Sorry if i'm asking something after too much time. I'm working on a shot, and I'm trying to create a "shadow cleanplate" similare to yours, but when I apply the keyer effect directly to the colorspace node it doesn't work as expected, it just make darker the dark areas. I get something similar deactivating the red and green colours on the node
Nice tutorial, I am kind of confused about the part where you set the colorspace to HSV but then used a regular luminance keyer to key the highlights in HSV. Should not the keyer be set to blue keyer, or am I missing something?
You can set it to the blue keyer, that would be correct. In my script here, I copied back in the Red and Green from the original, which is doing the same thing but in a different way.
Dude this is literally genius you're amazing! I always had hacky ways of dealing with double shadows and have never seen such a good method for dealing with this. Thank you so much
Has anyone been able to get this tactic to work? On my end it doesn't really do much to highlights, and just makes the image WAY darker without revealing/leaving the details behind. Exact same node setup. When googling, looks like another person had same issue.... working in linear etc.... !
hmm usually it works, if your highlights are completely clamped and there's no more detail in them - then there's no way to bring in more detail without painting the detail in. If your footage has some dynamic range it should work. If there's detail in the brighter areas like the example image ground area, it should also work.
Thank you so much. Your tutorials are very good. Please could you make a tutorial on the noise node and it's goodness, cause I'm trying to understand that node very well. I know it's very powerful
for crossing shadows I use a constant/voronoi gradient to fake the real one and min this with the cg mask as mask input. The rest of implementation is neat though
The way how you create your shadow in this complex case is really great; "min"-ing a shadow can help in a lot of simpler cases to add the correct shadow in a quick and efficient way, though and definitely without bothering "stencil"-ing the shadows or paint them away
You probably could do a lower number and do more “steps”, personally I haven’t tested it. It would mean a lot of nodes, but generally 0.5 and just copying hasn’t produced any obvious color banding for me in most cases. Worth testing out though, might give a good result!
I’ve been doing vfx since I was young, but also had few great instructors in college (full sail). The primary instructor I had no longer works there. However a lot of the advanced stuff I learned mostly from working with other people in vfx studios, as well as with VFX supervisors at places like ILM or Weta where they have 20+ years of experience. Some of those guys have incredible artistic eyes and technical understanding, so when you spend a lot of time with them you learn exponentially
@@CompositingAcademy Holy cow you worked at ILM and Weta. That is a very proud moment Sir. As a person living in third world country, I can't study VFX because of no VFX college. That's why RU-vid and your courses helped me out. But I don't know how would I learn these things from scratch or land a job. Thanks for replying me.
Awesome I’m glad they have been useful! My goal is to make a competitor to vfx colleges because they’re vastly overpriced and many students leave with an insane amount of debt. I believe I can put something together that will be better than those programs at a fraction of the cost, so I’m working hard on that this year! The courses were structured in order for that reason, but I will be adding some additional elements to finalize the whole package as well as having live teaching included for those who want it.
@@CompositingAcademy The debt part is pretty scary although I agreed that learning VFX is pretty expensive. You are doing pretty good with the quality of NUKE series specially NUKE 707 has Transformers like CGI quality. I think you are not just a compositer but also a great CG Generalist because I remember you modeled porsche in NUKE 303 which was fantastic. The effort you are putting in NUKE series are astonishing. I have a small question and an obstacle which is bugging me alot. Like compositer role is to get all final results from other artists in order to complete his work but how would I make a project or showreel because I can't add the assignments I did from courses in my reel. I hope you are getting my point because how would I tackle other roles in it or should I collab with other students from different field for making a reel. Thanks in advance.
This is a neat trick. I am staring at that HSV image though and I'm noticing the shadow is purple but the floor is blue... Isn't there a From merge node trick in there somewhere that could be used with that colourspace? i.e. painting the tree shadow to blue first and using the difference info somehow?
You definitely could. What you're seeing primarily is difference in hue which is why it's appearing more red. Basically the warmer areas / areas in the light are warmer in hue, so you could do similar to what you said or just do some color grades which might be faster.
Hey Edmund, The Udemy beginner courses have english subtitles, but not multi-language. However, if you google for Udemy subtitle translate, there are ways to do it. Cheers!
The main way would be figuring out how to get a good shadow cleanplate, and then just blending that into the shadow alpha. You can roll off the highlights in a similar way probably by using the Curves tool in After Effects, and just repeating that effect until you have a similar 'flat' image. Would have to play around with it as I haven't used after effects in a few years, but the principle is pretty much exactly the same: target the highlights, bring them down a bit, and keep doing that over and over to get a shadow plate.
Thank you very much for posting this- great information here! I was curious on another topic. If you're using a Nuke spotlight in a 3D scene, how do you get the spotlight to create soft cast shadows like you'd see in nature? So far all I've been able to get are hard shadows with the spot or directional light. Thanks in advance!
Unfortunately there's no easy way to do a soft shadow in Nuke as far as I'm aware. There's iBlur which can simulate a soft shadow easily, but if you wanted to just cast soft shadows you would probably need to build a gizmo that does this. I have a few ideas on how you could probably build that tool, but it would be hard to explain on a text. Hopefully though they just add some more features to Rayrender so we can get soft shadows in a less confusing way.
Hey Alexander, Thanks for you tutorial. Very interesting way of adding shadows. This reminded me of a tutorial from FXPHD Tips and Tricks Volume 3, class 05. This is also about adding shadows and this technique involves the exposure node. I would love to know your take on that. Probably your way matches the attenuation of the shadows more.
Thanks! I haven't seen that particular tutorial so I can't really compare. But it sounds like they're just using an exposure node instead of multiply which basically do the same thing, except that the exposure node is measured in camera values ("stops" of light), vs just 0-1 like a normal grade. Visually though there's no difference.
that was rendered in lighting. I had a directional light for the sun, then I just used a geometry to block the sunlight where the tree is placed, to cast a shadow. Tricky to get the angle lined up with the real shadows but it works
@@belovedangels6457 I believe I used light linking / shadow linking. So that the tree shadow would only cast onto the cube but not the ground as to not create a duplicate shadow. Then the cube would still cast a shadow. Been a while since I did this tutorial, but if it's not that then the other way would be to just render the shadow pass separate (disable the trees and only render the box shadow).
This method works on video as well. You would just framehold the video, create the shadow cleanplate from the still image (the same as explained here), and project that out onto 3d ground geometry.
Thanks! I think HSV and HSL are pretty much the same, the math is slightly different. Ben Mcewan wrote on his blog that explains the difference pretty well: "HSV is the same as HSL, except the V stands for “Value”. There is a difference between luminance and value based off the math used, but it’s a similar concept. If you multiply the blue channel in HSL vs HSV colourspace (blue channel, because Blue has been converted to Value), you’ll notice that HSV produces a similar result to just multiplying your image the regular way, whereas HSL appears to desaturate the highlights as they get brighter. HSV also seems to give a flatter, more diffuse look to the saturation values, so you’d probably want to use HSV over HSL in most cases."
@@CompositingAcademy thanks for the reply. I often use HSL. Going start to use HSV more times now. Besides that, one thing came to my mind: this "isolation process" (let's call this way) by changing the colour space then changing back to the original, shouldn't isolate hue saturation and Luma (or value) information in each isolate channel R,G and B? so why this difference between HSV and HSL affects the saturation since the channel for that is the green one? does it make sense?
@@elironerosa3609 Hey! Sorry didn't see this comment before. I'm not entirely sure to be honest, I think the way the "Luminance" channel is created must be slightly different, which is why it is affecting the saturation slightly when using that alternative option. My guess is that it's doing some math behind the scenes on the R G B channels, but these two colorspaces do some slightly different 'difference' operations to create that brightness channel. In other words, it might be "weighting" one channel more than the other when it goes into the highlights, when calculating what is the luminance vs color. Probably someone who knows further in color science or the guys who work at foundry could answer better than that, but that's about what I know!
Hey! Most definitely you could, in After Effects or Fusion probably would be the easiest. I'm not too familiar with Blender's compositor, but it probably could do this. Honestly though it's best to learn either Nuke or Fusion for more advanced compositing. Nuke has a non commercial version that is free to use for personal projects!