All language subtitles for nuk309-class09

hello everyone

and welcome to class

No. 9 of new can digital environments

and this class is gonna be the last

one where we work on the balcony shot

so what we're gonna do today

first talk about a few more things that have to do with

exporting plans from Speed Tree into Maya

because we wanna vary a little bit

what we have there

and we're lucky enough to have a

two plants from the

Speed Tree plant library

and I'm gonna talk about it in a moment

and then we're gonna go into my layout

the scene finish it

then set it all up for render

so we're going to look at setting a 0 VS or passes

setting math layers and math passes

rendering it all out

then we're gonna go into nuke and um

work in comp and use the passes that we created

to give the final look to the balcony

and the background

so as I've said

the Speechery guys were really generous

and agreed to give us two plants

uh from their plant library

um to use in this course

and for you guys to use uh

when you work on the shot

so these plants are from the commercial plant library

so they're giving us those plants on a condition

that they're only going to be used for this project

so I trust you guys not to use them for anything else

this is really uh

a gift from uh

Speed Tree guys

so we have this uh uh

I chose two plants that could fit well in the balcony

you know plants that would go in part

so we have this

uh tobacco plant

and also the tropical snow

and this one actually comes

uh with the pot that was built with it

so that's great uh

you can export these in Maya

now we're gonna go in Maya and look in some

additional problems that these plants present

when you um

tweak the shaders to work in Arnold

so I brought into my idea

the tropical snow plant

and did the usual stuff

the things we talked about last week

took each one of these again

I exported it as a separate objects for material

and for each object

go to the material and change it to AI standard

and you'll see that

you have more nodes here that relate to the material

UV chooser node

um place to detexture

these these

um the texturing on these plants is a

bit more complicated than what we

on the plant that we did on our own

but uh you just have to find the

the general shader

which would usually be after all

the texture nodes right here

and I already changed all these to uh

the AI standard

and I put a ground plan and uh

and a general um

light dome uh

just to light it

uh but here's a problem

you can almost see it uh

in the viewport

if you look at this leave

and let me uh

just render this out

um so what you see is a

is a very obvious mismatch between the geometry

and the actual um

the actual texture

and this is because these textures

for the leaves use opacity maps

they use an alpha

and once the alpha is

used you're not gonna see this part of the Geo

it's gonna be cut out

but it doesn't work by default

and the main reason is that

unlike other renders

Arnold treats

every object by default as opaque

and it's a good idea to do that because by that

you already eliminate all kinds of unnecessary

transparency calculations

so every object that is transparent or half transparent

needs to be defined as non opaque

so what you need to do is go and select the leaf object

so let's select this one that we are looking at

and you go to the actual node of the Geo

and you go to Arnold

and what you need to uncheck is opaque

once you do that

Arnold treats it as a transparent object

but you still have to plug in the alpha map

and the way you do it is again

you go back to the shader

and the alpha transparency is actually

enabled in the refraction

so if you open up the refraction part

here's the opacity

and this is where you wanna plug your alpha map

so you go and search it

um of course

it's gonna be a file

so we go to the tropical snow

and we look for leaf No. 2

this is leaf No. 2

and what we want is the the Alpha and here it is

you open it and now if we re render it should work

and that's already much better

okay so I went ahead and selected

the other type of leave and did the same

basically go to the object properties Arnold and um

disable opaque

and then in the shader

um attach the opacity map or the alpha

and that should be good

and we can render and see and

you know indeed

the shape is right

but you can tell that something is still wrong

because these leaves look black

looks like the

texture is not really working on them

the other types of leaves look okay

and you can see that actually in the viewport

so something is wrong here

and what I do is again

go to the actual

object properties to Arnold

and go to subdivision

and change it from non to Catal Clark

and now it works so

here is an instance where I can't tell you why it works

I really don't know

but after experimenting a little bit with this

and it has might have to do with

these leaves being two sided

I really I'm not sure about it

what I know is that this actually works

if we render it as a whole

let's try that

well it looks great now

so problem solved

if you ever see black leaves when you import the

speed tree plant

now you know what to do alright

so it's time to go back to our main scene and um

you can see that I incorporated

the new plants into the layout

uh here is our tropical snow

and here is our tobacco plant

that you can export and trade

the same way we did for the tropical snow

and here's another plant that I've got

and of course you can create as many as you want

now you can see that um

right here I added the one plant where we had animation

and if I play it

you can see that it's animating

and we can see it better

if we go into perspective

so here's the layout in perspective

I didn't put any pot here

because we don't see it anyway

so there's no need for that

and if I select the leaves and

go into the

point cache

what you can see is that I

time shifted the start frame to 1,150

because we don't see it before that

so that we don't end up with

frames that don't have animation towards the end

and it's got that animation in there

and I I went a bit more exaggerated than what we did in

the previous class

but in the context of the camera move

and seeing it there

I think that will

work fine so we've got the scene laid out

we've got all the shaders and textures

and all the lighting

now we wanna set up uh

everything for rendering

and um just because rendering takes time

I mean that's the part of 3D that I really hate

well everybody does

you can definitely start by

going half ways and rendering the whole thing half ways

actually in this class

everything I'll show you was rendered half ways

and actually works pretty nice in the calm

and and usually when you render a CG

it's almost always the same case

CG always comes up

too black too contrasty

and um too sharp

when you put it into a plate

you almost always have to soften it one way or another

in comp so sometimes rendering out something

not at the full resolution

but let's say it's 75%

or even 50% like we do here

is not necessarily a bad thing

anyway so um

let's go and look at the

render layers

and we've got our

master render layer

and we've got our a 0

render layers

that we've said before

you just have to make sure that all the new

objects that you're adding

are in there

you wanna go and add them to this layer

so the first thing we wanna do

if you remember a few classes back

we were looking at the first

test renders that we did

and we noticed that when we apply

the distortion

we have these

little strip of

stretch pixels toward the end

and that's of course

usual because you're pushing in render

so you're losing

you don't have

any pixel information there

so we need to overscan

and it's very easy to do in Maya

all you need to do

and I went back to the master layer

select your camera

tribute editor

and you can use

change either the prescale or the postcale

it doesn't really matter

but what you want to do is

push out a little bit

so let's say point 95

that's basically 5% over scan

and that should cover that

that little strip for the distortion

and now all we need to do

when we're back in nuke is to compensate for that

and scale it back up

now uh let's talk about AOVs

or render passes

we want to include in our render

all the render passes that we think we will need

income that can help us

we can always

enable everything

but sometimes just makes the

XRS heavier and slower

surrender um

so it's a good idea to choose what you want

and know what these are

uh let's go back to our

oh we are on the master layer

and open the

render settings

and we wanna go to AOVs

and the first thing we want to set up is

we don't want each

pass to be on a separate EXR

we want them all to be in one EXR

sequence is a

multi channel the XR

so we go to default drivers right here

and click on the arrow

we don't have to change this

and go to the

tribute editor

and all we need to do is enable

merge a 0 VS

and now all these a 0

VS are gonna be merging to a single multi channel E x R

um now let's look at the options we have here

these are the general AOVs that work

for all the shaders

um we don't need ID because we're going to create

our own mats

uh the normals pass

this is something that I find

very useful for

uh relighting purposes

and I'll show you that in nuke

um so let's enable that one

uh the position pass

um that if you do true relighting in nuke

which we're

not gonna do here

we're gonna

use the normally as a

way of cheating a

bit of the light

if you are going to do

true relighting in nuke

or you really need

the information of where each

object is in 3D space

you wanna enable the

position pass

I don't think we'll need it in

for this shot

so let's leave that

Z depth will include it

will take a look

at it again

I'm not sure

we'll need it

for this context

um beauty we already have

a motion vector

we are already using motion blur

in the render itself

that we said

a few classes ago

so no need to deal with that opacity

I don't think we'll need uh

we don't have to deal a lot with

transparent objects

except the leaves on these plants um

these are for

their handy

for other things that we don't need

let's leave them

so we're basically selected

the normals

pass and the Z dip

and now let's go to AI

AI standard

which is the shader

we're using for

everything we have in this scene

and um we definitely want direct diffuse

we want direct specular

we want indirect diffuse

and we want

indirect specular

all these could be helpful

emission we

don't really have

objects that

that have emission on

um reflection

again we're not

really using reflection uh

only as as part of the spec

as the same thing

for refraction

and subsurface

scattering again

we're not using

any of these

here you see

all your selected um

aovs and it also shows you

the data type

it chooses automatically

usually you

don't need to change it

so of course

normals will be vector

because it's direction

Z depth will be flowed

because it's an infinite

number by the way

Z depth in Arnold

is never normalized

so it's never 0 to one

it's zero to

huge numbers

and we'll see that

so you have to know

how to deal with that in nuke

and then all the

lighting passes are

of course RGB

now if you wanna test in real time how

one of these a 0

VS looks like

or just to see what it gives you

uh you can do it without going into bat render

uh you can change

the render view

a 0 v let's

uh choose uh

let's say the

indirect specular

and now you can just

do a test render

and it will render

just that a 0 v

okay so here it

how it looks

and this way you can test all your a 0 VS

before you render

let's switch these back to beauty

and this is it

your main render layer is set up

your AO is already set up

now we wanna

set up another 1/3 layer where we create mats

because usually when you tweak things in nuke

you'll need to have some way of separating

one thing from another

you don't wanna affect everything

and you have to decide oh

what mats you want to create

how you wanna divide this scene

sometimes you only know after you work in comp

and then you realise

let's say that you need a mat for just the spot

it's very easy to set up

what we're gonna do here is set a generalized

kind of mat

dividing the scene into something logical

thinking of color and lighting

and I'm thinking the floor is very sensitive

because it's already very

kind of blown out

and anything we do on other stuff like the plants

might affect the floor in an unwanted way

so we wanna have a separate mat for the floor

I'm thinking let's have a separate mat

mat for the floor

one mat for all the um non plants stuff

so the railing and the um

this part of the balcony

and a third one for

um the plants and the pots

just to give some general division

now there are different ways to do it

um I like to use just RGB mats

meaning that in each uh pass I'll have

you know three mats red

green and blue

and so we don't need more than one pass

because we basically are thinking of

uh 3 mats so um

all you need to do is uh create

um a new layer

and let's call this layer mats

and now you need to um select all your Geo

so let's do this and then take out the light

um that's it so we've got all the Geo in there

we want to add selected objects

so everything is in here now

now we can select the floor

and we'll assign a new shader to it and again

let's open the Attribute Editor

select the floor and sign new material

and that will be again an AI standard

and we want to call it flooring

a mat

and we don't care about anything here

basically we just wanna go to the mat section

and enable it

and choose a color

and we wanna use either red

green or blue

we have them as presets

but if you wanna make sure that this is a

a perfect value

which it should be

you can change

the display from HSV to RGB zero two one

and of course it should be

1 for red 0 for green and blue um

we can go ahead and assign a green color

to all this stuff and a blue color to all the plants

so I've done just that to sign the maths for all three

and if we render now this layer

we can see how it looks

and as you can see

it's very fast because it's all flat

there is no re calculation

so you can render these separately

it's very easy and efficient and fast

and that's it

so now that you've got these three layers

I usually like to batch render each one separately

it's up to you

so I disable to

select the master layer

save the scene

go to render

and just batch render

and then go ahead and do the AO and the mats

the AO and the mats are gonna be much faster

the most time consuming of course will be the

master layer

so finally we're back in nuke

and here's our render

the whole thing

or actually I rendered

up until 2:67

it doesn't matter

the rest is kind of the same

let's look around

1:20 that's a good area to see

so here's our render

and here's our AO of course

because we're working here 1 to 300

you can go in the rent in the actual XR

and change these two offset and put 1,000 there

that will offset it back

or you can add a time offset

notes the same thing

so we've got these two and uh

we wanna probably merge them through

multiply to add some more shading in there

and again that should be controlled

when we see it in context

so that's multiplying the render

the beauty with the AO

not at 100%

I've got it about 85%

now let's just quickly look at the

different passes that we've got here

and we can do this

through here

so here's another

and alpha that comes with it

here's the depth

and as you can see

we see nothing at all

but it doesn't mean there's no depth there

it's just not normalized

so numbers would be crazy

and we're not gonna see

the difference until we use

a great note

for you control scrub over

you can see in the red channel

because it's only the red channel these huge

like 20,000 numbers

and how they received back to 10,000

which is the back

and this is the balcony that right

right close to us

so if we wanna see anything in here

we can do this by

adding a grade node

and we wanna grade everything

and we need to take the gain

way down to a number that will compare to this

we have something around the 20,000

so something like point zero

zero zero zero one or something let's try point

and suddenly you see things appear there

now we don't have enough contrast

we can take the gamma and

push it down

and then suddenly

you know when I really crank this

you start feeling the dips

now why is this so hard to um

to see while we're talking about

a pretty small distance

from the camera to the edge of the balcony

compared to the rest

now uh if you use this specifically for the focus

you can do the same thing without using a great node

using the ZD focus node in nuke

if you wanna use this as an alpha for something say for

uh hazing the background more

you really need to tweak it

uh just like we did here

but to be honest

for this balcony shot

we have the balcony and we have the background behind

and I think if we just put slightly different

levels of the focus for foreground and background

that would be

good enough for us to give a sense of depth

we really don't have to go that detailed here

so we're not gonna use the Z dips

I just wanted to show it to you um

here's the normal and that's very simple

um red would be a green would be the y

every light coming or normals facing up

and then red and blue are normals facing the X and Z

and we might use that as a little

you know cheap trick I use

um this is the direct diffuse

and this is the direct spec

which usually is

very useful in many situations

um this is the indirect diffuser or the bounce light

and this is the indirect

specular or the bounce reflections

and you can actually see that again

all these can become very handy

so you wanna always have them in your render

let's go back to RGBA

and finally

here's our maths render

very simple and very useful

okay so let's start by looking at the whole picture

so we wanna go back to the end of our script

and look at her so

it's very clear that we need to use some defocus here

if we compare this to the plate

yep we're way too sharp

it also feels too black

uh too muddy

well it needs some comp work

so let's get started on this

so first let's set some

the focus for the background

and we should look at the plate

um this is actually our cleaned up plate

so we're missing all the markers here

but that's fine

um we're definitely out of focus

not a lot but enough here

and as we turn around

by the time these guys come in

they're already in focus

somewhere along this turn

our BG gets more into focus

so what we need to do is animate

um let's say the background

so here's our pre rendered background

from the previous classes

and I've already got a d focus here

um that's that is animated

so by the time we start doing that turn

it goes from

what was the value here six to 1

just leaving a little bit of the focus till the end

so it's not totally sharp

and what you probably wanna do is copy it

and put this on your CG balcony

but give this slightly lower

numbers so our the focus

of until the rock is 4

and then when we go in focus that would be zero

so together

that will at least give a feeling that these

area of the balcony is slightly more in focus

than the back

um so we've got that

another thing we might wanna do on the whole background

not just the CG

but the whole background

is that feeling of a flare

if you look at her hair

at the blacks on her hair

as she goes towards the corner

we've got some sunlight flaring happening

and that if you remember

made our extraction a little bit harder there

so what we and then it's gone

and we kind of want the background to go with that

so what we can do is animate the grade node

um I think it's basically just a gamma around this area

so we have it

and I raise the gamma generally just to give it a bit

you know to make it a bit more lifted

that's without just a little bit

I think it helps um

and that becomes bigger around here

and then goes back to one but what I did was mask this

put a general mask kind of in the area where she walks

and let's look at the whole thing

and of course that roto is blurred a lot so it's um

it's a soft gradient just at this point to give the

around her in the background the sense of that flare

and that's turned off

and you can see what it does is kind of lift

these areas in the background

not all the way but here

just to go with her flare

and when you play it in real time

you'll kind of sense it it's small

small detail um

that will help so um

now that we've got the general level of the focus

let's look at our CG and see what we can do to make it

feel a bit more in there

so a general grade won't hurt

the blacks are generally too strong

it just feels a bit too black there

so if we can just give a little bit of lift

and you can see just lifts everything

puts it a little bit more in the back

that already helps a lot

now um the plants

the plants feel um

a little bit too even and a little bit too dark

especially the leaves

not so much the pots

um here is a trick I use

a lot of time using the normals map

so when we attach a

shuffle node and we just select the normals

uh from our main render

and if we look at the the green channel

that's basically normals facing up and well

you know whenever you have things outdoor

everything facing up towards

the sky will usually be brighter and

regardless of where the sun is

because the sky itself is uh

you know a huge light dome

now this already happens in the render

but sometimes you just wanna boost it a bit more

so here's what we're doing

we're selecting um

the green as our alpha

and uh we are putting a color correct node here

where we gain up things um

and when we add that

if you look at the plants

you see that the areas

at the top of the leaves suddenly get brighter

and this will help

and it also actually helps on the balcony

but wanna wanna do a different treatment

but it certainly doesn't help us on the on the floor

as I said before

the floor is already very sensitive

it's kind of overblown

so what we want to do is

not have it on the floor

just the plants

so we take our

um our mats

and we select the blue where the plants are

and that's gonna be our alpha

so we only have the plants and we use a mask node

um to um to mask this green

normal channel

and now basically we have just the green channel

just on the plants

so in here now when we enable these

we did not touch the floor

but we added some life and light

to the plants

another thing we might wanna do

and that can also help us on the balcony edges

is take the uh

the direct spec

which gives another kind of nice sunlight kick

and this time we're gonna select

we want it on the plants and

uh the railings

but not on the floor

so instead of selecting the blue and the red

we can just use a stencil node

and just select the um

the ground is an alpha

so I have a shuffle here

shuffle node

that selecting again just the green

so when we stencil this

we get all the um

all the highlights on the railing and the plants

but not on the floor

and we can grade this a little to be a bit warmer

and then we can just plus it or added to our render

let's look at the colors

so that's without

and that's with

and we can go and look at

another frame

and again that's with

without and that's with

so we're basically boosting

the highlights

giving another kick

and now if we look at the um

the whole thing

and these are small changes but they mean a lot

when you look at the whole thing

so the two things that we

now did on the plants and the railing

that's without

and you see everything feels a bit

kind of dull and flat

and that's with these changes

suddenly there is life

let's look around here

so this is with our added life

and that's without

everything is kind of flat

and darkish

now it's it's giving more definition

is also doing something nice on the edges of the pot

so sometimes you know

as good as your render could be in the lighting

it's always a good thing to take it in confident

kind of you know

boost things up to give it a little bit more life

and match it more to the plate

now this transform

I forgot to mention it before

as you remember

we did an overscan

so we need to compensate for this and

scale it back to where it should be

and uh the number is this

and you calculate it very simply by dividing one by the

by the number you use for the overscan

so we did 0

95 so 1 / 0

95 gives you 1.0526

um that's just a little bit of math

and um the only thing you wanna

make sure is that you have black outside enable there

and um then we reform that and put the um

distortion on

and here is another little

thing I usually do on CG

not always but it helps

so um let's speak this area

uh what I'm doing is taking the whole thing

and lowering it a little bit

what did I do 10 here

and then using a max merge mode

to put it over

and what the max

does is that it still preserves the very highlights

so we're not choking any highlights

what we're adding is a very subtle

and again I'm talking about putting it at

I have it the mix at point 3

very subtle kind of flare

and this is something that happens in the lens

usually when things are very bright

they kind of flare

it helps break out the edges

a little bit of CG

and give it a bit more of a

realistic feeling

as far as we're concerned

and again it's a very subtle

kind of twig

but something that

can add some detail

or just some feeling

and you see it here happening

there are other ways to do it

but I usually like this simple method

um I also usually soften everything

just to touch

and soften is a great filter because

you can introduce very small amounts of blur

the blur filter is

is by pixel

and is way too heavy

soften is subpixel

and you can set the amount and the size

an edge blur always helps to just

blend the edges with the background

we can look at this

with the background

and just disable all these three

and you'll you'll feel the difference

so first using that

bit of flaring on the edges

then the soften

almost unnoticeable

because we have a defocus there

and the edge blur again

very subtle but helps

I think we'll see more

if we don't

if we turn off the defocus for a second um

and again you see all this noise here

that's because in my render I did not

first of all it's Afrez

but I did not set the settings

um for antialising and all that too high to save time

once you're happy with everything

you should just up all these settings

um not too much of course and re render it full erase

so you'll get the final image but um

if we look at it now without the defocus

that's that flaring which always helps

now you can feel the soften and the edge blur too

which helps kind of blend those edges and um that's it

it's starting to look

pretty nice

and let's look at the whole thing in motion

so let's use our trusty hero to um

have you rendered the part of it

I didn't render all the way through up to frame

260 something

um and I reformative to HD and render JPGs

it's always easy to just wanna watch something

and you don't wanna do the quick time

instead of rendering Dpxes or XRs

which are gonna be much heavier to uh

to load in cash

you can just render JPGs as you go and uh

it's starting to look

uh very nice

from here on

I'll leave you to

refine it and I'll give you some suggestions and ideas

what I'm seeing here

I mean it's nice to see

that movement in the plant when the camera settles down

and we'll see more of it if we render a bit more um

and you can feel that

that bit of

flaring on her in the background as she passes

I would maybe exaggerate it even more

make it a bit longer on the background

the way it feels to me right now

um maybe when I re render

I will increase the motion blur a little bit on the um

CG and maybe the background

just to give more of that sense of fast movement um

you're definitely you know

you should feel free to add more stuff in the balcony

I mean it is a balcony

there could be a chair or a table

or some other smaller pots with plants or anything

um that you want

another thing is the actual story of the movie

if you're thinking of working this for the actual film

the stories that she wakes up in the morning

and she comes out and there is not a single person

alive in the entire world or city

they're all just gone

so at that point

you wanna go and look at your background

and see if there is any areas where you see

and this is of course just a steal image

but see if there is any

area where you actually see people like

these two here um

having cars in the middle of the street is kind of fine

because you know

they just stopped

you don't see the people in them

but having a guy on a motorcycle

that gives it away but again

you know in the context of the whole thing

it's really hard to see that it almost um

the the very fact that the

everything is static and

and no cars are moving kind of gives that idea

if you do wanna

add any kind of movement in the background

you can think of some steam

or some smoke coming from somewhere

that could just give a little bit of movement

but you don't want too much

and her edges still need some work um

especially the hair and the areas

you know right here where we had to cut some

because we had to replace um

the floor and um

this area also need some work

so we cut out that

bit of like half transparent greenish

glass piece here

but the Roto still needs a little bit of refinement

so we don't get this

weird edge again

it can all be worked out

probably add something here to fill it in more

um from now on

it's up to you

we've done a long journey on this

that was uh

and um it's coming up pretty nicely

take it from here

and make something great

and um next class

we're taking a whole new shot

and we're going to concentrate on taking a

um a matte painting that was done for us by

Matthew Connor

and we'll see how we can take that basic math painting

and integrate it into a difficult

environment

so see you all

next week bye bye