Destruction Compositing Techniques in NUKEX

Welcome back everybody. And in this lesson we're going to make our sky replacement and our mountains. I'm going to create a whole new scene because I don't want to have my mountains and my sky just in one scene with the fire and smoke. That's going to take a long time adjusting stuff so let's not do that. All right, so what I'm going to do first is I'm going to copy my footage over here. And I'm not going to copy it. I'm just going to do it with a Postage Stamp. I'm going to plug it in and hide my input. And I'm just going to call this Footage_For_Sky [INAUDIBLE] extension. All right, now we've got this on its own. And I'm going to copy my camera. And I'm going to clone my scanline rendering. Why am I cloning my scanline? It's because I don't want to copy my scanline and it's going to take a long time loading the script. All right, so I'm going to make a new scene, plug my scene in here and my camera in here. I also got alpha channel for you guys. In here there was an alpha channel, but this line is straight. That's because of the [INAUDIBLE]. And it was only to key out the points for the tracking. So what I have over here-- and you can load it in, and it's in the alpha folder-- it's the right alpha channel. So I'm going to copy this alpha channel over to the P pipe. And as you can see, it's now adjusted. I'm going to plug in a filter, erode. And that's called erode filter. That will get rid of one pixel. And why do I do that? I need it because some edges are not really good. So I'm just getting rid of that with just this simple node. All right, what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to premold it. And now I have my plate without a sky. All right, that's great. So what I'm going to do right now is I am going to create a card. I'm going to create a card and put it in our scene. And said I'm going to view it and our camera is standing over here. And we know sky is very far away. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to rotate it. And this is my card. And I'm going to rotate it to-- let me see-- 90 degrees. And going to put it in the back, all the way in the back. And what I'm going to do right now, is I'm going to plug in the sky. The sky you can also find in the folder Assets. And it's over here. This is a gray sky from Google. And has nice falling rays, a very epic sky. So what I'm going to do now, I'm just going to plug it in. And here it is. This is sky. It's very small. So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to scale it up by 100. It's very big and it's still too close to the camera. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to put it far away in zSpace, very far away. And actually, it has to be really far, because sky is-- I think-- 1,000 miles away. All right, let's view this in our scanline. Let's tap. And we can see, it's very small. So I'm going to bump it up to 1,000. And here it is. This is our sky. And it moves with the camera. So the only thing we should do is now merge this over. I'm just holding control. And I'm going to merge the A over B. Actually, I have to put the foreground, because this is a foreground. I'm going to put it in the back. So what I'm going to do is shift-x. And view it. And now we can see our sky. And now we can view it. I'm going to go to my proxy because it's going to take a long time loading that. So what I'm going to do is this, moving. And it looks nice. I know it's a little bit too low. So what I'm going to do is go into my Y and my card. And I'm going to pull it up a little bit because I want the hot spots over here, because it's going to give the really nice glowing effect on the robot, on your CG element. So we're going to do something like this. And as you can see, the sky has noise. And our foreground element doesn't have noise. So how to fix it, is in new Nuke 6.3 I know there is a great Denoise tool, which you can Denoise your footage with. And now we're going to get rid of the noise. So what I'm going to do over here is I'm going to search. Please position your analyzer region. And so we're going to just look for that. Somehow I can't see it. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to delete my viewer and start a new one. And I think the noise is over here. Well, I don't know where it is. But I think it's a bug. And we'll come back later with this. So what I'm going to do right now, is we have our sky and we just want to grade it a little bit. So what I'm going to do over here with the sky is I'm going to Gamma up to something like 1.5. Because as you can see in our original footage, the sky is a little bit the same. Oh, there it is. That's funny. So this will fix our Denoise problem. As you can see, now the noise is gone. So I'm going to put this on later because if I work with it now, it's going to take a long time. All right, so I created my sky. And I put it back over our plane. And looks really nice. It's a whole new sky that gives it a nice look. This is really boring. And now we've got a dramatic sky. And it is really easy. I just put a card really far away in the scene. Yeah, we have to scroll a little back. And here it is. And we're going to do the same thing with our mountain. But I'm now going to show you how to animate your sky. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to plug in a Transform node. I'm going to view my sky. And I'm going to hold control and put my pivot point on the horizon. And I'm going to skew it. You don't want to do it a lot. So what I'm going to do is set a key I want for the end and then put it at 0.3. I'm sorry, 0, something like this. No, this is a little bit too much. So what I'm going to do over here is put it to 0.05. So now this is really cool because this is not moving a lot. This is morning moving a lot. And it give a really nice effect on the shot. And if you view this in our final image a little bit back, you can really see that the sky's moving and it's a really, really nice effect. So what I'm going to do, also, for more integration for the shot because if you can see this, we got harsh lines and we don't want that. So you can get rid of that with just an Edge Blur. And look, now it's gone. And to give it a feel like it's really there, like this sky belongs to the footage, I'm going to use a light wrap. A light wrap is very handy. But don't use it too much. It's going to give your final image a really weird look if you use it too much. So I'm going to use a light wrap, plug my B into my background and my A into my foreground. And I'm going to generate rep only. And I'm going to bump up my intensity. And I don't see nothing. I think I did something wrong. Yes, I did something wrong. I have to plug my A into here. So now we have it. Now we've got our nice sky. It's eating in our foreground. So I'm going to bump up my Diffuse and I'm going to put another merge, and plug my A with my B. And remember, this is our final image. So I'm going to make it easier for you guys. And put this over here. And put this one over here. So we know that this is our light wrap. So we take from our B, our background onto our foreground. And we merge this one over. And I'm not going to use the operation over. I'm going to use operation plus. And now, you can see the [INAUDIBLE] helps. But as you can see, it's a lot. So what I'm going to do over here, I'm going to bump it down to something like 0.29. That's Better. You don't want to have it a lot because you get this weird effect and it's very horrible. So I'm going to use 0.23. It's subtle, but it helps integrating the sky into the footage. All right, so let's go over to our mountains, which is the same steps, the same things we have to do. We're going to create a card. We can use the same one. And we're going to plug it in. And we get this weird effect with no worries. And deselect it. And then we're going to load in our mountains. All right, we've got some nice mountains over here. Also, a high-res image from Google. I'm going to make a fast roto, just a fast roto over the edges. I already have a key. I'm going to load that in. And that's over here. This is just a simple key. I will show you. Let's plug this in. What I did over here on frame 80-- because the frame [INAUDIBLE] 80-- what I did over here, I painted away this stuff because as you can see, the lighting is coming from the left. And in our life plate there's lighting coming from everywhere, it's overcast. It has no direct lighting. So that's why I just got rid of this. And now you don't know where your lighting comes from. Maybe some edges over here and shadows, but that's no problem. And I did a frame hold. So it holds the whole plate. Did a keyer using a blue key, and then roto. And only for this section because I only want to use this section. And all right, then we are going to invert it using Invert and Alpha Channel Only. And now we have Alpha Channel. What I'm also going to do is I'm going to plug in a filter route. I can just fix this one. I'm going to premold it. So now we have our mountains. So what are we going to do over here? I did it wrong. So as you see, we've got these weird horrible lines. So I think there's something wrong. So I could put this to one. And now it's gone. These ones, we can get rid of it. And we can just go to the frame where we made our Bezier and just do stuff like this. But you won't see it because it's really far. And you don't want to see me doing a lot of roto. So all right. So we've got our mountains, our cool mountains. What we're going to do now is we're going to put it in front of our sky. And as we know, the sky is the forest and the mountains are more in the foreground. So what we're going to do, is we're going to position it. We're going to take our mountains and make it a little bit in front. So now if you feel our camera-- Let me see if I can get my camera [INAUDIBLE]. As you see, the mountains are really not in place. We have to bring it a whole lot down. So what I'm going to do for the mountains, I'm going to go to my card and I'm going to bring it down. The best way to do it is go to your scene and just zoom out a whole lot because it's really far in 3D space. Select your card. Go to your Y and bring it down. And now the only thing you have to do is position your mountains. So that's what I'm going to do over here. I'm going to position my mountains. Scale it a little bit. Let me see if the scale's good enough. So now you can already see we got our mountains in the back. And the good thing about this, is because now we can also do a light wrap on these mountains. But first we just want to make sure the mountains stay nicely. So in this lesson we created a whole new sky. We placed our mountains. And in the next lesson, we're working on the integration of the mountains. And we're going to put F-16's flying over. All right, see you in the next lesson.