More Experiments with Viewport Compositing

no, the viewport issue was not having had the film set to transparent, which I find to be incredibly inefficient, you shouldn't have to decide between seeing your environment and having visible, functioning holdouts. kind of defeats the purpose of having the feature on top of everything. it also still does not work in the eevee viewport, while using the holdout material does - seems to be overall more reliable. in general this entire thing is kind of stupid anyway, for proper removal we should all use masks in post production lol. nevermind, the holdout toggle works in eevee too as long as another object has a holdout shader? i am utterly confused at this point and will not investigate any further for my own mental's sake. my opinion will be: just use the shader.

Chromfell

Oh, yeah! Ack- Sorry I missed this. Is there a particular step in particular that's throwing you?

Ian Hubert

you may be exporting in jpg instead of png

Where are you finding yourself stumbling? There's certainly a lot of steps involved, but I'd say each phase is shown at a pretty decent level of detail somewhere in one of the videos on here, maybe one of us can point you in the right direction!

Carter Burr-Kirven

Upon even further further investigation, it seems I wasn't crazy, the Holdout toggle does work in Eevee, but only to a point! It seems to be tied to the material linking system somehow—objects in the collection will hold out as long as they don't share a material with an object on the outside that's not being held out? I don't know enough about how Eevee works to understand what's going on there, but I'd say maybe the renderer is simply designating those materials to be considered Holdout behind the scenes, and can't handle them being both Holdout and not Holdout? As soon as you assign a material from inside the collection to an object on the outside, all the objects with that material become visible, but the rest of the collection keeps holding out. That’s on my machine, at least! I don’t claim to have the definitive Blender build, for all I know I have the bug and you guys are experiencing the intended functionality! I’m on a Mac, running 2.82.7 as well.

Carter Burr-Kirven

Oh, okay, Blender manual says Holdout toggle only works in Cycles. Could have sworn I saw it working a minute ago when I tried it this morning, but, well... I guess not? Good call on the shader then. Still puzzled on the transparency though!

Carter Burr-Kirven

Weird! Presumably a bug, then?

Carter Burr-Kirven

I'm using the same version as Ian, 2.82.7, and as you can see it also didn't work in Eevee for him, hence he had to switch to Cycles in the video. And yes, like I said, I have transparencies turned on, because it works exactly like it should with the holdout material in Eevee!

Chromfell

is it possible from start to finish follow along In-Viewport Compositing....coz am failing like crazy....it is tuff

shonal bose

Holdout on collections works just fine for me in both Eevee and Cycles—what version are you using? As for the black holdout, do you have Transparent switched on in the Film settings?

Carter Burr-Kirven

Hey, just adding on for peeps and Ian. In Eevee you gotta use the "Holdout" material from the material type list for it to work (guessing cycles uses path tracing to create the mask so that makes sense, I guess). Also, for me the Holdout switch doesn't do what you'd expect, it just makes the area black, not transparent... any ideas? I am rendering in RGBA, that stuff seems to be in order. Besides, using the shader in Eevee works just as expected :|

Chromfell

you’re amazing!

Justin

Yeah I kinda only understood a small portion of this... links would be good. Thanks Ian.

Doug Brown

how very strange! that's usually the one thing other softwares/engines get working. a shame, however the convenience of the "window" version is still pretty great though, haven't seen a straight-up method like that before.

Chromfell

I am really loving this approach you're developing Ian. Turning Blender into a crazy-powerful, full-3d compositor. It's nuts!

Nathan Vegdahl

Jan: Huh! You're the first person I've heard recommend PNGs! That makes me feel a little better about my life decisions, actually :D. I've definitely tried dipping my toes in EXRs multiple times. Maybe it's just the AE thing. Faust: Man I'd LOVE to hear your thoughts on color science. I know a bit, and I've heard a lot of people talk about stuff- but a lot of times it seems like there isn't totally a consensus, as much as there's just "workflows", and I'd be super curious to hear yours at some point. Also see your film, if I ever can! Indy: Dang. That's a lot to think about. I've used AE since I was a kid- never really thought too much about it, but maybe it's time to consider jumping over to something else. At the very least I want to snag ACES

Ian Hubert

AH! That's awesome! And yeah, it took me a while to figure out the whole collection/render layer system (it was pretty different before blender 2.8, the transition drove me crazy for a minute), but now it's just stupid convenient. Between that and Shadow Catcher objects, you can do pretty intense composites. Good luck with the transition!!! And man, that was my assumption too, you'd THINK that's what the camera vector does! I've messed with it quite a bit, and can't exactly figure out what it's doing (done some googling and haven't been able to figure it out, either). It definitely doesn't "stick" once you leave camera view, though :/

Ian Hubert

Also, holy crap, that hold-out functionality is incredible. I was SO looking for something like that, and Blender just HAS IT? YO! I am doing a client project exclusively in Blender right now to force myself to transition and this is worth its virtual weight in GOLD right now.

Chromfell

I see the window vector, that's actually awesome, but why didn't you try the "camera" vector? I mean, judging from the name, I'd figure it should do exactly what you tried to get the updating UV projection to do?

Chromfell

Definitely agree to comp in the right colorspace makes day/night difference. We use ACES at work in the studio which made me download and install it on my home computer as well for personal compositing. Watching the same cg element under default Nuke sRGB vs under ACES CG lut makes it look so much more realistic. Definitely recommend people to drop into the free Nuke non-commercial and grab a copy of ACES Lut packages. Nuke loves exrs and that's why I render everything in exr sequences to have greater control in post over how far I can push the color correction.

I switched to fusion a couple years ago and never looked back! So much nicer than AE for VFX. Linear workflow is possible in after effects, it's just a pain to set up

Zeke Faust

By the way this shot looks awesome!

Jan van den Hemel

EXR is great but in my experience After Effects doesn't play well with it for some reason. Like you can use it but it's a bit of a pain to get the right colors. That's why I tend to use good old PNG sequences when using a Blend --> AE workflow. But if you're comping in say Nuke or Fusion (or in Blender!), EXR is definitely the way to go.

Jan van den Hemel

The feature is a (very) low budget sci fi, and my post company is just doing the VFX. We have a super limited time and a lot of shots, so Eevee has been a dream for efficiency (and I've taken a lot of inspiration from your "lazy tutorial" mindset i.e. just banging it out and making it look good) I've recently become obsessed with color science and done a lot of reading and such, so if you ever want to chat about it or see my workflow feel free to hit me up

Zeke Faust

Man yeah this is exactly the conversation that needs to happen for this workflow to be useful, for sure! Like, I kind of sloppily grade stuff so it's all "good enough" (definitely just trying to default to linear), but my color workflow in general is just all over the friggin' map, so I'm hoping I can learn something from you guys (I USED to know what ACES was). I SUPER need to just put in the afternoon a figure out a more EXR based workflow. Present me is already kick me on Future Me's behalf just cause I know I should have done it ages ago. Also Faust! What type of feature are you working on??

Ian Hubert

I know how you feel. Real color science is extremely complex, and there's few people who fully understand it. The whole paradigm of linear workflow is to bring everything onto an even playing field so it all plays nice together. Once you have your elements matched to your plate, you can put any kind of global transform on it that you want. But filmic doesn't look so nice on skin, so yeah you either gotta build a custom grade or cheat it a bit. Good thing is if you kick it out to a wide gamut log format, you can retain all your info and make all those choices later in the grade

Zeke Faust

Sorry to hijack your comment, haha

Carter Burr-Kirven

Just the coolest. Brilliant brilliant.

Colin Levy

When I say losing highlights, I'm talking about Filmic being a display transform that I just really love the look of, with its highlight rolloff and desaturated brights, but that obviously I don't want to put on my Blackmagic or Red footage in the comp, or bake it into the CG before compositing... I'd welcome any advice though, I've spent hours and hours trying to understand the nuances of color management and figure out how to run my pipeline, and every time I feel like I've got enough working knowledge, I realize I've barely scratched the surface!

Carter Burr-Kirven

Honestly I haven't really settled on one yet, I've only finally switched to a proper linear workflow in the past year and I'm mostly working on personal projects, so there's not really any client delivery specs to speak of, so I've been sort of winging it and trying things out to see what I like best. I haven't worked in ACES short of a few experiments in Resolve that I gave up on after getting weird color shifts and finding it harder to get simple grading tasks working in a way I liked (I'm sure I was probably doing something wrong), but I know I really should!

Carter Burr-Kirven

You shouldn't be losing highlights if you're going back out to log. What's your color pipeline like? Are you in ACES?

Zeke Faust

Agreed! I've been struggling the past few days with getting my EXRs to look as nice in Nuke as they do under the Filmic transform—can't use the transform on my whole shot because it clamps whites and I don't want to affect my live-action, but can't transform it within the script or I lose my overbrights, so I'm trying to mimic that really nice rolloff look of the Filmic curve with manual grades and saturation adjustments... Holding out for a more robust color management system, for sure!

Carter Burr-Kirven

Your shots look amazing btw

Zeke Faust

I'm working on a feature and recently used that exact single frame as environment lighting trick you mentioned! So useful. AND if your projection is a linear EXR you can use it as an emission material and actually have light sources from the image casting real light on the objects. The collection/view layer system in 2.8 is also super powerful. The one thing in blender really holding us back is the color management, which is pretty clunky and imprecise.

Zeke Faust

Live footage Tracking and comp its magic. Love it!

Alvaro Letelier