hey guys just a quick note before we
start this video series was intended for
more of an intermediate level student
so if i'm going a little bit too quickly
or you're not really understanding some
of the concepts involved i highly
recommend that you go back and watch the
plane vfx tutorial
and the arm wound vfx tutorial so this
series is going to combine elements from
both of those
but i'm going to try to speed it up a
little bit so we're not spending the
same time on the same topics
that said we do cover everything there
are two different scenes involved with
this and both scenes are slightly
different
although the overall concepts are the
same anyway i hope you guys enjoy it
let's get started so what i have for you
today is the first
part of a short visual effects series
taking a look at merging two different
shots together so
most of the time in vfx you're not
dealing with just a single shot you're
dealing with a sequence an important
skill is
being able to combine the different
shots of the sequence and make it look
like the effect
is progressing between two shots it can
be a little bit tricky to do but i think
that these practice plates will make it
pretty easy we're going to be using
many of the same techniques used in that
arm wound series we're gonna go over two
different types of tracking
there's very minimal roto most of the
fun part though comes from
the maya paint effects where we're gonna
generate some kind of
weird growth on these petri dishes and
then composite all the passes and render
layers together
to come up with this final result now
this specific one actually used mental
ray i
actually made this about three years ago
but mental ray has
since been deprecated and honestly v-ray
is a much better product anyway so we're
going to be using that right so this
first part we're going to start with
doing all the mocha tracking all right
let's get started the first thing you
want to do is check the link in the
description where you can grab the
plates
after you've got the plates downloaded
extracted and into after effects
interpret the footage at 24 fps there's
nothing special you have to do these are
just 8-bit tiff files
and we have two shots here in the
sequence and we're going to create
two compositions in the same after
effects project
so shade so it's going to have its own
composition and then we're going to give
shot b its own composition as well this
is going to make it a little bit easier
to go back and forth between shot a and
b
because the main effect is going to be
in both
and it's going to be progressing
throughout both so from a technical
standpoint
these plates are pretty easy to deal
with the tracking is fairly
straightforward there's very little roto
to do
it gets a little bit more involved with
matching the rack focus but it's nothing
too
fancy there and then also for the light
that is
shining on here we could have taken this
into a 3d tracking application but to be
honest here it's really not
necessary as long as your effects are
pretty low and they don't go up really
high up on the petri dish like whatever
effect is growing inside
you won't really notice anything the
hardest parts about these two shots is
going to be matching the progression
between
shot a and shot b because there needs to
be some progression but the
shots need to look like they were in one
sequence
and to do that we also need to make sure
that parts of the effect like if we have
bits
growing on this paper towel that they're
growing in the same place on shot b
that's what makes this a little bit more
tricky but to be honest i think this is
a really good set of practice plates
which is why we're using it for this
exercise all right so let's go ahead and
start tracking these so to track these
we're just going to use mocha ae
if you haven't seen the arm wound vfx
series that i released just a little bit
ago
we go over mocha with a bit more depth
so if i'm doing something too quickly
you might want to go and check out
that video on tracking in mocha ae the
first thing you probably want to do is
change
essentials which is default and swap
that over to classic
it just gives you more options here it
is more similar to the older version of
mocha if you like the newer essentials
workspace then that's fine too so for
this we have a rack focus to deal with
so it's going to be a little bit tricky
to start the track there
and then towards the end it goes off the
frame anywhere in the middle here would
be a good place to start
so i guess i'll just start around frame
130.
we're going to grab a next spline tool
we're just going to roughly go around
the paper towel part of the petri dish
and then to close we're just going to
click the right mouse button i'm going
to select
all of these points and then just round
out the edges by pulling in that blue
bar now we do want to make sure that we
have
a little bit of space around that paper
towel but
since the paper towel has these dots on
it they kind of act as tracking dots for
his which is really convenient a good
rule of thumb is you don't really want
to track things that could move
independently like in the hand in this
case i think my hand's pretty steady in
this but
something like this would be a good
place to start you can leave this on
luminance that's fine
bump this up though to 80 of pixels used
this is large motion
and then we should be good so we can
track forwards or backwards first
doesn't really matter but i'm going to
start tracking backwards so it's going
to be the little play button with the t
so this is much easier to track than
that arm wound exercise
and mocha really does a good job where
it goes out of focus it can still
track the pixels fairly well it might
slide a little bit but it's going to be
blurry and out of focus
so you won't really notice there is a
part here where the track is going to
fail
because there's not enough pixels left
to track by frame
28 right so we don't even need to bother
tracking anything before then
and then we can go back to frame 130 and
then track forwards
same thing here this one is also going
to end prematurely because it goes off
screen
you could if you really wanted to force
that over one more frame and i would
actually recommend that because
in after effects we do see quite a lot
of the effect here or we will still see
a little bit but if the track suddenly
stops
motion blur will not be interpolated
properly so if we just go one more frame
over
then that will be out of frame and then
we won't notice anything wrong
so what we're going to do we're going to
set a keyframe at frame 215 or just
before it stops and then go forward one
more and just pull that there
that will make the motion blur
interpolate properly and we'll still get
some blur
on that last frame right so that should
be good really quick the controls here
for zooming in and out or the z
key just in case you were not aware you
can also use the magnifier glass
and then panning is the same as an after
effects with the middle mouse button
right so this should be good
what we're going to do we're going to
call this p tree base texture
there's going to be two different types
of tracks that we use here the first one
is just going to be a regular corner pin
which is the next part so we're going to
maneuver these corner pins
so we could have some kind of texture
projected at this angle
might help to have the grid icon on so a
little bit better gauge of perspective
and always check from multiple frames a
little bit tricky to get right on the
first one
something like that looks pretty good so
we're actually going to have two
different types of tracks on this
the first track is going to be a corner
pin track just like this
which is going to be projecting an
orthographic image so something that
doesn't have perspective
into this perspective all right then
what we're going to do we're going to
duplicate this
then we're going to do another one
called ptreat 3d object
now on the 3d object version we don't
really care about this corner pin
since what we're going to be adding in
3d is already going to have perspective
we just need to track essentially the
position
we don't really want to push it into
perspective because when
you line everything up in maya or
whatever 3d app you use the perspective
is
already the same we just needed to
follow the motions of the petri dish in
the shot but we don't need to
push it into perspective so to do that
what we're going to do is click on this
expand the planar surface
and then we basically just get an
orthographic view
of our corner pins and this grid so this
one is going to be for our texture
and then this one is going to be for the
3d object
that already has perspective when we
actually add the effects
this probably will make a little bit
more sense i'm just going to click this
and then we can close mocha next what
we're going to do to make a new solid
call this p street dish base and what i
actually recommend that we do here is
make a new folder
in our project window one's for shot a
and the other one is for
shot b so shot b is going to contain
the plates and these comps and then shot
a is going to be these
we're only working on shot a right now
this is going to keep things a little
bit more organized
also in solids you can grab this and
pull it into shot a
so going to the plates of chade going up
to the
moga ae effect go to create track data
and for this we're just going to use the
ptree based texture
and then click okay you'll see the
corner pins applied and we need to go to
export option we're always going to do
corner pin supports motion blur
and then the export layer is going to be
that petri dish
base then click apply export then we
have a solid that we can
then add textures to when we could
pre-compose it right so this is working
properly next what we want to do is
pre-compose this so ctrl
shift c definitely want to leave all
attributes we'll just call this petri
dish
base click okay so we want the corner
pin left outside and then when we work
inside this comp we can stack
different textures on this base layer
right so we're going to do the same
thing on the other side
grab another mocha effect shot b is
going to be much the same as
shot a except for the fact that we do
have these two fingers
that are occluding part of the petri
dish so what we can do we can just
quickly track the fingers and then use
them as a mat
so the main track knows to ignore these
areas so let's grab another x line
roughly go around the finger
you always want to make sure you keep
enough of a border around whatever
you're trying to track so mocha can see
the contrast
on this i'm just going to leave this at
30. 30 is going to be fine for this we
don't really need a particularly
accurate track on this
if we wanted to use that for rotoscoping
or something we could be a little bit
more refined with it but the rotoscoping
honestly is really really
straightforward
so at frame 16 this begins to break so
let's set a keyframe there and we'll
just go forward and then just help this
along as it leaves the frame
and then we'll go back to frame 39 and
then just track
forwards so it kind of messes up here at
the end but by around frame
46 so already kind of cleared anything
that would be occluded
we can help this along with a manual
keyframe but after this we don't really
need to do any more tracking
grab a new x blind we're going to do the
same thing for the thumb
again we can just leave it on the
default settings i'll go backwards with
this first
actually ending pretty early help this
along
just to get it out of the frame i'm
going to turn off the index finger just
temporarily and just get this out of the
frame at frame 50 though we don't need
to
track anything else
and we can track backwards sliding a
little bit here so we can just
pull this in we don't need it to extend
so far out
so this begins to break here so we'll
just finish this up manually
let's rename this to be thumb we can
turn both these layers on and then turn
the gear icons
off select both of these create a new
folder just call this fingers
turn the gear icon off we only want to
use this as a matte
and then we'll go probably to frame
let's say
50. grab a new x spline and then we're
just going to roughly go around
the petri dish so holding down the shift
and alt
keys allows you to scale that out
uniformly from the center and we really
don't need these to be rounded it just
looks a little bit cleaner
right so this is going to be our petri
dish base and then to use this as a mat
it's going to be the same way as in
after effects so it's going to be
underneath
the fingers folder i'm going to set this
to be 80
and then i'm going to track backwards so
you'll notice that when the fingers come
over
the petri dish base texture track
doesn't move at all
so that was the that was the issue it
could have moved a little bit had those
fingers remained there
and then as we play this forward we've
got a good track i'm going to duplicate
this like last time
the first one up here this will be the
texture and on this one we're going to
add in
a corner pin turn on the grid icon
and then just do your best to match the
perspective with these corner pins
so that looks alright then for the
second one this one is going to be
pushed so
expand the planar surface and then we're
looking at more of a orthographic view
so this is going to be for the maya 3d
objects that already are rendered in
perspective
and this is going to be for an
orthographic or just a completely flat
image
that's going to be projected in
perspective all right click the save
icon and then close mocha
same thing as before we're going to grab
a new solid call this
p treat dish base b and then in shot a
here
i'm just going to rename this one to be
a just to make that a little bit more
clear
pull that back in close the a folder
then i'm going to take the
petri dish b texture put that into shot
b
turn this layer off open up the tracking
data create track data i'm going to just
do the petri dish base texture for now
click ok let's see our corner pins in
there
export option corner pin supports motion
blur and export the layer 2
the petri dish base b then click apply
export and there you go
we can pre-compose this leave all
attributes
and then now we can put a texture in
here and everything will work perfectly
if we need to at any point we can go
back in and just tweak some of these
edges a little bit i think
this one just needs to be pulled in just
a little bit more there's also another
thing i might want to track which is
this
front area here if you have part of your
effect
either the 3d object or even just the
texture approach the edges here
since this area is blocked a little bit
by glass
we need to be able to hide the effect
from showing up in this very
thick area of the rim and then also be
able to blur it a little bit
or maybe simulate some kind of
refraction through this part of the
glass
so let's pop back over into mocha really
fast
i'll pull this point in just a tad i'm
gonna turn off the gear icons of these
i'm also just going to hide these
and then we're going to track the front
section here of the glass
i'm going to turn off the corner pin if
i wanted to add a point right here what
i can do
is go up to this little plus button i
can add a new
point right there let's call this layer
rim
this again needs to go underneath that
fingers rota layer
set this to 80 and then track backwards
so it begins to slip again here at about
frame 15. so
frame 17 it looks pretty good so i'll
set a keyframe
and this is happening so quickly and
it's all out of focus and there's a lot
of blur
any mishap with the track unless it's
major
is not going to be noticed especially
for this rim so i'm not really worrying
about the accuracy too much about it i'm
sure around frame
16 this looks fine all right cool
so i made an adjustment to the corner
pin here now what we have to do is
actually reapply the track so if i go
back to track data
petri dish texture then i need to go to
that petri dish
base delete the existing corner pin we
have to go into
the transform of that layer reset it and
then just
reapply it and then that's now pushed in
just a little bit more
that's how you reapply tracking data now
for that rim
we're going to use this a little bit
later we're also going to use this petri
dish
track a little bit later as well all
right let's get started with the
maya portion of this tutorial so if you
haven't already you need to download the
shot a
setup and shot b setup scenes these
include a camera that's already aligned
with petri dish in the plate and in shot
a
the light is tracked with the petri dish
now you'll notice that the petri dish in
shade is actually static
and while a 3d track is not necessary
the light change
does need to be simulated so i just
simply grabbed a copy of the petri dish
put that in a locator with the light and
then just manually animated that over
several keyframes
pretty roughly it doesn't have to match
exactly just to get the angle at the
light to change
then simply deleted the petra dish from
the locator and just left the light in
there
all right so let's load up shade and go
to a new perspective view
and we need to select that base go up to
the generate menu i'm going to detach
this menu i'm going to click
make paintable and then get brush i'm
going to go down into the underwater
section hold down the b key and we can
pull in that brush size
and just draw some paint effects on the
base if you haven't seen my my pain
effects video
there's a lot more information than that
about paint effects and how to apply
them to geometry
i'm going through this quite quickly so
it might be beneficial to watch the
other video first all right so the first
thing we're going to do
is increase the brush width it's going
to make the pen effects not look as
perfect in a spiral they're going to be
just a little bit more randomized along
that curve
we can do things like adjusting the
width scale and open up the growth
tab then we're going to open up behavior
and then bend
so i'm going to start with bend so at
the very beginning this is gonna have a
bend of about negative three
i'm gonna close the generate menu open
up my graph editor and then i'm just
gonna attach the graph editor underneath
the outliner
so it's contained in one screen i'm also
gonna set the
maximum number of frames to be 500 so
when we're animating this we need to
consider this as one
shot because the growth needs to be
consistent over shot a and shot b
so shot a is 250 frames and shot b is
250 frames so it's just much
easier to have the paint effects in one
one scene and then we'll transfer either
the paint effects over to shot b
or the camera from b into a i'm going to
convert the tangent into a weighted
tangent
to give a little bit more control over
the easing
because i want this to be fairly slow in
shot a and then in shot b
after the petri dish is set on the table
then they'll all
rise up something like that
i'm going to zoom in here on the petals
go into flowers and in flowers there's
lots of options to control things like
the petal size
or in this case the length and the width
so i want these to look a little bit
more ominous
scroll down here and then we can add
some kind of
curl to the petals there's also a really
cool setting that if you have a light
source
or sun you can actually have the flowers
always
face the sun so we can use this
parameter and animate this as well
so i'm going to set a keyframe there and
drag that up so in shot
b 300 frames is going to be in shot b so
at the start
of that so about 50 frames into shot b
then they'll start
unfurling and then the flowers will look
upwards
so right now we have something like this
but there's still quite a few changes i
want to make
for example the bud size i'm going to
play around with that
next we're going to go up and then under
growth i'm going to add twigs
so you can add twigs to any paint
effects and that all it's going to do is
have like offshoot branches that come
off the main stem
but i'm going to increase the dropout
which means that the twigs are not going
to be on every single
branch they're going to be a little bit
more sporadic there's only going to be a
few of them throughout the animation
now when you're animating these paint
effect parameters there
are certain ones for example animating
the length if they're curled up
or still growing outwards that will make
them jitter
so you always want to make sure you
avoid jitter or
avoid sliding for example if you really
need them to grow
it's always better to use the flow
animation which i covered in the other
paint effects video
i'm not going to be using that here i'm
trying to keep the parameters that i'm
animating
to a minimum to prevent jittering
because certain things like length
size scale they can make the
paint effects wobble around a little bit
too much and sometimes really
sporadically like sometimes one frame is
fine and the next one something has like
jumped across several pixels and it's
very noticeable
you want to make sure that every time
you make a change you preview the
animation even to scrub through and just
make sure there's no
popping going on all right so at this
point we need to convert these into
polygons so we're going to go up to
modify convert
paint effects to polygons and then
select the option box and then we're
going to set the poly limit to zero so
that means that
it won't run out of polygons so if it
exceeds 100 000 it will just keep going
so there's no limit
after you convert them we get materials
so we need to select the materials in
the outliner just
right click over them to select objects
with that material once that's selected
we can right click
over the geometry and assign a new
material we'll assign a v-ray
standard material call this one petals
and we'll grab the next one
the branches so right-click over it
select objects with material
add a new material again a v-ray
material and we'll call this one
branches so after those have been
reassigned you can go up to edit and
then delete
unused nodes which will clear those two
old materials that are no longer in use
right so next
is render layers so i have the render
setup window already open
docked to the left hand side the first
layer is going to be for ao so the way
that we're doing ao in this is going to
be with a render layer
not as a render pass we're going to
create a new render layer right click
over that and then we're going to create
a new selection i'm going to select the
base
and the mesh group in the mesh group
contains the
petals and the branches select the eye
to select the al layer
and we're using this on a separate layer
because it's going to require the base
to cast
shadow or the ao part of this then we're
going to right click over that
collection
create a new material override then in
the override material we're going to
grab a
surface shader and in the out color of
the service shader we're going to grab a
v-ray
dirt node so next we just need to make
sure that this is rendering properly
let's go up to render settings
switch the renderer to v-ray and then go
up to ipr and just make sure that this
is rendering
all right so this looks fine for ao
there's nothing that really needs to be
changed here you always need to make
sure that there's no areas are really
really dark
because at those areas that are almost
black or black that would be a problem
when we composite but this looks fine
for what we need i'm going to switch
back to the master layer here and the
next thing that we need to do is
calculate our z depth so to calculate
that we need to go to
create measure tools and just grab a
distance tool and then
put in the two positions i'll switch to
a perspective view and just realign
that second locator so i've demonstrated
this in a video as well but this is a
really good way to judge your distance
so that says 7.8 just maya units from
the camera to
the to the center of the petri dish so
now let's create a new render layer for
the rest of the passes
we'll just call the shot a and we'll
rename the ao layer to be
shot a ao because it'll be a shot bao
later
then let's switch to that layer then
let's create a new collection add the
geometry to the selection and then
select
the i for shot a next we're going to go
into our render settings
go into render elements and then grab z
depth i'm going to start just with z dip
for this
go into the extra v-ray attributes and
the depth white
is what we need to change so based on
that number that we saw with the
measurement tool which was 7.8 i'm going
to
give a value just above that so i'll do
a value of 10
for the depth white so when this renders
we need to switch the pass to z depth
and we need to be able to clearly see
the paint effects on that so that
doesn't give us enough contrast really
fast i'm just going to go into the
render settings here and then decrease
the maximum render time down to
something like three seconds
so 10 is not enough there's not enough
contrast so next we can go to the depth
black and then
increase that so we don't need quite as
much range
so with a depth white of 10 a death
black of 5
we're beginning to see the paint effects
on the dish still is not quite enough
though so we need to go
and then just boost that up a little bit
i'm gonna enable the history here so we
can compare them if needed
so six is a little bit better i'll try
seven
seven looks pretty good try going a
little bit more than that maybe to eight
and eight is clipping so there's it's
too dark so we'll go back to seven but
that should give us enough value and we
can easily just add a curve to that
change the contrast in after effects as
needed but there's still enough
information there to begin with all
right so now we can
finish setting up the rest of this
render layer we'll go into the petri
dish base
go into render stats right click over
primary visibility and then create
an absolute override then disable
primary visibility so now when we render
it
that goes away because we don't really
want that base to be in the shot
we only need it for ao so next we can go
back into the render settings
add in the rest of the passes so we need
gi we need lighting we need reflection
and we also need specular now we don't
necessarily need any other passes here
but if you have something that glows you
would need self-elimination and if you
have anything that is translucent or
transparent you would need a refraction
pass as well go into
gi make sure gi is turned on then i'm
going to go into v-ray and just change
the aa filter to gaussian go into color
mapping
we're going to disable color mapping or
tone mapping
length is good presets though i'm going
to set this to full hd
so it gives me the option to zoom in and
see a little bit more detail
we're going to set up our image file
output even though we're not really
ready to render but since we're doing
most of the settings here
we'll just go ahead and do this so we'll
right click over the file name prefix
choose layer slash version so these will
create folders
and then the name of the file will just
be the layer and then the version then
don't forget to add a version
label next for the image format we're
going to change that to exr
multi-channel
and if you go to the image format
options you can see that that is set to
as 16 bits per channel exr file
so that is going to be adequate for what
we need we don't really need 32 bits per
channel
even though that in after effects we do
work in full float all right so the next
part is going to be the
surfacing but before we do the surfacing
we do need to make sure that the uvs are
okay and by default in paint effects we
go up here to the uv editor let's take a
look at the evs they are not very good
i'm not going to remap these
per se but i am going to just make them
scale down a little bit more so if you
can see by the checkerboard
that those are stretched so i'm going to
select all the uvs
i'm going to stretch them up you zoom in
here
you want to make sure that those checker
boards are squares or as close to
squares as possible so i'm going to
stretch up that selection then we'll
scale down the entire thing move this
over we just want to use one uv set for
this
and if i was really concerned about
maximizing uv space i could put this
diagonally across but it honestly
doesn't really matter we're not really
wasting any space per se because we're
going to be repeating the evs
anyway so it's not really for games it's
not a final model or anything this is
just a quick uv
fix for something that is never going to
be anything else except
rendered once so don't waste time uving
it right so next we're going to go back
into the hypershade just select that
branches material just to have that
selected go into diffuse color and then
we're going to add a v-ray
layered texture so layer textures allow
you to stack textures up like in
photoshop or after effects or something
so i have some textures
that i've already picked out kind of in
mind so i just put these into pure ref
i'm going to start playing around with
those
let's click on add new item and then in
text we're going to add in a new file
so you'd load this in just as you
normally would load in a file
load in this pomegranate texture then
let's go to the ipr
and just see what this looks like so
let's go into the placement node and
then just add those
repetitions to the uv just to tighten up
the textures so it's going to be
repeated but i don't think you'll notice
any seams there let's back out to that
layer texture
let's go ahead and add a new item so
again we're going to add in a new file
and this time i'm going to load in a
meat texture so by default this one will
cover the one beneath but we can add a
mask to the second texture
let me go and grab this kind of grunge
texture here and then that will be our
matte
now it's always safer if you're using
ipr that you don't change
textures out without pausing the ipr i i
didn't there but it is a little
dangerous to do so now with the matte
loaded you can see that that meat
texture is only showing up in
places over that original base texture
i'm going to go back into the meat
texture go into the placement node
double the uv repetitions on that just
to add a little bit more detail
essentially it's just scaling down the
texture you can also rotate it as well
just to find a little bit
better angle or just find specific paint
effects that you want to see more of
that meat texture on something more like
that
i'm going to pause the ipr here i should
have done that before but i'll do it now
next we're going to grab just another
texture but this one is not really to
add in
new detail per se it's just to add color
like a difference of color
so for the blending mode we'll go down
all the way and then we'll choose a hue
blending mode this is going to allow it
to have some more vibrant purples and
pinks in there which is kind of more of
the
the vibe i was going for all right so
the next thing is we need to do the same
thing
for the reflections we need to go back
up to the hypershade i'm going to graph
the network of the branches
and in order to maintain the placement
nodes or how
the uvs are tiled we need to be able to
duplicate
the layered texture node and then all of
the file nodes as well
pull this out here to maximize our
viewing space so what i'm going to do
first
is grab the layer texture go to edit
duplicate with
connections so now we have a duplicate
one and then i'm just going to rearrange
the file nodes so they're together and
then the other placement node
can just be at the bottom i'm going to
select all of the texture nodes
that go into the copy that we just made
and then delete them
and then select all the file nodes and
then edit duplicate
with connections so now we have
duplicates
for the file nodes these are for the
reflections so these can be loaded in
with
grayscale versions or more like
reflection maps
so i'm gonna do this first for the
pomegranate one then the meat one and
then the
swirl one the since the grunge texture
is already black and white we don't
really need to do anything with it
and you could leave these literally the
same texture
but if you wanted to be able to use the
reflection maps for glossiness for
example you do actually need to use
grayscale maps let's go one by one and
then attach these to the correct
placement so you do have to remember
where these go but then the blending
modes are all set and that's all the
same
next we're going to connect that second
layer texture to the reflection color
of the branches material so now if we go
back and turn on ipr
at the very beginning you're not really
going to notice anything because the
glossiness is set at 100 and
we don't really have anything in the
scene that's going to make it clear that
it's
reflecting in a moment we'll add an hdr
so the very beginning let's just take
down the reflection glossiness to
something more reasonable
we can also unlock the ior then increase
the fresnel ior
as well just to give it a little bit
more shine allow the reflections to wrap
around the geometry a little bit more
right so the next thing is we have to do
the same thing for the petals
so it is the same process i'm not going
to show the entire thing but we do need
to take a look at the petal uvs so if we
select those
go into the uv editor and zoom in these
uvs are
minute they're way too small so what
we're going to do is
just select the uvs in the uv editor and
then to scale these down
quite a lot so the checkerboard pattern
appears much larger this will just
make it a little easier to texture and
keep the texture sizes more consistent
i'm going to go into the petals
diffuse color and again we're going to
add a layered texture
so for this we're going to add a new
item adding another file node again
and as a base texture i'm going to use
that swirly rock
to give it some kind of color and i'm
going to add a new item another file
and this one is peeling paint so the
textures that i'm adding here are
absolutely completely random
but as long as it produces kind of an
interesting result it's going to look
quite cool you can always change these
later you just have to experiment with
different textures like here
let's change the blending mode to that
peeling paint one to subtract
it's going to get a lot more saturated
like blues
we zoom in there it has some texture to
it it's a little ominous that's what i'm
going for
the camera is never going to get super
close to these so as long as it looks
good from far away that's all we need to
achieve but it's still important that
you do texture these
and add detail to the textures so not
everything looks homogenous
and so there is detail in there for this
next part it's going to take a little
while so i'm going to speed this part up
while i mess around with the textures
don't forget to add in reflections and
then lower the reflection glossiness as
well
remember if you leave reflection
glossiness at one that means your
reflections are mirror-like and you'll
never get any highlights
all right so now that is done we can add
in a new light
so that for this we're going to go up to
create lights and then we're going to
grab
a v-ray dome light all right so in the
dome light we're going to click use dome
text and then we're going to select a
texture so
this is the texture i intend to use it's
kind of just like an office scene that
has pretty muted tones which kind of
matches the plate so we're just going to
throw that in for some extra gi and some
reflections
this is how it looks and how it's
reflecting everything will look pretty
good
and don't forget to go into options and
then select invisible otherwise
the hdr will show up in the background
so next we're going to go into our
render settings
make sure we have viewport subdivisions
enabled and also camera motion blur i
forgot to do that while we were setting
the rest of the settings so make sure
you do that i'm going to save this
and now we need to take a look at shot b
so i have this open in a separate file
and shot b you'll notice doesn't have
any lights and it doesn't have
any kind of motion at all this is just a
static feature dish
and then the camera so what we're going
to do i'm going to select the camera
we're going to go to file export
selected
and then just type in like shot b camera
and then
we're going to import in this camera
into shot a
but before that we're going to save this
as shot b
version 1. be careful not to overwrite
anything when you do this
but this is the most efficient way to do
it then we'll go to file import and then
we'll just
import shot b's camera since shot b is a
lock off we did want to have a specific
camera for shot b so now we can go ahead
and then just remove
camera one which is shot a's camera so
for shot b we don't need that light to
be animated so let's go open up the
locator for light take the directional
light out and then delete the locator
then we can just reposition
the directional light downwards because
there are overhead lights in the scene
where i shot this
later on we can tweak the lighting
between these scenes but this is just to
get something out that we can start
compositing with we'll probably have to
come back into maya at some point so i'm
going to collapse these render layers
and there is a specific render layer
that we do need for shot b
so due to the angle of shot b and the
fact that the paint effects are growing
up
they should reflect in the petri dish so
we need a new layer for the petri dish
glass reflection let's go ahead and
rename
shot a and sha ao to shot b and shot bao
and add a new one called shot b glass
gonna right click create a new
collection
and we're gonna add two collections here
we're going to have one for the paint
effects and then
one for the glass we'll add the
corresponding objects
and on the collection for the glass and
right click create a material override
and then we're just going to add in a
new v-ray material
we'll drop down the diffuse color and
then crank up the reflection color to a
hundred percent
go into ipr and we can see that the
environment or the
dome light textures environment is is
reflecting in the feature dish we don't
want that for this specific layer
so we can go in and then we can just
remove the texture
so we can just create an override for
that texture to right click create
absolute override then uncheck that then
we'll go back to the material
and then turn off use fresnel then we
need to go to the
paint effects geometry go into the
render stats and then
create an override for the primary
visibility and turn it off
because we don't want the paint effects
to be visible in this render layer we
only want the reflections of them to be
visible let's relaunch ipr
and now you can see that the paint
effects have disappeared but the
reflections remain
uh so the only other thing here is that
this is still white and i forgot to
disable the light i disabled the texture
instead so let's go back to the
dome light right click over enabled
create an override for that
and then uncheck it to disable that
light and then you can see that petri
dish reflection is now black and now we
can composite
very very easily with this alright so
now we just need to change a few
settings so in render settings in the
common tab we need to change the
start frame to 251 and it ends at 500
make sure the camera is camera 2 or shot
b's camera
and the layer names and version numbers
should have been changed automatically
based on the
layer name and in our render layers we
need to actually turn off the master
layer we don't want that to render and
render layers will
render sequentially so it will start off
with shot b
a l then i'll go to shot b then shot b
glass
and before you render shade you'll want
to make sure you disable the master
layer for shot a
as well so at this point we can just go
into the scene folder
where you've saved your maya files make
sure your project is set and right click
over shot a
and in the context menu select render
all right so i'm going to render out
both shot a and shot b
and then in the next part here we're
going to start compositing so we'll
likely need to come back into maya
and tweak some settings and then do a
final render the render quality for this
was a little bit low so we'll need to do
a final render anyway but just to get
something
that we can work with we'll render out
both of these and then we'll head into
after effects to start compositing all
right welcome back to part three in the
last video we left off with rendering
everything from maya so now we need to
go back into after effects
and then start compositing i've already
loaded in the
five sequences into after effects so we
have two sequences for chad a
three for shot b now on this we need to
go to the top one up here go to
interpret footage
main make sure you interpret this at 24
fps
go into color management and make sure
you interpret as linear and force that
to be on
so just remember that after effects does
not do this automatically for
exr sequences that are below 32 bits per
channel and the ones we're using are
only 16. i'll click ok
then we can select back on that same one
interpret footage again and remember
interpretation
shift select the other ones and then
select apply interpretation i'm going to
take
shot b put that into the shot b folder
and then take the shot a sequences and
put them into
shot a so now we can grab shot a pull
these above the base
and turn off this base texture here zoom
in here by the way the shortcut key for
that is the
question mark key or just shift slash
and it fits up to 100
and now let's get started so we're going
to take ao put ao above
for now we're just going to turn that
off so the first thing we have to do is
line up the track
so we go to the plate go to our mocha
effect create track data and then go
to the ptree 3d object track then click
ok
on the layer export we're going to go to
shot a
and then apply export so now it's going
to be moving around with it
it's just not going to be exactly where
we want it to be so now we need to go to
shot a and we're going to grab either
another corner pin or you can use a
power pin so
i prefer power pin and especially since
we already have a corner pin
it's kind of easier to work with if
there's a different effect i'm going to
pull this above
the regular corner pin and then simply
reposition this
so it fits where we want it to go on the
dish
we're going to do something like that
and then let's just play this forward
and see
how it looks so there's a little bit of
a slide at the beginning there but for
the rest of this this looks pretty good
i'm not really seeing anything super
noticeable there is one thing though
where we didn't have motion blur on so i
want to show you the difference and why
it's important to use a
supports motion blur option with your
corner pins turn on motion blur make
sure it's on for the composition and
then re-render it and then you can see
what it looks like with the motion blur
on so as this is rendering i just wanted
to point out one thing here
anytime that you have a corner pin track
if you want to have any
type of transform adjustment or you're
loading in layers or something like with
an extractor you always need to put that
before
the track kicks in if you put them
afterwards it's going to kind of mess up
the placement a little bit so if i put
this corner pin underneath here it would
not track
properly so it looks pretty good here
and then you'll notice at the end with
motion blur on you'll get the the blur
going which is what we need we need that
to match
same thing from the top here we want
that to match as well
so that looks pretty good so the next
part here is to separate this
sequence to all those different passes
and then actually start compositing
the different pieces together i'm just
going to call this growth
and this specific layer is just the
beauty so it's all the passes combined
to extract them we're going to use
extractor
and the beauty does not need extractor
so we're just going to duplicate that
and then drag an extractor on the
duplicate here and just so you don't
forget to do this
we're going to turn off the beauty pass
right now and then
you won't ever forget to turn it off
i've seen that a lot of times with
students that they have composited
everything and then their beauty is
either at the top or the bottom
and if it's at the top it just
completely covers everything that you're
trying to composite so
just make sure that's off it's for
reference purposes only okay so going
back to extractor here
extractor needs to be above all of these
corner pins you can see here that it's
black
and that's because these corner pins are
adjusting the positions i'm going to
pull this above
now the color is reset this is what it's
supposed to be if you've used extractor
in the past you'll notice that this
ui is a bit different and honestly it's
a lot better it's easier to use so
instead of having that silly button to
click
now you just get directly to your layers
and we can just select
gi you also probably want to unmultiply
this it's not going to make a big
difference for any
anything except for the z depth on this
particular one but
just a good idea to generally you want
to unmultiply it if you've rendered with
a black
background alright so next we're going
to call this gi duplicate that
next layer is going to be lighting
duplicate that
then we're going to do specular and then
reflection
now the order of these layers does not
matter because they're all going to be
additive so make sure you change your
blending mode there
gi is normal and ao at the top here ao
is multiplied but i just realized i
forgot to put the tracking information
down so we go back to the plates
change the export layer to shot a ao
apply i'm going to grab
that power pin paste in the power pin
then pull it above the regular
corner pin turn this layer on change the
blending mode to multiply
and now we're just getting the shadows
so if we got to do ao without ao
your paint effects will never look
grounded they'll always look like
they're floating above whatever the
texture is
so in this case with the little shadows
it makes it look a lot better
right you definitely need ao so now i'm
just going to rename this one to be
growth
ao so now we have all the main passes
composited but now we need to grab
z depth z depth is going to be a little
bit different so we can just duplicate
reflection i'm going to pull this above
here though call this one z
now z depth does not have a blending
mode it's just going to be normal
and then on the layers here we're just
going to select z for z
and this version of extractor for single
channeled
passes such as z depth you don't have to
go and manually reselect the malt
disease it does it for you which is nice
i like to keep utility passes above all
the rest of the passes
this is why this is on top next we're
going to pre-compose it and we're going
to leave all attributes we want all of
these to be just left alone then click
ok
so when you do that you've got a grab
extractor because there's nothing to
extract
on on top of the comp go inside the comp
and then paste the extractor back in
so now this is correct i'm going to lock
this composition here double click our z
depth comp
drag that over to the side and then
we're going to work on this one if you
watch the plane compositing tutorial i
did a few months ago this is going to be
more or less the same but one thing
that's going to be different here is
we really want to have that base of the
petri dish
in here and i forgot to actually put
this on a separate render layer so
instead of having to go back into my and
re-render it what we're going to do is
just use a matte
from the ao so all we have to do is take
this ao layer drag this underneath and
we'll just call this
just base and we're going to grab a
gradient effect so we want a gradient
ramp
pull this over and the way this is going
to work pull this over to the side a
little bit
select this layer and then we can pull
these
positions down so they're about around
here
and then we're going to sample the end
color it can be
like that and then the start color can
be like that so we want to have
something that's
kind of like this so it looks like it
was rendered in maya
with that same type of gradient so a lot
of these are going to be invisible but
that's okay
now this is just so when we reference
this layer in the z depth in the camera
lens blur if you didn't have this border
and it was off
the camera blur would stop with a hard
edge wherever this is which isn't very
realistic so we definitely want to have
a cleaner approach to this now there are
plugins for this such as this one
the frischloft i don't know if that's
how you pronounce it but these two
effects are awesome
they're pretty expensive for what it
does but it does it really really well
so if i'm doing anything professionally
or just my own projects i always use
this it just does
a lot better job and you can use z depth
passes directly without having to do
silly things like this
all right so let's go back into our main
composition we're going to turn this
layer off and we actually have to
approach
defocus in a slightly different way to
that plane tutorial because the plate in
the plane tutorial was cg and we did
want it to be out of focus we could just
have
an adjustment layer that would affect
everything including the plane and the
background but in this case we only want
to blur
the growth effect and nothing on the
plate so what we have to do in this case
is
create a new null object we'll just call
this defocus control
and for this we'll grab a camera lens
blur effect so camera lens blur
drag this over here we're going to
rename this to be master camera lens
blur
just go to the first pass it doesn't
really matter which one you do it on and
then grab another camera lens blur so on
here i'm just going to click e
then open up camera lens blur and then
do the same here e
open up camera lens blur so on all of
these passes we're going to have
a camera lens blur effect that
references this defocus control
effect so we're going to go down to blur
radius hold down the alt key and then
select the stopwatch
drag the pick whip and put that over
blur radius and now if we change the
blur radius here
the master control you can see it's
changed down here on the child
there's a couple other things that we
want to do here as well on the
blur map we definitely need to change
this here to be
growth z depth that's going to be the
comp we can do effects and masks
and we actually have to do the same
thing on the master you can't animate
this parameter
and you also can't use expressions on it
either but do the same thing there
same thing with rep repeat edge pixels
we want that to be on
we always want that to be on we would
never really want to animate that on and
off
so just to make sure that is selected on
both so the only other thing that we
might want to change here is going to be
the blur focal distance so let's open up
that in the blur map of the master
camera lens blur
then scroll down to the child make sure
that's open hold down the alt key
on blur vocal distance drag the pick
whip up and then we're going to attach
that to the blur focal distance of the
master camera lens blur control
this is going to allow us to change the
focus after the fact
all right so let's close these layers
grab the child effect for the camera
lens blur and then
paste it on each one of these passes now
this beauty pass up here we can just
pull this
we can just pull this above everything
else here this is just for reference
purposes so you can turn it on turn it
off to see
what was rendered from maya versus what
you composited
so anytime you want to change your
defocus you just do it here on your
defocus control i'm also going to turn
this layer off
so you don't see that annoying box in
the way and then we can
just take a look here so as the further
back we go the more blurry it gets but
in the center
it's more in focus so to pull this back
into the center
to really see this working let's
increase our blur radius to something
like
20. so they're really really blurry then
we just increase our focal distance
and you can now see that these are the
ones are in focus which is
about where the focus is okay really we
don't want the blur to be that crazy
and in fact even five is too much we'll
do something more like
i think one was pretty good we could
maybe do two i think two looks pretty
good we can
go ahead and tweak that a little bit
later so now let's go ahead and add a
texture
to our petri dish base layer so for this
again we're going to make sure this is
locked double click our petri dish base
drag this over fit both of these up to
100 percent actually move this over a
little bit so we get a little bit of a
better view
back to our main comp make sure this is
actually turned on you should see that
black
order and for this i need to load in
some textures
so i'm going to go ahead and just make a
new folder here called textures
open this up so i'm going to pull in
some of the textures here that i used
for the maya part of this where i
gathered for the maya part
i'm going to go ahead and start with
this pomegranate texture and for this
i'm going to delete the solid that's in
there we don't really want that in there
anymore
scale this up so it covers the entire
thing and then we're going to grab
one of these mats so these mats i'm
using here this
grunge mat and this moisture mat these
are actually from substance designer and
they're just default
grunge bitmaps that they have provided
and they're 8k
so they're huge so if you don't have
substance designer it's a great piece of
software and it has some really useful
things that just right out of the box
that you can just
save out and then use them for other
things as well such as this which is
pretty cool now for this i'm not going
to make a map for this as well i'm going
to try to keep my layers pretty simple
but i'm going to just roughly go around
the perimeter here adding some points
just to kind of roughen this up get
something like that
i add a couple more points here just
make this a little bit more jagged then
we'll add a roughing edges and for
roughing edges we're going to take
the border quite high up take the
sharpness down crank that
border up to the maximum and then we can
just feather the regular mask with the f
key
so at this point the pomegranate can be
switched to a
luma matte and then we have more of a
broken up
pattern here now if you wanted to switch
this to a luma inverted because we were
actually using that luma
with the alpha we want to undo that if
you wanted to do something that was
opposite of this
you can simply use an invert effect i'll
flip these values
around in this case though it was
already pretty good
so i'm going to keep this just normal
another thing that you can do even if
you have this mask in place already you
can grab the pan behind tool or the y
key then you can just reposition this
find a better position
and the mask stays in the same place but
i'm quite happy with this i am going to
grab a curve so
just to adjust the contrast pull this
over
do something kind of like that nothing
looks looks all right
uh we will later on we'll blur this but
you do want to make sure it doesn't go
over the edges
so it will pull this in a little bit
from the sides
same thing down here we don't want it to
go quite so far all right so now i'm
just going to play around with some
other textures i'll grab this slime one
scale this down and i'll use an effect
called reptile
expand this left and right we'll do
something like 1500 pixels
and we'll add that to the left down and
up parameters then we can change the
tiling in a little bit if that's going
to be an issue then we could use this
other grunge map here
actually i think i'll do do this one and
then on the slime we'll just change that
to be
luma i think on this i'm going to scale
down the grunge map and on this i'm
going to invert it
so i'll grab an invert effect and then
i'll grab another pen tool and then just
roughly go
over the areas where you want this to go
over that orange part
let some of that green kind of creep
around here as well and then
we're going to take the same roughing
edges from that moisture
layer paste this on here and then we
just have something else
to work with makes it a little bit more
natural not as sharp
but again we can we can come and change
these all right so i loaded in a couple
more textures
try this meat one not sure if this is
really going to be what i want
i don't think i want a lot of those like
sinew parts here like the fat
i just really want some of the some of
those little textures in there
i can just reposition that there i'm
just gonna rotate this around
more like that grab another reptile
effect and just drag this one um would
actually be
the down because we rotated that one so
that's going to create a seam so we can
just blend the edges
i think this should be okay next uh we
can grab another type of matte
i do have one here grab grunge map 14
slap this on here looks kind of
interesting use a lumen for this as well
definitely want to grab a curve so on
the grunge map and then just boost that
up a little bit
this would get some kind of red areas
around here
in fact we could lower that a little bit
too
looks kind of interesting then of course
same thing as before
grab another pen tool drag this around
here
i want each one to be a little bit
different this is why i'm not just
copying and pasting it
and with the option to be able to
control it differently and i also don't
want to have to mess with pre-composing
matte layers on this
grab that same roughness effect copy
paste that down there
all right so now we're getting something
that looks pretty disgusting i think
perhaps on
the slime material we turn this one off
i think it's covering up a little bit
too much of the holes so we'll go back
to that grunge map and i think on this
one what i'm gonna do
i'm gonna grab a curves on this one and
i definitely want it to be a bit darker
i'm gonna crush down some of those areas
are a bit brighter so the darker it gets
i mean
less of that slime is going to show
through more like that basically
it's also on the slime there's that hard
edge we are going to repeat the pixels
there as well and that should
fade those edges out a bit better i
think on the
direction of this pomegranate i want to
rotate this round i want these edges to
go the other way and then doing that
we're probably going to have to stretch
that out of it
i think that looks a little bit better
we're getting a lot of lines are going
more or less the same direction
then here on this meat texture i don't
think i want this part here
so i can just take this mask in pull
that there pull these in a little bit
too
i don't want them to go so close to the
edge they can also feather this out a
little bit more
okay so it looks kind of interesting
we've got a lot of stuff going on
the colors though they're not really
matching but it's useful to leave colors
on there as you're messing around with
placement
so it's very easy to tell where things
are at least that's what i like to do
but next we're going to select all these
layers just collapse them
and then we're going to start with this
slime layer and i'm going to
change the color and the saturation so
we're going to first lower the
saturation down a little bit and then
we're going to
change this so it's not quite red but
it's definitely
a gross green color more like that and
then we can go
to the pomegranate i think that's a bit
saturated
so we can we can lower the saturation of
that down quite a bit
around negative 30. i kind of like the
meat actually the meat layer kind of
ties in together
these little these little bits but uh we
can come back we can play around with
this later
another thing is on this meat texture
there's a little bit too much detail but
when we add the blur layer to it it
should
make that go away otherwise we can go
ahead and then just manually blur this
layer ourselves
go ahead and shut that down now go back
to our main composition
and then we're going to just do a little
bit more color correction and
i just realized that we actually haven't
done any color correction for the plate
so let's do that first
go ahead and create a new adjustment
layer just call this cc drag this up
here
grab our curves and for this we'll add
just a little bit more brightness
and take the blue channel up and we
definitely want to take the red channel
down we want to do something more this
definitely is going to darken that down
a little bit and then on
the texture here i think we might need
to go and add
a bit more gaps it's it's looking a
little too homogeneous now after all of
that
so on this pomegranate one on the
moisture texture matt
pull this in and what we could do right
here
because it looks a little strong here
grab another little mask there click
m switch this one to be subtractive the
feathering and then just
bump up the feathering to about 100. i
think that looks a little bit
a little bit better you could do the
same thing here as well just for this
edge and we could uh do one here as well
so both of these could be subtractive
on this slime we could do the same thing
we could feather
the grunge map out a little bit as well
and do something like 300 pixels
all right so let's go back to the main
shot now we could play around with this
forever like i always say with things
like this
for the petri dish base though should go
ahead and then switch this to overlay
i'm
going to darken this down quite a bit so
because it gets darker we do want to
go into our curves and probably just
bump up the
the black values up just like that but
now this is going to look more
moldy so if you don't like overlay
because it's kind of got rid of a lot of
that texture
you could experiment with some other
ones but this one really doesn't blend
particularly well with the petri dish
because we definitely want to include
some of that texture
this is why overlay would be a good one
to choose because it's also going to
change with the light multiply is going
to be very very dark i mean you could
use multiply
but i think in this case we do get the
lighter areas i'm going to go back to
one of these passes
grab the camera lens blur that we just
made then we're going to paste that on
here as well
so by pasting on the camera lens blur
from the passes
since it uses that base from the ao it's
going to cover up this area as well
and it's going to blur the areas a bit
better now we can add another camera
lens blur to kind of blur that just a
little bit more but i think this is
looking
pretty okay next let's start compositing
some of these pieces up here
grab a curves above the camera lens blur
i'm going to pull
the gi up a little bit you don't want to
do it too much it's very sensitive
so you're trying to lift this up so the
black values blend in better with the
petri dish
so this now looks like they were all on
the same
same scene more or less if you turn this
off they're very very dark they
stand out too much this looks a little
bit better for the specularity we can
see that these are the
highlights if we turn these off they
look very dry with them on they look a
little shiny i'm gonna grab the red
channel here
pull this up a little bit so if you do
it a lot they're like really really red
you just want to do it more like
that they are a little bit too sharp so
i'm going to grab a fast box blur before
the camera lens blur
zoom in here we want to just do this
very slightly like not even really one
pixel
maybe half a pixel 0.25 they're just too
sharp
so we want to just soften those out that
looks a little bit more natural next for
the reflection
i don't really have any qualms with the
reflection right now if you wanted to
make that a little bit more reflective
though grab a curves
and then you can add a bit more bit more
light to the scene so we could do
something like that
and normally this type of situation
would indicate that you're clipping the
values but these are so
dark as it is anyway we have quite a lot
of room to play with so we can just
crush these values up until we get
around there and now these are going to
be quite a bit brighter and they're
going to interact more with the light
as it goes back and forth quite like
that i think this should be
pretty interesting to continue and to
see how we get the other
shot to look alright so let's go ahead
and save this and in the next part we
can move on
to the final scene in the last part we
looked at shot a
we got that composited we still have to
go back to shot a and then we'll have to
make some tweaks and stuff like that but
we need to do the same treatment to shot
b but shot b is a bit more involved than
shade so anything that's a
like a repeat of shade you can just
refer back to that tutorial for but then
there's a lot of other new things that
we have to do in shot b
so the very first thing that we have to
do let me just tidy up these folders
here
open up shot b and then grab the
sequences for shot b
we'll pull these above the petri dish
base and you can see that these are not
tracked
so we need to do that i'll pull ao above
blending mode for ao is going to be
multiply
and then the shot b glass we'll pull
that above all of these and for now
we'll just turn off this one and ao
so to add this layer to the track we're
going to go back to the plates open up
track data
petri dish is the one that we need um if
you wanted to change this so it
matched shot a i think we called this
one 3d object
you can just do that pretty easily and
then we can go back to create track data
then it's confirmed 3d object good and
then export 2
shot b version 1 apply and export and
then we're going to do that
again on ao and on the glass
so now when we play this forward you can
see that this is tracking with it
let's turn off this base texture like
that and the next part is we need to
realign this so it matches shot a
so what makes this a little bit tricky
is that we have to look at chad a and
look at the placement
of each pane effect growth each piece
and that needs to be in the same place
in shot b let's lock the composition for
shot a go back to the project window
double click
petri dish shot b drag the comp to the
side so then we can see both at the same
time
so zooming in here we need to have a
look and find these key
pieces like this one's uh they're going
to be larger in shot b because they're
growing upwards
do keep that in mind so it's probably
better to try to do this around frame
45-ish somewhere around there but
they're still going to be a bit bigger
but
these two are matching try to find the
ones that are matching around the edges
so you need to try to look at the
distance it is to the edge of the petri
dish
so to do that once again we're just
going to grab a power pin
i'm going to minimize the petri dish
base b there and then the power pin can
go above the corner pin now remember it
is important that you put this above the
corner pin otherwise this is not going
to work
so we're just going to try pull these
edges in
and this is pretty tricky because they
are all moving
try something more like that but we're
looking at the distance from the edge
and we're trying to get that as
close as we can so there's going to be a
lot of things in this tutorial that i'm
just going to have to
just kind of skip over or speed up
because otherwise this video is going to
be really long
power pin is a good tool but it is a
little bit tricky
because any time that you move one of
the corners they all kind of move
so it is a good tool but it does take a
little bit of tweaking to get it right
but i think that looks pretty close
i think looking at the edges we have
some around the this rim like right on
that rim that we're gonna have to fix
later but i think for now that will be
okay
next let's go ahead and add in that base
texture so we can go back to shot a's
base texture for this
grab all these layers copy them go into
petri dish base b
paste these in and let me turn on the
transparency we don't want this black
background to remove that
so it should be that all right turn this
layer on and then we have to do the same
thing with this
grab another power pin pull that about
the existing corner pin and then this
one we need to pull down
quite a bit
i think that placement looks fairly
accurate there like anything else in
this video we can tweak it later
but let's go ahead and then grab some of
the color correction and add the correct
blending mode so for example here i'm
base b going up to overlay i'll match it
a little bit better and then in chat a
although the lighting's slightly
different we can grab the curves
paste that in there and then we also can
grab the color correction the entire
layer and then paste that in here as
well
the lighting is slightly different or
the color correction could be slightly
different on both of these but i think
that works really well so let's take
this power pin we're going to copy that
onto ao
make sure this is above the existing
corner pin and then the shot b
glass so if we turn this layer on this
one is just going to be
probably additive i think that will be
okay or we could do something like um
exclusion so exclusion is going to just
dim it down a little bit
here if we add another power pin we can
just pull this in from the sides it's
sticking out over the edges
a little bit too much i'm just going to
pull this down more like that
okay then ao we can turn this one on
and this is looking pretty good okay to
get rid of these annoying motion paths
let's go up to view view options and
then
turn off motion paths and keyframes
click ok and those go away
otherwise it's kind of they just get in
the way of things so the next thing that
we have to do
take shot b and then we have to extract
all the passes out and then set up
z depth so if you don't remember what to
do you should have a look at the
previous part where we went over that
i'm not going to go over it again i'm
just going to speed up the video or just
jump ahead to that point but after that
is done
then we can continue with the new things
for shot b
alright so now i've got all of the
passes composited with the z depth as
well
on the defocus control i have the master
camera lens blur which is using that map
then i just have an extra
global camera lens blur just to add blur
to everything regardless of that map so
i have two effects on both of these
and any one of these passes if we scroll
down you can see there's two but they're
both referencing
the effects on defocus control okay so
there are obvious problems with this
and i just wanted to go ahead and show
you some that happen right away
so i'm going to render a preview of this
and then we'll take a look at that and
then
identify areas that we need to fix
so we can see there's a track slide here
which is a little unusual because
generally this is a pretty easy one to
track but we do have a slide and right
here at the end
after it's put down you can see we look
at the right hand side here
that everything kind of just stretches
out to the right
so that's kind of weird and annoying it
doesn't actually
start until i write frame 142 143-ish
the easiest way to solve this is simply
delete all the tracking data after
frame 42 because nothing moves so we
shouldn't even need tracking information
there so let's go ahead and do that
and select all the layers that use that
track then we're going to open up the
corner pin then we're going to click u
and we're going to scroll all the way up
to the top here and then
frame 43 is where the cursor is and
we're just going to select
just marquee select all of the layers
transforms
from 43 onwards then just click delete
then that problem goes away
we also have an issue at the very
beginning here where we can see that
some of the paint effects
get a little bit too low they're too
close to the edge so we need to pull
those back up
so i think everything looks pretty good
at frame 20. and
to do this i think the easiest way is
going to be to solo the plate
let me go ahead and just collapse all
these layers then we'll just turn on gi
and then we'll animate this power pin so
we can see that there's an issue here
where they slide around a little bit so
everything looks good at frame
29 30. so i'll set keyframes here at 29
for the power pin now we could add a
separate power pin for this but i think
it'll be fine just as it is
click u and then we're gonna just go
backwards a few frames
and there's one slide here so we need to
stretch these over
to the left
and then we need to go back and just
check to make sure we haven't made that
worse
so right there now there's another slide
so we can
set manual keyframes here at frame 28
so right here we can push these over
so you just have to go frame by frame
and kind of compare the positions
i think that looks pretty good
then at frame 18 i'll set new keyframes
then if we go forward till about frame
14 or
13 we can see these are too close to the
edge just going to pull up this line
just a little bit
and that should fix that issue so then
we need to go to the first frame that we
started keyframing so in this case it's
frame 13 for me we can copy this power
pin and then we can go layer by layer
and just paste that in
and it will paste beginning on frame 13
and it will override the existing power
pin
okay next we need to add motion blur to
this so all these that move
so this all of these layers move we'll
turn on motion blur then we can
unsolo those layers and have another
look
all right so there are still a few
things that we need to do here one issue
here is
especially at the end they're very very
dark and this is not something that we
can fix in after effects
the problem is some of the pedals here
just are not reflective enough so this
is something i would have to go back to
maya to fix
i think i will do that later on but uh
that will not be part of the tutorial
because it looked quite good there i
think
but then when they open up they cast
themselves in shadow and then there's
just not enough light hitting the top
there are just not enough reflections at
the top okay so we also have to
rotoscope the finger and then we have to
deal with this
rim so the rim is actually a little bit
interesting how we're going to do it
and then the rotoscoping is fairly
straightforward so let's go ahead and
fix this rim so if you recall earlier
we actually tracked this section of the
front so if we go back
into mocha here we have the rim this
front section that we did a
transform track on not a corner pin
track so we're going to exit out of that
we're going to duplicate our plates
call this rim and then we're going to
move rim all the way up to the top then
we're going to grab
a new solid call this rim mat turn that
layer off
and then we just need to go over this
section of the rim here
if i turn off this rim that we just
added
we can see these are just right at the
rim edge here if you have some that go
lower down
it's the same technique here although
the rim itself needs to be more opaque
and the roof we actually have a lot
higher refraction
so you would see some kind of color
maybe going through it but it's not
going to be that strong but i'll show
you this
in case you have some that come lower as
well let's turn on the rim
go up to tracking data and then we're
going to do create track data
rim click ok then we're going to export
that to the rim
matte now this is not a corner pin this
is just a transform track and then click
apply export then on the rim mat
grab a pen tool and then we're just
going to outline the rim like that don't
forget you can hold down the control key
on these tangents just to break them
then you can change the curve
you can have it differently depending on
which side you're working with if i turn
this layer on
and now move it backwards it should move
with
the dish so there's a part here where
it's sliding a little bit so
we'll go ahead and fix that so click m
it was
good in its current position at around
frame 45
or 43 or whatever wherever the
dish stops moving so we'll keyframe the
mask path
then go backwards again we'll turn this
layer off just so we can see that
rim and then just pull up the points so
they line up
this is like really really easy
rotoscoping so it might just be a little
bit time consuming to do
but it's not technically challenging and
this really slides here
it's complete this i think the track
just stopped so we'll pull these back
up now this is going to be completely
out of focus so if you're slightly off
it doesn't really matter it's not going
to be noticeable at all
we'll come back down maybe we can get a
little bit more of it in focus
so we can place it a little bit better
that looks decent enough for the roto
we'll set this rim to be alpha
and then it covers up this section here
now we need to feather this just a
little bit maybe
5 to 10 pixels so that looks a little
bit better now if you have
paint effects that come a little a
little bit lower you really should blur
them a little bit
and they should be slightly less opaque
so what we're going to do in order to
achieve that and in fact on this rim
i could add just a little bit of
coloring on this rim we can take
a copy of the shoppie growth beauty just
duplicate this
pull this above the rim mat and then we
can duplicate the rim matte
as well then we can take both of these
layers pre-compose them we'll just call
this
rimmat with growth let's go inside here
i'll toggle the transparency on put both
of these on
growth goes underneath and then the
track matte would be set to alpha
so now it's only selecting those paint
effects that were within that rim
so then we can turn this layer off and
then grab an adjustment layer
let's call that rim growth adjustment or
something we can grab a fast blur
pull this over so if i turn off the rim
so you can see what this is going to do
a little bit more clearly with the rim
growth adjustment layer
using the matte as an alpha we can
increase
the blur radius we could do something
like 5 and then it's going to blur it
now the matte itself is not blurred so
we do need to blur that a little bit too
we can grab the fastbox blur and then we
could do the same amount
but then on this layer we could change
the saturation very slightly and be a
little less saturated
you could change the color or whatever
then on the rim
the room would actually these layers
would go on top turn on the rim layer go
to opacity and then we could just lower
the opacity a little bit
more like 70 percent looks pretty cool
so a little bit scraping through but it
is a little bit blurred
pulled that back up to 75 or so
not very much of it would show up on the
rim but that now looks a little bit
better maybe even
just a little bit more i don't really
want that much color showing through
there okay so next we have to rotoscope
the fingers this process is pretty easy
grab a new solid
now for this i'll do two individual
layers for this
and because we tracked the thumb and the
index finger you can see we could
use this as part of our rotoscoping so
this is completely optional you do not
have to do this but if you go up to
track data
open up the fingers folder grab the
index finger click ok
this again is just a transform track you
never really want to use corner pins
with masks then apply this one to
index finger roto click apply then on
this layer we can
start adding in our rotoscoping now
we're really only interested in the
parts
that have contact with the pen effects
we don't care about the top
part i'm going to go and change the
color here to make this stand out a
little bit better
pull this back up now this there is
quite a lot of blur here i
would not add motion blur to roto masks
you can
and sometimes it's okay to do that but i
think more often than not it's a little
bit counter intuitive and it will end up
blurring your roto too much and allowing
too much in
that's completely up to you i'm going to
try to include some of that blur and
then just maybe go halfway into the blur
and then just feather it
so at this point the paint effects
should still be pretty low
so i know that i don't need to bother
rotoscoping anything more than
this edge so let me go ahead and finish
this
and then you do the same thing for the
thumb as well all right so when you have
both of those
roto masks finished we're not going to
bother feathering them until we actually
see how they look
but i'm going to grab both of these
pre-compose them column finger roto and
click ok
this layer can be turned off and the
easiest way to do this
is simply put a copy of this layer above
every single one of these passes
and the dish roto itself i'm going to
change the color here to
dark green just so they stand out a
little bit more then i'm going to
duplicate one over each one of these
passes
we're going to select all the layers
that require that matte and switch them
to alpha inverted
unsolo the plates then we need to go
ahead and feather it you could also
blur them as well but it doesn't
particularly matter i'm going to
push this over i'm going to lock this
composition now and then
open up one of the roto mats they're all
the same now inside here
it would be a good idea to add a fill
effect just so we can see them without
having to turn off our
transparency select both of these
and then this one we can maybe feather
these 10 pixels or so
this one is going to take a little bit
more work there's a lot of detail there
so we can open up the mask expansion
might do like a value of negative
maybe 1.5 or so maybe just
five with the feathering a little bit
too much of a gap here
another really useful thing you can do
is grab the plates paste them in
and set them as a guide layer so then
they won't show back up over the comp
but then you have another reference
so here i was a little bit sloppy with
the masks
pull that back up
that looks a little bit better
rotoscoping is going to take a little
bit of time to do
so while it's quite easy it is really
time consuming so i'm not going to tweak
all this here i'll finish it up for the
final preview of this
but i'm not going to show it here
otherwise this video will be like
hours long probably if i spent time
doing that on all the
technical fixes let's have a look at the
thumb i don't think
i only really was requiring the thumb a
little bit
further on where it passes this area so
that looks that looks fine so the only
other
thing that we need to rotoscope is going
to be the shadow
so there is a distinct area where the
finger casts a shadow now for the petri
dish
base texture we don't need to worry
about it because we're using the overlay
blending mode but if we look
at the paint effects they're not getting
darker if you wanted to do this
really really accurately you'd really
want to have that finger in maya so then
it would block highlights and block
reflections as well but in this case we
can get away with it just by rowing kind
of a matte layer over it and then adding
that with an adjustment layer so let's
go ahead and do that i'm going to solo
our plates again
call this finger shadow and this can be
pretty rough
something kind of like that now this
area also gets a little bit of shadow
too
so for that we'll actually just use a
mask feather adjustment
we can just grab the feather tool and
then just pull up the feather
here doesn't really matter about this
edge do this part as well
that just feathers it just in those
areas and then i'll go ahead and just
animate this over a few frames
now we could have probably attached this
to the petri
dish track but this is pretty quick to
do
so let's unsolo the plates grab this
finger shadow
pull this all the way up underneath our
cc then we're going to grab another copy
of the growth
beauty basically just to use the alpha
for it
we're going to select both of these call
that finger shadow matte
go inside here don't actually need this
cc layer we're going to take shot beauty
pull this under
turn it on and this is going to use the
alpha
and then just turn off the finger shadow
now only the pen effects underneath that
shadow are going to be affected
we can feather this quite a lot
40 pixels or so that might be a little
bit strong
more like that maybe go back to shot b
then we need to add an adjustment layer
call that finger shadow adjustment pull
it underneath the mat
set it to alpha then on the adjustment
layer we can just grab a curves or
something
pull this down and now we're darkening
down the paint effects that are
supposed to be underneath the finger
that's a pretty quick and effective way
to do it we don't want to
crush the blacks too much but i think
around there is pretty good
that's a good way to cheat it okay i
think this is looking pretty good but if
we compare this
to shot a they're looking a little bit
like overly saturated
and a little bit brighter now there is
more of a direct light here if you see
on the table like it is
in light but if we look at the color of
the paint effects
in shot a in shot a they're a lot
less saturated so let's go into the
lighting layer
this is what's going to really affect
the color and then we'll lower the
saturation
maybe by an additional 10 or so then on
the
reflection we might just drop that down
a little bit
be more like that this isn't more in
shadow so we do have to keep that in
mind as well
now for the glass rim these are a lot
brighter
than what they're supposed to be
reflecting we'll go back to this shot v
glass just call this shot b glass
reflection we'll grab a camera lens blur
also grab a curves so that's going to
blur it down and then on the curves
pull this down so they're a lot darker
now we do want to see them
but they need to be a lot darker so i
think i think that looks better i think
they're just too saturated now
grab a hue and saturation you can just
tone down the color there
more like that again we can we can tweak
this later but
i think this is looking pretty good go
back to our defocus layer
i think this is a little bit too blurry
so on the extra blur i'm just going to
lower that a little bit should sharpen
that up very slightly now there is
a little bit more of a greenish tint to
this i'm going to go back to that
lighting pass
and then i'm just going to just kind of
nudge the hue
a few degrees more that kind of makes it
very slightly more
of a yellowish red i think that looks a
little bit better
okay now i'm probably going to make some
other tweaks between now and when i
show the final result of this but i
think this is looking pretty good so the
other thing is the
color correction so if we go back to our
color correction here i'm going to grab
another curves just so we can go back
and then reference the original one this
one seems to have
a little bit less contrast if we look
here the lighting is a lot brighter and
then this
just is not that bright so i just want
to bump up the mid tones a little bit
let me i don't want to lift the black
values very much
then that looks a little bit better and
then also on the blue channel
we could just add a tad more blue very
very slightly
just so they seem like they're more
aligned so with a slight adjustment it's
gone from
more greenish to a bit more bluish to
zoom in here
do that just a little bit more maybe
again we can play around with this for
days
on the petri dish base texture
i think i might need to go back to the
blue channel here and just add a bit of
blue
add a bit of blue into this i think that
looks a little bit better
okay also the black values here look a
little bit dark
so that's mostly going to be controlled
by the gi
bump that up just a little bit more you
have to be pretty careful with that
though
okay probably gonna tweak that as well
okay let's go back to
shot a because there's a few things that
i think we
overlooked last time so one of those was
the defocus so at the very beginning
this thing should start to defocus so we
need to
match the rack focus so at a round frame
let's see the by frame 70.
the background is out of focus and the
foreground is in focus i think
so what we can do here on our defocus
control grab a camera lens blur we'll
call this rack camera lens blur and then
on our ao we'll grab another camera lens
blur basically we're just going to
attach these
like we did with the regular defocus
i'll call this one rack camera lens blur
hold down alt attach it to the rack
camera lens blur of the master layer
then we're gonna have to go through each
one of these layers down here and then
manually add
another camera lens blur and the reason
is we already have a camera lens blur
added
so if we copy and paste the lens blur is
going to
override the one that was originally
there so we have to have a
second one
now we can go back to ao and copy this
rack focus one
and then just paste that one over the
new camera lens builder that we just
added
so on our defocus control at the very
beginning here
at frame 70 this should be at zero
because the focus is now
on the petri dish we'll keyframe that
and i think it's around frame
52 the background starts to go out of
focus
so then we'll set this to be something
like 15.
that's pretty blurry i think we could go
a little bit more
something more like that okay so that's
now going to animate
so the focus is going to animate with it
just seen here though
on the growth ao layer motion blur
should be added and on the petri dish
base layer
should also be added there and then at
the end i think there's a part where
they stop moving right here 2 15 they
stop so what we need to do is
grab all these layers that move and then
we need to trim them
click alt right bracket then by frame
216 they're gone
there's also another issue here by the
fact that this is very blurry but then
the tracking stops and i think i
mentioned this last time that you should
continue on the track
so the motion blur also keeps going so
go to frame 216
then we're just going to move these over
to the right with the shift arrow keys
just to add some extra blur so if you
look down here we're just using the
arrow keys just shifting those over a
few pixels
so maybe like 50 pixels or so so when we
go back
the blur kind of looks a little bit
better like that
cool okay so i think this one is now
ready
so there are tweaks that we can do on
both of these but i think this is a good
start this is definitely something you
could show a client and
with a little bit more work this could
become a final effect
right so i'm going to go back into my
i'm going to fix some of the issues
with the petals just being a little bit
dark and this entire scene just looks a
little bit dark so i might play around
with some of the materials there but
overall this is as much as i really
wanted to cover with this try to make
your own effects anyway
and just use this as a reference but
this would be a good start at
compositing so i'll show you
the final result in a moment and then
the original one again that i had
done a few years ago so i tried to
follow that pretty similarly but
this one did change a bit but the same
techniques are involved
i'm going to pop back over to maya
render out a new version and show you
that now if you guys
also do the same thing in maya don't
render over the version that you
previously rendered so
if you have a version one definitely
make a second version of version two and
then when it comes to
reload those all you do is go up to the
sequence you want to
replace with the new version right click
replace footage
file and then you just go find the the
new version that you
rendered out and then you don't have to
recomposite anything it will just kind
of fall into place
okay so here are the final results for
shot a
and shot b
so on shot b i went into maya and
re-rendered out
a version with slightly more reflective
pedals and then i just did
some tweaking to the color correction
also on shot b there's still a tracking
issue towards the beginning which would
require just a bit more time with the
corner pins but overall
this should give you a pretty good idea
of the workflow that's required to
produce
a visual effects shot like this and how
to deliver something that would be
acceptable
to show a client
all right guys thank you so much for
watching if you have any questions feel
free to post a comment i'll get back to
you right away
if you did learn something there drop a
like really appreciate it otherwise i'll
see you next time
peace
