All language subtitles for 3. Adding the Clouds

So to add the clouds, our scene is going to get a little bigger.

So I need to right-click here, go to 3D,

and I'm going to pick a node called Scene.

Scene just acts as a hub for all of the different pieces of

a 3D comp that we're putting together.

So I'm going to attach the sphere to the scene,

and I'm going to attach this object to the scene,

and I'm just going to move this around here,

and that's just so that we can have multiple objects

plugged into the ScanlineRenderer here.

So I'm going to select the Sphere Node, I'm going to hit Ctrl+C on the keyboard,

Ctrl+V to paste it out.

I'm going to pull this triangle out, I'm going to add this sphere to our scene,

and I'm going to bring this cloud layer down over here and connect it.

Let's connect that Viewer2 back up to our 3D scene by dragging

this arrow over to the camera to see it in 3D,

and you'll notice right away that we have the cloud layer in there,

and we only see the cloud layer because right now our 3D

object is exactly the same size as our earth.

So the cloud layer should be slightly bigger,

and the cloud layer itself, if we take a look at this in the first Viewer,

and I hit A on the keyboard, you'll notice that there's no alpha in here,

so we need an alpha to get rid of all of these black parts of the image.

So to do that, I'm going to right-click,

and I'm going to go to Keyer, and I'm going to pick Keyer.

Let me drag that out here,

and I connected it in between because we had these selected.

So, if I'm looking at this image in the Viewer,

you'll notice that now we have the clouds,

and the clouds are all cut out.

Pretty good so far.

So let's take our first Viewer and let's connect that

back up to our ScanlineRenderer, so that we can see what the camera's seeing,

and it looks like by default here, the camera is not seeing that cloud layer,

and I'll bet that that's because our cloud layer is the

same size as our earth right now.

And it needs to be slightly bigger so that it appears above the earth.

So let's just test that by double-clicking on the Sphere Node,

and going into the uniform scale, and I'm just going to jump this up to 1.

1, and you see our cloud layer appear.

It does look a little floaty though so let's see what we can get away with.

So I'm just going to dial these values in by hitting Ctrl on the

keyboard and by hitting down until it disappears,

and it looks like that's about where it disappears.

So, I'm just going to do a value of 1.

01 and that gives us the clouds right on top of the earth.

Now I want to go back and take a look at our original graphics,

so I'm going to take the second Viewer and connect it

up to our original graphic here, and compare the two.

What I did want to point out here is that in this image,

it's very subtle, but the clouds themselves have shadows,

and that's just one little trick in faking clouds on earth.

You can see the shadows are pretty pronounced right here.

3D packages do a really great job at calculating this

lighting and giving us realistic shadows,

and it's a little harder in comp, but NUKE is all about cheating the image.

So let's see what we can do to get those shadows in there.

Let's center these elements.

It's subtle,

but what we're going to do is we're going to use

the clouds themselves as shadows,

and this is a pretty common technique in compositing.

So I'm going to take these pieces of the shadow and drag them out,

I'm going to hit Tab,

and I'm going to add a ColorCorrect Node in between

the Keyer and the Sphere Node.

So what that's going to do is we're going to color correct this image,

and to color correct this image,

all we're going to do is we're going to take the gain,

and we're going to set the gain all the way to 0,

and that's going to make all of the clouds turn back.

So if we look over here at our earth, we have shadows of clouds,

but we don't have clouds now,

and you can see that by selecting all of these things and

hitting D on the keyboard to turn off that layer,

and turn on that layer.

So the clouds are in there, those shadows are in there,

and it's super subtle, and now all we need to do is take this tree,

I'm going to hit Ctrl+C on the keyboard,

I'm going to deselect by clicking anywhere.

I'm going to hit Ctrl+V on the keyboard to add that back in.

I'm going to delete this ColorCorrect Node,

and then I'm going to connect this up as a third element in our scene.

So these are our actual clouds.

So now what we've got is we've got our color of earth,

we've got our shadows of clouds, and we've got our actual clouds,

and you'll see if we do that same operation again by

selecting these and by hitting D on the keyboard,

and turning off the shadows and turning the shadows back on,

what we've done is we've just muddied up the image because right now we've

got black and we've got white laying on top of each other,

and it's kind of making this dirty gray.

And that's because these spheres are still at the same level,

the clouds aren't above the shadows,

they're technically at the same level as the shadows.

So I'm just going to go into the Sphere Node that we copied and pasted,

so it's at 1.

01, and I'm going to change this to 1.

02, and there, we get those clouds to pop out a little.

And now if we AB these by selecting this and hitting D on the keyboard,

you see the clouds are in there, but it's really,

really subtle, but that's the kind of subtlety we look for in compositing.