Speaker A
Hello everyone, and welcome to another session of Demystifying Post-Production. And this one is about how to make your 3D render pop.
Learn how to enhance your 3D renders using AOVs and Photoshop compositing techniques in this Maxon training session.
Ask about this video. Answers come from its transcript only — with the timestamp, so you can check them.
Generated from the transcript and can be wrong — check the timestamp.
Key Takeaways
- AOVs are essential for advanced compositing and enhancing 3D renders.
- Photoshop can be effectively used for 3D compositing despite not being specialized software.
- Beauty compositing and multi-pass compositing are two main approaches with pros and cons.
- Proper management of blend modes and layer organization is crucial for clean composites.
- Using ID passes and custom AOVs helps isolate and enhance specific elements in renders.
What the video covers
- Introduction to making 3D renders pop using AOVs and Photoshop.
- Overview of Maxon events and resources for Cinema 4D and Redshift users.
- Dustin Valkema shares his background as a composite photographer and 3D artist.
- Discussion on beauty compositing vs. multi-pass compositing workflows.
- Detailed explanation of working with AOV passes and Photoshop layers.
- How to manage blend modes and layer adjustments for compositing.
- Using ID passes and other info channels for material and object separation.
- Tips on creating selections and alpha channels from AOV layers.
- Addressing common questions about Redshift shadow passes and compositing techniques.
- Preview of upcoming sessions covering Raptor render, Camera Raw, and advanced compositing.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Maxon Events Overview
- 00:54Host and Presenter Introduction
- 05:22Compositing Approaches: Beauty vs Multi-pass
- 13:30Working with Bump Normals and AOVs
- 17:51Q&A: Material and Object AOV Differences
- 21:47Handling Jagged Outlines and EXR-IO Plugin
- 30:15Creating Selections and Alpha Channels from AOVs
- 36:47Using ID Passes for Layer Grouping and Enhancement
- 48:45Shadow Passes and Blend Mode Discussion
- 56:09Workflow Tips: Actions and File Organization
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
So, with me is Dustin Valkema, who's going to present all of this. How to become a wizard with Photoshop and how to use AOV and so on, so on. A bunch of very interesting things to see. So, how are you doing, Dustin?
Speaker A
I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I'm happy to be here because I know it's been too long. I'll just be real. It's been too long since I've been on with Maxon and Demystifying. So, it's good to be back. A little bit nervous. I have no
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idea why. I think it's just been the time in between, you know. So, yeah. Hi everyone.
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Yeah. It's been long for me too. So, I'm very happy to be here. So, first I need to talk to you about a few things. But first, let me show my screen.
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And so, you know, of course, about all the Maxon events we do at Maxon. You can see here on the Maxon webpage in the events page everything here. So, this is us today.
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Make your 3D pop, but there are a lot of other shows like ZBrush Live, Maxon Color every week. Of course, Hashi and Set talking about VFX and Chill.
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And Ask the Trainer with Noseman and Jonas. And the NAB very soon and so on, and so on. So, you see everything is here. You have the data.
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And you have to click on any of the thumbnails to know what it's about.
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And of course, if you missed one of the shows, you can very easily see it on the Maxon training webpage. So, our YouTube page where there's everything that we do. So, including the quick tips, very interesting, all the quick tips about how
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to use Cinema 4D, Redshift, and so on. You can browse, of course, with all the streams. So, again, Ask the Trainer, all the other Demystifying workshops, and so on. So, everything is there and
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this show should be no exception. It should be available very soon to you. And of course, as with every show we do, we do have some free t-shirts to offer you. So, you'll find in the comments, I'm going to
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paste it right now. Let's do it. I'm trying to do it. There we are. So, we have a Dropbox with this PDF where you will find the password for the free t-shirt, of course, because we wouldn't be
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anything without a free t-shirt. And we have very important all the files that Dustin is going to use today, so you can follow along with the resources.
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It's very handy. And all the interesting, well, that's the YouTube webpage I have already talked to you about and so on.
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All right, so go grab this PDF so that you can enjoy all this.
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Okay, so I think I'm done. And now I'm going to hand over to Dustin so that he can go ahead with his AOV matrix.
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Yeah, let's do that. I've got so many windows. All right, so for those of you who don't know me, I'm Dustin. It's been a while since I've been on the Demystifying series.
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I am a composite photographer slash 3D artist slash pixel junkie. So, I like to mix my photography, generally cosplay photography. I run a small cosplay photography business, and so I turn those people into, you know, kind of movie poster superheroes and so
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on. And I use Cinema 4D and Redshift to create my 3D environments. I do a lot of post-production. I spent about five and a half, six years as a Nuke artist, planned on going into visual effects in Hollywood and all of that stuff.
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Things changed, family grew, and I got into commercial product rendering, which is currently what I still freelance a little bit. But that's been my primary focus. And so I spent a lot of time learning how to work in
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Photoshop. Natively, it's not the best 3D compositing software. And so I've spent a lot of time learning how to use Photoshop, how to work with the tools that are there, some of the maybe do's and don'ts inside of the
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software. And so we're going to be talking about a lot of that over the next four weeks. Today is going to be quite a bit more discussion-based.
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And so we'll have hopefully a little bit more time. If you have questions, we're going to be taking a look at the render that you see on the screen, as well as the Raptor render that we'll be talking
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about later on in the month just to kind of compare the two and see what maybe more of a final file might look like.
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And then we'll also dive into some Cinema 4D and Redshift and talk about the AOV manager and so on. So all of that considered, let's go ahead and get started with this.
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All right. So what we have currently is the Nintendo Switch. I'm sure we've all seen them. We've seen the ads. And this is a beauty render of that Nintendo Switch.
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What do we do once we get to this phase, which is what we get when we export a Photoshop document out of Redshift?
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And this is pretty much the starting point of any of these processes for compositing. And so when we get into this, it's going to look crazy. The first thing that you need to know, if you guys go ahead and download the files that
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come with this session today, that's what we're going to be using for the rest of the month. So you can take a little bit of time, you know, kind of maybe create your own composites and so on. Mess around with it. But if you
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want to save it, just kind of save them incrementally so that you can start at the same spot that we are each week.
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So, with that being said, once we get our files into Photoshop, we're going to have to change all of these layers just selecting them all, just holding the shift key.
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We'll have to take them all and change them to the normal blend mode. And so, when they're all linear, it's going to just stack that light on top of one another, blown out image and everything gets extra crazy. Now, at
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this point, we're really going to talk a little bit more before we go into the passes. We're going to talk about the different types of compositing that I do in Photoshop.
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So, you have a beauty compositing, which is basically just taking your beauty render and then manipulating that, not rebuilding an entire beauty process in Photoshop. It's just using the beauty layer, making your tweaks on top of that. And then you have the
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multi-pass approach, which I would consider building that beauty layer up from all of your different layers.
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Both of them are great. A lot of times I find myself kind of shifted a bit more towards the beauty processes these days.
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We'll get into why that is in a little bit, but I tend to work a little bit more beauty or kind of a hybrid approach, which is exporting that beauty render and then using your reflections and your specular passes and various
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things to really enhance that and build on top of it. So, we'll be getting down into a bit more of the heavy beauty compositing. I believe that's next week where we're going to start looking at the Raptor render and getting into that.
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And then we'll be talking about Camera Raw and other things that you can use to enhance your renders a little bit later in the month. So, my process when I get into the compositing side is to first analyze the renders that I have.
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So, if I turn off my beauty image and I just named this here, this is just the regular image. You can see it in the downloads.
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All that I do is I render out a multi-pass PSD when I'm doing beauty composites and then I render out a regular image and I just drag that render or that regular image into my Photoshop document. It
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works a little bit easier that way. So, once we get in here, we can start to look at the different types of information that we have. And at this point, I think we can start at more like the ID passes. So, I have this
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if you look at, you know, the little section where it goes over what we're covering today. I might skip around just a little bit depending on how things flow out. So, ID passes, you have it's pretty much all
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of your info channels. So, when you think of the way that you build materials in Cinema, right? And
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reflection. You have your diffuse color, which is more of a color texture layer and everything else is information.
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That's what the info channels or the ID channels are once we get to Photoshop.
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So, this for example is an alpha puzzle mat. We'll talk about how to create these. This just gives me a solid clean red alpha that I can use to cut the switch out for the background.
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Then we get into a second puzzle mat that is going to cover the screen and the little thumb knobs.
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And then you have a third one. So, puzzle mats are great for zero to 100 100% or I should say zero and 100% alpha, right? You're going to get a solid red, a solid blue, a solid green.
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Three channels for whatever you decide to assign those channels to, whether it's materials, whether it's objects. Uh we'll we'll start to get into the some of that once we get to the Redshift side, but three channels. And then we
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start to get into the other ones, which are crypto mats. And so, with the crypto mats, they're a little bit different in Photoshop than what we might see in something like Nuke or Fusion, right? We have a bunch of colors that come in.
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This is a blessing and a curse. Why? Because trying to select each of these individual colors can definitely be painstaking because you get little aliased edges and different things like that. Uh whereas the puzzle mats allow us to go directly into our channels
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and we can see it here inside of our channels panel that we have straight alphas that are here already. Um a little bit later we're going to be talking about how I build my alpha libraries and what that looks like, but
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just a kind of spoiler, it's all done inside of the channels and manipulating the different passes.
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So, with that being said, that's the difference here directly with what we have in our multi- Oh, excuse me. In our multi-layer file, it is the crypto mat that has a bunch of different colors, and then you have your puzzle mats,
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which allow you to select 100% alphas directly in your channels. So, All right. With that being said, understanding uh what a couple of those are is definitely going to help as we start to talk about the rest of them.
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And now we'll move on to the bump normals. If I'm going super fast, uh luckily this is all going to be back. I want to make sure that I get as much information out to you guys throughout the month as possible
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because we can always go back and rewatch it, but I know that there's times where I'm going to kick myself for not giving enough. Um so we may move fast, just be ready for that.
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So we have our bump normals or our normals render pass. Red, green, and blue. Okay? So up and down is our Y axis, left and right is our X, and then forward and back is our Z axis. So there's a couple tricks that
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we'll talk about once we get into Cinema 4D and Redshift as to how I get the blue channel. It's really just flipping or rotating my entire scene, but how I get my blue channel to show up in a regular
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normals pass. Um because it's not very intuitive if you haven't done it before. After today, you're going to understand how to do it if you want that information. A lot of times I am kind of 50/50 with it, whether I need it or not.
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So the bump normals directional information, all right? And so with this, again using the Photoshop's channel panel, uh wow, say that five times fast.
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That's a little bit crazy. We have our red, our green, and then our blue. Our blue is currently black uh with a little bit of information here off on the side.
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And we can fix this uh prior to actually rendering that out, and we'll discuss that.
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So our green channel is going to be our up and down information, all right? So the green channel is what I use most often, and that's because it allows you to get a very beautiful roll from the top to the bottom of your object or your
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area of interest in your environment that you're compositing. So, when I worked in commercial automotive, all right, like they always like to have this light roll from We'll We'll talk about just the door panel. You have a light roll from light to dark, and it
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just had to be a really nice light roll. And that can be tough to do sometimes just with lighting, especially when you're on a timeline. And so, in this case, we a lot of times would just be a
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Nuke, and we would use the normals pass to go in and start to adjust that light roll. So, we could brighten the top, slightly darken down towards the bottom of the vehicle, get a nice light roll.
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Um super easy tip. Definitely something that you will want to know um about, especially as we start to get into next week, where we're talking about how to really relight with normals and use this pass um really more in like a production style
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environment. So, there we go. Uh we'll move down. We have our shadows. So, the shadows pass is one that I use almost independently um and very specifically as a channel for a layer mask in Photoshop to use something like a curves adjustment
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layer, or I will often times just use an exposure adjustment layer to start to tone down um those shadowed areas, but it's when you see the render pass, you're like, "Hey, this has color. This isn't really working the way that I thought it
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would." Again, you head to channels. Once you have it here, and then you can start to, you know, really pick out the best area. I think that, you know, this one here is pretty solid. Um so, pick one of your channels. We'll create a
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mask for that, and everything would work fine. Now, throughout the process of analyzing these renders, we're going to talk about how to set up presets for your renders so that you don't have to set these all up every time, especially once you start
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to build a nice AOV structure and you like it. Once you use your preset, you may not have certain attributes to be rendered out. So, in this case, I don't have any subsurface scattering. Um or I do a little bit. It's in there, but I
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don't have a lot of it, right? So, a pass like this might be one that I might just delete out of my file, could throw it away. I don't need to really save it.
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Emission We have a question already about the AOV. So, this is Yulena asking, "What is the AOV material and AOV object in a rendering? What's the difference between the two?" Uh the difference between material and object AOV is
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All right. So, yeah, if we're if we're rendering um something like a puzzle, I'm assuming we're talking about either a puzzle mat or a crypto mat and the difference between the the two of those. Um so, the material ID or
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whatever it mask you're putting your placing it on. If it's a material, really what you're going to get is everything of one material is going to show up in a specific color. And so, if we're looking at something like a crypto
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mat and we have that set to material, um let's bring this switch back up here.
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So, if we look at the materials here on the switch, right? If we're setting a material, let's see if I may already have it set up.
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Maybe not. I might have done objects. No, this will be it. Okay. So, the way that it's going to work, we'll use the crypto mat as an example, is the materials are all going to give you one color or one alpha for that material. An
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object is going to be a bit different because you're going to have different colors or different alpha selections per object that you set up.
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So, the difference is really just a material. All materials will be selectable or all objects will be selectable, especially as they get to be more individualized in the way that you set it up. So, in this case here, this
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is my object. Um actually, let's head right over into Cinema. We'll just take a look at this here a moment.
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Make sure that Uh I'm pretty sure So, I do have my object ID set up, but this is actually for a different one.
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So, the cryptomat is going to give us we have 1 2 3 primary objects here.
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And it's going to allow us to set all of this up in our objects. Like I said, materials are going to be a little bit different. Um the materials, if we head into our Redshift materials, and we'll do the black rubber here.
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So, for setting up the materials this is kind of skipping quite a bit ahead uh further than what we planned.
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So, hopefully everybody's still tracking at that point. All right. So, inside of the material in your output node, you have a material ID. Okay? So, this material ID is what you're going to assign to either generally speaking, I usually just use
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this when I'm setting up my puzzle mats. And so, I can assign this to the red, green, or blue channel inside of a puzzle mat. Important to remember, puzzle mats only have the three channels that you can set up. So, red, green, or
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blue. So, you almost have to be fairly smart about how you play it out with setting up your selections.
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Um and you can also just create multiple puzzle mats like I did in this scene file here. So, this gives us a little bit more.
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Uh let's see. I've got to move one of my windows here. There we go. Back to Photoshop. So, puzzle mat material ID or the Redshift object tag is going to be your object ID.
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You can set those up. That's the difference. Did I answer the question? Does that make sense everyone?
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Yeah, a lot of sense. And we have another question about uh she's Dave asking uh I tried the puzzle mat, but I have a jagged outline when I do it.
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Uh let's see. You have a jagged outline when you do it. Okay, so let's skip a little bit. Uh we can we can take a few steps back and we'll talk about some of the the selection methods um
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that have to do I'm kind of reading some of the comments here. So, when you're selecting in Photoshop, okay? There's there's two very important things to remember here. And this also goes back to why I use uh maybe 16-bit more often than I use
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32-bit EXRs um once I get inside Photoshop. Photoshop doesn't handle 32-bit selections very well at all. And so, that's where having a solid cryptomat EXR aside of your regular EXR is great.
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Um but most often when you're working, you have all of your tools available to you in Photoshop at a 16-bit mode. It gets a little bit different once we get to the 32-bit side and those EXRs.
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Um so, I'm going to answer that question. I want to back up a little bit, you know, to some of the stuff in the beginning. We were discussing a lot.
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I want to talk about how you get your EXRs into Photoshop. So, this was saved for a little bit later. We're just going to handle it now.
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And there's really two plugins that I like to use. The first one, I'll bring it up onto my screen here.
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Uh the first one is ProEXR um or sorry, EXRIO. Two separate tabs. So, EXRIO is really more of a fully featured like it there's a lot of great options here. You can import EXRs very easily, save them easily using this Photoshop plugin,
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but it is only for Windows. So, if you're a Mac user you would be using something like ProEXR.
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Um I'm not a Mac user, so forgive me if I give a little bit of misinformation, but when you're using ProEXR and you're looking to get into that, um it looks like they did update uh a little bit here. I'm not sure if
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that's the Photoshop version um or just something for like Premiere Pro and After Effects, but previously when I was a Mac user, I had to install this to my actual plugin directory, not the uh media folder that the instructions told
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me to put that in. So, just keep that in mind if you're a Mac user and you need to use ProEXR.
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Just make sure that you install it um in the proper locate location in your plugins folder.
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Now, either way, uh once we grab one of these plugins that we want to use, um it's really going to give you a lot of options as you start to move down into like the the compositing side. So, I'm
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going to show you what that looks like here a moment. Uh we'll use a downloaded file.
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Let's see. We'll head to the Raptor renders, and we'll open up a multi-pass. I can move that off to the side here.
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So, like I said, I'm using EXR-IO, and so right now it's just reading that format. I do think that I have the dialogue box that normally opens. It gives you a bunch of options. I think that I have that disabled. Um
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I apologize. I probably should have just reinstalled it all completely. Uh that does get hard when you're actually working on projects to start changing your dot or your uh plugins and stuff.
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Um but that's definitely uh a good route to work in using EXR-IO if possible. They have a lot of options.
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So, once we get in, this is going to be how all of our files are going to look specifically. Now, compared to the direct output um that we were using for the PSD and then the Nintendo Switch file, these ones are now
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all set to linear color space or to sorry, not color space, the linear blend mode. And so, with these ones, we could really just start organizing everything right away and start to get to the compositing process.
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Now, cryptomattes are a little bit different, and I will show it We'll just show it here on the Raptor comp. So, when we're in Redshift, we get a couple different files that like to kick out directly, and those are the
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cryptomattes. Regardless of whether you're setting any of your other files to export directly, which means that they create like their own file, the cryptomattes are going to do that. And so, these cryptomattes, if we maybe pull in the object, we'll pull in an object
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cryptomat, open that up. This is going to give us a whole lot of files.
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Um in Nuke, this would be something that we could shuffle out into their own individual selections. Uh in Photoshop, it gives us a whole list of different um layers to use.
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It's taking a moment cuz there's quite a bit in here. So, the first thing that we'll see is that we have some unusable uh layers here. They're just like very harshly masked and so on. I'm not too worried
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about those. I'll usually select all of the RGBA and delete those. And now what we're left with in this cryptomat uh file is a whole lot of different selections uh for various parts of this scene. And so, the raptor is going to be broken
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down by, as we can see here, you have the whole body and the skin, you have the teeth separate, the eyes separate, everything there is separated. Um and that gets really tough. This is one reason why a lot of times I like to work
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with more of a material base because when you work with object base, you start to get all of these different files, and it can be quite a bit to manage. Um so, that's what it looks like when you
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import a cryptomat. We've talked about how to import those using EXRIO or ProEXR. Now, we can talk about some of the selection processes that we are going to use. So, we'll use the switch for this in particular and talk about how I like
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to go throughout the process of making selections. This one's going to be 30 or sorry, a 16-bit image. The 32-bit image we're going to get to a little bit later in the month and repeat some of this process because it is a little bit
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different and not quite as intuitive as this. So, first things first inside of Photoshop, we have our layers panel over to the right-hand side and we have our channels panel. My layout is probably going to be a little
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bit different than your layout is. That's because the channels panel is generally over right next to your layers panel.
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I just like to pull that out and set it off to the side because I do a lot of 3D compositing where I'm building alpha libraries and I need to save all of those.
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So, all of that being said, all right, we have our alpha channel that's already set up. We can see that it's set up here.
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Now, this one is actually taking the floor alpha along with it. This is what I was exporting out out of Redshift. And so, I have two separate alphas. I have just my object and then I have my object
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in the shadow. So, what we're going to do is take a look at our red channel with the switch alpha puzzle mat on top here invisible.
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And all we have to do is control or command click the red thumbnail. That's going to create the little marching ant or the marquee um type of selection around it. And this little icon here, I wish we could zoom
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in a little bit better. I probably need one of those apps that lets you do that.
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Um this is going to be the save selection as a channel. So, this is how we're going to store the selected information as its own selection.
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So, we'll click that, and now we have our alpha channel. Control D to deselect.
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And now, I'm going to have to name all of these as I start to create these different masks because once you start to get maybe even hundreds of different channels in here, you have to know what they are.
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And so, if you're doing these 3D composites, um even standard compositing in Photoshop, if I'm doing a photo composite, I'm creating multiple alphas, I like to name them.
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I I've been in files where they're not named, and you can almost not read it because it gets to be a bit crazy.
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So, we'll call this one, um product. There we go. And now, we can repeat that same process uh for the rest of our puzzle mats because we know that those are pretty easy. So, with the puzzle mats, we can
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select the red, create a new alpha, and call this thumb stick. There we go.
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And we'll select the green. This is going to be our screen. And so on and so forth. Uh we can pretty much run through all of the red, green, and blue channels for that.
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So, the other side of that, I could sit and go through that for quite a while. I think we should get to Redshift at some point here.
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But, when we're doing that through the puzzle mat, it's super easy. Very quick. Red, green, blue channel. Maybe multiple puzzle mats, but that's all that we really have to deal with.
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Now, with the cryptomat, this is going to be quite a bit different because this is more what I would consider non-alpha-friendly colors here. Right? So, the way that we would normally go about this is say pressing W, grab your wand tool, we're
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going to make a selection. Okay? With that selection, we're going to create an alpha.
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So, now we can click on this alpha here for this right stick or this right um controller piece.
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We select it. And we can zoom in. So, this one here actually looks uh fairly solid.
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But, I think what I believe it was Dave that was talking about it earlier um is there is a lot of times where you can get some really harsh like aliasing. And so, most of the time, especially if
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you're dealing with a depth of field, I don't like to use the cryptomat as it sits. That process is going to be a little bit different. We're going to work with uh I what I would consider the multi-color um version of this cryptomat
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here, and then we'll talk about the actual cryptomat EXR that Redshift kicked out. So, with this one, this is pretty good. That's a decent selection.
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Uh let's see if we can actually get a bad selection out of this. Try it out.
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Maybe bring up our other cryptomat. And I'm going to select the screen. Let's see how how this looks.
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And deselect. So, here we can see that we're starting to get a little bit more of that jagged aliasing um depending on your file, what your deliverables are, the final resolution of the file.
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You can hide a lot. So, don't be alarmed when you start to make some of these selections and you get this type of look. Um I've actually ran into it quite recently, if I'm being honest where I had a client that zoomed into 500% and
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was like, "I see a tiny little edge there." And I was like, "Well, I guess I can go and fix that." Okay? So, one of the ways that I go about dealing with the standard cryptomattes inside of my
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renders, right inside of this multipass, is going to be using There we go. We have it up. All right.
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So, I'm going to be using the color range. So, if we head up to select and we choose color range here, all right? This is going to now allow us to select any of these pieces and then we have like a tolerance-based
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selection. And so, right now, I'm just going to select There we go. We'll just select a button.
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So, now with the button, we can see that we have even the background a little bit selected because all of those color values are starting to mesh in together.
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And what I can do is take my fuzziness amount and we can start to bring this down.
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And we'll see that now we're starting to get much closer to the selections that we're really going to want to have here.
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Now, remember when I talked about the puzzle mattes and how you have, you know certain um certain numbers of the red, green, and blue channel.
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You have three three channels, but you can only use three. So, you have a certain certain number that you can use every time. The cryptomat's going to be a little bit different. Now, with this cryptomat, this is the material one, so I have the
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same material on my buttons that I am using for the edge of the screen and they're just slightly different. One has textures, one doesn't have any extra normal textures to it. So, they're both assigned the same.
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Now, in this case, what we can do is take a look all the way in here and see what this fuzziness slider is going to do.
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So, we have our one selection that we did and we had quite a bit of stepping and aliasing. Now we're using the color range, and we have to try to feather this out just a little bit. So now I'm
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increasing that fuzziness. We are at 500%, so keep that in mind as we start to look at the various levels of crunchiness on these edges.
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But I generally try to get to a point something like this where I have it, it's fairly sharp. Once we go back to 100% I'm not seeing any insane amounts of stepping. Some files, like I said, when you get to rendering a depth of field in
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your image, this makes it very difficult to pull this kind of selection. So we'll click okay.
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And now with that selection currently active we can go ahead and create an alpha from that. So once I select it, we can see that we have the alpha we just created. There are definitely times where other pieces might slip through
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like this one here. In that case most often I'm just going to grab a selection.
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Excuse me. And I'm going to fill this area with black. Anything that you're not going to want you can just make a selection around it like this. Usually a garbage mask works pretty well.
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Maybe not that one. You can press X to flip so that black is in the background.
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And we can just press delete. So now that's how I like to go about cleaning up masks most of the time. So two types of selections that we talked about, the first one is the wand selection.
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It will work sometimes, it won't work others. The other way is to start getting used to using a color range because you can get some really nice results with that.
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So and we need to talk about the other side of this, which is our cryptomattes.
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So, not the cryptomat render pass that we have in our file, it's the other cryptomat, the actual direct output that Redshift gave us, which is its own EXR here.
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Okay. So, with this open, just like the one with the Raptor comp, we're going to have a lot of these RGBA layers. I'm just going to delete them.
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And now, funny enough, we see the first selection that we actually made is our first layer here.
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And so, each of these different cryptomat layers is going to be a zero and 100% alpha status. So, it's very much like the puzzle mat. Sometimes you can get away with just exporting and using a cryptomat like this.
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I think most often it's going to save you time if you know that you want a specific piece uh able to be edited, like you create something like a puzzle mat, assign a material ID or an object ID to that, and
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just have a few pieces, if you're beauty compositing, that you're going to want to make adjustments to. So, that'll help out.
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Now, looking through these, we have everything, including the floor. And everything is in its own selection.
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So, at this point, all that I'll need to do, I can just select all of my layers, I can copy them, head back to my other file, and just paste those in up top.
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So, we have to talk a little bit about file organization, right? Just the base, I'm not talking about naming every single layer that you put in there, but as you can already see, we're going to run into an issue of understanding what we're
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looking at. I've been doing this a very long time. I still get confused in my own files if I don't organize things a certain way, and I'm not a very OCD person that way.
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I just kind of learn the hard lessons and have shot myself in the foot enough.
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So, I like to organize things now. So, what I'm going to do first, placing these layers in will create a group.
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Call that group crypto, and then I'm going to go in and select all of my other ID passes.
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So, we have all of our puzzle mats. Can get rid of my Actually, I'll keep my AO pass in there. We have the crypto mats, and then the shadow and bump normals, and then going to create a group here and call those ECC. So, it's
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just my accessory passes, ones that I can use if I need them, and then I can take my crypto group and drop that right into my ECC passes.
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Okay. So, with this done, with the crypto passes, this is the base for how we can start to organize, and then now I know exactly where all of my crypto mat um render layers are at. Not the ones that we
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initially kicked out, the ones from the direct output EXR. So, with these, this makes our selections quite a bit better and a lot easier to manage. So, I can control or command click on my red channel.
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I can save that. Deselect, and we can start to move in now and take a look.
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I'm not sure that you will be able to see the difference between the color range selection and the actual crypto mat 100% alpha uh that we just created, But, there is a bit of a difference.
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If you can see the difference, let me know uh in chat. So, you might have better eyes than I do. Uh but, there definitely is a pretty solid difference here between the way that that aliasing stepping and kind of the
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slight feathered edge of that cryptomatte pass is going to work. All right. So, we know how to deal with the cryptomattes.
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We know how to deal with the EXR. We've started building alpha libraries. Kind of check the time.
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Might go over a little bit. That's fine. All right. So, as we start to get into um the other render passes, we're going to do a very kind of brief overview of some of these so that we know what they
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are once we get into Cinema 4D and Redshift. Um the AO pass, ambient occlusion. I call it the soft shadow pass. It's basically like if you were to take an overcast sky, use that to light a scene, it's like
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those ambient shadows, the cracks and crevices that you can really start to pull details out of.
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So, with these passes, I use it for contact shadows, and I use it for details.
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The details are going to be in places like right around the buttons. Some of these softer shadowed areas I'll use, especially places depending on your general lighting in your scene. It can be really nice to pull some detail
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out of these small uh divots that we would have in this thumbstick. So, the AO pass is great for nice ambient shadowing and the cracks and crevices in your scene.
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We've talked about the shadow pass a little bit, exposure adjustment layer, using this as a layer mask.
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And then we have other passes like our diffuse lighting. So, our diffuse lighting is going to be our diffuse lighting without reflections, um refractions, and all of that. It's just going to be the color and light information of our textures that we have
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on our model. Get to emission, things that emit light. So, I have the background that's emitting a little bit of light, and then I have the screen. So, these are pretty good uh passes to use if you want to
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layer those even on top of your beauty pass and make small little LED lights, maybe computer screens, things like that pop just a little bit more.
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All right, refractions we don't have. This is one of those passes that was empty for us. But, we do have reflections.
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And so, the reflections aren't really going to look exactly like you think they would look when we think of a reflection. So, you have like a direct reflection and an indirect reflection. So, the direct reflections are going to be like your specular
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highlights. Um if you're looking at my face, it would be much more like the catch lights that are in my eye, not the actual reflection of that light coming off the table. So, specular lighting is going to be what you see from your
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light source. The reflections is a bit more indirect. Um I'm just reading the comments here a little bit. So, hopefully that makes sense. We'll be able to see this a little bit better here once we look at the reflections
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pass itself. I'll zoom out too far so you can all see it. And then we get to our specular lighting. So, again, the reflections is going to be the bouncing or reflecting of light. These are going to be the
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direct like specular what we would think to see of in a specular uh or reflection pass. So, it goes two ways. Back in the day it used to confuse me. Probably still confuses me cuz my brain's running in circles at
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the moment. But, hopefully that makes sense to you all. So reflections refractions specular lighting, they're all really about light and where light is coming from. Not always as much the direction, but the reflections from the environment of light.
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So, those are good to know and mess with. Most of the time I'm going to use a specular pass almost always when I'm doing a beauty composite. I'll keep that specular pass just so I can boost some reflections and crunch it down a little
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bit. We'll talk about a lot of that stuff next week. Okay. So, global illumination is going to be more of the ambient pass. Not the ambient occlusion for the shadowing, but this is just going to be more of the
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ambient lighting from your environment. Super useful because you can use this pass specifically. We can see already that's it's a little bit darker here because I have a bit more direct lighting going on. But, for the global illumination and the bouncing of light
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around our scene, it's going to be a darker pass. I like to use this pass, throw maybe a curves adjustment on it, boost it up a little bit, and it helps fill some of those shadows in the dark
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areas that I have in this scene. I believe it's week four we're going to be talking about rebuilding beauty or yeah, rebuilding the beauty pass, um but comprised of all of these layers.
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So, we're going to rebuild it all. We'll talk about it. We'll be able to see exactly how some of these layers when they're manipulated can change the complete look of our our render completely. All right.
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So, then we have our beauty pass. And this one looks different than this guy.
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So, one of them, the regular image, has the view transform, the AC transform on it when it's kicked out and output.
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And inside of my render, my beauty pass doesn't have that. Now, in this case, when we're talking just beauty, I know we're going to have to hold because a lot of people are going to be like, "Well, how do I get AC?"
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We're going to have a whole like webinar on that type of stuff. Um in fact, it's very simple. I promise, we'll get there in a couple weeks.
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But, knowing why I like to kick out a regular image and then bring that into my multi pass is because of this.
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Because if I wasn't using this type of setup, then I would have to go and apply the AC transforms. I might as well just work in 32-bit and just rebuild everything and do it, you know, kind of the longer way, if you will. So, in this
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case, I wanted to show you what the difference was. We'll talk about how to apply the the AC slots um that are in your downloads. So, those are already there. Uh it's very simple.
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If you want to set them up, I'll just give a little bit of a uh little bit of a spoiler. Uh where's it at? You can go into the color lookup. So, the color lookup is an adjustment layer and it lets you
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load lots in. So, your first layer, your first lot is going to be lot one in there, and then the second one is going to be lot two. So, two different layers.
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If you want to start messing around with that early, that's how you would do it.
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But, we'll talk about that in another week. All right. So, do we have any questions um so far? I heard or I thought I saw something about post effects.
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Yes, I was trying to answer question. I didn't see them update for a for a while, so suddenly I had a lot of question. And yes, there was a question about post effects because there is no pass for post effects. I answered that
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you had to to make a difference comp between the the one with post effects, the beauty pass, and the composite with everything and post effects.
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Do you have another trick for that, maybe, Justin? Um I cheat. 100% I cheat. Let me see if I can pull this up here a minute.
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And Okay, so this is what I use. It's on my screen. That's what I use. I use Optical from Composite Nation for all of my post effects stuff. Yeah.
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That's exactly it. It's a glow generator. Um quite beautiful. Allows you to do the bloom and glare.
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Let's see if I can click in here. That's what I say. Most of the time actually post effects is is good is is good, but it's actually rather okay more than good.
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Meaning that you you can do much better with a good compositing plugin like this one or Optical Glow on After Effects and so on.
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Yeah. And so this is this is how how I cheated. Um That's yeah. That's that's the best way the best way to do it and you can manipulate it in post. And so yeah, super cool. Definitely worth checking out those guys. I'm not sure if
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we have a link if you want to put a link, but it's composite nation.com.
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Um is there a flowchart somewhere that shows procedural all steps? Steps of all of them order the professional post production line.
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That would be a good idea to make. There must be some more the internet, but we we could create us one for a specific for Redshift and that would be very interesting, a good idea for another another tool.
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Yeah. Yeah, let's That would be that would be pretty good. Maybe Lionel and Lionel and I will take that on.
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We'll create something pretty neat. Um so, yeah, do we have any other questions about what we covered so far? I know that we just discussed the bloom and glare side of it with post effects.
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Well, there is another question which is interesting. Is there a reason why the Redshift shadow pass come through inverted and the blend mode is set to linear dodge compared to the standard physical render where the shadow pass is set to
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multiply. That's a good question I have asked myself very often and I don't know.
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It's very weird because you have to composite the other way around. It's It's strange. It works, but it's strange.
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Yeah, it it it's definitely it's definitely tough. I mean, there's there are things that you know, in every render engine, every tool that you use.
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That's why there's multiple tools. You know, now I use Redshift exclusively, but I was I was on Octane for quite a while. And I just I love the updates that I was getting with Redshift and I really like
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the fine-tune control. Um and so, some of that fine-tune control is going to be discussed right now.
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Because I want to talk a little bit about some of the processes in the 3D side. So, I know that it was just brought up like how we start to go through you know, maybe like working for clients
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and and the way that you know, you can expedite processes or a a Um in photography we have a phrase that's like get it right in camera.
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And it's it's a hard one for me because I love post-production so much. I almost fought that for so long.
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I'm like, you don't have to get it right. I Like I started photography after I was a 3D artist.
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Um and so I'm like, I just use Photoshop. You can't tell me you can't tell me what to do, right? But there is a little bit of like nuance and flow to that for a reason. So, the way that I
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like to work um with clients is you work in stages. Um so, you have to set up a process. And this is also something that, you know, going from being a studio artist that, you know, works in one part of the
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pipeline to being a freelance artist, you know, like business owner, whatever, like you you have to set up processes for certain things because your clients need to be educated on how you work. And if you just throw things at the wall all
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the time, like you're just creating a headache for yourself. Uh so, with that being said, um quite often, like we'll definitely get to probably a fairly standard workflow.
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Um for me, it's generally getting the concepts nailed in. It's kind of like the 3D pipeline. But you're like doing it yourself, right? So, you get your concepts nailed down. Um I like to work with clients early on on exploring
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cameras and lighting. Uh the reason for that is because once I get into lighting, I'll know what my materials need to react to.
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Uh if I work on my materials first, sometimes that's great. But oftentimes, your lighting is going to change your material can look off. And so, it's a lot easier to get your cameras and your lighting knocked out. Um when it comes
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to, you know, the the post-rendering and post-production side specifically, um I like to work with a lot of different actions, and I like to create as much automation as possible.
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So, maybe once we're in week four, um we'll talk about that a little bit after we have more of an understanding of like really how to dive in and use some of these different passes and things.
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Um we'll talk a little bit about maybe how I go about using actions and maybe create a couple of them that will organize my files for me.
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Um you know, we'll do certain parts of a process for me. Uh towards the end of the stream here, we're going to be talking about a plugin that my company CG Hacks um just put out that we'll give you guys for free. It's
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a free download. Um but for instance, that takes all of your layers that you have selected or all of them in your file and automatically converts them all to individual smart objects instead of having to go through the painstaking
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process of right-clicking and doing different things. Um you know, like it's all about automation and, you know, finding those type of processes. So, first one, when I get the post, I like to automate if I know that my client needs, say, 12 different
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product renders on white, it's the same type of background, I have all of my puzzle mats the same way, my crypto mats are the same way, the background never changes, I can start to build different actions that select pieces, create, you know, their
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their own adjustments to certain things, and then all that I have to worry about is maybe just a little small tweak per image instead of redoing everything on every one of them. Um there was uh I think it was I was working at a studio
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called Think Chromatic. Um We were doing Home Depot renders. And we we really automated a whole lot of processes because of Photoshop. So it would be interesting.
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I kind of just click a button and you sit back in your desk and you know browse Facebook. I can say that now.
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Um can't really talk about that when you're at studio. We'd let the We'd let the software work for us. So we'll explore that a little bit this month. Um Do we have any any questions about I have just pasted your
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your website CG Hacks with all the the freebies that you can offer. Yeah, so so let's talk about it. Uh we'll bring it over.
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There we go. See I can get to uh I can pull windows from one screen to another. I feel proud of myself. It's there. Uh so this is CG Hacks. Um This is my company. I just started. I've got
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a group of friends um that are working with me and we're building a lot of really cool tools for Photoshop artists as well as 3D.
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Um so on the Photoshop side, uh you guys can download I would say maybe just do this now uh cuz we'll use some of these assets uh in week two and further. So maybe just go ahead and down the
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download the free mini pack right now. Go ahead and get that. It kind of houses a lot of our Photoshop overlays. So we do really two primary things. It's Photoshop compositing and 3D. So the Photoshop side, we get super inspired by
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visual effects in Hollywood. And so a lot of us found a problem with having to find assets that match Hollywood's quality and be able to have the high resolution images that we can use in Photoshop. So, my guys and I, we figured
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we would solve that problem. So, we're using the Hollywood techniques, right? We're 3D artists. We started doing different things. We got guys that simulate and uh Ryan Hanson is amazing.
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Adrian is amazing. Go to our about page, you can read about these guys. Ryan Sims, super dope. Josh Fenniger, amazing guy that developed the plugin uh that we're going to talk about right now. So, you guys scroll the site. I don't like to do
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whole kind of uh marketing spiels, all of that stuff. But, if you head to shop and then down to freebies, you'll see these smartify layers plugin.
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So, this is the plugin that I was discussing that takes all of your layers and instantly I shouldn't say instantly, you still have to wait for Photoshop's process, but it goes through and creates all of the individual smart objects for
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you instead of you having to right-click each one. Um and yeah, it it saves a lot of time. I feel like my hair is already starting to grow back now that that this plugin is here. Uh if you know about the headache of having
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to right-click every single one of your 30 render layers, um it can be a pain. And so, you know, to kind of show what this might look like, um this is pretty much it. You select, click selected layers to smart objects,
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and everything gets created, and it works out pretty well for you. So, thanks Josh for that.
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Um but yeah, so two sides of it. Go ahead and download the free mini pack because we'll be using some of those assets um for parts of our other presentations, and this guy here is just an awesome plugin that we're going to be using as
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we start to get through next week. So, with that being said, um if you guys are curious about more in-depth, maybe not such long, um, webinars on this stuff, uh, check out our YouTube channel. So, still fairly new YouTube channel. I've
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got plans, uh, to where we're basically going to do a whole lot of a whole lot more post-production for 3D. Um, kind of similar to this, but we'll be building out series of much shorter videos. And you guys can check this stuff out that
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we already have that's on more of the photo compositing side, but in week, I believe it's three, it could be two.
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Um, we're going to be talking about how to add like photo overlays into our renders. A lot of times I mix and match, you know, the 3D side. I don't use VDBs as much anymore for fire or Alembics for
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particles and different things. Now I more or less just use the CG Hacks assets that we have of fire and smoke and so on, um, because it expedites a lot of the processes that I have to do. Um,
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and especially once you get freelancing, you realize that time time is not always on your side. And sometimes you need to work quickly. So, go ahead and check those guys out.
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Um, download those assets. And we're at 1:03 currently. Do we care if I go over just a little bit?
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No, go ahead then. Okay. Yeah, see, and and good demystify. I wasn't sure if we cracked down on that or not. It's been a while.
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All right. So, uh, Redshift side. I am going to make sure Let's head down to render and Redshift.
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Okay. I'm going to attempt to do this with both of my GPUs running. Uh, we'll see we'll see how that plays out.
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Makes the process this bit faster. So, a couple key things that I want to talk about uh, when we're in here is the AO pass, how I set it up, how I like to set it up to have a little bit more control
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over it. Um so, Lino, this is more me telling you so you can keep me on track.
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And we're going to talk about how to set up the puzzle mat and look into the crypto mats. So, we'll start there.
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And then we can move uh move on if needed. So, I did see a question. Are there any questions?
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Well, Okay. Yeah, I haven't seen most of them, but if there a new question, I will tell you.
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Okay. So, I see Scott's question. Um for your regular image you kick out for beauty compositing, is that just an image you save out from Redshift render view?
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Uh Yeah, okay. So, we're going to have a little bit more to talk about.
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Um No, it's not. Generally speaking, I like to just kick those straight out of the render settings.
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Um so, with the render view running here, let's go ahead and open up our render settings.
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So, obviously, we know we're in Redshift, so make sure that we have Redshift selected. That gives us the Redshift um little tab down here at the bottom. We'll make sure that our mode is on advanced. We can head to
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uh AOV here. And take a look at this. So, the AOV side, generally speaking, you're really not going to have to change a whole lot here, especially if you're working on stills and it's just you. Sometimes you may have to go and
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make changes to this. I wouldn't worry so much about it right now um in this moment. But, the AOV manager down here at the bottom is super important.
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The multi-part EXR is important if you have that unchecked, and then you can have the multi-pass compatibility here checked as well. So, a lot of times when I'm setting up uh maybe in a a fresh version of Cinema and I'm setting things
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up, these are kind of the things that I'm looking for just to make sure that they're set up correctly.
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Um once we get into the AOV manager, uh the process of creating these AOVs is pretty simple.
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I'm just going to delete all of mine. There we go. You can see it chugging already. Do you see it on your screen? It gets a little bit laggy.
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All right. So, it's very simple. You have your AOV list on the side here. You choose what you want. Um I don't have the list uh immediately, but in the Redshift documentation, there's actually uh an AOV topic in there that gives you uh
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kind of a breakdown of, you know, the most common or the needed layers for a beauty compositing. I'll have that for the webinar once we get to that stage of the month. Um but if you're curious about any of
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these, uh we'll be talking about them throughout the month as well as YouTube. So beauty simply drag that in, okay? Ambient occlusion pass, we'll drag that in, and it's literally just a click and drag.
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Uh let's see, what else do we want to do? We'll do a cryptomat and we will grab a puzzle mat because those are a little bit different.
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So, what we'll see is the ambient occlusion pass inside of the render view. Let's go ahead and turn this maybe not make that full screen. There we go. Complete opposite of what I was trying to do. So, inside of the render
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view, we can head from our beauty down to our AO. All right. So, our AO pass even if we kick in the buckets is not really going to give us information.
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Um yeah. So to kind of make that a shorter description that's what you're looking at.
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Maybe one of the one of the developers will will fill me in on on where that gets a little bit more accessible.
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So, what I do for my AOV pass or for my AO AOV is create a custom render pass.
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Actually, I can answer for for the AO the AO pass which is not the AO pass is going to give you any material that that's using the AOV the ambient occlusion shader.
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That's all. So, it's very misleading. Yes. Yeah. And so, this one here, let me turn off my buckets for a minute.
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Uh no, Peter. The this file is not available. Um Oh, I'm sorry. That's my fault.
Speaker A
No. it wasn't in the No, just just the renders. Um I I don't own the rights to to all of the uh the 3D assets that we used and being that it was a bit more of a post-production month.
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Um It was definitely a bit more difficult to uh try to include these. So, sorry about that.
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All right. So, our custom AOV pass. We'll see that we have a default material here.
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Okay? Going to close my render settings for a moment. Open up my material manager.
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There we go. And we have the RS AO material that's here. And this is what we're going to plug into our custom AOV.
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Under the default material. Sorry. So, how do we get to that in the first place? Now, we'll head up to create. You can head to Redshift materials. Oh, uh sorry, it's under utilities. That's right. And then we'll see the AO.
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So, that's going to give us our RS AO material we can drop into the default material for our custom AOV.
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And so, we can in this AO custom. Now, inside of our render view There we go.
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Now, we get our AO. And so, this is going to be nice because we don't have to worry so much at this point now about getting those details um out of a file that's just black. And so, I ran into that quite a while. I
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forget where I saw the the tip for this, but whoever that was, thank you. Saved my life.
Speaker A
So, as we start to put that together, um we can see that we have our custom AOV for AO. Sounds really weird when you say it. You don't know whether to say it like forwards or backwards. Um let's
Speaker A
talk about puzzle mat. So, flipping into our puzzle mat, this is going to be a little bit different. Um I'm going to just have to move some of this.
Speaker A
There we go. So, maybe we can see it a little bit better. Come on, Redshift. There we go. All right. So, with the puzzle mat selected, you'll see our mode here. Okay? So, our mode is going to be material ID or you
Speaker A
have the object ID. So, now we're going to use our material ID and we're going to set this to one, two, and three.
Speaker A
Maybe I was, you know, not quite so smart and I clicked once for each, but we'll set those for one, two, and three.
Speaker A
Now, with these being set up, we are going to have to manipulate our materials so that our materials have a material ID of one, two, or three like with the corresponding color. So, what I'm going to do here
Speaker A
is maybe just change I'm going to let's create a new Redshift standard material and I'm going to hold down the alt key and bring that over the plastic rough. So, the alt key and dragging on top of another material
Speaker A
is going to replace that material with the one that you dragged over. So, this will let us set this up uh a little bit more fresh kind of in this scene.
Speaker A
So, with the new AO or sorry, it's now I'm stuck on AO. With the uh puzzle mat AOV and we have our puzzle mat here inside of our render view.
Speaker A
Let's turn on our buckets and we are going to render out just a small section here.
Speaker A
So that we're not kicking off and and rendering the whole image. Okay. Sweet. I'm going to have to change this just a little bit. Sorry guys.
Speaker A
That's because we already have some of this set up with all of the other materials and I didn't replace all of them.
Speaker A
So what we'll do is we can set this to 10 and 11 and 12.
Speaker A
I don't think I have as many there. So this should work out pretty decent.
Speaker A
That'll all go back to black. There we go. All right. So with our new standard material, we have to go into the node editor. I'm going to drag this off to the side. Remember the 10, 11, and 12
Speaker A
that we just created um in our AOV manager. And with our standard material that we just replaced, we're going to select our output node and we can do we'll say 12 for this.
Speaker A
So that is currently set up to be our blue channel. So as this renders out, that material is now going to be blue inside of this pass. So the tough part about using the puzzle mat um with your material ID is that you just
Speaker A
have to know and remember that like hey, I have this material set to this ID. So when you're doing multiple different puzzle mats, you don't get confused as to what is where. Um so check your materials and know your materials are
Speaker A
there and if before like if you're going into somebody else's scene file, go to their AOVs and check out what's there because you may find six different puzzle mats with a bunch of different numbers and you that will tell you that
Speaker A
hey, I have to go figure out what these masks are. Um, hopefully they put some annotations inside of their scene file, but if they didn't, uh, that's a good indication is to one of the things that they've adjusted.
Speaker A
All right. Crypto mats. Crypto mats are a little bit easier to set up because you have your object name.
Speaker A
Make sure that this is all the way on the screen here. You have your object name, material name, your RS object ID, and a user attribute. So, most often for this, I'm not really going to be using the Redshift object ID because that's
Speaker A
what I'm setting up the puzzle mats for is very specific pieces. Um now on this one, uh, the material let's do material name. And we'll just change straight over to crypto mat. So, we'll see right away that the crypto mat
Speaker A
is starting to get rendered. We don't have to set up all of the different bits of information like we did for the puzzle mat, like going into all of the different materials and the output node and then changing the material ID. This
Speaker A
is just automatically going to assign kind of IDs to everything of the same material as it starts to work through it. So, it saves you a lot of time. The biggest bit of time that you're going to be taking is on the back end when you
Speaker A
get to Photoshop, you're going to have to open up that alternative, uh, EXR file for the crypto mats, pull those crypto mats into your main file. It's a little bit different, but it still works. So, with those there, um,
Speaker A
let's talk about saving this all out. So, I'm going to There we go. Turn off buckets.
Speaker A
Turn off my region. Let that think for a moment. And we'll talk about how we go about saving these out and getting this process rolling. So, the save is going to be how we're going to save these out. Now, this one I re-rendered
Speaker A
part of my file, so I currently have saved checked or unchecked, sorry, for the regular image, but this is what it's going to look like as I am going through that process of, you know, saving these out. One kind of key important bit of
Speaker A
information is that the alpha channel is not generally ticked. And I'm rendering out a PNG, and so when I tick alpha channel, it's going to take the alpha channel from my render view.
Speaker A
So, if we click into the alpha here, maybe reset that a moment. Oh, looks like it's still updating. But once we like go into the alpha side, this is going to show us exactly where that transparency area lies in our scene
Speaker A
file. So, everything that's white is going to be visible, everything that's black's going to fade off. It's like a layer mask in Photoshop or an alpha that we're using at any other time. So, in that case, alpha channel is going to
Speaker A
render out a completely transparent background to my product that I have here. Now, with the saving side of it, this is how the image that you all have, this is how I rendered that out. I just rendered it straight out of the regular image
Speaker A
save dialogue, and then the PSD was a multi-pass image. Now, you can very easily, let's just pause the render view here a moment.
Speaker A
We can head up to save a multi-layer EXR or save image as. Those are two different ways to do it.
Speaker A
There are kind of cheat codes sometimes when it comes to giving your clients um you know, say just like a preview render or if you want to head into Photoshop and just do more like a basic photo edit, right? Photoshop has a lot
Speaker A
of great selection tools, so on and so forth. You just want to quick and dirty edit, you can go into that. Now, the way that we do that is by copying our frame buffer.
Speaker A
So, we'll see if I can move this over and just show where that actually sits in the render view. Now, up towards the top towards the picture viewer icon, you'll see the little uh stacked papers.
Speaker A
And this is going to be copy to frame buffer. That's going to allow you to just open up Photoshop, paste that directly into Photoshop off of a new document, and you can start to go to town just kind of compositing. So, if
Speaker A
you're doing something for say personal work or social media, and you just want to have a quick render, that's a method I would take.
Speaker A
You don't even have to render it out um you know, crazy resolution or anything like that.
Speaker A
So, any questions? Mm. No. No. I don't see anyone. Okay. Yeah, there is a question about volumetric lighting, but that's I'm sure that's something you're going to to cover in the next um or maybe next after session.
Speaker A
Oh, let's see. In a scene with volumetric lighting, which AOV uh would be beauty without volumetric lighting?
Speaker A
Huh. I I know I cannot tell this one because it's there is none already but you you're supposed to recreate your composite and then if you just exclude all the volumetric lighting and you have a Okay. All right. I was thinking maybe I
Speaker A
I was like man like it really stumped me there for a minute. Um but yeah if there's really no easy way to do it then I feel a little bit better cuz I was like maybe I should know this.
Speaker A
Um I actually like to do a lot of my my atmospheric perspective maybe not like crazy volumetric lighting and all of that but I like to do my atmospheric perspective.
Speaker A
Um you know and kind of like that hazy depth or fog I just like to do that in Photoshop. Um save render time.
Speaker A
So and it's more flexible. Yes, I agree. One last thing. I got it. One last thing. I'm sorry but I have to say this while we're talking about render passes is your Z depth. Z depth is a huge thing
Speaker A
that if you don't know what setting to have it on that is going to be an issue. And so we're going to cover that really quickly then we don't have the questions come up in you know a later part of the month.
Speaker A
So we'll head into the AOV manager and we will bring in our depth pass.
Speaker A
Select depth. And what we'll see there we go. Aha. It actually worked last time it was freaking out on me.
Speaker A
So inside of your Z depth pass attributes all right you have your filter type which is full and you can go minimum depth max depth center sample whatever that's fine. You leave that at full. That's like from your camera to
Speaker A
the furthest point back in your scene. All right. That's easy. Depth mode this is a little bit different. So if we keep if we keep this at Z, your render is really not going to have any information that's going to be
Speaker A
usable in Photoshop. Um it's meant for more uh like Nuke style, Fusion style. I'm not sure if you can use uh an unnormalized Z depth in After Effects. Uh Lionel?
Speaker A
Yes, yes, you can. Yeah, you can. I always use the depth mode on Z because you have all the depth and but you know how to you know how to do it.
Speaker A
Yeah. So, in Photoshop, it's a little bit different. So, Photoshop, we're going to use the Z normalized. And what that's going to do is give you a very clear representation of the white and the black kind of near to far, far to
Speaker A
near, whatever one you choose, normalized or normalized inverted. Um you definitely want to have that normalized, especially if you're going to be using a 16-bit depth uh cuz you just won't have the information there to crunch down. So,
Speaker A
yeah, hopefully that makes sense. I'm glad that we just logged that little piece so that um if anybody's watching this, it gets a little bit difficult sometimes.
Speaker A
Uh you know, demystifying, we always go over and I want to make sure that we kind of finish as closely as possible.
Speaker A
So, uh any final questions before we have uh we have to call it. No, I think we're done now. Uh we'll see about how how to add um depth of field on the next week, I guess. Uh Yeah. So,
Speaker A
like I said, this month is kind of progressive. Um we are doing more of this discussion today. We'll be talking about various topics next week. Uh a little bit more hands-on next week.
Speaker A
Um and every one of these weeks is kind of building up to the final week, which is a bit more of the rebuilding your beauty pass using all of your layers. And so, yeah, it's it's going to be start off a little
Speaker A
bit slow, a lot of discussion, and then we'll move into the craziness and fun stuff. Nitro music, Z-depth question.
Speaker A
Let's see if I can find it here. Do you see which one he he had asked about Z-depth?
Speaker A
Yeah, it was about how how to use it with the with the Photoshop. Oh channels.
Speaker A
Channels channels everything. So, using the Z-depth, we're going to get to that. We we have a whole webinar that's going to be talking about re-lighting with normals, using the Z-depth for various things, compositing with your Z-depth, like using the alpha channels and stuff like
Speaker A
that. You know, to put everything together. So, don't worry, we'll get there, but the short answer is your channels. And so, you'll use your channels to a layer mask, that layer mask to adjust whatever adjustment layer or grouping of effects
Speaker A
that you have going on. So, yeah. All right. I'm done going over, I PROMISE.
Speaker A
MAYBE NOT NEXT WEEK, just today. All right, so So, thank you very much for Dustin for sharing all those tips. Yeah, it's very interesting, especially for me because I do all my compositing on After Effects, and it's very very close to it. But,
Speaker A
as you said, as Photoshop doesn't do very well with 32-bits, you have to well, to to use it some tricks to overcome the the the caveats.
Speaker A
Yeah. it's it's very interesting. I'm I'm pretty curious to see about the the depth of field inside Photoshop. We we'll see next week. Okay, so thank you everyone for following along.
Speaker A
And we will see you next week for the second episode. And how to to get amazing stuff in Photoshop.
Speaker A
Yeah. Sounds good. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye.
Topics:3D renderingAOVPhotoshop compositingCinema 4DRedshiftMaxon trainingbeauty passmulti-pass compositingpost-productionrender passes
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