Making Giants - Compositing

Music : [intro music]
Joey Korenman : Holy crap. We have rendered frames and a lot of them actually, uh, so I rendered shots one through five on Rebus farm, and it's pretty mind blowing how fast that was done. So I submitted those five shots, about 570 frames, total average render time of about five minutes per frame. That's about two days of rendering and it was done in about an hour and the cost about $56. So yeah, a little bit cheaper than buying my own render farm. Now the last three shots I went ahead and rendered locally because I had X particle caches that were one and a half gigs each and I was just more comfortable letting those crank while I went to NAB in Las Vegas. So those three shots, about 530 frames total rendered on my iMac in just over three days. Big difference. So now we need to take those frames and make them pretty.
Joey Korenman : And to do that, we're going to start in my favorite compositing app nuke. Now I want to also point out that the Foundry recently released a free noncommercial version of nuke, which opens the app up to a whole new generation of artists. And it was a brilliant idea on their part. So if you want to follow along, go to the Foundry, download it. And for now we're going to hop into nuke and comp a shot. So I've imported my multipass EXR file here. And, um, you know, if we kind of let it Ram preview a little bit inside a nuke, um, you'll be able to see some of the movements, right? And you can see the buy-ins kind of creeping up the side of the building and it's going to look really nice, but visually there's a lot of things that aren't working right now.
Joey Korenman : The shadows, the ambient occlusion is just way too heavy here and it's getting just too dark. You can't really see what's going on. And you're kind of losing a lot of the detail and the vines. Um, overall the shot feels a little dark. It's not quite saturated enough. So there's a lot of things that we need to fix in compositing. And luckily we set up all those passes, right? So if I look up here, I'm in this channels menu, I can actually see all of the different passes that I rendered out and, you know, there's a lot of them. Um, and, and all of them can be useful in different ways. Here's the ambient occlusion pass, for example, um, you know, here's the global lumination pass. So this is one of the things I love about nuke is that this little node, right, this is just a, an image sequence.
Joey Korenman : It contains all of this information. Now over here, I've brought in some of the reference images, um, that I have on Pinterest. And then these are some stills from the Sherwin Williams campaign that, uh, buck did. And this is one of my favorite looking spots of all times. I think it's just beautiful. It's composited beautifully. And so a lot of times when I'm doing compositing on something that kind of looks 3d, you know, like this, uh, I like to pull in frames from spots that I think have a similar art direction, a similar vibe. And that way I can just kind of go back and forth between them and, and try to figure out, you know, okay, why doesn't mind feel as good as this? Well, obviously this one's a lot brighter. There's more contrast. And it gives me hints as to, you know, where I need to push and pull colors and brightness values and things like that.
Joey Korenman : All right. So here's my reference. So the first thing that we need to do is split out all of these different channels into their own little nodes. And that way we can mix them together and start to do some of the complex interesting things that nuke lets you do. So the way you do that in nuke is with a shuffle node. All right. Uh, it's just, you know, silly name for, for something that basically splits out different channels. All right. Um, and I'm going to try and not make this too much of a, how to use nuke tutorial. It's more of a composite tutorial. Um, but you take your shuffle node. Um, I like to turn on the postage stamp option, which then gives you a like a little thumbnail and then in the options for this node, um, all I need to do is set this to whatever channel I want.