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Now here's the raw "merge" of the three separate elements, brought together with no modifications made to them. Well, kinda...
The "real" fire was rendered much slower than the speed of the Fusion smoke/fire, so it had to be sped up. And of course the elements had to be transformed into the same position, etc.
The second image is, FWIW, the "flow" of the nodes in the compositing app.
Oh, and I forgot to mention...
When compositing from different sources, often you'll have stuff with different pixel resolutions and aspect ratios. So you need to decide on your final output aspect and resolution, and tweak all of your source material so it matches.
But if you're doing a project from scratch, you can determine that at the beginning (or you'll be told what it is), so you can match all of your source material at the outset.
Now, let's say that we decided we want to grab an image from the internet and composite it with a background we rendered in Carrara. How do we do that?
Well, I grabbed a photo of some flames, and I want to composite that onto a Carrara/Blender render. So I import the flames into PS in a separate layer over the background. And here's what I get.
Hmmm....not too good. So what do we do?
Well, we learned before that Blending Modes can be used to get rid of parts of your image, while keeping other parts. We saw that if you have, for example, a shadow pass that is mostly white, with small areas of dark representing the shadows, and you multiply that later with the rest of the image, the white goes away, leaving only the shadow.
And the same thing happens when you Add (Linear Dodge) an image with a lot of black. The black goes away, leaving only the parts of the image with luminance.
In this case we want to get rid of the black background. Now, we could select only the black color and delete it, or something like that. But if you try it you quickly realize that the selection doesn't handle the transparent areas where the black background shows thru the transparent flames.
So we can try doing a simple Add blend mode. And the result is the second image. Much better, right?
However, there's a lot of room for improvement. The flames feel a bit "weak" and overly transparent. So next we'll look at what else you can do.
So now what you can do if you want some more depth and strength to the flames is another very important technique. And that is to add duplicate layers to the image and apply effects and different blend modes to the individual layers.
Clearly what our flames need is some more strength and depth, so we can duplicate the flames layer and play with the opacity, blending modes, and effects applied to the duplicate layers.
Here what I did is add one more duplicate layer, and used a very "fuzzy" Color Range selection in PS to remove most of the old dark background.
The first image is the result of the multiple flame layers, and the second shows each flame layer, side-by-side. One blend mode was a darken, and the other a lighten. And I also tweaked the opacities where needed. And I also added a slight Glow filter to the topmost flame layer.
The idea here is to consider using multiple, duplicated layers, and modify them independently, then bring them together to get the image you want.
OOps !
Now, one other aspect of compositing I want to discuss (well, actually two aspects) are INTEGRATION and COMPLEXITY.
I recall someone here said something to the effect "Stuff that is composited always looks fake" or something like that. What was meant, I believe, was that bad compositing jobs look bad. There are a lot of great compositing jobs that don't look composited. In fact, much of what you see in movies is composited and you'd never know it.
But one of the main reasons for bad compositing jobs involves lack of integration. And another is that compositing in the real world usually requires a LOT of work, and incredible attention to detail. Because humans are incredibly perceptive about even slight inconsistencies in the images they see.
I posted in the start of this thread an image of a character standing in front of a perfect green screen, with consistent values of (0,255,0) for each pixel. That NEVER happens. In fact, often you'll get green/blue screen work that requires an incredible amount of work to clean up. And if you don't put in the time and effort and attention to detail, it will look bad, especially when things are in motion.
So the key to making stuff look good in a composite is INTEGRATION. You need to figure out how to integrate your composite layers with the other layers in your image so that it looks like a real life, seamless image. And at the same time you need to deal with a myriad of real-world details and difficulties that you will encounter with most images.
Now I posted an absolutely HORRENDOUS, quickly done composite in the beginning of this thread, showing a female character standing in front of a background that was an image of a city street. I'll repost it here.
And the reason why it was so bad is that it was not integrated whatsoever, and there was very little time and effort and attention to detail to make it a good composite.
There are many areas that need to be considered in order to integrate your elements together. I'll list some of them here:
1. Image resolutions
2. Edge blur
3. Light wrap
4. Lighting colors
5. Shadows to and from surrounding environment
6. Camera effects (focal length, camera position, DOF, aperture, etc.)
7. Environmental effects (fog, etc.)
8. Reflections to and from surrounding environment
That is just a few of the considerations. And as you can see, in the composite I posted most of those things were not considered. And as a result, the character sticks out like a sore thumb compared to the photograph in the background.
Now a couple of those items might need a little discussion. Edge blur and light wrap are often very important, though subtle effects that make an integration more seamless. Edge blur involves making a very thin mask outline around, say, the character and then slightly blurring only the part of the character defined by that thin edge mask. It effectively blurs the character into the background.
Light wrap mimics the real world effect of the light which surrounds the character or object providing a slight overlap of light around the edges. It's a very subtle way of helping to place the character in the scene by mimicking the interaction of the character and its environment. But of course it applies to any object you might be integrating in a scene.
Unfortunately, the difficulty with all of this integration is that it takes a LOT of time and effort.
Now here's an example of a mask I could have made which would have allowed me to better integrate the character into the background.
This thin edge mask can be generated from any object mask or alpha channel, usually using a feature in most apps that is something like "Find Edges". You take a simple black/white mask, find edges, and it gives you an outline image like below. And usually you will take that image, as I have done, and blur it to make the edge effects a bit softer.
With this edge mask you can then blur edges or add a light wrap effect.
Now, on the other hand, while the character does stick out like a sore thumb, keep in mind that in most images you WANT your main subject to stick out like a sore thumb, and be the focus of the viewers' attention. But you want it to look good, not strange... :) :)
In order to have the character stick out with minimal work, I did a very quick and nasty DOF blur. But the whole thing looks strange.
So the lesson here is....don't do that. Take the time and effort to consider what you should be considering when doing composting work.
Another thing I failed to do was I failed to match the resolution of the character layer with that of the background layer. And as a result the character render layer was only like 720 x 480 or something ridiculous like that.
As you can see from the zoomed image below, the result is some horrendously bad edgies around the character, making seamless integration almost impossible. (click to see full size image)
cdordoni, forgive me for kind of blowing off your question about 16 bit a while back. I didn't want to respond with my knee-jerk reaction. :) :)
I guess my reaction to a discussion of 16 bit in a forum like this is a bit like my reaction to discussions about gamma correction by folks who have no clue what it is, and for whom gamma correction is the last thing they should be worrying about with their images. Or for those who spend incredible amounts of time and money outfitting their computers with 64GB of RAM and super high speed, super cooled processors so they can dump everything on their hard drive into their scene, rather than just using their heads and employing some more efficient scene management and compositing techniques.
Often, discussions of technical details like this, which affect maybe 1% of users here, 1% of the time, become somewhat irrelevant side issues, but take up incredible amounts of argument and discussion.
Again, my apologies. Too many years of frustration here I suppose.
I guess my answer to you is this: "Have YOU ever encountered a situation in your compositing or image manipulation where you felt the need for a bit depth greater than 8 bits?". Because if you haven't encountered a need, why worry about it?
People tend to assume "Hey, this cool thing is 5 times 'better', so I should use it", without realizing that, for them and what they are doing, it might be irrelevant. I mean, if you're doing all this effort to make awesome 32 bit/channel images that you can post on Youtube, it's kind of irrelevant.
Working in 16 bit is pretty much standard for many people. Working in 32 bit is awesome for some very specific needs, but otherwise is, IMO, pretty much a waste.
I'm not familiar with what you can generate in Carrara, since I rarely use it for anything serious. It's far too limiting in many areas. But if it's limited to 8 bit renders, I'd imagine that is fine for 98% of the folks here.
So have you found a need for 16 bit? Just curious...
Important caveat. Thanks. Will adjust how seriously to take your comments regarding the capabilities of Carrara accordingly. But I do appreciate your general discussion of compositing using other software, and while it really belongs on a forum for other software, I'm glad you posted it here.
Please keep posting such educational discussions.
Joe -
I do some modeling and 3d printing related work based on 16-bit heightmaps (essentially the same as a Depth Pass). The 8-bit limitation is a deal breaker for me because the 256 levels result in significant banding/stairstepping in the finished product.
Although I don't use AE, I did some test a few years ago in Photoshop that indicated some compositing applications would also suffer from having only 256 levels to work with.
However, since you have not experienced a problem, I would not worry about it. I have spoken to other users that do compositing, and there are relatively few who have an issue with 8-bits/channel.
I was hoping with enough people voicing concern that something might be done to fix Carrara in this area. After all, there is a 16-bit TIFF export option for the render passes, which does not actually produce 16-bit output (although the file is in 16-bit format). I reported this as a bug when I initially discovered it, and it was later reclassified as a feature request despite Daz confirming that it does not work. Go figure.
I appreciate your input though, and it confirms that there is just not enough interest for any action to be taken.
What I was referring to was that I am merely unaware if there is a render option in Carrara for generating greater than 8 bit images. But if you want to take that as a general excuse for discrediting me in some way, join the club. I'm sure the club President will wake up and weigh-in here pretty soon. :) :)
I never said I haven't experienced a problem. I am one of those who, in my compositing days, was using 16bits as standard practice because the work and workflow called for it. But I don't recall hearing of anyone using Carrara for the type of professional work which required significant compositing, color correction, and various effects which pretty much require 16 bit.
Yeah, that was a "general discrediting" of what you say. But, people can either appreciate the positive that is said or focus on the negative, and despite the exhortations of some :-):-):-):-) there will be people who think the worst. Oh well, all I can do is tell people to embrace the negative because it also brings some great stuff. Some people will think the worst no matter how much praise is offered, in my opinion.
Maybe we should ask the forum volunteers to move some threads that are tangential to Carrara but are more focused on non-Daz software to the Commons, which would seem the logical place for such posts, unless the thread helps discuss how Carrara can be integrated with the techniques. Then authors wouldn't take it as a general discredit if people take notice of the authors saying they don't use Carrara very much - which would normally seem to imply that the posts belong somewhere else.
:-):-):-):-)
Belonging somewhere else does not imply error or discredit.
:-):-):-):-)
I for one am very glad this was brought up here and grateful to Joe for taking the time to explain in great detail what was for me a very fuzzy concept :)
This discussion certainly does belong here because it is explaining what can be done with the render passes. Unless Joe was expected to say - OK, Carrara has these render passes...now, if you want to learn more, I'll take it to the Photoshop forum and for those who have GIMP, I'll pop over there and repeat!
The fact is that all these different softwares that are used to achieve an objective are interrelated and it is good to learn how to integrate them into a workflow.
Please, guys, let us take the positive from it and give credit where it is due.
Thank you, Joe, for sharing your expertise :)
I second what Roygee has said here, besides evilproducer and others have pitched in on this thread as well, sharing their own knowledge on the topic which together with Joe's invaluable information will come in handy to present and future Carrara users wondering about how to get started integrating post work into their Carrara workflow. Personally I prefer to have useful conversation like this which directly references Carrara, to be in the Carrara forum as I hardly look in at the other forums since my focus is on Carrara workflows at the moment. But if the forum admins vote otherwise, then I guess that would be that. Then again, we can always skip threads that don't necessarily interest us, I do that all the time without feeling they are pointless, because I might find them useful at some other point in time. Joe gets a lot of flak, but I think, maybe once in a while, he should be given some slack. (hmmmm...interesting rhyme- flak / slack) Not trying to be his defender or anything as he's obviously more than capable of holding his own, but just saying what I feel, with due respect.
Roy, Dada, I too thank Joe for posting the composite tutorial here. And, I have asked him to post more here. This is all good stuff for Carrara people like me to know. Thank you again, Joe!
But I also frequent the commons forums. What Joe set out to do in this thread is by and large not software specific - on purpose. That too is good. No complaints. When asked to relate to Carrara, Joe on several occasions in the thread has said that isn't the point, or declined, or said he doesn't know about Carrara, and in one case voiced concern about people demanding to be spoon fed. OK, some people are sensitive, not a problem. But that is all the more reason for this to be in the Commons instead of limited to Carrara users.. Not to get rid of it (I frequent there), but because this is good information in the spirit of what the commons forums are for (things of interest in general, including Studio users, Poser users, Carrara users,...)
examples of why Joe's excellent thread should be getting a wider audience! Yes, wider audience. In some cases below, users of other software will PAY for the kind of info Joe has generously shared. Thank you again, Joe.
studio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnqj6K3_uc0
and
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/tutorials/dazstudio/studio-render07
poser
http://www.contentparadise.com/productDetails.aspx?id=22817
and
http://www.sixus1.com/store/Secrets_of_Poser_Revealed_Render_Passes
EDIT: again, to be clear, I frequent the Commons forums and the Carrara forum. I am not implying this info is not of interest to Carrara people. I am saying it is also of interest to the Commons. But, I am glad it is here in Carrara even though I think it is a better fit for Commons. I would also encourage Carrara people to continue to participate in other forums here, especially on topics that are not Carrara specific. And for the minority that don't stray from the Carrara forum, not only might you learn interesting things in the other forums, but Carrara will also get some more exposure by your participation even if you don't overtly intend to mention Carrara.
You couldn't pay me enough money to spend time in the Commons. :) :)
No thanks.
Very true, in a way - which other Daz software renders passes?
The problem with posting in the Commons is that interesting subjects soon get buried on page 5, submerged under a load of off-topic silly stuff, such as "The frozen pizza delivery complaint thread" and such :)
Unless your question relates to Studio or Poser and the subject is buy, pose, render, all you get is strange stares when posing a question.
Not a place I frequent too often :)
Yeah, this forum is annoying enough, and frustrating, and filled with enough fragile egos and childish hurt feelings...but the Commons makes this place look like, well, not as bad. :) :)
Well, I guess we can forgive your ego problems. ;-)
Point taken diomede64, about the other forums, plus, it struck me as well that with the work put into this thread, if so inclined, Joe could beef it up some more and dust it up into a pdf tutorial for the Daz store, for him that would be a safer way of engaging the larger Daz audience with the added benefit that they can thank him with some money without the attendant risk of catching....how do you say it..... cooties(?) at the commons.
Silly to some perhaps, but deeply sarcastic and offensive to others ... where's the heavy moderation when you really need it?
But wait Joe, theoretically if you left the Carrara forums and headed into the Commons instead, wouldn't that drastically decrease the amount of annoying, frustrating fragile egos and childish hurt feelings here? :) :) :)
Nah, he ain't going nowhere, he'll miss y'all way too much if he did!
Yeah, I know...I'm always the bad guy.
So in spite of that...is anyone actually working with the stuff I've been posting in this thread? Seems like there's, as usual, a lot of discussion of unrelated side issues and personalities, but is anyone taking this opportunity to learn anything? Or does everyone already know all of it? :) :)
Yeah, no kidding. When they not only allow personal attacks, but even participate in them, you've gotta wonder who's watching the store.
Diomede, thanks for the recap...
But my intent was not to disregard the positive comments I've received. My intent was to post this tutorial in the hopes that people would use it to improve their skills. I didn't spend over 2 weeks posting this stuff just to get thanks, I did it in an attempt to help people expand their horizons and work on new skills.
I gave maybe 4 or 5 challenges in the last two weeks, all of which would have taken less than 15 minutes to complete. But I don't recall seeing anyone participating.
So I was just wondering if anyone is actually using this stuff, and experimenting and learning. Because if nobody is really going to use it in practice I'm wasting my time.
Apparently you, like others, like to focus on the emotional and personality aspect of things. I don't care about that, I care about the skills part of all of this. If people prefer to discuss where it should be posted, or how it should be presented, or who thanks who, instead of spending the same 10 minutes on actually trying the stuff, then you have to wonder whether people really care about the skills part.