All language subtitles for nuk309-class04

hello everyone

this is class No. 4 of nuke 3:09

and today's I promised you

we're going to start working on the balcony shot

and this is gonna take us through

the majority of the course

so without further introductory words

let's just get started

so played in here

uh starting at frame one

we're setting the globals to 1 to 300 and of course

set them to the right resolution

and the first thing we wanna do is uh bringing our

tracked camera and check that everything works well

so you should have a camera track file look

let's import script

and the cam track scraped is the one you wanna bring in

and the track for this shot was done by Marco Dehui

I I hope I'm pronouncing the name right

and he did a wonderful

job on a on a pretty hard track here

and um what we have is a bunch of locators

and they are attached to a scene

and here we have an axis

for the camera and the as you can see

the axis is not animated and it's the origin

and the camera itself

and as we play through

you can see nothing happens

and this is because he originally did the track

starting at frame 1,001

so what we can do is simply time off set the camera

so let's do that

and of course let's put in here 1,000

and zoom out a little bit

we can see the camera doing the move

and you can already see how difficult this move is

because it's not only a one 80 degrees pan

there's also a lot of horizontal movement and vertical

so not an easy track

in order to check the track we want to see the locators

over the plate

so we can simply put them over

and we might wanna reduce these to about half

so they're kind of half transparent

um and as you can

as you browse through the plate

you can see the locators

sticking to

either tracking markers or other features in here

or the you know the corners on the tiles on the floor

and everything seems to be working fine

but let's take a closer look at what happens at the

edges of the frame

so right here you can see that

each locator is basically the centre of the locator

is that the corner of the tracking marker

that's how they were tracked

um if you look at the ones

toward the edge of the frame

you see that they kind of slide off

and they get better as they move into the frame oh

you see that one

and that's a sure

sign that we're missing distortion here

every lens has at least

some amount of distortion

so of course that's part of the job of the tracking guy

is to calculate the distortion and

add that to the equation

and Marco did that

but since he used the 3D equalizer

he used um a specific set of plugins

that was made for nuke by um

the company that makes 3D Equalizer

and for that you'll need to go online to their website

and download a bunch of plugins

so you should

have that link in your files

and let's just take a look at that

so when you go um to that link

you'll get a bunch of stuff here

to download

and what you really need is the

Lens Distortion plugin kit

don't do the same mistake as I did

and uh download

the one just below it

which is an older version and very confusing

this is very easy

you unzip it and you basically drop all those plugins

into your uh

plugins folder

and then back in nuke

you basically need to go as usual to um

to your all plugins

a click on update all

and then once you do that

you should see them in the L

uh all these LD uh plugins

these are the uh lens distortion plugins

so once you have them set up

you can just uh

load that little distortion scrape that you have there

so let's just do that again

import scraped um

and it's the uh uh the distortion script

bring it in and

edit under the render

and what you see now happening is that it

gets even worse

and that's of course

because currently it's set to undistort

and we wanna do the reverse

we wanna distort our

tracked markers to match the distortion on the plate

and now you can see these all kind of

feeding exactly at the center like they should do

which shows us that now we've got um

a good distortion

a good track and we're ready to go okay

so for us to start laying out the background

we need to do a few things

first of course

we need to get rid of the green screen

cause we wanna see the background behind her

and for this we can do a very rough

primate extraction as we did before

so let's go ahead and do that

let's add a Kia here

primat is usually my favorite

and scrub around her

and really what we wanna do is quickly clean up the BG

let's do just that

really don't have to worry about detail

let's clean up a little bit here

that little area over there

and as you can see

it's heating a lot of areas that are not supposed to be

extracted at all

but we'll take care of it in a moment

um of course we can get rid at this stage of

any of the rigs and the tracking markers

that's for later

um let's um

take care of her

yeah and that should be

enough

a little bit of noise there

okay that's good enough

so of course the

all the green is not gonna help us

when we wanna set the color for the background

so we might as well

um do a little more than this and

kill the spiel so let's bring our trusty kill spiel

let's pre mold all these

and now we've got her without all the green spiel

obviously what's going on here is way too much

green spill going on

on this area and extraction

um we don't care so much about the spill

what we do wanna keep this without holes

just so that we don't get confused

so basically if we look at the original plate

uh that that is a half transparent

or more than half transparent

so that will be a bit of a problem later on

for now we wanna kind of

put a line right here where the wall goes

and everything

basically everything to the right of this line

uh will be totally opaque

uh at this point

and we can do it roughly

so all you need to do is just you know

I'm creating a rectangle

then shift Z will make all the corners

um sharp or busy

and basically you create a line

and now you just need to animate it until this part

goes out of frame

okay so I got a roto here

as you can see

I didn't even do it for every frame

just a quick dirty roto to kind of um

mask out this area

so it's all opaque

and now we can simply

add it to the prime at just an over will do

so our mat now looks like this

which of course makes more sense

and now of course we wanna switch the over here

instead of putting our

scene 3D scene over the plate

we wanna put our plate over the 3D scene

so now the 3D scene is becoming our background

okay so we did the first step

we can at this point turn off the locators

really don't need them anymore

but

because the green screen is kind of curved

uh and we're missing the edge of the balcony

and we're missing any sense of like

railing or something blocking the edge of the balcony

everything seems kind of like in the air yeah

it's gonna be a little bit hard to visualise

the background of the city without

seeing something a bit more

straight and solid there

so at this stage before we even go to Maya

we might wanna construct something very simple in 3D

nuke just to serve as a sort of indicator

we can later on actually

export that into Maya to help us

as a reference when we set up

um the the real 3D scene in Maya

so we don't have a lot of um

3D indication

we've we've got those um locators

I mean we can use them

but actually we've got better Geo for that

because Marco in order to get the track right

uh had to build a survey model

based on the trackers and the information

he had there in the scene and

other steal images

so we can use that survey survey Geo

even though it's

we can't use it as is

but you we can use it as reference

so let's bring that in

so what we need is a re Geo node

and we wanna load the Geo we got from Marco

and that's a simple OBJ

there's no animation or anything

um and what you can see here is basically

based on the tracking markers

he built a floor

and it's great because the floor

as you can see is at zero

which already helps us because every car we were gonna

put there is gonna match um

the elevation of the floor

and what you can see here is

the two green screens on the side and the front and

some elements that represent

the back wall

so let's connect this Geo to our scene

we can turn off the locators now

this is a better reference

and let's put another scene here

and that would be

that would be for our nuke Geo

and for us of course we want to create a floor

so here is our card

they're very small so let's

change the uniform scale to

let's say 1,000

that's better

let's rotate it to lie down minus 90 on the X

and let's make it square so

scale for y would be 2

and now we basically wanna move it to a line

with the green screen

with a Geo of the green screens

and basically we want it to kind of

extend a little bit further than where the um

green screens on the on the balcony are so

maybe a little more something like this

and

on that we wanna bring it a little more

yeah something like this

let's connect this scene to our main scene

so we can see everything

and now let's do um those edges

and we don't wanna create actually

like detailed railings or everything like this

I'm thinking that the railing will create

will have a sort of a solid base

concrete or you know stucco base

and on top of that there will be the

actual metal railing

so we might wanna do something like that base

at least to give us some

reference for an edge of balcony

so um let's go ahead and add a cube there to our scene

and we might wanna

try and scale it up

well that's

way too much to say uh

uniform scale 100

and we don't need all these subdivisions

we just need a simple cube

um so this is it

um let's bring it roughly up to stand on the ground

and now we wanna extend it

all the way to the balcony

and we probably want to make it now we're

and not as tall and we

at this point where

kind of estimating and guessing and probably

the best way to get a feel of how much we wanna go

how big and how tall

uh would actually be to uh

really look at it in the comp

so let's turn off the

the original Geo

you know and let's put some texture in it

and usually I'm using checkerboard for these stuff

just helps you see where things are going more easily

and uh oh our ovaries deal at half

50% let let's make it full

and this is already looking pretty nice

so assuming this is the base of the railing

and on top of that we'll have um

the metal rails

when she gets closer to the edge of the balcony

that should go about here below her shoulders

something like that

so the height

is feels good on that side

the thickness is not as important for now on

so we can go back to our model

and simply duplicate this cube

let's turn it around 90 degrees on the

y and simply bring it to the other edge

to give us that other side of the railing

and now we can go back look at the whole thing

yeah and this is starting to work

so now that we have a basic layout

we can bring in the panoramic image for the background

but a word of warning here

it's a huge image

it's 18K and uh

I've been having problems with nuke

crashing on when you bring it in the first time

and part of it is um a memory

so you probably wanna

clear all your cash before you even bring it

it's always a good idea and of course

save everything um

bring it in it's a thief file

and you can see that it's eighteen

k that's very big

so be careful with it

give it some time

um and some love

once you bring it in and it's working

it will probably hold on there

so this is of course

a panoramic stitch

and it was actually shot by our very own

John Montgomery in Mexico City

and it's a great panorama

I mean we've got all the resolution

we've got all the detail there

uh very high definition

so that's great

but of course

there are many things that are not gonna work just

out of the box

uh first of all

if we look back at the plate

we can see immediately that

uh the plate was pro and

and the panorama were probably showed

at different times of the day or maybe a different days

it's a different location

uh different camera

different exposure

so of course

things are not just gonna match

uh magically

uh besides that

um if we really wanted to do it for real

we'll have to create a whole matte painting there with

the whole foreground as 3D or at least

uh projected on cards because um

as you remember

when we looked at the camera

we don't just have a nodal pan

and actually cameras rarely do

a nodal pan

because they don't rotate on their nodal point

and once you have something that's more than an

odal pan and has some lateral movement

you will be expecting to

see some parallaxing background

which we can't do

with a single image

but looking again

at the plate

and realizing that

there is a quick move around

and then we kind of settle

on a certain angle and not move much

beyond that

we can definitely go with what we have

it's a little bit of hacking

but it will work

so all these issues

the lighting

the colour uh

the placement

I think it's a great opportunity um to um

be in a situation that is very similar to what you

encounter everyday when you work in production

most of sometimes we have this utopian uh huh

um notion that if

you do everything technically correct in visual effects

everything will fall in place

and we just have to plug everything

to the right

uh place and it will work

and a lot of artists expect things to work like this

and then they encounter

all kinds of problems that were not anticipated

and a good VFX artist

is one that is able to sort of hack things around

to make them look good

because as I always say

at the end of the day

when the director looks at the stuff

he looks at the visuals

he's reacting to what he sees

he does not really

care on how you did it

you did it and whether you did it

technically accurate or not technically accurate

and again I think the only

part in visual effects that really has

to be 100% technically accurate is camera tracking

everything else is subjective

and depends on your eye

your creativity

and your judgement okay

so let's now move on

so now we wanna place this image on a cylinder

and I'm saying ceiling right now sphere

uh because really there's not gonna

be a lot of up and down movement in the camera

most of it is um

turning around in the lateral movement

so I think we should be safe

putting it on a ceiling door

and that will make things easier for us

so let's create a

a cylinder here

and we can already put it on the ceiling there

just like that

it's tiny so

let's just change the radius to fifty

and also the height to 50

and you can see the image there

now we have

a way too much

subdivision in here that we don't need

so the verticals

we don't need

anything really

we can turn it just to one

and we can reduce this as well

as long as we don't get

too faceted

so 24 should be

um good and now

if you look at the projection

you can see that it got

switched around

because we're looking inwards so that

a circular tower

is now on the right

side instead of the left

so really we want to just

flop the image to work for us

so let's do that

let's just add a transform

and minus 1 on the width

and now that circular tower is at the right place

the other thing you're seeing is that we're stretching

our panorama too much

and that's of course because in the cylinder

it's currently the U Extend is set to 360 degrees

but this was never a 3

60 panorama

it's only about 1:00 80

and again we have to judge by our eyes

so let's do it one 80

and that already makes more sense

also um you've noticed that I

made the radius and height similar

and that's a general rule you should always keep

if you do not want to distort your image

assuming it was shot correctly and stitched correctly

uh you wanna keep these the same

and a good way to judge

that is to look at something that's either

square or circle

and we can look at right here

this banner

on that building

and you see those circles

so if I change the height to say 70

um you can immediately

see that we're stretching everything

uh similarly

if I'll change the radius to say thirty

now we're squeezing everything

so is a general rule keep these the same

okay so let's take our cylinder with the image

and add it to our main scene

like this and

of course it's tiny little one um

at this point

I think it's good to use a transform Geo node

because we're gonna play a lot with the

position and rotation of the cylinder

to work well for our shot

and it's usually a good idea

once you have good settings for your Geo to just

use an additional node

to transform it

so let's add

a transform Geo here

and first thing we wanna do is of course

make it much bigger than that

let's multiply by twenty

and now it's encompassing our whole

um scene more or less

uh and again

we'll we'll have to cheat on the distance

because in reality

things that are closer to the balcony

are not gonna be the same distance

as the back

so we have to think of like a

a median distance

so to say and that should work for our shot okay

now maybe it's a good

idea to actually see it in context of the shot

um so this is towards the end where she's looking

and this is where we see the background after

the fast move

and the um question is what do we wanna see there

um based on that

we will rotate the ceiling there or our transform Geo

uh to put the area in the image that we wanna see

and I think it would be nice to see

a street right there

let's try and rotate the y

let's see let's do 40

and now we actually went the wrong direction

so we should go

to the minus

let's try thirty

um so you see the street here

I wanna I think it will be a good idea

that she looks down the street and not this way

um let's try minus 70

and that's already looking better

now you see a lot of this building

that might look a bit ugly

if you wanna see more of the street

we can uh push back a little bit

let's try minus 60

but the thing that bothers me here

assuming we have a railing here

is that it almost feels like her balcony

uh is rotated in the wrong direction

it should be kind of parallel to the street

so for now let's keep it at minus 70

and now you can see it moving through the camera

and here's our railing that we created in nuke

that's helping

now there is another problem

disregarding the light

which and and the colour which are now off

um the perspective looks wrong

so it seems like we're looking way too much downwards

we should probably have the horizon lower down

and see more sky

it just doesn't look right

the way it looks right now

and you can see it throughout the shot

feels like we're

looking way too much downwards

so to change this

we basically need to bring the cylinder down

by how much

that's basically based on how it feels

let's try and bring it down minus 50 on the y of course

um this is already feeling better but I still have this

feeling that we're looking too much downwards

let's try minus hundred

okay this is starting to feel better you see her height

you can feel the camera position

and as you look around

that kind of feels pretty good

now again this is um

a good example of where you really have to judge things

by your eye

you don't have the measurements and the

you know the precision tools to define

and we're basically marrying two different things

we're marrying us one shot

shot with one camera

uh somewhere

to another background shot with a steels camera

on a stitch

so really at this point

it's pretty much up to you

your eyes and your feel

now another thing that will define what

what part of the background were exactly seeing

and how it moves through the shot is the actual um

location of the cylinder in the X and Z

uh in relation to the camera

and for this we wanna go back to our 3D scene

and we are seeing our camera right here

uh doing its move

and again that's a decision of

where we wanna place the cylinder right now

let's look at our centre and a Transform Geo

it's a little bit in front of the camera

um we might wanna look at it from the top and

again that's a decision do you wanna align it to the uh

starting position of the camera

and then the camera is gonna get closer to it that way

um or do you want to align it to the um

end position of the camera where we see most of the

um background

um and I'm feeling that's what we wanna do and again

we have to look at it and see how it feels

so I'm moving the whole cylinder to about here um

something like this

so the camera starts a little

at the back and then goes here

and this as you can see

changes the position a little bit of the background

and I feel this is actually better

it's bigger now in frame

um I see the railing here kind of feels right

let's look towards the move yeah

I think this is actually helping also makes this uh

big building feel

a little bit more aligned to the edge of the balcony

and again here feels like our edge of the balcony

is kind of parallel to that street

which kind of makes sense

so let's keep it this way

now here's another thing we need to be aware of

and for these

yeah let me just let's turn off our

nuke Geo for a second

and if you look at the edge of the frame right here

you see some weird stretching going on

let's see if we see it on the other side yeah

you can see it here too

and this is because we are using a distortion node

which is distorting the image

and you'll see that if we turn off the distortion

everything falls back in place

but of course we wanna keep the distortion

and the way to solve this

issue of stretching the edge of

the frame is simply to overscan in our scan line render

so overscan is set to zero

we wanna have enough pixels there to cover

this area then that depends on our distortion

let's try 30 pixels

and that kind of solved it

let's try twenty

now we see a tiny little bit of it at the edge

so let's keep it at 30

so you wanna set the minimum amount of pixels there

so you because overscan is gonna take a little

bit more time

cause it's scanning

a bit of a wider

frame but keep

enough so that you get rid of

the issue of stretching because of distortion

now let's talk now about

color and light so huh

quite obviously

we can't really change the light on our background

and obviously we can't change it on our foreground

uh we're kind of tied to what it is

but right now

it doesn't feel too bad in terms of light because

you can see

that the light is coming from the top

and a little bit from the right on her

generally uh

on on the background here

so this is matching

kind of the light that we see

on on the uh background

it is coming from that side

um as you can see on the poles to the delighties

I think on our plate

it's coming a bit more from the top

but we can live with that

as long as we get the colors to match

because right now there is a total mismatch

and it helps to look at the

plate itself

it's very lifted bright

uh kind of warmish

um definitely not the uh kind of

blue sky contrasty

generally blue um

background that we have

and we can change it just by

changing the color

let's add a color note here

and I think the first thing we wanna do is reduce the

saturation now satur

reducing saturation only brings the values of the red

green and blue closer together

it's not necessarily help you gonna get rid of the blue

but it will help us uh have a little bit less of that

colour range that we have now

which is too exaggerated for the plate

let's uh change it to point eight

and you see there's not a big difference

but we're getting a bit rid of that

big range of colours

and um as usual I try to start with the big brush

strokes on colouring and then do anything smaller

so I'm feeling like we should bring up

the gamma to reduce the contrast in general

uh let's do that

let's put it to 1.2 okay

that already feels much better because we're

and it almost feels like more hazy

which I think is the kind of

feeling that we get from the plate more hazy

less saturated

still feeling too blue and still feeling a bit too dark

so um let's

bring in the gain

we wanna probably make everything brighter

um we want to um take out some blue

hmm something like this already feels better

so let's see

let's make everything a bit

let's put this at 1.6 the red

well that's now 2 red

let's bring the um

green almost to the same level as the red

and now it's probably too green

let's bring the blue to let's say point three five

not bad

point three six

I think this is starting to feel much closer

as you can see

you can feel

let's bring those our little nuke stuff here

just to cover that area that we're not supposed to see

um if you look at her

you look at the background

now it feels more like we're in the same environment

we might wanna

no you know

I don't think we wanna go much brighter than this

if you look at the whites here

you look at the whites there

they're they are kind of blown up

look at her shirt

kind of like here

and I wouldn't judge by this colour

because as you remember we did a

a quick dispeel on everything

which we shouldn't really because um

that made everything feel a bit too blue here

we'll tweak this later on to match better

but I'm looking more at her shirt

and the white on her shirt

and that is starting to feel like this

and the the color of the sky now feels much more like

the kind of sky you'd wanna see when you expose to her

I bet that if we could actually see sky in the original

image it will feel like this blown up and white

and not blue and defined as it was before

so I think we are making good progress here

I think we might wanna reduce the contrast even more

so um we can do this by changing the contrast here

let's put it to point nine

and that gives that extra feeling of kind of haziness

which I think we really wanna see in here

and we'll do more saddle

colour correction and some flaring to match the plate

later on but I think now we're in a much

better position in terms of color and feel

so now that we've got a background pretty much set up

at least as a starting point uh

we probably wanna render that background as a prequel

because you don't wanna have

all these 3D stuff going on here right now and

slowing you down

when you render the background

uh is a precomp

you might wanna turn off your

color correct

because you wanna be able to do that

post a precomp

on your rendered background

and now we we're back

you see how weird it looks

suddenly this is the original color

so uh you wanna turn this off

and then the last thing I wanna talk about before

you actually pre comp

this is a motion blur

and whether you want to a

bake the motion blur into your precompt

background or not

and which type of motion blur to use

so they're basically two ways to

do motion blur on a 3D object in nuke

uh the more accurate one would be

and let's again

let's just turn these off

because these are not of course

you don't wanna render them with the background

these are just placeholders

um and let's go to the area where she's moving fast

which is somewhere around here

the fast motion

camera not her

the camera sorry

um the more accurate one would be to do

a real 3D motion blur

and for that

you go to multi sample

and start raising those

and as you do that

you get a true 3D motion blur

now I have samples at 3

which is too low

because you can see the motion blur feels almost like

stepped that looks horrible

so to get a true uh

good looking motion blur

you might wanna set this at least to like 10

and that gives you a much nicer

gradation uh

more steps in between

and this is great

the only problem of basically two problems

one is that it slows down your render considerably

of course and that's up to you to decide

where you wanna spend time in terms of rendering um

but the other thing is that I'm

not totally convinced that this

motion blurry is correct

I'm not saying nuke is doing something wrong

I'm saying again

because we're cheating the whole thing here

um if I look at the actual plate is this frame

I don't see tons of motion blur

what I see is the focus

and you can um

very easily um

figure out if what the blur you're seeing is actually

camera focus

or motion blur

because motion blur tends to go to one side

you know depending on the direction

and feel more like a doubling

as you can see here on our render

uh and here it feels pretty consistent

so for for some reason

we don't get that much amount of motion blur

so if we precomp and render out this using this method

we're pretty much tied to that

we can play with the shutter

but at least at this stage

I'd rather do the fake 2D motion

blurry using motion vectors

so we can um

turn this back

to 1 for now

and we just want to output a motion vector

and right now it's set to forward

which is good enough for us

we might want to change

the classic to

distance or velocity um

the classic is the um

is the legacy

old way of um

getting motion factors

and of course

now we need to um

to add a filter

um a vector blur

and we want our vector blur to basically receive

the victors through that channel which was forward

and right away you can see we're getting

tons of motion blur

it looks a bit similar

it's not that bad

similar to what we had with the true 3D

the good thing about using motion blur is a

that you that it's faster

uh and that you can

keep on tweaking it in the comp as much as you want

you're not tied to something

and it's easy to tweak just changing the multiply

so making it bigger will give us even more motion blur

which I think we definitely don't want

put it back to one

and um uh putting it

2.5 will give us a more reduce motion blur

so we always have control over that

so now that you um have vector information in here

you can render it without any motion blur

and um the only question is how do you render

um your extra channel or layer in the same E X R

and that will do in the next class uh

we'll talk about multi channel E x R's

and after we do that we're gonna go back to the plate

and start cleaning it up

because if we wanna go further with the shot we really

have to start thinking of getting rid of all those rigs

those stands

and those tracking markers

cause they're getting in our way to seeing things

so a lot of work in the next class

and I hope to see you all there bye bye