Architectural Visualization with C4D and Octane: Compositing in Blackmagic Design Fusion, Part 1

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Instructor Brandon Clements

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  • Duration: 10:07
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In this video we will take a look at using Blackmagic Design Fusion for compositing our render passes from Octane Render. We will learn the basic fundamentals of navigating in the software. We will also build out our beauty pass by utilizing the merge node to combine render passes.

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Transcript

Hello again, and welcome back to this video. Where were going to be using Fusion 8 to composite our Render Pass that we had got from Octane in Cinema 4D. So this is what we left off with, with our final render in the last video. And here is our final result that we're going to be creating in Fusion 8. So you can see, it's just a little bit more brighter, a little bit more inviting, and something that you'd see in an editorial. So this is an overview of all the nodes that we're going to be creating. So let's go ahead and get started by coming up to our window and choosing a new composition. so there are two ways to get our footage into Fusion. We can come up here to this top bar where we have all our nodes, and we can drag down a Loader. Immediately, we'll be greeted with this pop-up window where we can navigate to where it is on our drive. The easiest thing for me is to just, drag it in from a Finder window or the Explorer window. So once we found that on our drive, we just drag that into the Node Graph window, and it creates a Loader node for us automatically. Then we can go to Import, and we can see all the different settings here, what kind of file type it is, the depth, pixel, aspect, ratio, everything. By default, it's going to read it from, like the format of the EXR. But if you need to tell it specifically what to be, this is where you're going to find how to change that. So we go down to Format. And this is all of our…This is our multi-layer EXR window. So, what we can do here is just start to build everything out. So I want to find my Diffuse Direct. Okay. So Diffuse Direct is going to be Layer 11. So I'm going to just fill this in, so red, green, blue. Okay. So that's how you can set up what your multi-layer EXR is going to be on your Loader. And then if I hit F2 on the keyboard, I can rename this. So I'm going to rename it to DiffuseDirect, hit OK or Enter. And now, what we can do is drag it into either of these viewers. So if I drag it and drop it into this viewer, you can see that I get this little dot that shows up. And once that fully loads the image, we're going to be able to see it here. Now it looks a little funny. It looks kind of contrasted and the colors don't really match what should be here. So what we can do is just click on the…So this is a lookup table. And, Fusion is inherently linear, so we're going to have to tell the Gamma to change. So we're going to choose, the easiest one that I like to use is the Gamut View LUT. And we're going to say No Change to the source color space, but for the output, we are going to change it to Monitor space, sRGB, and of course add the gamma. And then we can actually use the LUT on both of these windows to check this out and view it. So, if we do it here for the second window, again, we enable the LUT, and we'll just use the Gamut View again. We'll hit Edit, and we'll change it to this Monitor space, the sRGB. And there we go. So, both of our viewers are now...have a gamma of 2.2, viewing a file input that has a gamma of 1. So we have that curve on there now. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to show you guys how to build this out very quickly. So we're going to hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to basically copy and paste another node. We're going to change the format again. So let's do Diffuse indirect, which is going to be layer 10. Once that is changed, I will hit F2, and I will say DiffuseIndirect. So now we have, on viewer one, DiffuseDirect. And once this loads on viewer two, we will have the Indirect pass. And you can see what we're viewing in the actual viewers and the node that is corresponding with that in this bottom part. So DiffuseDirect, DiffuseIndirect. And, you can also see the dots that are on the nodes displaying what viewer they are in. So you can hit one and two to switch these. So, if I hit one on the DiffuseDirect, we'll just switch the viewers. So how do we actually combine these together? Well, I know that you're going to be using a lot, is the Merge node. So if we just drag this and drop it into the viewer, we can also right-click, go to Add Tool, and then we can go to Composite and Merge. So this is how you can gain access to all the different nodes inside of Fusion. Now basically, we need to take the output... Of course, if we hover over any of these icons, we're going to find out what the names of those are. So it looks like we have a foreground and a background. So if you think of the foreground as the layer on top, and the background as the layer on the bottom, we're going to combine these. So if you don't want to remember the colors, what I always do is just right-click and hold from the output, which is the red square. And I'm going to drag and drop that onto the Merge, and I'm going to say this is the Foreground, and then I would drag and drop this onto the Merge again, and I'm going to say this is the Background. So you got to right-click, hold, and drag and drop that. So let's view what the Merge node is doing. Okay, so it looks like we only see the…what looks to be the foreground. So we can't see through onto the background, so we're not really compositing these together. Until we come to the Alpha Gain, you can see we're set to Additive. When we bring the Alpha Gain down, we essentially now have an add node. So let's start to bring all of our passes together. I'm going to pause the video, and I'm basically just going to copy and paste this and change all of our layers, so we have them to work with. So when I come back, everything will actually be stacked up. All right. So now, I have all of the Loaders here, and I've renamed them appropriately. And I've also came into the Format and changed what multi-layer it is on, okay? We even have a Beauty pass that we had saved out. So if I hit one, we can view what the raw render looks like. So you may be wondering from the Beauty pass, that this doesn't look specifically like the Cinema 4D render. So, let's take a look at this and then let's flip over to see 4D. So this was the result that we have in Octane in C-4D. So this is different than what we have in Fusion, and I'm going to show you why. Basically the reason why is, when you look at the camera imager that we rendered from, we have this response curve. So this is almost like a LUT. This is basically a lookup table. It's going to add color, and it's going to bring brightness to shadows, mid-tones, and highlights, and it's going to give it a different look than what we have right now in Fusion. So let's flip back over to Fusion and take a look. So again, if we come into the Gamma View LUT, and we go to Edit, we have some different kind of LUTs that we can flip through and change to get a different response curve. So you can see with the 709 LUT, we can get something that's very similar to what we had in Octane, but we still don't have the color changes that we had from the camera imager. So now, I basically have all the control to create the look that I want here in Fusion. So now, we need to create more of these Merge nodes to hook up everything that we need. So I'm going to go ahead and just Ctrl+C on the Merge, and I'm going to start pasting some more Merge nodes in here for us. So we're going to take the output, and we're going to put this on the foreground, and we're going to take the output of this, and put it on the background. And we're going to view this in viewer two. So you see, we got a little bit more of the ReflectionDirect showing up. So again, let's say Foreground, Background, View It. And since I've copied and paste the same attribute from Merge node one, I'm going to have this Alpha Gain already set to be an additive effect. So we're going to keep going through this. Okay, so we basically have our stack made up. So you can see that this is the Beauty pass, right here. You can see the name, Beauty. And this is our last merge. So, we're getting pretty much the same result here. The last node that we have is an Ambient Occlusion node. So I'm going to drag down a new Merge node. So I am going to say that this is going to be the Background, and then I'm going to have the Foreground, the topmost layer, being the Ambient Occlusion node. Let's go ahead and view that in the second viewer by hitting number two on the keyboard. And once that loads up, you can see from Octane, we have mostly white, and we have these areas that are close together being very dark, okay? So since we adjusted this Render Pass inside of Octane, we're going to have a nice result here when we flip this to Multiply. And once we do so, we can see the difference between the Beauty... Let's just zoom into the breakfast set. And here's our Ambient Occlusion Merge node. So you can see, we get a lot more of this darkened area here. Everything looks like It has a little more contact, especially with the shadows on the table and on the couch. And then you can see even in the rug, we have a little bit more detail kind of showing up. So we can adjust the Blend node to bring in the amount of Ambient Occlusion up and down. And now you can really see the effect. So I like this to be kind of subtle, so I'm going to have it around 0.5. Now we have our ZDepth node. So there's a lot we can do with ZDepth. And in the next video, I'm going to show you how to do depth of field inside Fusion. We're going to use a Depth Blur node to kind of fake our camera. And we can also use this to build out a fog. So if we needed to add some type of fog to our environment, we're going to use that to kind of brighten up the image a little bit more. So I'm really excited to show you some more stuff here in Fusion 8. So in the next video, let's make our render look even better. Thanks a lot.
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