Original subtitles

hey guys welcome to part 1 of the nuke tutorial series

of how to go about creating this shot

my process of going about it

and how you can do it as well

so there's gonna be a couple different things

that we cover in this tutorial

uh it won't just be the nuke stuff

I'm gonna talk about a couple different topics uh

in this first video

so if I go here

this is what we're gonna talk about

so starting with the concept

how we did some of the practical effects

so my wife is

uh you know

a fashion design background

and kind of a more traditional art background

so she helped uh

and this is more of a collaboration

definitely on this side

in terms of concepting and effects

uh so definitely credit for that but uh

so these are some of the things I'm gonna cover

practical effects

practical lighting and then

we're going to do a general overview of the script

so this is a pretty big script

and there's a lot of techniques used here

so I know that there's a range of viewers watching this

probably some really senior people

probably some beginner people

so keeping that spectrum in mind

I'm still gonna talk kind of on an intermediate level

in the way I'm explaining things

but I'm not gonna explain like

really basic sliders and stuff

cause that's really covered in my basic courses if you

if you guys have seen them

so that's kind of how explaining go about this video

and yeah so

part 2 will be different stuff

so more in detail

so this will be more of an overview video

the specific one

and part 2 will be really going into

the specific details of every kind of layer

every technique

and really how to build it up

so it won't just be kind of looking through the script

and stepping through

but really explaining each process

so part 2 the next video

will be kind of tracking keen tools

smart factors in paint

mixing tracks

2D 3D face enhancement

3D Light civilization integration

uh part three of the final video

is how we can use elements

creating complex alphas

uh 3D relighting

and making elements interact

so there's quite a lot here

and this is really a simplified list uh

there's probably a lot of little techniques uh

in there that will be covered

so yeah that's pretty much it

so we'll start restarting with the concept

so this shot

we wanted to do something kind of artistic and fun

just to try mixing some practical effects

with some of the energy effects that I'll be providing

so that was kind of the goal of this

and to have some sort of meaning behind it

so that's kind of the concept of the shot

and sort of shedding like

the past self

and moving towards the ideal

that's what's kind of

like the philosophical meaning of the shot

but just to show you guys some of the process

the iteration process that goes on

so this is kind of the final cop

but these are some notes I gave myself along the way

and this is just a show

and this isn't even the earliest cop

the earliest cop is

you know really basic

but usually you know

final composites

it take lots of iteration

and I've talked about this before

if you guys have taken my paid courses you know

everything is about iteration

I don't know one single composite

who's really good

who just nails everything up

version 1 it takes multiple layers of iteration

stepping back

looking at it from different angles

and try to perceive

what could be done here

to improve this image

so these are the kind of stuff that I'm looking at

along the way

you know maybe it's too noisy

in this area

we have you know

the pattern up here

maybe it's a little bit too bright

or maybe I'll run some things to the cracks

so when I'm working through this design process

and really this is a design process

it's thinking about

where you know

this could be technically correct

and could totally work

but composing is not a purely technical thing

it's it's a

it's really

you have to think about motion

you have to think about light

you have to think about design

and composition

so these are

the things that

not that many people are talking about

so that's why I think this project is pretty fun

because we get to really get into those type of things

versus just like

here's CG integration

or here's color matching

stuff like that

so these are all

little notes I gave myself along the way

you know depth of field

it's a little bit too sharp here

if you look at the footage

a little bit too sharp

just some blending notes for myself

maybe there's some warping going on

from our smart factors or tracks

maybe something looks a little bit too flat

so these are all

the level detail

we can really dive into

when you're building this image up

so you see here

this is another version

but it's just

really too noisy

so if you kind of zoom out

it's almost too much to look at

you have like

all these white dots and your

your eye doesn't really focus on something

so this is something I wanna convey in the series

as well as like

where's your eye looking

how do you train that eye

what are the details you want to look at

and how do you balance that image

so this is something

is example really

just you know

the effect is sort of working here

in this picture

but you have

like all these white dots

and it's hard to focus on one specific thing

also it's a little bit too saturated

maybe so flat here

you know the shoulder looks very very flat

so these are the kind of things that I'm thinking about

along the process

so you see from this version of this version

I kind of go here

darken the chin a little bit

maybe brighten up the eyes

to sort of bring the focus to the eyes

it's a little bit of an artificial brightening

but it gives it a little bit of a softer look

and sort of brings it a little bit less creepy

and more kind of a soft

softer look

and then going on to another version here

uh there's a lot of changes in between

but again you had the same problem uh

you have this like

really kind of too much

little bright highlights

appearing in certain areas and yeah

so these are all the little things I'm thinking about

so if you go from this to the final cop

you can see sort of

it's the way I did

the effect was kind of keeping the leading edge bright

and then it's kind of darkening across time

yeah but you still have these nice

like rolling highlights underneath the cracks

and that's something I really wanted to focus on

with this effect as well

was I don't want to just mask a crack and create a glow

cause that's a really simple effect

and really want

what I wanted to demonstrate

is how we can do a more complex effect

if you have some some good elements to work with

and so that's kind of the concept and iteration process

in a very quick and simplified explanation of it

and yeah so

that is that

so on the next part

which is practical facts

so what is this

practically

what is happening here

practically

um so basically

this is sort of a clay

it's a white clay so you can

this is a basically

video of it

you can like

buy this in store

um and yeah

my wife bought this

it's like white clay

and we also use some like

it was called clown white paint

you can get

like a Halloween store

it's a little bit different than like

an acrylic or something like that

it's more for like

Halloween makeup

so it's like

this mixed with some of this

and this gives us a nice

practical base to start with

so if we compare this to the practical footage

this is actually the practical

so we have a lot to start with here

and then we can enhance what's already there

so you can see the

some cracks added

we added some 3D cracks 2D cracks

and then painted in a bunch of different textures here

so it's it's

it's a good idea to start with

practical effects if you can

especially if you're filming this to yourself

or doing a project on your own um

and mixing traditional film making techniques

with composing

so I think especially with YouTube and internet now

it's like everything is super about 3D

and you're not seeing a lot of practical

effects being used

so I wanted to sort of

mix that in here

and you know

it's some future videos as well

we have some ideas for that

and that will be

yeah kind of fun to talk about

along the way

even though this is composing channel

composing is about mixing it with the real so yeah

that's something that I thought people find interesting

so talking about this more

uh one thing with the lighting

so practical lighting

you want to light this in a way

uh you know

I'm not a portrait photographer

I'm not a studio photographer

but I do understand lighting pretty well

and one type of lighting that you can do

is called Rembrandt lighting

so basically

you can take

it's a it's very cheap way to do lighting

a cost effective way rather

and you can sort of

let me just set this up here

so you can sort of

basically the way this is light is it's just two lights

so you have like

a main key light coming from right

we have another light coming from the left

and we have a bounce card

just use the white sheet

basically to sort of fill in this area here

and that gives it

so we don't get too much contrast in this area

which gives it a softer

less aggressive look

and that's gonna give us

this type of

this type of lighting that we have here

and this is called Rembrandt lighting

so it's spelt like this

we have R E

and Rembrandt

RAM Brant lighting

and my rotor paint is little bit laggy here

so you guys can forgive the handwriting

RAM brand lighting

so this is what we're doing here

and one of the key features of this type of

portrait lighting

is to try to create these inverted triangles

on the opposite

or the shadow

side of the face

so that's kind of what I went for here

is we have this lighting

lighting up most of the side of this cheek

completely in light

and then we have this inverted triangle

and one thing to note

when you're doing this type of lighting

if you guys ever film something like this yourself

is to try not making this too big

otherwise it kind of doesn't give this sort of look

and so we have the soft lighting here

and one thing to look at

if I just pull this open

is if we have this

so this is a different lighting test we did

obviously this is not what we wanted

so we didn't want this sort of creepy effect

and you see that by back lighting stuff

we get a totally different looking shot

so you know there's no

there's not much bounce

like going on

and we have this kind of contrast

rim light and a little bit

brighter on this side

and so this is why lighting is really important

and why I'm talking about it

because lighting determines the mood of a shot

and if you are composing something

let's say you're filming yourself

you're doing your own project

um you know

you need to be thinking about

what the actual shot looks like

if the shot itself starts out badly

no matter what you do in the composite

um you're not gonna get a good end result

so that's pretty much of it

for the kind of practical effects and the

practical lighting

so now I'm gonna talk about

the general overview of this script

so this is a pretty big script

and this is

like the project file

like I said

I'm not gonna break down

every single technique in this video

that will come in part two

so the project files are

now available when this video is posted

and you can

go and get those

if you want to do this project

what comes with the project file

it comes with footage

11 cg assets

it can be used for demo reels

and also like

my paid classes

also offer kind of email support

get stuck on something

as was one round of written

critical feedback

so if you send me your video

I'll send you back

you know a draw over

of some notes

or improvements you can make

but there's only one round of that

as you know

if I get a lot of emails

I can only handle so many as one person

and obviously

I have to have a limit there

so these are the things that you'll get

uh one thing that's not included is the script

so I'm not including the script as

because people would be using this for their demo rail

uh you're kind of expected

if you're gonna be taking this

or downloading this project file

to already know a little bit what you're doing

um and if you want more

like classes

on building up to this level

I already have a bunch of classes out

that will get you to this level

so I'm not gonna give a script

because that would kind of devalue

the demo real shot

because people would just copy portions

and then it's not their work

so that would not be good

so yeah here's the stuff here

we have a couple effects simulations

that you'll get

uh these are from the Composing Academy Look Dev Pack

which will be releasing soon

so this is something I've spent uh

many months on

I've been working on

in my past time

actively and passively

to create a whole bunch of

looked at effects

it will be around 200

simulated effects

that you guys can actually do

look development with

so I'll be talking more about that

in some upcoming videos

how we can use these

and how this fundamentally changes the approach

towards certain shots

which is why

I created it

so we have a bunch of different ones here

some liquid kind of stuff

some kind of

uh nebula kind of galaxy

explosions um

some sort of embery

kind of fiery looking stuff

we have like

actual embers as well

which you can simulate

extra embers

if you want 3D

we have some

line effects here

which these are kind of

what's being used in the cloth

so probably

in the demo video

didn't even notice

because it kind of goes by quick

but there are some sort of

like effects

if I play this here

there are some sort of effects

wrapped on the cloth as well

some sort of like

I don't know

energy kind of drips

that are appearing

and that's coming from that effect that I just showed

and then we have some like

ripple fires that I'm using in some of the edges

so you'll see some of that around where the effect is

coming off the shoulders and coming off certain areas

so you see like

little portions of stuff kind of peeling off

at certain points

and so there's a really high level detail in the shot

you know if you zoom in

you can see quite a lot of stuff going on

we see bigger embers coming out of the chunks

and stuff like that

so we have all those little details that we can add

and by having these simulations

really gonna be useful

so you can use these for other shots as well

so if you're getting this pack or this shot

you can use these for other projects as well

so you'll get early access to some of the stuff

that will be released in the next few weeks

we also have some shot specific effects

so this is a cloth simulation with UV pass

that we can wrap some of our other simulations on

so we can take some of these sort of

like this effect here that I showed you

see this one

so this is the effect that you can wrap onto the here

and then you can get some sort of embery kind of effect

so you can see

like here it is like this

can we get something like that

and so we can create bigger embers

that have more life to them

than simply just tiny little nuke particles

or something like that

so this gives us really awesome way to mix in

so you can see just these little

kind of glowing pieces or chunks

that just give some size variation

and a little bit more interest

rather than just using you know

basic embers

we also have some shot specific effects

so some smoke

that's being emitted from the geometry of the face

and simulated

so I'm really not going to cover

super in depth the simulation

because I'm using multiple different softwares

multiple different particle systems

to create all of these

so I might go into the more of those in the future

but this is really a composite project

so that is so this is kind of

simulating what you would get in production

so you would get all these things handed to you

as composure

and you would be able to build that shot out

so these are some flow pads

generated until brush

I'm going to talk about that in the Part 2 or part 3

I think it is

more about how these are generated

why I use this method

and why it is actually useful

I did get a couple questions saying hey

why are you going in VR

is it actually useful

and it is actually useful

not because it's VR

but the way that

tilt brush generates this type of geometry

and stretches the UV space to 0 to 1 space

and you have

basically you can just you know

draw these geometries

and not have to manually

extrude them

so if you're doing lots of things

with a lot of curvature

there's no super simple way to

bend textures along splines

or gray warps in nuke

and so this kind of solves that problem

you can get these geometries

and simply export them

and use them that way

so you'll get these

given for you

because I know most people probably don't have oculus

but if you do have an oculus

I will cover a little bit of that

and how you can create these

in that part three

and then we'll get the 3D Geo tract

so this is from Key Tools

I'll talk about Key Tools uh

in the next video

and we'll talk about

how you can create these geometries

they also have a 14 day trial

I think on their website

so we'll talk a little bit more about that

in the next video

how you can use the face builder

the face tracker

to get this 3D model

which is really

really gonna help the tracking

and I'm gonna break that down further

and then we also have a subdivided head

which is the same model

just with high resolution

that we can basically

create more advanced displacement from

so by adding geometry or resolution

we can add details

in a way that is a little bit more realistic

than maybe just sticking 2D textures on a geometry

so that's it for the project file

the there should be a link in the description for that

and that should be available now

so one thing I wanna mention

before I continue on

to do the overview of the script is uh

yeah please don't email bunch of questions

and email support if you're working ahead

so I'm releasing the project file now

so you can download it

and you can work ahead

if you wanna start to approach it yourself

and try to figure it out

um but please

for all the questions

wait until part 2 and 3 are posted

which I'll be posting one a week

so in the next two weeks

both videos will be out

so it's feel free to work ahead

and try to figure it out

or just like

recreate it

but you know

hold off on the questions

because a lot of stuff will be covered in detail

in the next two videos

so if we step through now

we can just take a look at this comp here

so I'm gonna break it down

so basically

I started with the 2D

sort of smart vector on the skin

so just enhancing and using some textures

and kind of cutting them up and saturating them

I'll talk about some frequency separation again

we use some different techniques to match the lighting

and we go into a more advanced version of that as well

when we start talking about the 3D head

so we can actually stabilize some of the lighting

by using the 3D model

so that will be a pretty cool topic in

I believe the second video

so stepping through

pretty much the same technique

so for the body

the majority of the body is just smart factors

so if you were to cut this into different pieces

the shot we have sort of a smart factor in the chest

shoulder hand

a little bit on the cloth

and then we have some problem area which

not a lot of detail to track here

so I'll talk more about how we will combine tracks

and use different things to solve

sort of these hidden problems that appear

but yeah that's basically the first half

here is mostly smart factors

painting in some 2D solutions for the

for the stuff there

and then we're doing some desaturating

and let's just step through

so the effects are merge in

next we also have some interactive balance

so we can use some blurs

we can use some darkening before

so one thing with this composite is

I didn't want this to look like the whole effect was

like plused over

so a lot of times

I was doing like

a darkening with the effect

prior to adding the effect over with A+

so that just gives the effects

like this dark

sort of spreading effect

as the cracks kind of move forward

and you'll see

if you just plus it over

it doesn't look

if I were to take this off

you see it feels really

like just additive

so I really wanted to add darkness

as it's kind of spreading

so pretty much all the effects are doing that

so you can see here

we're getting darker pieces as the effect spreads

and we can use some time offsets

and a couple different variations of techniques

to get that darkness to spread faster

so that the light effects will be easier to see

and they'll flow over it

so again that's more about balancing

more of a creative decision

rather than purely technical

um and also uh

when I talk about the effects

a little bit more in detail

I'll show you guys

how to combine these in different ways

uh how I warped some of the perspectives

to sort of match the body a little bit closer

rather than just

we don't wanna just stick a 2D video uh

on you know

this picture

what we want to do is kind of use

I use some I transforms

rotations to sort of

bend certain pieces

so that the flow of the effects

will actually go in different directions and yeah

I'll talk about that again more in detail

once we get to the effects

uh and then we do some heat distortion

uh I'm gonna go over some more advanced heat distortion

so uh we'll go over this

this portion here

which is creating sort of a normals map type of thing

and sort of using some god rays and some Luma keys

to kind of generate a more advanced heat distortion

as it's coming out of the cracks

um and yeah

so that's kind of how that's

that's created there

so we create a more advanced heat distortion

uh which gives it this nice ripple effect

as the heat is coming up

and if you're watching the clip and you zoom in on it

you'll see you'll actually see the

that level detail does

does help a lot

uh the shoulder

same same idea

same type of thing here

and then we have the embers

so a lot of the embers is a lot of retime uh

retimed effects

so either I retime them or I time offset them

uh to basically we have like

small embers coming off

and then we have

like big chunks

so it's really just using that same

that same element that I'm giving you guys

over and over

but I'll just kind of like

mask a different portion

and if I just gain up here

yeah we'll just

you can just cut a piece from here

and use that in one area

or cut a piece in the middle

use it in different area

and it will give you the look

that there's a bunch of different ones

but actually

we're just using the same one over and over

with offset

and you'll see here

by the way I'm using daisy chains in my comp

I haven't made a video about this yet but

um I was thinking about it

because this is something I kind of do

is I'll merge each element over the background

one at a time

just to see how it looks

and then if they kind of go together

for example

these are all ambers

I'll kind of just

you know put all these on one layer

and then merge it over as one

and why this is useful

is because we could pre comp this out as a layer

it's just a nice way to organize your script

by doing that

and yeah so other stuff here different

will use some God rays

we use some different things to sort of

we don't want to completely flat edges

so I wanted to sort of break up the edge

especially since we're against black here

to you know

not make it feel 2D completely

so we want to have some of these little

effects kind of flickering off

so I'll talk about some different stuff with that

and then there's just a bunch more Ember stuff here

we have some burning edges effects as well for the skin

so we can get some different type of

rolling effects there

and this is the cloth thing so again

we use some of those elements to wrap it onto the cloth

and we can use that on both sides of the cloth

this is the more complex part of the script

so the center area

we start to go into some of the 3D cracks

and 3D displacement

so we can take his face and displace in different ways

to create got more 3D looking stuff

and also add ambient inclusion and details like that

so we have these chunks that we're adding out all over

and you see I use 3D more uh

more on the face and 2D more down here

and that's really cause the facing angle

so like this has more rotation

so because of that tiny bit of parallax

we're gonna feel that this is more 3D

rather than opting for 2D

just sticking a texture on here

and I didn't use a lot of

I didn't really use 3D cracks down here

because there's not much parallax

so you're not gonna

it's kind of a waste of time if there's no parallax

to feel that something is actually truly 3D

so yeah we'll talk about all of that and yeah

and I'll also talk about that effect here

so um again

working in UE space this is

this is why I wanna make that prior video

because we do this a lot

in this particular project

we're gonna flatten this face

and this is really one of the awesome benefits

of having keen tools and face tracker

because we can work in UB space

we can stabilize the lighting

so one of the facts we'll talk about

is how we can stabilize the lighting

and use that to basically integrate textures

into the picture by using the lighting that exists

rather than just

like kind of sticking something on

and manually doing color corrections

and yeah and I also talk about

how to generate these crack mats

so this is how we're running the effects through

so we're gonna use this to mask

some of those UV pads that I showed you and yeah

we use some frequency separation here Luma keys

some manual rotapaints

and working in UV space

again so that's

that's why that UV space is really

really helpful for creating

for creating that

you know if you're working

with just purely smart vectors

we could do some stuff here

but where you gonna have problems

is where these things overlap

so I'll talk more about that in the next video

and then yeah

basically just the same concept going all the way down

so you can see

like if we just look at this layer

what that layer looks like

so we can see that you know

that those textures are really running through and

that gives us a pretty cool starting point

so let me just keep stepping down

and also the face smoke so this is

we can use some of the pre existing stuff here to

actually light up some of the effects that we have

so again I'll talk about that

but we get this really nice look of like

kind of sparkling

subtle effect

and we don't want to play it up too much

otherwise you get a little bit too noisy

like I was showing you with some of the

earlier iterations

but it is really nice to have that subtle detail

and movement

just to bring that to life

and then there's like

a really tiny piece of detail where I kind of took like

one of the embers and reflected it in the eye

just to get

like you know

a tiny bit of movement into the eyes as well

but we also have some of the

some of the effects running through the eyes as well

so we need some polar coordinate or polar distort

to sort of warp these into spheres

and we can sort of get this effect to run through

the eyes as well

and yeah that's pretty much how that's being done

and more embers and then um yeah so

so some color corrections and grain and stuff like that

so there's a lot of uh

things going on there

but really how you combine all of them is

is really the key

and how do you manage a script like that

how do you organize it

yeah so that's that's why

these shots start to get a little bit more complicated

no specific technique is overly complicated

it's really just

how do you take all this bag of tools that you have

and manage it and combine it and use problem solving

to know what tool to use and where to use it

and that's really one of the core concepts of

being a good composers

knowing all that

so I think that's pretty much covered it

for the first video

uh yeah that's pretty much covered for the first video

and if you like the video

hit like it really

really helps the algorithm

so make sure to do that

subscribe if you're not already

project files are in the description below

and you guys can work ahead if you want

or wait a week and the first detail video will be out