Solid! That was so much information compressed into 20 ish minutes. To anyone who is new to compositing VFX, take your time and study each little bit preferably with your own spec project. There's no shame in watching this several times.
Thanks! You're right that you probably need to re-watch parts a few times, and everyone's project is different. If you're interested, check out the full length tutorial where I cram even more info into an hour and a half! th-cam.com/video/qUTx8KSvyJ8/w-d-xo.html
Setting the colorspace and linearizing it is something I have been looking for forever! I avoided using extractor because it was always darker. Thanks!!!
An actual TEACHER!! Thanks to you, good sir...Too many "click this, do that," and too many youngsters pretending to act professional by suggesting "well I personally like doing this, and it works for me so..." I can tell someone who knows the hell what he's talking about...You're the kind of person I wouldn't mind paying for their content, this is real quality stuff. Thank you!
@@CGStirk There's a difference between what most people do, and actual teaching. The teaching part has to really engage the student, and really give over the information with them in mind. I can tell one when I see one... Thank you for your very valuable content!
Project files for this tutorial and many others are available on my Patreon: www.patreon.com/cgstirk At 21:30, I think I cut an important step. Make sure to blur the Exhaust matte with a Fast Box Blur. Don't blur the Exhaust adjustment layer otherwise you will still see hard edges.
Placing the Highlight Compression effect before the Curves effect will the clamp the values. Tone mapping, which the HDR Highlight Compression effect is, should also be the last effect applied. I should mention that this sRGB workflow is deprecated. ACEScg is a much better workflow, and it comes with a much better tone mapping solution.
@@CGStirk curves clamps the values too! So if you want to smooth out the highlight rolloff you have to do it before the curves is applied. highlight should be last in the chain if everything before it preserves hdr values but if they don't, then to produce the correct effect visually it cant be
@@RuairiRobinson I see what you're saying, although the Curves effect itself does not clamp the values between 0 and 1 whereas the HDR Highlight Compression does. There can be problems salvaging values with the Curves afterwards, but that might not matter. It would be better to use a better tone mapping solution since HSV tone mapping is not good. There is a tone mapping plugin for AE but I never tried it as the preferred workflow is to use ACEScg now which solves this issue with its SDR transform.
Yeah if you dont work like this any more its redundant for you - but i'm still working this way because i hate, hate, HATE the aces workflow. It after effects its very bad. But for us dinosaurs using ye olde prehistoric methods, its easy to test the difference, just take any render with hot HDR highlights and add a curves that aggressively pulls the midtones down - then thrown on the highlight compression before and after the curves and you'll see which produces a more natural filmic color rolloff in the highlights very quickly! Everyone i know hates aces btw. I'm not alone here ha!
@@RuairiRobinson Yeah, it's a bit clunky in AE. I go back and forth between using the fnord plugin and the new built-in way, but the plugin is better in my opinion. Once the adjustment layer with the config and the color profile converter is set up you can use AE normally without color management changes and setting it on every input and output, which is too error-prone and annoying. We have ACEScg vs sRGB arguments at my work but OCIO in general has too many advantages, that is unless you're comping using Photoshop.
Doesnt the beauty pass have all thise passes already baked in? So adding afditional "copies" in top just makes them more intense? Is thwre a way to render those passes separately without noise in the same way that the framebuffer is compositing them internally? Thanks!
Yes, the beauty is most of these passes combined. AO is additional, in this case. However, you don't use the beauty with this compositing method, so you're not adding intensity to it, you're recreating it. Not sure what you mean by rendering without noise. If you mean denoising, then yes, but this tutorial doesn't go over it. Actually this whole series is pretty out-of-date. The materials aren't even PBR. For denoising in V-Ray, you enable the Denoiser AOV and then you need to enable denoising on each separate AOV.
@@CGStirk thanks for the quick response! I've been trying to figure out how to build a composite of a CGI screen from scratch in compositing vs starting with a beauty/combined pass at the bottom of the stack so I can have total control over each layer's influence. Feels like a powerful way to do it but I've only ever seen passes come out noisy even with noise pass driven denoisers built into modern render engines. The only time I've seen something close is in vfx breakdowns of blockbuster films but often they are still using common render engines like crazy and would like to know how that is achieved.
@@MHM4V3R1CK This is how you do it with V-Ray th-cam.com/video/9C-trY4RLBc/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared&t=23485 For Arnold, I believe you do it with an Imager and there's a layer selection field for choosing the layers you want to denoise. What renderer are you using?
Great info. How do you deal with the color space transformation when you are compositing something over existing footage, and Linearizing and going to SRGB totally messes up the color of everything else?
Thanks. Make sure you linearize the comp before working on it because effects that use color values will get messed up. If you linearize first though, there is not an issue. I'm also assuming you're using the default settings with Color Management enabled.
Can some please explain to me why when I import an exr sequence from Maya into After Effects, the exr sequence is stuck with my animation with a black background? I can't get it to be transparent. What am I doing wrong? In this video I see that the exr is simply dragged in and has a transparent background. This is driving me crazy.
@@CGStirk I'm using Arnold in Maya 2018. I put two characters in their own pass in render setup and when I render it out as an exr the black is not transparent in programs like After Effects and Photoshop.
Hello, can I ask a question? When in the after effects I make a layer with alpha and curves for the exhaust, they don't look like smoke, they look like a translucent outline of the shape that we modeled. What could be the problem?
Sorry about that. Newer videos have much quieter bg music. If you'd like to view this part without any music, check out the full version here: th-cam.com/video/qUTx8KSvyJ8/w-d-xo.html.
Is it just GI that's not working, and other passes do show up? I don't use Blender, but if the other passes are working, then perhaps there is an error in how Blender is saving that pass. A temporary solution is to save out your passes in separate EXR sequences instead of a single multichannel sequence.
CGStirk i render exr in blender and I render with these layers: difdir, difind, difcol, glossdir, glossind, glosscol. And when compositing in after effects what the blending mode in should do and what the order of these layers? Thanks you very much. This tut is very helpful.
Without knowing what channels these correspond to, it's a little hard to know since the workflow I used in the tutorial is different. For example, in V-Ray you can render a glossiness pass, but it is not part of the beauty. Furthermore, V-Ray can combine passes to make the compositing easier, but you lose the ability to alter specific elements. That said, I would guess that you need to precomp difdir and difind with the Add blending mode, then Multiply the precomp with difcol. The same is true for the glossiness passes, which would be blended again with the Add blending mode on top of the diffuse passes. So like this. Note that the parentheses are precomps: ((difdir + didfir) x difind) + ((glossdir + glossind) x glosscol) I hope that makes sense. These passes give you more control than using the abridged V-Ray workflow in the tutorial, and it's more cumbersome to do in After Effects than with a node-based compositor.
CGStirk I really appreciate your help. ❤️. I try ((difdir+ difind) x difcol) -> precomp -> and I blending this comp “add” above the combine image. And it quite working.
Yep. Later in the tutorial I go back and add a low intensity directional light just to add a bit more direct light on the screen-left side of the plane.
i created a LUT using camera raw in photoshop. i used that lut in after effects in exr sequence ,its washing colors. if i convert that sequence to jpg then its applying that EXR properly. but i have all sequence in exr . how can i solve this problem
@@CGStirk i did that but got this result Download link wetransfer.com/downloads/5f22163ea0e25cef61c69775ef2e6b4820200515165504/6284537b15c8ab564cf0ef086a6c2d4c20200515165504/1f6759 Really thanks for your replay. please look at that link ,how the result im getting thankyou.
if i change the workspace to srgb from none. its darkening many areas .and darking many filters already applied. on gamma 2.4 only its showing actrual rendered image in vray
The workspace is dependent on what you rendered in Maya. If you are using 2.4 gamma in Maya, then use that in AE. The sRGB workspace uses 2.2 gamma. However, judging by the two images you shared, the one of on the right looks correct, whereas the one on the left has lifted/washed-out shadows. The workspace needs to be setup prior to making color correction adjustments. If you change the working space, then the color correction usually needs to be modified.
How your matte is blurry? I mean I used my adjustment layer and made is the track matte but after using the curves.. It is showing me a matte but with proper boundaries.. Not like smoke
![DoF, aerial perspective, & camera shake in After Effects - VFX Plane Part 06 [Deprecated Workflow]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HZLRLE__qKQ/mqdefault.jpg)
![DoF, aerial perspective, & camera shake in After Effects - VFX Plane Part 06 [Deprecated Workflow]](/img/tr.png)
![VFX Plane EXR Compositing - Full Tutorial for Maya, V-Ray, & After Effects [Deprecated Workflow]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/qUTx8KSvyJ8/mqdefault.jpg)
professional video editor and SFX artist that makes YT tutorials and hes not using a mac? Respect.
I'm neither, so I guess it's okay to use PC lol.
Solid! That was so much information compressed into 20 ish minutes. To anyone who is new to compositing VFX, take your time and study each little bit preferably with your own spec project. There's no shame in watching this several times.
Thanks! You're right that you probably need to re-watch parts a few times, and everyone's project is different. If you're interested, check out the full length tutorial where I cram even more info into an hour and a half! th-cam.com/video/qUTx8KSvyJ8/w-d-xo.html
Setting the colorspace and linearizing it is something I have been looking for forever! I avoided using extractor because it was always darker. Thanks!!!
You're welcome. You should check out the video on ACEScg in Maya since the workflow for this series is only for linear sRGB and is quite dated.
Life saver with the correct setup for the project. I had completely forgotten about how to do all that.
Glad to be of service 👍
Excellent! Clear and specific explanation to using EXR in AE with the answers I couldn't find anywhere else. Thank you!
Glad to hear it. If you have any questions, feel free to post here or on the discord server.
An actual TEACHER!!
Thanks to you, good sir...Too many "click this, do that," and too many youngsters pretending to act professional by suggesting "well I personally like doing this, and it works for me so..."
I can tell someone who knows the hell what he's talking about...You're the kind of person I wouldn't mind paying for their content, this is real quality stuff. Thank you!
Thank you very much! It's great to hear when someone really enjoys these. I really put in a lot of effort into making them as informative as possible.
@@CGStirk There's a difference between what most people do, and actual teaching. The teaching part has to really engage the student, and really give over the information with them in mind. I can tell one when I see one...
Thank you for your very valuable content!
Thanks again. I'll keep making them!
Thank you so much for so showing the tricks I have never found anywhere else.
You're most welcome. Thank you for your comment.
Project files for this tutorial and many others are available on my Patreon: www.patreon.com/cgstirk
At 21:30, I think I cut an important step. Make sure to blur the Exhaust matte with a Fast Box Blur. Don't blur the Exhaust adjustment layer otherwise you will still see hard edges.
how do I become a pro at VFX maya?
A lot of practice and industry experience
@@CGStirk then I'll have to just practice cause industry experience id have to work somewhere and that right now is impossible :)
No entry-level job will expect you to be a pro, but the more experience you can get on personal projects will help you a lot.
@@CGStirk ok thanks for the response
SO USEFUL!! Very well explained
thank you so so much!!!
You're very welcome. Thanks for checking out the channel!
Who the heck clicked dislike? Theres always After Effects haters out there. AE is Awesome.
Haters gonna hate. Team AE!
Thanks bro this is solid gold!
Thanks! There are more comping tutorials incoming.
Thanks, awesome information
Glad it was helpful!
One minor point, you gotta put the highlight compression before the curves as the curves will clip the hdr values
Placing the Highlight Compression effect before the Curves effect will the clamp the values. Tone mapping, which the HDR Highlight Compression effect is, should also be the last effect applied. I should mention that this sRGB workflow is deprecated. ACEScg is a much better workflow, and it comes with a much better tone mapping solution.
@@CGStirk curves clamps the values too! So if you want to smooth out the highlight rolloff you have to do it before the curves is applied. highlight should be last in the chain if everything before it preserves hdr values but if they don't, then to produce the correct effect visually it cant be
@@RuairiRobinson I see what you're saying, although the Curves effect itself does not clamp the values between 0 and 1 whereas the HDR Highlight Compression does. There can be problems salvaging values with the Curves afterwards, but that might not matter. It would be better to use a better tone mapping solution since HSV tone mapping is not good. There is a tone mapping plugin for AE but I never tried it as the preferred workflow is to use ACEScg now which solves this issue with its SDR transform.
Yeah if you dont work like this any more its redundant for you - but i'm still working this way because i hate, hate, HATE the aces workflow. It after effects its very bad. But for us dinosaurs using ye olde prehistoric methods, its easy to test the difference, just take any render with hot HDR highlights and add a curves that aggressively pulls the midtones down - then thrown on the highlight compression before and after the curves and you'll see which produces a more natural filmic color rolloff in the highlights very quickly!
Everyone i know hates aces btw. I'm not alone here ha!
@@RuairiRobinson Yeah, it's a bit clunky in AE. I go back and forth between using the fnord plugin and the new built-in way, but the plugin is better in my opinion. Once the adjustment layer with the config and the color profile converter is set up you can use AE normally without color management changes and setting it on every input and output, which is too error-prone and annoying. We have ACEScg vs sRGB arguments at my work but OCIO in general has too many advantages, that is unless you're comping using Photoshop.
really good tutorial. thanks!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it!
very cool !
Thank you
Amazing_thank_you
Thank you!
Doesnt the beauty pass have all thise passes already baked in? So adding afditional "copies" in top just makes them more intense? Is thwre a way to render those passes separately without noise in the same way that the framebuffer is compositing them internally? Thanks!
Yes, the beauty is most of these passes combined. AO is additional, in this case. However, you don't use the beauty with this compositing method, so you're not adding intensity to it, you're recreating it. Not sure what you mean by rendering without noise. If you mean denoising, then yes, but this tutorial doesn't go over it. Actually this whole series is pretty out-of-date. The materials aren't even PBR. For denoising in V-Ray, you enable the Denoiser AOV and then you need to enable denoising on each separate AOV.
@@CGStirk thanks for the quick response! I've been trying to figure out how to build a composite of a CGI screen from scratch in compositing vs starting with a beauty/combined pass at the bottom of the stack so I can have total control over each layer's influence. Feels like a powerful way to do it but I've only ever seen passes come out noisy even with noise pass driven denoisers built into modern render engines. The only time I've seen something close is in vfx breakdowns of blockbuster films but often they are still using common render engines like crazy and would like to know how that is achieved.
@@MHM4V3R1CK This is how you do it with V-Ray th-cam.com/video/9C-trY4RLBc/w-d-xo.htmlfeature=shared&t=23485
For Arnold, I believe you do it with an Imager and there's a layer selection field for choosing the layers you want to denoise. What renderer are you using?
@@CGStirk Thank you for the info! I'm using Corona and vray depending on the job in 3ds max and for simpler product work I'm using blender and cycles.
@@MHM4V3R1CK I would imagine there's a way to do it in Corona and Cycles. I don't use that software though.
Thanks you for that awesome tutorial!
What's the Track ID from the Intro soundtrack? Its amazing!
Thanks! It's Siren Screen by Ooyy
Great info. How do you deal with the color space transformation when you are compositing something over existing footage, and Linearizing and going to SRGB totally messes up the color of everything else?
Thanks. Make sure you linearize the comp before working on it because effects that use color values will get messed up. If you linearize first though, there is not an issue. I'm also assuming you're using the default settings with Color Management enabled.
Can some please explain to me why when I import an exr sequence from Maya into After Effects, the exr sequence is stuck with my animation with a black background? I can't get it to be transparent. What am I doing wrong? In this video I see that the exr is simply dragged in and has a transparent background. This is driving me crazy.
This could be due to several reasons. What renderer are you using?
@@CGStirk I'm using Arnold in Maya 2018. I put two characters in their own pass in render setup and when I render it out as an exr the black is not transparent in programs like After Effects and Photoshop.
Is there transparency in the framebuffer? Are you using a skydome?
@@CGStirk No skydome. Just the two characters and area lights in the pass. Where would I go to check transparency in the framebuffer?
In the Arnold render view, go to View > Alpha Channel
Hello, can I ask a question? When in the after effects I make a layer with alpha and curves for the exhaust, they don't look like smoke, they look like a translucent outline of the shape that we modeled. What could be the problem?
I have a pinned comment on this. You need to blur the exhaust matte layer. I accidentally cut that part from the edit
@@CGStirk Oh, sorry, I read all the comments looking for an answer except the first one😅. Sorry again. Thanks a lot!!!
@@bohdanosadchyi You're fine. It's my fault!
lots of knowledge here for compositing. nice. background music quite distracting though
Sorry about that. Newer videos have much quieter bg music. If you'd like to view this part without any music, check out the full version here: th-cam.com/video/qUTx8KSvyJ8/w-d-xo.html.
@@CGStirk awesome thanks.. watching it now
@@risnandarmultimedia5296 You're welcome 👍
ok so i have been looking for a way to get my sky back in after effect from a 3D max render i did in 3D max. please this is very urgent
Interpret the footage to "Ignore Alpha" in After Effects. Not sure if that's the issue, so you may need to provide more info.
Does after effects support .exr?
Of course
@@CGStirk brother in my ae 2019 in effects panel its only showing extractor but not openexr effect?
@@basejumperdx4573 OpenEXR is the format. You only need EXtractoR to view the channels inside
@@CGStirk ohk thanks a lot sir 🥺🙌
@@basejumperdx4573 No prob
i export exr from blender but when import to AE, add extractoR and it couldn't chose Layers for GI? can you help me?
Is it just GI that's not working, and other passes do show up? I don't use Blender, but if the other passes are working, then perhaps there is an error in how Blender is saving that pass. A temporary solution is to save out your passes in separate EXR sequences instead of a single multichannel sequence.
CGStirk i render exr in blender and I render with these layers: difdir, difind, difcol, glossdir, glossind, glosscol. And when compositing in after effects what the blending mode in should do and what the order of these layers? Thanks you very much. This tut is very helpful.
Without knowing what channels these correspond to, it's a little hard to know since the workflow I used in the tutorial is different. For example, in V-Ray you can render a glossiness pass, but it is not part of the beauty. Furthermore, V-Ray can combine passes to make the compositing easier, but you lose the ability to alter specific elements. That said, I would guess that you need to precomp difdir and difind with the Add blending mode, then Multiply the precomp with difcol. The same is true for the glossiness passes, which would be blended again with the Add blending mode on top of the diffuse passes. So like this. Note that the parentheses are precomps:
((difdir + didfir) x difind) + ((glossdir + glossind) x glosscol)
I hope that makes sense. These passes give you more control than using the abridged V-Ray workflow in the tutorial, and it's more cumbersome to do in After Effects than with a node-based compositor.
CGStirk I really appreciate your help. ❤️. I try ((difdir+ difind) x difcol) -> precomp -> and I blending this comp “add” above the combine image. And it quite working.
@@linhbui7088 Awesome. I'm glad that worked!
did you render it exactly like you left it ? only with the dome light ?
Yep. Later in the tutorial I go back and add a low intensity directional light just to add a bit more direct light on the screen-left side of the plane.
i created a LUT using camera raw in photoshop. i used that lut in after effects in exr sequence ,its washing colors. if i convert that sequence to jpg then its applying that EXR properly. but i have all sequence in exr . how can i solve this problem
Make sure you have linearized the workspace and that you have set the color management for the EXR sequence to "On", not "On for 32 bpc".
@@CGStirk i did that but got this result Download link
wetransfer.com/downloads/5f22163ea0e25cef61c69775ef2e6b4820200515165504/6284537b15c8ab564cf0ef086a6c2d4c20200515165504/1f6759
Really thanks for your replay.
please look at that link ,how the result im getting thankyou.
if i change the workspace to srgb from none. its darkening many areas .and darking many filters already applied. on gamma 2.4 only its showing actrual rendered image in vray
The workspace is dependent on what you rendered in Maya. If you are using 2.4 gamma in Maya, then use that in AE. The sRGB workspace uses 2.2 gamma. However, judging by the two images you shared, the one of on the right looks correct, whereas the one on the left has lifted/washed-out shadows. The workspace needs to be setup prior to making color correction adjustments. If you change the working space, then the color correction usually needs to be modified.
Also, when you make a LUT in Photoshop, you'd need to be using the same working space too.
How your matte is blurry?
I mean I used my adjustment layer and made is the track matte but after using the curves.. It is showing me a matte but with proper boundaries.. Not like smoke
Make sure you blur the matte, not the adjustment layer.
So first I have to blur the matte.. Then use adjustment layer right???
Yes. The matte is the outline of the smoke. That has to be blurred, not the adjustment layer, which only blurs layers underneath it.
Sorry for the confusion. I just realized that this step was somehow missing from the tutorial. Apologies.
It's okay man.. Thank you for the help. It did worked for me
And what a great tutorial 😁😁
and he didnt show the final shot. Thanks. :(
This is part of a series. Check the full-length video, or see the first or last part for the final shot.
please can i have render passes
Sorry, I don't have them to provide anymore.
@@CGStirk Okay
why not vray next?
This is V-Ray Next
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