see that just the highlights

the very tips of the fire are getting brighter

and what that does visually

after a defocus is going to give these little

sort of boosts in the Boca Highlight

so if you boost it up a tiny bit

you'll see the circles

only a few of them get boosted out

but it seems to add more detail

gives it a little bit of that punchier look

that we're going for

and we can push it a little bit further here even

and maybe we need to expand our key here

so we can grab that little bar

and if we move it over

different areas will be

affected as well

so we can push it up much further

and then we get something kind of like this

and we start to get something that's kind of nice

so we'll put our roto node here and we'll just

we're going to cut off this side

we're going to switch the roto to a stencil

and then we'll take the roto double click it

cue for the overlay and then we'll draw a circle here

and then we'll just hold

Ctrl to grab these points and just feather it outward

and we can just reduce the brightness by essentially

stenciling it out

so don't worry if you look in there

but maybe just a hint of something

that's kind of interesting

so there are more ways we can balance this image out

even more

so right now as a compositor my eye is going here

it still feels a bit

it's just like your eyes going here

if you just

zoom out and look at this as almost an abstraction

you know

you have like this just black hole kind of thing

and also like you're not feeling

the connection

between this light and what's off screen

and of course this fire might be in front of him

so you wouldn't see it behind him

but what I like to do as an artist

I like to try to hint those

light directions as much as I can

and so what we can do is we can put a great note

after our defocus and our other grade note here

we're going to plug it into a radio

I like to use these radios for this

sort of pools of light concept

so if we turn on our over light

essentially the radio is just creating the circle here

like we did earlier

and we're going to put it over on this side

and we're going to use that to just boost up the side

so just boost it up in the gain

we can kind of brighten what's back there

just a tiny bit and that's going to help

make it not so dark

we could even add a bit of a gamma

which would actually decontrast it a slight bit

so we can have a slight gamma

a slight gain which actually boost the highlights

and just make that circle a little bit bigger

and we'll kind of have something more like that

and then we can add a

tiny bit of color to it if we want

so we can add slight bit of warmth into that side

so it feels like there's just some light casting

and if we just disable that and enable it so disable

and enable you see how just those slight

grade corrections

we can guide the eye in certain directions here

so continuing forward we can do another one here

did this little spot correction

we can do another spot correction here

I typically try to avoid areas that look very cut out

like very dark on something bright

it can happen

but I try to avoid those areas if possible

so I'll put a radio here

and then I'll

move it to area

so put it down

we don't actually need to see it while we're doing it

but we can just grab it

put it here and then we'll just take this grade node

and we'll just kind of

brighten that

start darken that a little bit

you don't want to be looking there right

in

those areas of high contrast is where you're going to

look so

we can adjust this one a little brighter

maybe just behind him

it gives a little bit more that hot feel behind

we could desaturate that slightly more

potentially but

we'll leave it at that for now and we'll start to

bring out some details on this guy

so I'm going to expand our comp

just to make everything really clean

one thing we can

do if you want to start organizing your script

is to

label things so you can actually hit tab type backdrop

it'll create this node that surrounds the other nodes

which is useful for just grabbing stuff

but what you can also do is double

click it and you can put labels

so just say smoke element

and then we can do the same thing for this guy up here

move all these

and then we'll just

put a backdrop around it and call it fire trees

and you can change the colors of these nose as well so

you know if it's fire we can make it orange etc

usually I try to use these saturated colors because

if you stare at colors too much

it'll actually affect your perception of color

you'll actually burn colors in your eyes

it sounds kind of ridiculous but it is true

you have to be careful with looking at really saturated

colors because

it'll distort your perception

so I'll try to use a little bit desaturated

and continue forward here

so next thing we're going to actually do is

we're going to start to make his metal

look a little bit more hot

because we look at the highlights

they look a little bit clampy right now

and what happens with really

bright metal when it reflects something like fire

is that the very very highlights will get almost like

blown out and there will be a tiny bit of glow

so what we're gonna do is we're gonna

isolate the highlights

of the armor and we're gonna

paint out those highlights and add a slight glow

just to give it a little bit

more of that metallic feeling

so now we're gonna add that glow

and how we're gonna do it is we're gonna start with a

key or node and we're gonna plug it in

off of this branch

so we're not actually

not gonna do it on the same layer

we're gonna have the glow coming in as a plus

because it doesn't need to be something that's solid

so if there's something like a glow

usually you can think of it like that

you don't have to think of it as something that needs

an alpha necessarily

it's gonna be plused on at the end

but we're gonna use the alpha

that we create from this

key or node to isolate different parts of the metal

so if we look at this and hit 1

and we hit a our keyboard to look at the Alpha

we're going to crunch this way way down

until we just get the very small details of the metal

and what we can do is we're going to do a pre mold

so remember if we have an alpha

that's stored in the image

and if we pre malt it it applies the

cut out to the colors

so it'll apply that

change that we've made

and now we just have those areas

and now what we can do is we can take a mask

so 0 and an m

mask off the side that is in the fire like this

hit enter and then we get that

and now what we'll do is we'll grab our

little exponential glow node that we have

and we'll put it on the end

so now it's going to only

glow those highlights

now this might be too intense

it's going to be way too intense but let's just

put it over

and then we can adjust it

so put it A plus B

right now it's over but we'll set it to a

and then we have something like this

now this is way too bright it looks like overblown

so we want to keep this as a really subtle effect

so we're going to take the

brightness and put it really low

and then we're going to take the spread

and put it low as well

we want it to be like a very tight

glow it's just on the edge

so we can actually

maybe we can bright that tiny bit and just try to find

the right

spa for that

so we can do something like that

then we can plus it on

and something like that looks kind of good

now on the top it might be a little bit too much so

we might need to adjust specific areas

another thing we can do to make it look better

is if we desaturate just the very highlights

it's gonna always help so I'm gonna go here

with the keyer node before

and

we're going to desaturate the highlights of the very

hot metal areas

so I'll do the same thing I'll target those areas

and I'll just take a saturation node so if you hit

type saturation

and you plug that into the mask

and then we pull it down

what it's gonna do is

gonna take some a bit of the color

out of the very very bright areas

and that can help sometimes by by

just not having everything in one color

kind of feels a little bit more two tone

so if you disable it and enable it

just adds a tiny bit of color into the range there

and it's a very subtle

effect we don't want to overdo this

otherwise it's not going to look good so

some of the white areas are not working so well

so we want to make sure that those are

not included in the mask

so what you can do is

take another rotor shape on the same layer by double

clicking

we'll draw it over the areas that we don't want

so I'll draw around those white areas

and then over here we can click this

little

stacked square icon and switch it from an over

to a minus so

this is actually subtracting away

so if you look at the alpha

in here it's actually subtracting

all within one note

and then that's what our resulting glow

looks like

and then we're just putting it only on certain areas

and that's a pretty cool result

that we just start to feel a little bit more

photographic by blowing out certain areas

now the next thing we're going to do is create

some embers flying in the foreground

to give a little bit more depth to the image

because having something really close to the camera

is just an interesting trick that filmmakers use a lot

and visual effects artists use a lot to give

more depth especially in these very shallow images

where we're very

zoomed in on somebody

and so here's what we did in the script before

and you'll see it

we have a few of these

burning little

flakes of embers going in front of the character

just to feel like there's a fire towards us

usually you can do that with a

stock element

or something like that

but we're just going to create it in

nuke with a noise pattern

so you might be familiar with noise patterns from

after effects or sort of generating

clouds and Photoshop

same idea so we're gonna

use some noise patterns and just do a very simple

steel frame since we're doing a steel frame

but it'll just get you comfortable

using the noise pattern as well

so if you hit

tab and type noise

it's gonna give you this node here

and so what we're going to do is we're going to

gamble it down

and we're going to make the points really small

like very very small like this

we can gain it up to make them a little bit brighter

gamble down

we only want a few of them we don't want to

go crazy with it

and we'll do another noise pattern

so we have another one

and then we'll make that one

smaller but not quite as small

kind of like bigger clouds like that

and then what we can do is take this one

and mask it by the other one

so we're gonna mask the small points

and so what we have

instead of just having a ton of small points is some

small points have been like masked out

and you'll have to play the scale and the size of it

so I'll just do this real quick

and then I'll grab the one I already did

because I kind of played with the size

but this will be good

and what we can do is we graded up

we'll give it a bit of color

so give it a little bit of

yellowish

orange yellow

and then what we can do is we can gamma

a little bit of red

so by doing this separately

multiplying a bit of color and then gamma

the gamma will affect more in the

edges because the gamma

typically affects more in the shadows

and the mid tones

and the multiplying

gain is more towards the highlights

so we can just pull that in a tiny bit like that

and while it's not obvious here

once we defocus this

it's going to start to look like something

so if you start defocusing these

points and making them bigger

we're going to get these sort of

you know out of focus spheres

and it's not bright enough so we can't see much

so we'll take another

grade and just boost it a lot

until we start to see something

and you see we have

this which is starting to look interesting

now it doesn't look like they're in motion

so what actually

happens with something

that's out of focus and in motion

is it creates a streak

so if we go back to the one that I did

you see how they look more like streaks

and so we need to actually make them move and add

motion blur to them

so we can create these streak effects

and then we will defocus them

so before I defocus

we're going to need to add some motion to these

so I'll just expand the script

and we'll continue and we'll do that

so the way we're gonna do this

first I'm just gonna reduce this a

tiny bit more with the bigger clouds

we just want a few these points

if there's too many it's gonna look

it's gonna look sort of chaotic so I just want a few

and then I'm gonna put a transform node

I'm gonna middle mouse

click and so we can see the whole timeline

if you kind of

click middle mouse

click and drag you'll see like a

certain amount of frames

but if you middle click

it'll show you the whole frame range

there

I have it set to global so I'm gonna go to frame zero

by just clicking it and then I'm going to hit

create a transform though

so we haven't talked about keyframing yet but

one thing you can do is you can right click

and say set key

and then you can move to another frame

you can move the position

and it will automatically create a keyframe

see how it turns blue

and then down here turns blue

just to make this a bit easier

I'm going to middle mouse drag over these frames

so you can just see the frames you're working with

so you see that it moves from those two positions

now we're designing this shot as a still image so

we're kind of doing a cheat here

and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to move it

off the video

kind of like this

and then

at the end I'm going to move it kind of far away

and so we're gonna design everything else on frame 5

so what I'm gonna

do is I'm gonna turn the motion blur on by

clicking here and saying 1

and what it does is it gives us streak so you see

it'll go from

our first position all the way to our last one

and that's creating the motion blur

and now we'll just continue workout frame 5

we'll ignore that this is animated

if we were doing video

obviously we need to do some different things

but this is just to show how to use motion blur

how can do a simple keyframe

and then how we can defocus these

to create this effect

now if they don't look long enough

we can adjust the shutter speed so that is

setting out the camera on how long

an image is being exposed per frame

so if you're familiar with photography that's what

shutter means

and if we increase that

it's going to increase the length

of these sort of little

embers that we're creating here

so I'm not really reading them very well

so I'm gonna increase

the brightness

maybe by a lot so I'll just

increase that number by a lot

and they're a little bit yellow for me

I want them to be more orange

so we can just add a little bit more color

and those that we already did

something like that is kind of good

and instead of doing anything else to transform

if I don't like the position

because this is creating the motion blur

I don't want to mess with this

what I'm going to do is create another transform node

close everything else

and then I'll just move it back over

so now I can play around with that position

find something that looks that looks cool and just

have a few embers that look like they're

blowing in front of the camera

and I would probably try to

darken specific ones like this one

I would darken

maybe I would brighten some here

because I want some more on that side

so I'm not going to spend too much time

nitpicking each Ember

but if you were to design this

and you want to have specific elements that look

a specific way

it's worth the time to invest

by playing around with these values

and there's no way to

type in numbers

you shouldn't type numbers

you should

play around with these sliders and play with the size

and play with the amount

just to get or even the seed

if you play with the z

it's kind of like adjusting the seed

so we can keep

messing around with the different cloud size

so this one maybe looks better

so you see I just adjusted the size of the bigger

clouds that we created

and it just gave us a different

random sample of points

and that's kind of it

and what you could do

and what I did in my original script was I did

two variations of this

so I broke it off into another direction

so to show this

I had some motion blurring in one way

and some motion blurring in another way

and I merged these two together

to make it feel like the particles are

blowing in different directions

because they shouldn't all be flowing in the same

direction and if you had an element or a video

they're blowing in all different directions

so I just quickly

did it this way

so you can look at the script and study it

I really recommend doing that

to see exactly how I did it

and then I use a frame hold on frame 5

which is between the frames

just to make sure that we're

on a frozen frame there

so if we want to do a similar effect

I just deleted the node

and then we can hit tab and do frame hold

and it will frame hold the frame that you're

currently on so frame 5

so if we drag this they won't move anymore

if we disable it

you'll see that they're kind of sliding around

which I didn't

I didn't want to deal with the animation

just because we're doing the basics here

and dealing with motion and

designing the motion is a whole different process

and so we're just doing a still image

so that's a good point to end the embers

it looks pretty good

you'll have to play around with it and

just to get comfortable

that's the good way to get comfortable

especially with noise nodes

these are really creative nodes

but they're only creative if you play with them

and you just have to play around to get good

at doing it

so next thing we're gonna do is add

chromatic aberration

we're gonna do a very cheap and quick version of that

so there's a node called Transform mast

transform masks so masks is on the end

it's not the same as transform

essentially what this nose actually used for is

moving stuff around but through a roto shape

so that's what it's normally used for

it has a mask input

so if you look at the normal transform

it doesn't have that little triangle on the edge

whereas this one does

so that's what it's normally used for

but it does give you some alternative options

in this extra bar up here this is channels

so if we split this to RGB

we can actually just

move one channel

and what that does is a simulus chromatic aberration

which is something

that happens when the light is

splitting in the lens because lenses aren't perfect

and so you'll notice this on different things

so if we uncheck

the green and the blue

and what we're going to do is zoom in here

we'll zoom in quite a lot

and in the Translate X we'll say 1.5 pixels

and what this does if we view it

you'll see that we get this sort of color

splitting on the

edges and it's

simulating the imperfections

in a camera lens

now

this might be too strong and we might mask it off or

things like that but

people typically will overdo this

it's kind of a trope and visual effects

you see it very very overdone

especially motion graphics and stuff

you'll see like a ton of this effect being applied

so I think 1.5 is good

you can even mix it down

slightly if you didn't want to do

exaggerate it

but that's a pretty cool effect that we can do

the other thing we can do just before

it is we can tab and save

lens distortion

so that's another note that

you can actually get real lenses

and so this is typically using CG composing workflows

so you want to switch this from

un distort to re distort

and

after that you'll want to take this

little slider here and just

push it up a tiny bit and began some fake

lens distortion around the edges

so it's gonna add the curvature you would see around

a lens so a piece of glass curves around the edge

and so that's kind of what we're simulating here

the last thing we're gonna do here at the end is add

film grain so in film cameras there are grain

and in digital cameras there's sensor noise

so sometimes the

term is used a little bit interchangeably

but that is technically correct

so we're gonna do just the grain node

and there's some presets here if we zoom

in we can see what it's doing

it's adding grain over the shot

and there's different size and intensity

here for different color channels

so most often there will be

more grain in the blue channel than the other channels

just because there's

typically less light

but we can switch the preset here

so we can do this one I think the preset GT5

274 it looks pretty good it's like a bit smaller grain

it just looks

yeah overall pretty nice grain

and that will also kind of cover up any

imperfect edges sometimes and compositing

so it's always good to have grain

you always want to have grain for sure

because that gives it that kind of film quality

that we're going for

also you want to make sure to uncheck

apply only through alpha

sometimes you can forget this

and that's not good

because sometimes an alpha will get carried down

this stream

and we haven't really talked about

you know data going downstreams and

a little bit more complex subjects but

that is the case sometimes

so we just want to make sure that's off

so it applies to the entire image

and the very last node we'll create is a write node

so if you wanted to save this out as a picture

you want to save it out as a JPEG or a video

we didn't do video in this time

but you just want to save as a JPEG

you give it a file name

so you can say file name dot jpeg

and it will automatically detect the format

file type and we can adjust the quality for example

if you were to do dot MOV

it's gonna give you the options for a movie file

etc so that's good to know

also we're not doing image sequences yet

but if you do want to

save out a set of images instead of a video

which typically loads better and faster nuke

you can do the

underscore and then three hashtags

and then for example JPEG

or another file format that's common as EXR

so it would just save about a folder of images instead

and you can load those into nuke as well

that's all just to say

those are some different options but JPEG

will work if you want to save out your picture

that's about it for this project

so congrats and getting to the end

not everyone probably made it through so you know

project complete

big congrats having the the guts to push it through

it's not always

easy to transition from after effects to newth

but I promise you

it's worth it in the end

and the level of composing that you can get to

and the complexity that you can really dial in on

details is going to be worth it in the end

especially if you want to work on films

if that's your goal

so we do have more tutorials that are available on