Destruction Compositing Techniques in NUKEX

All right, everybody, welcome back. And in this lesson, we're going to create our fire and smoke. I already did this for you guys, set up the scene that is the sky replacement. I used my old one, because there was no need for me to bring the new one if it's just the same. So I bring it up, and this is in-- color space sRGB. Now, as you can see it's really washed out, but what we are going to do is we are going to put our lot. That's our viewer over here, we're going to put it to none. And I'm going to delete these. I don't know what it's doing over here. So now we've got our footage in the right space. And now we're going to create our smoke. So first thing we're going to do is we're going to load up our fire and smoke. So in your folder, in Assets, I have three, I think I have a lot of different smoke. So if you can just load it in. Some of them are not working I think. So as you can see over here, we got a big fire. And it's like 501 frames, so we can move for the background. So we can retime it and everything. So what we're going to do now is we are going to place our fire in the right space. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to put my viewer to my sky replacement. And I'm going to view my tracker. I want my fire to be in the foreground. I think over here is nice. So 0.6 error less. This one is 0.4. Something over here is nice. So what we're going to do is we're going to create a card. We got our card. If you just plug our image in here in the card in our scene, we're supposed to have our fire over here. And that's correct. As you can see, the card, the point we picked was over here, but now it looks like it's right in the foreground. So what we're going to do, we're going to load up our scene. Press F on the card, and start working. And as you can see, the fire is below the ground. So what we're going to do, we are going to go to our card and move it up. And move it up, so it's on the right space. And the point here is on the ground, so we know that this point is on the ground. So that we are going to move it a little bit. And now it should be over there. So as you can see, now the fire is in the right space. But as you can see, it's really big. So what I'm going to do over here, I'm going to scale it down. But we have to look in our scene. So with my card selected, I'm going to scale it down. And we're down again. So it's on the right position of the points. So I'm going to my color space of my fire to linear. Now we can really see like all the detail and everything, so with fire I use your work in your space. So as you can see now, we've got our fire over here, which looks really nice. Of course, it's not corrected yet, but we're going to, first, we're going to do some roto on the fire. Don't be afraid. We're only going to roto the edges. So what I'm going to do is, as you can see, because we're at-- look over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a simple line with a lot of curves, so I'm going to do something like this and something like this. And I'm going to move it up a little bit. And I'm going to go to my shape and kill it. So what I'm going to do over here right now, I'm going to play this, and as you can see, we can really use this as our foreground for the fire for the sand. So I'm going to blur it a little bit. And then I'm going to go to my merge. And it looks weird, but we're going to fix it. So we get our smoke, our fire. First, I'm just going to check if everything looks nice. So now I'm just going to pause it and do a flip book. And I'll be right back. All right. Welcome back. I'm just going to cancel it. And I guess we're going to check, because I don't like to wait. So what I'm going to do over here, I'm going to check if my-- whoa, this is weird. I'm going to check if my fire is tracking nicely with the shot. And it is. As I can see from this point of view. It's tracking really nicely. I really don't like this. We're going to fix it. But the fire is-- yep, it's doing great. So what I'm going to do, I'm going to fix the edges, because I did some roto but I don't know what kind of roto I did, so we're going to fix it. So I'm going to delete this. And what I'm going to do over here, I'm just going to put a rectangle, and I'm going to do something like this and feather it a little bit like this. All right. And now, I am going to bring another roto, and now I'm going to do the that crazy stuff. So we are going to do something like this. This should work, because sand is really wobbly, so this should work. All right. Then we're going to bring it down, and now we have something like this. Still looks a little bit weird, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to move it a little bit down. So we've got something like this. And now we're going to check it out. So as you can see, it looks like it's in the back of it and fire is moving. So it looks really nice. I'm going to kill my rotations, so what I'm going to do over here I'm going to right click and set to default. It looks weird right now, but we're going to fix it in our scene. And we are going to bring our rotation to 90. So now it's really looking at the camera, and there's no rotation involved. So no errors. All right. This looks nice, and we are going to do some simple color corrections. And I am going to show you how to make this fire look real to composite. So what I usually do is I-- this has saturated by 20%, so 0.8. And I'm going to play with my gamma, I mean my contrast a little bit. My gamma a little bit up. Yeah, something like this. And my gain. So we got from here, a [? function ?] like this. Something like this. And of course, we need a glow to make it look real. So what I'm going to do over here with the glow, I'm going to go to my size, and I'm going to bump it up, because fire is something that glows a lot. We want to put my brightness a little bit down. Now we really have to have these hotspots in the middle. That's looking cool. All right. And what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to create a light [? rep ?] that will help integrating the fire. So I'm going to flip my A into my scanline render, which is the fire, and my B into my sky replacement. I'm going to generate my rep only. Bump up my intensity, so we got something like this. And I'm going to plug in a merge and set my operation to plus. So now, as you can see, this looks weird, but I'm not going to use that much. I'm going to bump it down. But we still have a little bit of the background merging into the fire. All right, so what I'm going to do over here is I'm going to create more fire. So with my card selected, I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to duplicate my card to something like this, and I'm going to plug it also in here. And now I can just move it around. I go into my scene again. Select the card. Press F4 to frame it, and I'm going to put it a little bit in the back, and a little bit bigger maybe. And we don't want our smoke to move the same way as the other one. So I'm going to plug in a retime node. Merge in it. Put in here and put my speed to something like 1.1. So now you've got more fire, and it doesn't behave the same way as the other. What I'm going to do over here, because it's still saturated I'm going to plug in a saturation node, and I'm going to desaturate it a lot, to something like this. All right. It still looks too bright. I think it's the glow. Yes, it is. So I'm going to put my size to 150. And I'll put my brightness to 25. Yeah, this looks nice. So if you want to see if your fire is in the right color, you can check your grading if it's moving the same way as the whole environment. As you can see, it's definitely in the right space, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put some smoke, because what is fire without smoke. All right. So I'm going to load up smoke, and that's in here. So View, I think. Yep. There's some smoke elements. This one is a fast one, and this one is nothing. And this one is a slow one. So what I'm going to do I'm going to use this fast one. As you can see, it's going out of the flames, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug in a roto and I'm going to put in a big shape. And I'm going to make it the color black, and I'm going to feather it by a lot, something like two, 300. 400 might work. And now I'm going to [INAUDIBLE]. So now, the smoke is fading out really nicely and not out of the frame. OK. It has an alpha channel, which is great. So I'm going to make a constant node in the right format. And we are working in 1080, 920 by 1080. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to reformat my smoke, and I'm going to copy it, copy the alpha channel. So now I have my alpha channel, and I'm going to promote it. All right. So this section is our smoke. I move you on the side a little bit. So now we got our smoke. This is the alpha channel, and this is the RGB. It's black. So we can see it unless it's on our plate. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going duplicate my card with the image here, and I'm going to put it in my scene. First, I don't want to have a lot of lines going to my scene, so I'm going to look in a [? MergeGeo ?] and just merge every single card, because I like to work organized and I think this is the way. So now we can plug our [? MergeGeo ?] in our final scene. So now if you want to check this out, we got our smoke, which is great. So I go into my card, go into my scene node. And I'm going to check where my smoke is. I'm going to plug it in the back. I'm going to scale it up, because I know smoke is coming from this side. So I'm going to scale it up, put it in here. I'm going to scale it to something like one, because fire is behaving fast, so the smoke is supposed to be big. And now we've got our smoke right over here. All right. So in this lesson I showed you how to position your smoke and fire in the right 3D space. In the next lesson, we're going to put more smoke. And we're going to integrate a little bit better. All right, I'll see you in the next lesson.