All language subtitles for nuk309-class06

hello everyone and welcome to class No. 6 of Nuke 3:09

and from this class onwards

we're going to spend quite a lot of time in Maya

and also in Speed Tree

which is another 3D software

specialises in uh plants

and people ask me

why do you spend time teaching 3D stuff in a new core

in a compositing or in a 2D course

and I have several answers for that

the first one is that in this particular course

we really need to do some 3D work to get

the shot going and to make it work

and who's going to do it for us

now this is not just a joke

it actually

represents a situation that's

I think characteristic for a lot of the effects

artists nowadays

some artists work in the big companies

and in the big companies

uh the system is more of a

conveyor built type system where each person

specializes in one specific task

does the job

and then hands it over to the next person

so a modeler will model

then he will hand the model

to someone else who do the textures and so forth

until he goes finally to the compositor

usually at the end of the chain

now there's nothing wrong with this system

and the big advantage of it is that each person becomes

or each artist becomes really

specialist in their own task

but the truth is that a lot of people

either work on their own or work in smaller companies

where there is no possibility of using this

conveyor belt kind of workflow

so people end up

wearing different

hats and doing a lot of different tasks

and to be able to work in a company like this

or even work completely independently on your own

you really need to be able to um

to go through the entire process of the

VFX work and not just specialise in one specific task

now beyond that of course

it's always good to expand your capabilities

and your knowledge

it will generally make you a better visual

effect artist

uh another thing is that nowadays really

you can't separate 2D from 3D

I mean nuke has got

uh much stronger 3D capabilities

now you do so much in in 3D in nuke

and besides

you know when you work in a 3D software like Maya

the end result is

2D render or even when you watch the screen is just 2D

so you know

the division is a bit artificial

the really it's the same thing

now another very important thing is that lighting

and comp are interdependent

basically every lighter

has to know comp and every compr has to know lighting

because they both deal with light

and light is color

and as I always say

the majority

of what we do in comp

is colour and this is the same as lighting

so I really think that every comfort

needs to know lighting

and and probably be a pretty strong lighter

finally you know

it's just fun

so with that

let's get started

so before we go into mine

start working on the 3D

obviously we need to

export the camera from nuke

we also wanna export um

the temperature that we created so

that we can

have some kind of reference that will help us uh

building the actual balcony in Maya

and uh it's a good idea to also export

our comp at the stage that it is

so that we can use it as a background in Maya

for reference

mainly for lighting

um so um for exporting the actual comp

just wanna render out a version

but you really wanna do J

pigs and all the XRS

because you don't want them to be heavy in my eye

you want them to uh

play quickly

and also there's no point in exporting the full 3K

we can export half raise as well

so for that

you just need to

add another reformat node and just

set it to scale point five

so now we're 14

40 by uh 8 10

uh and that's fine

because as long as we keep the same aspect ratio

uh that will work in Maya

and in your right node

you probably want to write it into your elements folder

and in there

you want to choose srgb

of course JPEG

and you can lower

the quality to like

point seven five

again we don't

need high quality

we just need some kind of reference

and of course

you'll need to render

the whole thing again

we wanna render from

the same frame that were we decided

we see the background

which will be

um frame 99

now the next thing to export is the camera

we can go back to our original 3D

setup where we have it there

and of course

we need a ride Geo node

now one thing to uh

remember is that

the ride Geo is not gonna

consider the time

off set that we put on uh

on the camera

so really we need to export

the camera starting

at frame uh

thousand and

one like uh

like it was originally set up

so the best way to

deal with this is simply to do all

the 3D work in Maya

starting at frame thousand and one

and then when we bring back

the renders

all we need to do is

offset them back to frame one

that's not a big deal

of course we need to

put the camera

into a scene

so let's just create

a scene just for that

and connect to the camera and right Geo

and now you simply give you the path and click execute

you wanna use FBX

I recommend using FBX

I like to export the camera separate from any other Geo

just to be on the safe side

and again I'm using FBX because it's tried and tested

it's true that you can use a lambic 2 ABC

uh but for cameras

I usually stick to FBX just because I know it works

alright so the camera is exported

and now we want to export our little mock up 3D scene

basically to give us some reference in Maya

um so it's already connected to a saint

so all we need to do is do another right Geo

and again I'd be um

I I'll prefer to use the FBX

um give it a path execute

and that's all

now that we've got the camera

the temp Geo and lores render of our comp

at this stage

we can go to Maya

so now in my other first thing you want to do

probably is create a project folder

if you go to file project window

uh you click new

I usually give it the name of the shot I'm working on

so it will be SH30

then you browse to your shot folder

and in 3D Maya

the way we set it up in the first class

uh right in there you put your project

you click accept

and that will create a bunch of folders

for you to put stuff in

you don't have to use that procedure

but I actually like using the Maya

default project setup

just makes things more organized

and easier to manage

so after you do that

you just wanna go to set project

and make sure you are using

um that project

you created

and from now on

anything you create here will

by default go to that project

I also like to enable the outliner always on the side

that's useful

and um now we can bring in the Geo and the camera

so we go to import

and I put both the Geo and the camera in assets

so first let's bring in the nuke scene

and there it is

let's now change our view to shaded

and this is our temp Geo

now let's bring in the camera um

and

here's the camera

it's really small

it's hard to see

we wanna make it larger

so let's make it larger

but you see that as soon as I start browsing

the timeline

it goes back to its original scale

and that's probably because

it has a keyframe on the scale

so let's go to the channel box

and as you can see the scale X

y are animated

even though there's nothing happening there

so what we can do is select all three of these

right click and go to break connections

now we can make the camera as big as we want

and it's still not moving

but that's because as you remember we

exported starting in frame 1,001

so let's set the frame range 1,001 to 1,300

and now you see all the key frames of the camera

key frame on every frame

and again since we are really starting only at frame 99

let's set this to 1,099 and this will be our work range

for everything we do in Maya everything before

99 we're not concerned with

because we don't see the background yet

now we want to set the correct resolution

for rendering and for viewing

so let's go to the render globals

we can already change it to a Arnold render

since that's what we're gonna use later on

for now it doesn't really matter uh

we wanna change a well

let's change a renderable camera to our camera

um let's change the resolution

to our resolution which will be 2880 by 1620

that's okay

now we can turn on viewer resolution gate here

and if we look through the camera now

well that looks nice

now that we have this setup we can set up a

a background plane to view our shot behind

so let's go back to the attribute editor

and let's select our camera

and in the camera properties let's go to environment

we wanna create an image plane

and for this image plane

first of all we wanna look at it only through camera

we don't wanna have it

there around when we look through another view

like perspective

and let's bring in what we rendered

which I saved in the elements

here's our precomplores bring in the first frame

and of course we wanna use image sequence

now it's not showing anything

because we need to offset it because we rendered it is

99 to 300 but actually

our frame range here is plus 1,000

so we wanna offset it

for some weird reason that I don't understand

the offset in Maya works in reverse

so instead of offsetting it 1 thousand frames forward

you need to do minus 1,000

I really don't know why

but now it works

and if we play

that's nice

let's make sure our resolution gate is on

now it's on

and we seat in the proper resolution and framing

and we're basically

um set up to start working

obviously you see that our Geo goes in front of her

where it really should go behind her

but this is not something we can do in Maya

that will be done in comp of course

uh for now uh

seeing the background help us also visualise the scale

but mainly we're gonna

use that to feel the general lighting

so it's good to have it there

alright we're all set to a start modelling

let's switch back to a perspective you and

one thing I like to do

um as a general setup in your create

because we're

really going to create a bunch of polygon primitives

I like to turn off interactive creation

I don't like dragging around

in the viewport to create a cube or a plane

I like it to just be dropped

by default at the origin

always makes things easier

but this is really up to you

and of course we want to create a floor first

thing so let's create a plane

and we can simply scale it

to match the size of the plane we have there

we can also turn off the resolution gate for now so

this is pretty much it already

doesn't have to match exactly

as long as we cover the same area

we know that we have a floor

in the view

we're not gonna have a hole in the floor

now in terms of position in y in height it should be 0

so that is good

and now we can already turn off our nuke plane

we don't need that

so this is gonna be our floor

we might as well name it floor

um now let's replace those um edges

and we really wanna do something that's a little lower

because most of the railing will be these metal railing

we just wanna base there

uh let's create a cube

and let's set the width to thousand

so we want it really long

um and let's set height and depth to about fifteen

so you see it's a bit smaller

let's just make sure that we're putting it

on the ground and it's okay to intersect a little bit

and um let's just push it to the edge of the plane

more or less again

accuracy doesn't have to be precise here

because we only care about what we

see through the camera

we're not gonna use this model for anything other

so we're not gonna look at it from

any different angle than what we have in the camera

and we can hide this piece already

and let's move this

all the way here

let's hide this piece too

and when you get to the point where you wanna

really put it close to the floor

it's gonna be a little hard to do it

like this you can um

click insert and move your pivot point to closer place

click insert again

and simply push it to here

now I think we wanna push our

um floor a little bit closer to her on the side

than it was when we set up the nuke um temp

so let's do it right now

uh we've got this setup

uh let's call it base

and now we can simply duplicate it

um and rotate it on the Y

let's rotate on the y 90 degrees

and it's already almost falling in its place

since we have the pivot right there

something like this and again

it's okay if they intersect

now what we did wanna do um

um that would

that can help with the lighting just a little bit

is just break those corners

so they're not totally sharp

do a little bevel there

uh we can select this cube

and go to edge

and select the top two edges

and go to Edit Mesh

bevel and we wanna open the parameters just to set them

and we do we wanna do a really small tiny bevel

so let's set these 2.1

and segments 3 would be enough and apply

and we got just a little kind of corner bevel there

we can go back to object mode and you can see

that you got a little bit of frame there which could

uh show we some highlight in on the shader um

we can do the same on this cube or we can just delete

and again just

duplicate this one again

and rotate it on the Y

and now we can just set it up correctly

now this intersecting area

and the way the bevils work is not uh I'd say

might not get approved by top modelers but again

we're gonna see this corner passing by with motion

blurry focus

so when you build these stuff and you build

for a show that you already know and are familiar with

you can save a lot of

unneeded work as opposed to somebody who puts

all the work on modelling before even knowing how

and it's gonna be shot and from which camera

which angle

um so we're done with the base

let's move on to the railing

we want to create one fence pole so again

let's create a cube

and this time we want the cube to be um

let's say we want it smaller so let's say 3 by three

and the height let's set it to 60

we got this skinny little pole there

we wanna put that exactly on the center there

so we might wanna change to a top view

and also help to switch to wire frame

and let's just put that in the middle again

I'm not using any precise tools

but I don't think it's necessary

we can eyeball those things

let's go back to perspective

and shaded and just

put that in the concrete

um if you wanna put a little bevel on it too

you can do that

um that's always good

so select the 4 edges

and we can just use

the same bevel setting that we had before

and again that's just adding a little bit of

you know breaking the corners

and that's good because we're gonna

wanna make this feeling more like painted metal

so now that we have one

we have to create

uh lots more

and we can just use the duplicate special and give it

uh an offset

so let's do that

let's go to edit

duplicate special

and we wanna create instances

because in case we change something

we can change one and have it apply to all the others

um we can estimate the total number

well I don't know

but you wanna create

more than you need

and then just delete

and we want to translate on the X

so let's set this to zero

and on the X will set a minus 80

so it's gonna create an offset of 80

and let's apply

and that's cool

we probably have a

bit more than we need yeah

we can delete this

it's not going to be seen by the camera

so no problem there um good

so we've got that

and we might as well do the same for the other side

so again we

select the center one

and this time duplicate special

we wanna keep the same distance and number

but instead of on the X

we wanna do it on the Z

and it's gonna be positive z

so we've set it to 80

duplicate special

and let's just go ahead and delete

whatever is not needed there

and just to check it out

it's a good idea to go back to your camera

um make sure you have a resolution gate set on

and go back to frame 99

and yeah you see how fast all this side goes by so

really we don't

need to go over the top in terms of modeling

the part that where we see more is going to be here

where we're going to see mainly the fence okay

that's good

let's finish the fence

let's go back to perspective

but maybe before we do that

we wanna put a little bit of order here

because we have all these cubes

so that is our floor

um let's call it floor right here

um so we have the name in here

then we have the two bases

and again let's just call it on the base level base

and we'll call this space too

and now we have all these

and we can simply group them all together

and we'll call this group uh

railing poles

so that is much more organized right now

so let's finish up the railing by

putting the top piece in there

so we want an elongated piece like this just so lower

um so let's create another cube

and we wanna set um the cube to be

thousand elongated height let's put it to two and depth

let's put to six

that's good and we probably wanna going to top view

to adjust the position so there it is right now

let's put it at the center of the poles just like this

and now we can

use the insert to move the pivot point to the edge

to help us align it and

that should be it

we can now even move the

epivo to be exactly over the pole

and in perspective

you would just wanna put it right over these

let's look in shaded see that they don't come through

let's lift it just a little bit more here

and uh we wanna do some bevel on this

now we want this to be more rounded

this is where you're supposed to uh

put your hands on other railings

so again we'll choose the top two edges

um but this time we're gonna do a bit of a larger bevel

so go back to edit mesh

um to the bevel parameters and let's change these to

let's say point four and add a bit more segments

let's say four

and yeah that makes it more rounded

yeah it will give

a little bit of a highlight kick right there

which is good

and now we can select this duplicate and then rotate

again on the y 90 degrees

and let's just go over the corner there

just want to align these two better

and again this kind of intersecting

um placement is not gonna be approved by a

serious modelling supervisor

but for what we need

this is not going to create any problem

and you know what

nobody's gonna see it

at this point

you probably want to save what we have so far

so we finished the basic model in the next class

that we're going to add more detail to it

some pots and plants that will break up the monotony

will make the balcony feel a bit more homey

and will also add some detail

colour and shadows and so forth

but at this stage

it's always a good idea to render out a test frame

or a couple of test frames and bring them into the comp

so you can see the whole thing in context

and um since we don't have any shaders

any textures

and any lighting set up yet

um the best way to render out the Geo

so it doesn't look flat is to use

an AO pass and ambient occlusion pass

and we'll need that pass anyway for our

our final work on the renders

it's always useful to

to have an ambient occlusion pass

so for this of course

we're going to use

Arnold and I

I just wanna say a few words about Arnold

everybody will tell you that it's a great render

and that's true

it's fast and um

it's very capable

um the one thing I really like about Arnold

above everything else is the fact that it's actually

very simple and straightforward to use

so for people like me who are not Maya experts

and don't have a PhD in writing shaders

um it's uh it's extremely helpful

and encouraging

and for compers who wanna build some stuff in 3D

or render out or light stuff again in it

it's very easy to learn at least the basic setup

um things before you go into the fine details

and I got to say thank you to my friend and colleague

Vadim Torchin

who introduced me to

Arnold and gave me a crash course on it

and really in a couple of hours

he taught me everything I need to know about it so

Arnold is really a step forward in terms of renderers

high quality renderers

just for the fact that it's actually

very easy to understand and set up

and as an example

let's just go and set up an ambient conclusion pass

so first let's switch back to our um

camera view

and now we wanna enable the channel and layer box

and we wanna go to our render layers and create a new

render layer

that will be only for ambient inclusion

so we can click that button here to create a new layer

and let's rename it a 0

and now we wanna select all our Geo

you see there's nothing here yet

and right click and add selected objects

um now these do have some kind of shader

it's a default Maya shader

we wanna override it anyway

even when we assign later on um

Arnold shaders

so we want to create an override on the shader

so right click over the layer

go to overrides um

create new material override

and what we wanna use is the AI

utility or the Arnold utility shader

and uh let's open the attribute editor

and this is the shader

and this shader is great

because it gives you all kinds of different

options to create different things

um from wireframe render to special mats and so forth

we just want the ambient occlusion

which is at the top

and that's about it

um now our render settings are already set

we can click the render button

now one thing you might wanna do in the options

you wanna set your test resolution to 50%

so really rendering half raise right now

and we don't need more than that at this stage

that will be plenty

and you can already see the ambient occlusion

um Geo here what we don't want is to see the background

so for this we need to select our camera again

um go into um

the image plane click the arrow right here

and in display mode just change it to non

and that will remove that and if we render again

and let's make sure we're rendering

this layer and not the base layer

we get the and you see that it's extremely fast

ambient occlusion in Arnold is very very fast

extremely useful

um let's again choose a frame where we wanna render

um let's say um we wanna see that corner actually

so that let's select frame

hundred and forty or thousand one hundred and forty

but in our comp of course it's 1:40

it's gonna go really quick

and now we just wanna go and save it

it will go by default to the images folder

and we can save it as a test

um we can save it as a 16 bit TF

it will include the alpha in there

so I I already saved one

so I'm just overriding this one

and now we can go into new can check it out

back in our camp in nuke

um this is where the background comes in

and of course we wanna put it right over the uh

the background

uh panorama that we have uh let's bring this in

and we can put it just before the vector blur

or you know what let's um

let's put it after the vector blur

I have a feeling that for the 3D

we're gonna use Arnold's own motion blur

because it will give us much more accurate results

as you remember

in previous classes

we decided not to use the Nuke 3D

um motion blur and uh

there were two reasons

first because the vector blur is faster

we have more control over reading comp

and also because what we're rendering

in terms of the background is

just a single image mapped on the ceiling there

so there is no real uh

3D depth in there

on the other hand

what we render out of Arnold is full 3D

so we might as well use

the motion blur that Arnold gives us

but for now we don't have motion blur

let's just put it right after the motion blur

and before the distortion

we'll put an overnode here and ah

it's coming out wrong of course

because we use half phrase

we just need to reform at this

so it's gonna blow it up

and this is it

you can see your Geo

you can see how it works with the um

with the background

let's go ahead and render out

a different frame to see how that looks

so I went back to Maya and quickly rendered frame 1:20

we can go to that frame

right here and I just overwrote the previous render

so really what we need to do is double click on it and

reload the new can that gives us that frame

and we can watch the whole thing

let's look at the

bottom of the comp

and you can see

the floor the ground

the AOR really helps

you kind of visualize what's going on of course

everything is just white

will take care of it

one thing I am seeing is that we might have a

bit too much of a distance between

our room here or the entrance to the

balcony and the edge of the balcony

we can certainly

go back to Maya and just shift the model

a little bit down

um so but you see why it's good to it

even at the early stage to start bringing stuff into

your comp and looking at it in context

so now let's go back to Maya

and to our perspective view

and we probably just wanna take

the whole thing

and just very slightly

move it down

and let's do another render of frame 1:20 right now

and again I'm saving it over the previous one

and now we can go back to nuke

and reload this frame

and you see we just brought

the railing a little bit closer

and I think that will work fine

so now that we're back in Maya

we wanna start thinking about shading

texturing and lighting

and the question is

where do we want to create

color textures or bump textures

and where do we wanna go with a simple shader

and I'm thinking that a lot of this stuff goes by

pretty quickly and is out of focus

and kind of motion blurred

and really when we settle down with the camera

we see just this railing

now this railing will be painted metal

so we might get by by just using

shader and appropriate setting on the shader

I think the same applies to these pieces

which are basically painted stucco

white or light gray

um materials

or maybe concrete

the one piece that definitely needs texture is

the floor since we're talking about a tile floor

so um we can create textures in Photoshop

but I like using nuke for textures as well

let's do just that

so I'm back in nuke now

and I've brought

one of those

JPEG photos that we got for the

actual balcony

and this is the kind of floor we want to recreate

and we're gonna do

a type of these plants and pots later on

but for now

let's just create a simple texture that will hold up

for the floor

so here is a simple tile texture

and you can find lots of these

anywhere on the internet

for free or get a library

it's fine and here is a simple grunge

um image and again

these you can find

anywhere or just shoot your own

and what we wanna do is

instead of using this

and tie it in Maya

which will create a very mechanical kind of uh tile

we want to actually create the tile here in

you can create a large texture

so that we can apply

we can break it up using the grunge

so um this specific image

already comes at a very good resolution at 28

so all we wanna do is create some tiling

and we can use the nuke um tile

node and let's do eight on each side

and let's also

turn on mirror for both

so we have already a nice style version

you just looking a bit repetitive and mechanical

what we wanna do is break it out with a grunge

um let's put the grunge over it

and of course that's blowing up the colors

instead of using a simple over in the merge

let's change to uh soft light

that's a nice trick

you might wanna use for this type of work

and that adds all this nice detail there that it's not

repeated and not tiled

and this is basically ready

um and it's not looking too far from the original floor

so that's a good start

you wanna write it out

probably just as a JPEG image

you don't need much more than that

and if you're doing that

you might as well create a bump map

for the floor just to help get maybe some highlights

and some definition there um

it's not a very deep bump

now if you look at the different channels the red

green and blue

the blue has too much of the grunge in there

that will go into the bump and

might break

the floor too much

what we basically want is those

edges between the tiles

so it looks like the green

channel would be the good choice

so you just want to add a reshuffle node in here

um you know what

and we don't even need to take the grunge in that

because really we just want that

let's look again at the different channels

yeah the blue has these artifacts in there

which we don't really want

so let's stick to the green

so in our shuffle now just

let's just grab the green for everything

and you can write this out

and that will be a black and white image

ready to be used

uh for tiles

so this is it

in the next class

we're gonna bring this texture

and we're going to create shaders

for all the other parts

set up the lighting

and we'll have the balcony pretty much ready to go

and the next step after that would be to

add details by means of adding

different parts and putting plants in there

and we might also for the

end part of the shot where we kind of

were centered on her

create one plant that we can put there

that also has some wind animation

to give everything a bit more life

so uh we'll meet all uh

next week bye bye