What is LookDev for VFX? Create Better FX (VFX Intro | Part 10)

[Music] hello everybody and welcome in this section we're going to be talking about look depth look development so we're going to be developing our look what

does that mean it means we're going to be creating shaders we're going to be applying textures we're going to be lighting our scene we're going to do a quick test camera and then start setting

up our renders so we can you know all of that is going to take us to our final image so let's let's go for it hello hello everybody welcome to look that we're gonna be taking a look at adding

some lights we're gonna render some things uh applying shaders it's gonna be a lot of fun so let's jump into it we this is the scene we're gonna be using we have

backdrop a grid sphere and some other funky looking spheres here with another grid so let's take a look i'm gonna turn on a light

in this case it's gonna be my hdr like i will talk about this just in a second just so we get something in our render preview there we go

so you can see the sphere in the render looks quite different than in the viewport and that is because it already has a shader applied the texture uh the all the textures here i got from

mega scans they have some very high quality textures so that's the that's the scene uh you can see the spheres here these are

primarily used just to test things out just to see how everything looks with 100 reflections with this chrome ball how our white surfaces will look like how

our black surfaces will look like and then we have this color chart here that is usually used to color balance or white balance the image later

and these are all just checkers just so we make sure that our image is in the correct space and so nothing is being blown out you

can see here this image is a bit white so if we just drop drop down our exposure you can see there's uh there's still information all the information information there so nothing

is actually being uh nothing is actually clipping but that's how you would use those checks those checkers just to check

anyway that's our scene that's the sphere i turned on our hdr light in this case so i'm using arnold or in this

particular case it doesn't really matter you have other render engines mantra is a native render engine with houdini but i'm using

arnold in this case so arnold and you can go to our flight and you have a bunch of different lights here so in this case we just added a light so

i'm gonna bring it up a bit i think it's like eight and if i crank its intensity we will start seeing the result here so

that's cool uh i will remove the slide for now so uh because we're gonna look at lights in a second so our hdr here is

a texture it's a hdr means for high dynamic range images and it's a spherical texture that wraps around rc rc so if i remove the backdrop

and re-render you will see our clouds appearing in the background [Music] and of course they're not appearing

it happens every time so it's because i have my contribution here set to zero for the camera and here we are we can see the clouds like so so

these clouds and this spherical image is wrapping around our image like so if i step into my camera zoom out a bit

and start rotating you will see that's how our clouds are looking and let me just check here i'm gonna use latitude and longitude so that's gonna

change it so it's mapped correctly to the sphere just have to re-render quickly but that's how that's what we're using currently to map

well to light rc and these clouds and you there's a bunch of different variations of this but these clouds are very soft and that's going to reflect in our image

as well that this is usually very a very good first base to apply to our image so let me back to my camera so let's

re-render from our main camera let's go with one here we go so that's how it looks like i'm gonna put back my backdrop

just so the image you can see we were getting some very cool details here very uh not details but reflections coming from the hdr and that's what we're looking for let me just

quickly re-render again and focus on this section when we're doing look dev like we are now all of that has to be taken

into account so we have to check at how our ground how our materials are gonna react to our hdr or any other light just

to see them in different scenarios and you can see we're getting some very cool details here from this texture which is very high-res

very cool so let's go back put back our backdrop all right cool so when it comes to rendering we can actually split we can do a few different passes so i'm just

going to quickly show you uh i have a specular direct here and i have a diffuse direct so if and both of them together are just our combined color

and the reason why you would like to do that is because later in calm you're going to see that if we split this in different passes we actually have full control

instead of re-rendering something if we want for instance if we would like this ball the sphere to be even more wet looking to have even more reflections we could

adjust that income or vice versa if you would like this to be less wet we can do that as well and i can quickly show you that if i

jump into nuke this is just the base geometry render this is the comp that we're going to be looking at later and you can see i have all the different passes separated here

like so and if we go back here later you then combine them together and it's just not just the different

passes but we have different aoes here so these are uh passes within passes which would just look like this so let's say for our lights we would

create a separate pass for our lights a separate pass for our hdr so for headlights hdr and our environment light so we do this because later we can then

have full control like so so i decided to make the headlights orange and because i have that separate pass i can just make them whatever color

i want it's very easy to change the same goes for our hdr image and same goes for actually i think this is our hdr and

then this is the environment light so you can change the environment light like so all right very cool

so let's get back to the the way we can do this is on well actually let me just turn on the other lights that we have in the scene let me turn this one off

turn the point light here we go so that looks pretty cool you can see we're getting more specular here right now it's catching a bit more

of some of the areas on our shader and this is just a simple overhead point light if i enable our quad light and maybe boost it up a bit

we're gonna get a nice orange tinted light coming from the left this would be our key light so this would be our top light and this one would be our key light coming from the side

we can i go out this is how does the light looks like if we change the size of the slide let's say it would make it very small the

shadows usually get a lot sharper and vice versa if you change the if you make it a lot bigger the shadows are going to get you can see

the shadow here is very sharp because the light source is actually quite small if we change this to 20 by 20

shadows will get very soft you can see how everything changed we can also also see our light here on the left but everything got much softer and this

the shadow here is actually coming from our point light so we can change the radius set it to 20. you can see now our shadow got a lot a lot softer maybe even two

soft oops let's just quickly re-render sometimes uh yeah sometimes you need to

let's go back down to two yes all right here we go we're back in business uh i'm just gonna remove the contribution from for our left light or actually i kind of like it so i will

leave it out so i'm gonna duplicate this light and i'm gonna duplicate it go into it so now we are driving the light and i'm gonna create

a backlight you can see where the scene is automatically updating here and this backlight is going to be a bit more sharp so i'm going to spin it down

and let's make it a bluish color and maybe up the intensity of it so now we're gonna get a nice backlight happening this quad is also

you know shining the light on our backdrop there's a bunch of different ways to remove that that i'm not gonna go into right now but you can also use a

spotlight with a spotlight you would be able to control the cone 100 and you just get more control like that so you can change it from uh what to a

spotlight and now we have our cone angle here and you can see now we're literally just hitting our sphere and not the background we can also change the

spot radius and lens radius all right so let's make this just a bit smaller so just a tiny bit more so we have a soft shadow here but this is still quite hard

so let's change this penumbra angle sure if i'm pronouncing that right so this will soften out the edge shadow as well

probably need to re-render again sometimes when you change the settings you just have to re-render just so all the settings get reapplied so here we go all right so that's pretty cool

i'm going to turn off the spotlight so you can see now we kind of have full control and we have our orange light here uh another light that i wanted to show you guys is

and let me turn off everything and let's go back to our camera is the gobo light and turn it on this slide is quite

special because it's using a texture and that's what i'm using here to create these pockets of light so if we go here these pockets of light i wanted to

emulate the shadows and pockets of light coming from a very cloudy day and that's how you did it that's how i did it with that gobo

go back you can see we start to get those pockets of light appearing i'm just going to remove the backdrop in this case it's going to be more visible [Music]

and i'm just going to turn the exposure up and you can see we're getting those pockets and how this works is you just set this to a spotlight and

go under filters you can apply shaders inside your lights and in this case i was just using this noise texture that is just a basic

very basic noise and that you can see it here that's how the noise looks like and that's that's where the light is gonna shine through and then in the shadow parts it's gonna you know

be shadowy anyway that's how it looks like and those are the different types of lights you can use i'm just gonna put back my hdr

and probably my well let's just leave it let's put the point light on as well and our backdrop so let's go and take a

look in the shader for our sphere another re-render just so we get the backdrop in this is the arnold renderer

i'm just going to change this specular to zero just so it's a bit faster i'm gonna go to progressive rendering just so we get results quicker here we go

uh don't worry about these settings every render engine has a bit of a different uh ui and different settings that are exposed here so i'm not going to bore you with all of that

and let's get into our shares so this is our test rock shader you know inside that's how it looks like it's nothing special this is kind of a basic setup

for creating shaders and let's let's see what happens when i turn this off and i'm gonna put this to the left so it's been bigger oh no we lost the color

what's happening so i was using a texture here if we quickly take a look at it show images it's called an albedo texture

and that texture is what is giving us the color you can see all the other maps that we're using here are actually black and white except this one that is our normal map and that

is that's going to determine where our bump is happening on the on the shader or on so that's our albedo that's what gives the color

this one is controlling the specularity you remember when i was looking at this if we remove this let's see what happens it's fully specular now because we're

not using any masks so the whole fader is actually just uniform so if i turn off this specularity now without using the proper map for it it's gonna be

completely dark because we don't have any specularity and vice versa if we go up it's gonna be completely specular and super shiny all right

so let's go back to our combined color map if we remove let's see we don't need this one don't worry about that

and if we remove our bump we still have some displacement happening because we still have our displacement map if we remove this one as well we're gonna go back to

uh back to zero and this will actually look like it looks in the viewport you know just a simple simple little sphere there we go it's a bit bright just gonna tone it down a bit

so if i go back and put this into normal you will start to see details reappearing here

so that's what our that's what that funky blue and violet image is doing it's giving us those very cool details uh and the shader on the ground is using the same

well the ground is using the same shader so you can see the details reapply here so that's how they look like very cool and if i put back our

texture in the base color re-render you will see we're gonna get we're gonna get our colors back [Music]

here we go uh which just this by itself in many cases that would be enough you can see we're getting a lot of cool details it looks quite photo realistic i like it so let's

start putting in uh the other maps so this one i'm gonna put into our specular and our specular roughness and in this case i would just use

okay yes re-render so this will start giving us back our specular map so that that's where it is and you can see our map is actually wherever our map

when i was showing you those black and white maps uh wherever it's white we're gonna get specularity where it's start we're not gonna get specularity we can change this with our color correct so if

i if i gamma up you will see everything becomes specular and this gamma will actually determine if i slowly go down

with it you will see how it's changing the image and now if i maybe push back on our exposure let me go back to zero

you can see very clearly what that map is doing if i go even lower the two low two five

and let's go higher with the exposure maybe five not two too high contrast lower contrast so you can see our specularity is now

applied and even if i remove it from here you will see an even bigger result if i push the specular up so that's pretty cool so let's leave it at that we got a different look you can

see it's kind of it's still doing the specular map in between the cracks so that's giving us a very cool result here very nice i like

very proud of this so let's let's let's plug in our displacement and that well that will change the image quite a bit

i love playing with displacement maps there are amazing oh here we go so that looks very cool now the displacement is

you can see it's not applying any displacement on in our viewport that's because this displacement is actually happening on in render time and we can change different

uh settings here in the displacement we can make it even higher [Music]

like so so that was that looks pretty badass and you can see it's changing it on our ground as well because it's the same shader and the amount of display so this is the

amount of displacement but actually our sphere is has to be subdivided also at render times to get to this result so if i put this to none

we will still be getting displacement but not as much because our sphere doesn't have enough typology it doesn't have enough of

let's say its resolution is not big enough to get all of those tiny details so this is what we get this could still work in a lot of cases

and it does because i use it here because i knew that i will be using depth of field i my displacement was not that high res

it was very low res just so it was giving me a bit of that bumpiness this is the reason i did that is because i knew that depth of field would not

would kind of render everything invisible and it takes longer to render with displacement when you're subdividing a big chunk of your area or

your ground that's will that will take a bit longer on your render because it has to subdivide everything at render times okay

you can see it takes just a bit longer all right so that's pretty cool love it so that's kind of the basics of faders how you apply textures and then how you

would render another cool thing that we can do is we go to the squad light i'm just gonna turn it on turn off the hdr so we get the full

actually let's turn on the oh the point light is that's too bright yeah sounds good so our quad line let's make this a bit brighter

[Music] and all right so we need to put the contribution put this to zero i'm going to call this or so this orange light this is going to be

our aov so if we go to the render and this is like i was showing you before that's just going to be a separate pass then we are going to have more control later in column so here oops

uh here i was already using those specular interviews they are here so if we go up say dba orange light

re-render we're going to get that light separate so later in comb like i was showing you you can then just modify it if you don't like the orange you can change it to blue or whatever other

color so here we go that's that light just that light being separated from the other lights that we have here as well and we can do the same for our point

light right so point and we just go here say same thing this is just like us like i said a specific thing you have to do in arnold

don't worry about it it's not really the point all right so now we have our point light and we have our orange light isn't that cool and then we can look at them combine so that's how you

would uh start doing look that on your lighting as well so we looked at how to do how you would do like that on your shaders on your asset here our asset in

this case is just this sphere and uh the ground but uh let's take a look at something more more concrete uh our ship

yay let's let's render the ship let's see what what the ship has all right that's how the ship looks like right now uh just to make it a bit more shiny

i'm gonna turn this on that's gonna look way more metallic just gonna be around quickly and

i will turn off the point light and turn back our hdr nope it's not right all right it's gonna get right with me

here we go i'm just gonna turn this off uh lower the exposure so that's how our ship looks like i didn't do a lot of um texturing on the ship again because i knew it's going to be

very dark and the textures won't be very visible i didn't even bother creating a separate material for the uh for the glass because you would probably

have to do that you would just group this and create a separate material for the glass and maybe for the guns but in my case i was a bit lazy and i didn't do that so let's

go to our ship shader that's how it looks like it's a bit bigger uh not that big it's still quite manageable so let's put it here on the

left where we have a bit more space all right ship shader let's see where we're at let's bring in our texture so this would be this would be a texture that i just

applied on the whole ship it just has some scratches it has some grungy maps and some other kind of shapes to it so that would just create

like a base color so our ship is not just a chrome a shiny chrome ball so that's one pass that i did a second pass that i did is i applied some

kind of deteriorate deterioration on the edges so let's fly that one so it looks like that it's quite manageable it's quite modifiable

right now it's inverted just because i wanted to show you how that would look like but you can see uh this creates very cool edgewear and if we go here and

invert it let's see what we get you see now it's inverted and we would start getting very cool details happening here on the edges almost like the edges were

worn down and we can change this again if we go from concave contacts to concave re-render let's see what we get and i will show you how this mask actually

looks like but it's actually it's looking at the curvature of our geometry and you can see now it's just going to do it in between

if we put our spread to a bit lower eight you can see now it's doing it just uh where our edges are and it looks very cool here on the gun as well

we can change the color of this easily to make it orange if we want to but that's really not the point and we just want it to have to be

have a bit of color variation it doesn't have to be too dark right [Music] and what this mask is if i just quickly show you here it just looks like this

this is a mask that is preceded procedurally generated for us with this curvature i'm plugging in some noises just so it breaks the edges and

let's look at convex again this is going to invert it essentially cool i'm not i'm going to leave it like this because just because i like it let's

increase the range to 1.

yeah two two one i will then increase this range i think i'm plugging in the wrong one

yeah that's the one [Music] so you can see how that would be changing we go back to one would give us a very

crisp edge if we go lower a bit it's going to give us a bit more of that white areas yeah we're here in there there we go that's what i wanted just a

bit more of that okay let's leave it like that the the last thing that i did was i added a bit more of that wear down

material so i added another texture that would just be scratches on top of everything so you can see that will give us this this kind of details and let's quickly

go to let's go and increase the resolution of our camera to

something like okay now it's going to take a bit longer to render and the image is going to be a bit bigger but you will see that we're going to get

much more let's just focus on this area otherwise this is going to take so long you can see our image is getting much more crispy in terms of resolution because it's much

higher res and now you're going to be able to see all of that image i mean all of that all of the textures that we applied and that's what uh that's what we get i

think that looks pretty cool so that's how you would do look dev on you know another asset in this case our ship the

texture looks like that quickly oh here we go so it's one of these textures that's the gobo noise before and this you know it just has uh it just has

scratches essentially to it just like you see here and they're always black and white images they are all right that's cool cool let's go back to our hd

[Music] it's gonna change quite a bit now a lot smaller all right cool so that's it for our look depth with our assets i just wanted to

quickly show you how you would do well i need to stop rendering how you would do that on your volumes so here we have the volumes and that's our that's a sneak peak of how the volume looks like

um let's see so these are our volumes and the let's go to our rendering so you can see here when i was rendering

the volumes and clouds and geo and our atmosphere are actually different passes so let me quickly show you how that looks like so we go to our geopass

you see it's just gonna be rendering our geometry with nothing else supply if we go to our atmos pass i love this pass

it's just gonna give us a very very cool moody atmospheric image you can do a lot of that in comp as well to get a similar kind of effect but in this

case i really wanted the headlights to be visible in the fog so that's how they look like and we also have different lights here of that render that's not

i pressed the wrong thing uh i have different lights and different passes like before you can see this is just that fog light this is the environment light

these are just the headlights uh and so on and it's the same kind of logic you would just split a lot of your passes in lollipop a lot of your lights into

different passes like here so you can see this is just the spotlights so you have ultimate control later in cloud so let's go back to our smoke pass

[Music] and let's look at this explosion these are the explosions here all right so that's our volume you can

see we have that crispy chicken shader going on looks very cool let's get into the front so the material is actually being applied here it's just a bit different

again it's all specific that's the shader that is giving us this crispy chicken look uh i'm not gonna go too much into it it's not the part

of this look dev uh workshop but we do cover all of that in our explosion workshop all right cool so let me try this with a very standard basic volume later just to see what we get and

what we can do to make it a little a little better volume like this in re-render and i'm assuming it's gonna look horrible

yep looks beautiful beautiful exactly what we want lower the density and this is what we get it's uh yeah doesn't look that appealing to be

honest if we compare it to what we had before so what we can do is to fix this a bit is bring in our own data so go to volume

load so we're going to be sampling our temperature that we got from the sim so we got our temperature and we plug it into our emission

so this is going to be our emission scale so instead of using emission just at a basic one a very linear value we're gonna change it to

temperature and we can start remapping this let's say we put it to 20 you will see now that this is actually changing put it back to

well let's keep it at one for now what we're going to do is create a wrap maybe a float and

this as our input and we want to plug this into the temperature so now we can actually control our temperature field is distributed

so and you can start changing a few values here and we're going to get to a similar result not not the same but kind of

with this method and let's see put down a multiply here just so it's a bit more visible to 10.

so yeah it's a bit noisy it's not the best but you can see what we're looking at here like we want to get to some of those

we don't want all the values to just be bright like this we want it to be a bit more we want some of the black the darker areas like here to come through right so

that's what we're trying to achieve with this method and we can get to a very we can get it in a good spot to be honest but uh it

it takes a lot of tinkering with the with the values to get there uh but yeah we just look at this one for just as a reference

we got something it's something uh you would but that's how you would get these volumes and those uh fields in and then start modifying them like that but

you can see it's like a night and day difference and this is not using any lights it's just using uh field fields like other vdb data to get to

this all right so we also have an emission pass here that will only show us the emissions so if we go to our smoke pass output

and again here we can plug in all of that and we have aoe 5 emission and that will help us later in calm to just select the emission and

glow put additional glow on top of it if we look at our scene just a bit more you can see i have a bunch more lights these are just lights uh for our headlights i'm using rivets this will essentially

just use the point transformation data on our light and apply our light you can see it here make it a bit bigger

there's a viewport i can scale money that's our light and it's going to move with our spaceship so that's cool so that's how i'm doing the headlights

all the other lights are some additional lights for our fog this is for our gobo and i'm rendering the hdr separately just as a background and you will see

that in con later um another an interesting pass was this atmo pass atmos pass that i was showing you before where is it atmos so this is this pass

and this is interesting because what i'm doing is i am essentially just putting a big box

of a big volume box on everything and this will create all of those volume metrics that you see here and that's a very cool pass to have in your vendors if you want to tweak it later you can

put it uh you can have more fog less fog anything in between so this is where our renders are uh this is our clouds let me just quickly show you the clouds

clouds render that's how our clouds look like and clouds and volumes are very similar and the way you would render them let's

just quickly preview that one i specifically wanted them to look like rainy clouds so they are a bit more streaky downwards uh just so it feels like it was actually raining and it creates a bit more mood

and atmosphere in that way and they're not really clouds this is more like a foggy cloud pass so here if you look at here again in our

renders i'm separating everything that that's going to give us full control later even the sparks if we go i put a direct frame let's check

sparks yeah sure they're here render sparks they're also separate and then we just plug everything and combine them on top specifically with sparks you need to

render them usually at a higher resolution and you have to crank up the um the samples

so you get every every spark visible otherwise some of them are too thin to be visible in the render all right guys that's it that's all i can think of oh another thing

there's a thing called a geo light and i just wanted to quickly show you how that looks like and what it does because it's it's a very important light let's get to it so our geology here this is

what we're using we're essentially taking our our volume converting it to geometry you can see we actually have polygons here

and caching that out the reason we do that is we can use that data in our geo live here and this will just you use a mesh

essentially here and plug in your mesh like so and what that will do is [Music] it's our jio light here it's going to be a bit slow to render

uh but it's definitely worth it because that will actually give us the right illumination coming from our explosion and that's quite important you know if the explosion is quite bright you need

everything else to be illuminated by that explosion and that is something you render separately as well just because you can see it's quite slow and we don't need this for the

whole 400 frames we just need this for those you know 15 frames where the explosion is actually active and yeah that's how that looks like

[Music] all right i think we covered pretty much everything this is uh the scene uh when everything is cleaned out and kind of

you put notes so other people know how to access it uh but yeah in terms of look dev i think we went through everything we covered how to apply shaders how to apply lights how to

render things um how to create different aovs and now we're gonna combine and go and combine everything go into compositing

and finish uh our cg project all right let's do it