#next clip it and set it to multiply. merge. then i had to offset it w/o being able to see what it’d look like at the end

[kingpains]

on the bright side i’ve figured out how to make auto actions in csp and made one each for a blur/noise filter and chromatic aberration. with the goal of looking like a screenshot of something from cartoon network in the 2000s

it took So Much trial and error to get the chromatic aberration to work well but once i learned that the auto action can only happen to one layer at a time i got it down pat

[bigcrownobject-blog]

VFX 1 Blog

In this blog I am going to give a breakdown of how I achieved my final pieces of work and run through the techniques I used.

Car colour correction.

First of all, for this footage two reformat nodes are needed and we also need to change our project settings, the output format is going to be 1920x1080 on the project settings and we need to reformat both of our image which are in the scene to 1920x1080 as well. We will then begin by merging the car layer over the icy road.

Next we are going to read in the windshield image which is an alpha image, we are going to use this image to punch a hole where we want in the foreground image. To do this another merge node is added between the car image and the first merge node. 

We now go to our new merge properties and change the ‘operation’ tab to stencil, this is where the hole is punched in our foreground. A transform can now be placed after the car image which allows us to move the car to a position which we choose.

In order to begin colour correcting I have dropped a grade node under my original car image however since we cannot colour a premultiplied image we need to add an unpremult node before our grade and then add a premult node in after the grade in order to premultiply the image again. We now have full control over the grade.

We are now going to use the curve tool from the image toolbox in order to see the lightest and darkest pixels on the image. The curve tool is dropped in and is linked to our car image and the curve type is set to max luma pixel, a constant node is then created which is like a solid and this is merged with our car image as well.

Once we had clicked go on our curve tool it analysed the lightest and darkest pixels as I previously mentioned, we then opened up our grade properties as well as the curve tool properties and we are going to copy our maximum luminance values into our whitepoint and our minimum values into the blackpoint of our grade.

We then go and add a panel called pixel analyser where our properties usually show up for nodes, the pixel analyser allows you to drag around the screen and gain information about the pixels and the brightest and darkest points.

Once we have all of these values we can again copy them across onto our grade node in order to match the colours correctly.

 We also need to match the mid tones of the car and the background which needs to be done by eye. First off we lower our gamma slightly and then adjust the multiply option under our grade node until we get the desired look. There is an improvement however now the car looks too warm for the surrounding area.

Finally we match each of the colour channels manually until we get the desired look, we hit R, G and B on the keyboard separately to control the relevant colour channels and we can then edit our multiply, offset and gamma.

Laptop Tutorial

 The footage for the laptop is read in at a 1280x1080 resolution, this needs to be addressed by firstly changing the project settings format to 1920x1080 and also adding in a reformat node and changing the resize type to distort with the format again being 1920x1080. This will change the footage to the desired resolution.

The screen then needs to be rotoscoped in order for a keylight to be placed in which is how we are going to remove the green off the screen and place and track our own image onto the screen.

Once we have rotoscoped the screen we add in a keylight node, the colour picker tool is then used to pick the green colour on the screen. Using the alpha channel, we can see our key properly and use the properties of the keylight to adjust the key using the clip black and screen gain.

We now add a track point to each corner of the screen using a tracker node, this is done specifically so we can corner pin an image accurately to the screen later on.

Next we need to read in the image we are going to use over the screen. In this case we are using a screenshot of a desktop, this needs to be reformatted to fit the 1920x1080 resolution.

Now in order to give the impression of the image being on the screen we need to use a corner pin node, we can then link this to the track points we created earlier as seen below. This tracks the corner of the image to each of the points allowing the camera to follow the screen along.

Once this was done we added in a shuffle copy from our keylight going back into the source footage, this brought back some of the colour information we lost when doing our key. This was then merged with the corner pin and a premult node was added in order to remove the green overlay on the screen of the laptop and we finally had the image merged over the laptop screen.

The hand was originally going underneath the image however this was resolved by going into the keylight node and changing the OutM component to ‘none’.

 The footage was completed with some colour correction, mainly to fix the green glow on the hand a hue correction was used to supress the greens a bit as well an overall colour correct and grade to try make the piece look more natural.

Tears of Steel/01_2a

First of all we need to change our project settings output to 1920x1080 resolution, a reformat node is also added in order to change the footage resolution to 1920x1080.

Next we needed to rotoscope the fence since the robot is later going to be placed behind it, I added in a roto node and animated it slightly with the movement of the camera.

Next a merge node was added and the mask pipe was taken from the fence roto and placed into the merge node. Another merge node was added in and linked back to our original footage with the B pipe and the A pipe was connected to the other merge node.

Next the robot image was read into the node tree and attached to the merge using the A pipe to layer this in behind the fence.

A reformat node was used in order to change the resolution of the robot to match the rest of the scene, a transform node was also used in order to scale the robot in the desired position.

A premult node was then added before I merged the robot back with my roto to get rid of the white background behind it.

The tracker node was added in and connected back to the source footage in order to see where the tracker needed placing. The tracker was tracked forward from the first frame to the last, a transform node was then linked back to the robot image and then this transform node was linked to the trackers movement. This allowed the robot to relate to the transform node which related to the movement of the tracker therefore the robot moves naturally with the camera movement.

When the robot and the footage were merged it made the footage overly saturated, to correct this a grade node was added after the footage and its reformat in order to bring the blackpoint and white point up or down until we got a closer look to the original footage.

An overall colour correct and grade was added until the desired look was achieved as seen above.

Tears of Steel/08_4c

First of all, we need to start by changing our project settings so that our output settings are 1920x1090 pixels. A reformat node was also added to correct the footage to 1920x1080 pixels as well. Once this was done we began with the rotoscopes of the different body parts, five were done in total to try and get the most accurate results.

We then piped the rotos into keylight nodes in order to use the colour picker tool to being keying the green screen out of the footage. The roto selection was inverted and the keylight OutM component was set to alpha, this displays only what is inside of the selection allowing for a more accurate key. The properties of the keylights were then adjusted such as the screen gain, clip black and clip white until an accurate key was accomplished.

Some time was spent re-adjusting some of the rotos such as the one above since there were some elements such as this red sticker which needed to be removed from the final composition. Once this was done multiple merge nodes were added in order to tie all of the rotos and keylights together which gave us a full body rotoscope of our actor with the green screen in the back completely removed from the scene.

Next a background was added in and as well as a transform node to scale the actor up. The background was read in and reformatted to fit 1920 x 1080 resolution, I merged this with all of my rotos and keylights by adding a merge node, I dragged the A pipe into my merged keylights since this is going to be the foreground and the B pipe into my reformat node for the background image.

This created the effect of the guy being layered over the background image of the boat however I was having an issue where parts of the actor were transparent.

I then wanted to tone down some of the colours such as the overexposure and overly saturated parts on the actors head. I added two hue corrects to take the red out of the actors face as well as removing a blue tint under his beard. I then added a colour correct and pulled down the saturation and contrast to remove the highlight on the actor’s hair.

I then added in a grade node and a hue correct to darken the character overall since I was going for an overcast and gloomy look with the background so I wanted the actor to match the scene correctly.

I added in an overall grade to again darken my footage as a whole, I also added in another hue correct node and brought down the blue and the red colours as much as I could, I then pulled in more green colours in order to get this gloomy, overcast look. The shot ended up looking quite cinematic and fits the pirate theme I was going for well.

Window Close Push

To begin with when we read in the footage it comes at a resolution of 1280x1080, this need changing to 1920x1080 since this is the resolution which we would like to export at. We address the resolution issue by firstly going to our project settings and changing our full size format to 1920x1080 and also adding in a reformat node and changing the output format to 1920x1080 as well, this gets the footage to the desired resolution.

The parts we want to keep in the footage now need to be rotoscoped in order to remove the green screen surrounding the pieces we want to keep. Here the tree, candle stick and window frame have all been rotoscoped in order to remove the surrounding green colour. This technique is used a lot in modern day films albeit on a larger and more complex scale, a great modern day example of this is with ‘The Avengers’ franchise as those films are very reliant on greens screen techniques.  

In order to remove the green colour from the background of the footage the keylight is selected to display the properties of that node. The colour picker tool is then selected and holding CTRL + left click we can select a colour which we want to remove from the footage, we set our keylights OutM component to inverted alpha so everything on the outside of our selection is made transparent, in this case the surrounding green area. We then adjust our keylight settings in order to refine the key, this is done by adjusting the screen gain, clip black and clip white settings until we get the desired key. This is repeated for all three rotos therefore three individual keylights were used.

Next we would like to merge the three keylights as well as start to bring back some of the reflection on the window behind the tree. In order to do this, we needed to add two merge nodes; one to connect two of our keylights together and one to connect the remaining keylight to the other merge essentially merging it with the other two keylights. Once this was done we needed to add in yet another keylight which is to be our outer keylight, we then took the bg (background) pipe from all three of our rotos and linked it into our new outer keylight.

We then can go and use the colour pick tool again on our new keylight properties and in the same way we did for the keylights earlier; remove the background. We need to bring the screen gain up again as well as the clip black but this time the clip white was brought down and the screen dilate was brought up as well bringing back some of the reflections on the glass from the original footage we read in.

A tracker node was added after the viewer was piped back into the original footage, three track points were then placed on the track points you see below in order for the background to move with the camera giving a smooth natural look. 

[jakubmalicekfutureworks-blog]

Jakub Malicek

BA (hons) 3D Visual Effects

DD1410 – VFX1

Futureworks

                              Introduction

  The world of Visual effects is like a world of magic. Sometimes we are stunned by an amazing show of tricks and illusions and sometimes we don’t even notice it happened.

Either way there is always a hard work and huge effort behind it. The road to success is steep and skills must be built by learning the basics so the knowledge has strong foundations.  In visual effects the Foundation blocks are Tracking, Keying, Rotoscoping and Colour Correction.

This production journal shows my first attempts to build the skills of the four key visual effect elements.

      hcw_laptop_green.[0000-0218]

     For this shot I was tasked to remove the green screen and replace it with an appropriate image that fits the location.

 First thing I had to do after uploading the footage was to change project setting to be HD 1080 and also reformat and resize the footage.

   After that I created a Rotoscop for the screen, which I animated so the Roto mask was covering the screen and the hand through out all footage. In the end I changed the Roto output to rgb and rgb alpha.

   Next step was to remove the green screen so a new image could be placed instead.

To do that I applied a Keylight which is an industry-proven colour difference keyer, which works the best with background colours which have only one primary colour in it ( red , green or blue}.

First I used Keylight Colour Pick to find the best colour and then switched to an alpha channel to finish the key by adjusting Screen gain, Clip Black, Clip white and screen despot.

      After I completely removed the green colour I was ready to proceed to the next step, which was to track the screen.

To obtain the most accurate result I used a 4 point track and tracked one point for each corner of the screen at a time.

   It became more complicated when I attempted to track the corner, which is covered with the hand at a certain point of the footage. Since the automatic track did not work well in this case I decided to use a curve editor and adjust the part of the footage manually by locating and deleting the key frames, where the track got off the most. And since the camera move of the footage is fairly linear, this solution worked perfectly.

    Once the track was finished I uploaded and reformatted the image that I decided to replace the green screen with. Then I dropped in a Corner Pin node and linked it with Tracker so the corners of the image fit in the corners of the screen.

   After that I connected the outM pipe of the Keylight to the Roto node and changed the outM component of the Keylight to alpha and connected it to the footage.

       To retrieve the colour information from the source I used a Shuffle copy node which I connected to the Keylight and the Reformat and merge with Corner Pin and then merged the shuffle copy with the previous merge and placed Premult after the shuffle copy to multiple the alpha information.

     To placed the hand over the screen I changed the Keylight outM component to an Inverted luminance.

   The last step was to correct the colours and give the composition more realistic look.

To achieve this I used Colour Correct and Grade to alter the colour of the screen. Also applied Edge blur, Blur and Glow.

 Then I used a Hue Correct to remove the green spill on the hand. Attempted to adjust the exposure and bring back some of the original green colour of the ambient and applied a Light Wrap in the end.

                                Windowclosepush.[0000-0209]

     Like in the previous shot the task was to remove the green screen and replace it with an appropriate image of my own choice.

 This footage I was provided with came in very unusual format of 1280 X 1080 so the first thing I did was that I reformatted it to HD 1080, distorted it and changed my project settings to HD 1080 also.

 After watching the footage, it become obvious that three different Rotos will have to be applied to key the screen to achieve a seamless integration.

     Once my background picture was reformatted I started to create and animate three Rotos. First for the tree, second for the candles and third for the window frame.

  Once all three Rotoscopes where finished and animated I was ready to start removing the green screen with Keylight. After connecting the Keylight node to the source and its outM pipe to the Tree Roto I changed the output to RGB and RGB.alpha and also the output component of Keylight to inverted alpha in order to isolate the area I wanted to key only the area that surrounds the tree.

                                                                                        Then I repeated the same process with two remaining Rotos and merged them together.

                                                                                     To maintain a realistic and convincing look of this composition, it was necessary to bring back reflections on the window. To achieve that I created a new Keylight and attached all Rotos bg pipes into it so I could colour pick and remove the green screen but preserve the reflections. Then I have to change the setting on each Roto by inverting the shape and changing the blending mode from over to screen.

       Next step was to track the footage so I could use the data for the image I was going to replace the green screen with. I tracked one of the squares on the window.  

     At this point I uploaded the background picture I choose and after reformating it I merged it with the foreground. To make the image to follow the camera move I attached a Transform node to the background and linked the tracking data to it.

   After that I started colour correcting both background and foreground to achieve a seamless integration.

My aim was to adjust the background picture so it looked more like a night shot. I used Colour Correct and Grade to alter the exposure and darkened it.

   Then I applied another Grade to reduce the strong blue tint to give it more real look.

   Also used Blur and Glow to create the effect that there was a real garden behind the window and added a Grain to it so it matched the foreground.

I approached the colour correcting of the foreground the same way. I darkened it and added a Glow and Light Wrap to give it a warm feel and atmosphere.

      Nuke 101 Car Colour Correct

    To complete this composite I was expected to place the car into a winter shot, colour correct it and light wrap it.

 After opening the background and foreground images I merged them together and created a basic composite.

 Next thing I had to do was to place the car behind the piled up snow on the windshield so it did not look like it was sitting on it.  To do that I brought a matte of the snow (four-channel image with same image in the R,G,B and alpha) and merged it  with the image of the car and then merge them both with the background image.

    To place the car behind the snow I had to change the Merge 2 operation from over to stencil.

    But before I started colour correction I had to use Unremult node which I placed before Grade node as the image of the car was premultiplied and we are not allowed to colour correct premultiplied images.  Then I used a Premult node that I placed after grade not to affect the background.

  To do a colour correction, first I attempted to find the brightest and darkest point in these two images. To do that I used CurveTool where I switched to a Max Luma Pixel.

     Because the image was premultipled, the value of minimum pixel was 0 in every property.

So I had to disregard that black area and I achieved it by applying a Constant node which creates a solid color with a choosen resolution.

I set color value of the Constant to 0.5 and merged it to the background and replace the black color with a middle grey.

         That allowed me to get a true result that showed the lightest and darkest pixels. Then I linked the values to Grade node and obtained a perfect dynamic range.

For values of lift and gain I used a Pixel Analyzer and the copied the values to Grade node and matched the foreground’s shadows and highlights to those of the background.

      The last was to match midtones by adjusting values of multiply, offset and gamma by eye.

To do that I was adjusting individual colours (red, green and blue) for multiply, offset and gamma values while viewing the same colour channels in the viewer.

                      Tears of steal/08_4c

     For this shot the task was to remove the green screen, create a garbage matte for the other equipment, match move the footage and composite an appropriate image that fit the location.

  Since the original footage was in 4K resolution, before doing anything else I had to reformat it, resize it and change my project settings to HD 1080.

 Once I had done that I started to look for the best point to track. After several attempts to track only one point I realised that that was not the right way to do it as the parallax created was too strong.

 The best solution I found was to use a three point track and track the red mark under the actors foot and those two balls attached to the stands on each side of the set.

     The next step was to Rotoscope the actor so the green screen could be removed.

      I created a separated Roto for actors hand as I wanted to remove the shadows on the box he holds.

When I finished the Roto and animated it I used a Keylight to remove the green screen and then switched to an alpha channel to obtain a solid alpha by adjusting screen matte, black and white point and screen dilate. After that I changed Keylight OutM Component to inverted alpha.

                When the green screen was removed I replaced the background with an image I chose, added a Transform node and linked it with the Tracker I previously created so the background image followed the camera move.

                                                                                                                                Then I added an Edge Blur and Degrain to enhance the look of the subject and colour corrected him with Grade and Color Correct.

To match the background I used pixel analyser to find the darkest and lightest points and Colour Correct and Grade to alter the tint so the background matched the subject and looked natural.

 Lastly I added a Grain node to the background and Light Wrapped the subject.

                           Tears of steel/01_2a

    The task for this shot was to match move the footage and Rotoscope the fence so a test robot could be places behind it.

 Like the previous footage the original resolution was 4K so had to reformat it and resized it first as well as change my project setting to HD 1080.

    Then I put an image of a robot I researched to a Photoshop and created an alpha channel so I could place him into the scene to see which part of the fence I will have to Rotoscop.

   After that I merged the alpha image with background, reformatted it, resized it and positioned it.

    When the robot was composited to the scene I decided to match move the fence with planar tracker and then use the Bezier shape to create the mask for the robot so it could be placed behind it.

        Next step was to remove the hand from the fence.  To do that I created Roto to basically sampled out an area of the fence and placed it over the hand.

    After I finished the Roto I changed the output to rgba and rgb.alpha , inverted the shape and change the colour to black. Then I merged it with background image and set the read1 settings to auto alpha.

     Then I added a Transform node and move the sampled area over the hand.

      To place the robot behind the fence I changed the fence Roto output to mask. Also I changed the settings to mask.a in the Merge node so it interacted with the mask and inverted it.

       The Planar tracker I wanted to use to track the movement of the footage did not work as I wanted so I applied a two-point track and choose two bright spots on the fence.

      Then I connected the tracking data to a Transform node so the image of the robot followed the camera movement.

 To colour correct this shot I started with matching black and white points with Pixel Analyser and obtained data copied to Grade. Added Colour Correct and Hue Correct to enhance the tint and saturation and lastly I used Light Wrap and Grain.

            Refrence list

    Nuke 101: professional compositing and visual effects

Ron Ganbar - Peachpit Press - 2014

 Titans: Mechs in Titanfall 2 - May 31, 2017- https://www.pinterest.co.uk/

 hoto Collection Night Winter House Landscap - December 15, 2017 - http://flashlarevista.com

 X-Wing Blue Print : December 15, 2017 - DeviantArt

 Nuke 101 Class 3 - Remove Unwanted Objects : July 15, 2016 - YouTube