[Music] [Stephen Lawes] Hello, everyone. How are you, guys? It is Wednesday. You've made it to the third day of Adobe MAX. It's a marathon.
All right, so what we're going to do is do a cold start.
We're going to show a reel, our Cantina reel first, and then I will do introduction. So we'll kick off there first, as everyone is just sitting down and relaxing.
[Music] Thank you so much. My name is Stephen Lawes. I am the Co-Founder and Creative Director at Cantina Creative in Los Angeles, California. This is Julianne Dome. She is the CG Sup at Cantina. We're a small VFX house in California. Predominantly do a whole range of visual effects but we are mostly known for motion graphics for TV and film, which you see a lot here. And I would say probably about 96, 97% of the projects we do use the Adobe suite, so Substance, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, the whole barrage of them.
About a year ago, we were approached by Adobe to produce a piece that focused on creating assets in Substance, Shaders in Substance, and then migrating those assets into After Effects and using the new After Effects 3D Renderer that came out just over a year ago, a couple years ago.
So we pitched a few ideas to Adobe of various storyboards and then came to a nice consensus of what that would be creatively. We'll look at that just in a second. We wanted to set ourselves a couple of mini tasks internally at the same time. One of them was to create all the assets ourselves, not using any off-the-shelf-type assets. We want to make sure that we used only standard plug-ins in After Effects, no third-party plug-ins, which was just a funzy type of thing to task that we set ourselves. And then, we're also going to include one asset and one piece of animation from Cinema 4D as well, so that we could marry all those 3D assets and elements together into After Effects.
So let's have a look at that piece first. And then what we'll do is break that down into two sections. So let's have a look at it first and then we'll carry on.
[Music] Okay, again, that was just a short piece, but we started in Substance, created all the assets we needed for the piece in Substance, and then migrated those into After Effects. We will split this up into two sections now. We'll start with Substance and the creation of those assets. And then the second part will be taking those assets, migrating them into After Effects and rendering and lighting them in After Effects. So let's start with Julianne and she's going to jump into Substance and show you-- Spend the next 15, 20 minutes showing you how we started that process.
[Julianne Dome] Yeah, good to be here. Very excited to be showing you guys all of this cool stuff. So we're going to start here in Substance with just this model of the bottle that I've mocked up in C4D. There's not a lot of detail to it because we can kind of get all of that there, using Substance. So the first thing that I like to do when we're starting a project like this is to take a moment at the very head of the job and gather as much information as possible, and that can be kind of where is this asset going to be seen, how close are we going to get to this thing, what kind of lighting scenarios are we looking at, is there any animation, all of that stuff is going to be really helpful so that you can start off on the right foot and you make sure you're setting everything up to be used maximally. So I think the best way to get started and the way that I like to get started is using this Substance Asset library. There's a ton of cool tools in here. I'm sure if you've used Substance, you're familiar with a lot of them, and I'm going to use that to get us pretty far here.
And the nice thing about CG is, there's all of these labels that's Plastic Armor Glossy, and all of these things, but as long as it looks like the effect that you're trying to create and you can always go in and mess with the texture and the roughness.
Once you've added that material, you can use whatever you need to get going. So I'm going to start with this material and then for that glass portion, I'm going to actually use this, like, aluminum just because it gets us into the place that we need to be. Now I've set up these masks already, so I'm just going to turn on the layers that I have down here so that we can see that. And you can see the effect that we're getting immediately. We kind of get this brushed black and a more glossy glass here. So for this cap, I have that as separate. I'm just going to search for a cork material, which Substance has for us right here. Drag that on.
For this guy...
Grab a Steel. I think I was using this one. And like I said, if something's not exactly how you want it, you can always open this up, and in here, I think that's a little too bright. It's clashing with this so I'm just going to go down in here into base color and darken that up a little bit and get that to a spot that I want it. So now just with using pretty four basic Substance materials, we're well on our way here. So the next thing I want to start adding is the cool branding details that Steve has given me. So I'm going to go back into here and add those on. So what we have here from Steve is just a cool logo and the name of the bottle and how I'm applying these is just in the Height channel. And so in Substance, all of this stuff, you can control what layers you want these to pop up in. So if I had color on, you'd see that this is just a very messy image here.
But we don't need any of that. We just need that Height channel. And the really cool thing about Substance too is once we bring that imagery in, we have a ton of filters that we can kind of custom in the look that we want. So I'm looking at this and it's pretty sharp. It doesn't feel super natural, so I can add a blur to start laying that in and getting that embossed look that we want.
I'm going to do the same thing for this logo. And then I'm even going to double up this so that you get that effect. And what's cool is you can layer these in, and they all have their own opacity. So let's say that that's a little too strong for that second layer. I can cut back on that, making sure I'm in my height layer here, and just lay that in a little bit less. And I'll do the same for this.
Okay, so now we have our branding and that's looking pretty cool. Going to make sure that you're always updating your lighting and looking at this from different angles just to make sure that you are getting the effects that you thought you're getting. So the next thing I want to add is that cool texture that we had going on the glass. So I'm going to add that...
And that was a cool custom image that one of our designers made for us, and I'll show you guys what that looks like here. So I'm going to add this in. When you add something like an image into Substance, it's going to ask where you want this to be added, and we want this in our Height channel. So I have this cool texture, but it's not really how I wanted it to come in. So I'm going to go over into my Properties, and instead of Warp projection, I'm going to do UV projection, and that's going to let me control this in the 2D view, which is a little easier for this particular image. So I'm just going to go into the Height channel so you can see what that looks like. It's just a very basic line pattern that she's created in Photoshop for me.
So let me go back into here, and I'm actually going to go to the version that I've lined up already, find that.
So we have that same image, and the problem is I don't want this displayed uniformly. So we're going to start making a nice mask to get this going exactly where we want it to be.
So we can go into our mask view and we can see now I've added just a completely black mask. So if I go back into the Material and grab my brush, I can start painting, if I'm painting with white on to show where this material is coming through. And now you could do it this way. You could do this whole thing with a brush, especially if you're very good with your hands and artistic. I am not, so I'm going to undo all of that. And I'm actually going to make a little layer here, add a paint layer and then I'm going to go in with the Pen Tool because that's exactly what I need for this project. And I'm going to come in here and just build a little path.
This way everything's really clean. It's non-destructive. I can come up here and close this path. And what that's going to do is give me these really nice clean borders that I can define, where I want that look and how I want that looking in. So I'm going to turn on the ones I've created there and basically what I'm doing here is just outlining everywhere that's going to have an edge between where I want the texture and where I want the non-texture. And then I can come in here with a fill layer that if I turn these off, you can see, it's very messy, and all that's doing is just filling in the space in between these pen-work strokes which again, I can come in here and adjust after the fact to get the exact look that I want. So that's super cool. And coming from Adobe suite, I love how similar it is to Pen Tools and other products, which is super nice.
So now we have this bottle and it's looking pretty cool. We're 90% of the way there. And at this point, I'm checking in with Stephen to see how this is looking in the comp, and that's when I start to notice a couple things. And the first thing that I notice is his lighting scheme is really dark, really moody and just looking really cool. So I want to, in Substance, match that as close as I can so that I'm looking at something a lot similar to what he's looking at. So I'm going to come over here into my Display Settings and in Environment Maps, Substance actually has a bunch of Environment Maps that you can play with, but I'm just going to pull in the exact HDR that I know he's using so that we can get something that's looking a lot closer to the comp. So here we go. We've got that light in, and now I'm liking that a lot more because I can start to really see how we're looking here in terms of our materials.
So the other thing I'm noticing, looking at Steve's comp, is that he is getting really, really close to this model. And so I know that I'm going to have to up the detail in this so that we can stay at a level of realism when he's coming all the way in and having some of these camera moves that are really tight. So looking at this bottle, I'm getting away with a lot in the black glass here because it's such a dark model, so I'm just going to add a little bit layer of dust and not really worry about that. The biggest challenge for me here is going to be this glass. So what I'd like to do is start adding detail to this glass, but I want to do that really intentionally. And there's two ways I will go about adding detail to something. The first is going to be adding wear and tear, and that's, Substance has a ton of assets that are going to help you with that. In the Masks, they have all of this grunge and all of this dust and dirt, and that's all super cool and can be really helpful. But this is a nice product that we're trying to show off, so I'm not going to be adding a ton of grunge in there. So I'm going to look at the second thing when adding detail, and that's thinking about the manufacturing side and the actual material. What is this made out? What could the imperfections be that are inherent to this glass material? So that's what I'm going to start doing here. So let me go into my glass detail there. And the first thing I want to do is break up these really big, broad reflections. They're just too clean for me. So I'm going to add this texture here that just starts breaking those up, and I'm going to add a little bit of dust so that you get that little speckle that you sometimes see inside of glass. And already, that's doing a lot for us, and, again, this is all just using procedural, out of the box Substance materials for us that I can go in and mess with the Tiling, and it's all going to be there for you. The next thing I want to add is, I'm looking at this model and I didn't do a lot of work in adding the details here to any of this because I knew I was going to bring this into Substance. So what I want to do is add a lip to the top of this bottle that would be something that more normal that you would see. So let me turn these off here.
How I'm going to do that is just painting in the Height channel, and now you can do the same thing...
And I'm going to add a paint layer here which, I think, if you are working in Substance, it is really nice using these layers. It's super awesome to be able to work in a non-destructive way. Right out of the box, if you make a mask and start painting, it's going to paint on the actual mask layer, whereas if you make one of these paint layers and start painting here, I can turn that on and off. I can have my own Opacity controls. Oops! Just deleted that. I can also change the blending mode individually, which is super helpful, so I highly recommend using these nodes here. Okay, so what I'm going to do to make this glass is, again, I could come in here and get my brush and start painting along the edge but it's going to be really hard to do that. So if you go into your Polygon Fill mode, that's going to be the easiest way that I found to get this done. And we'll get a white brush going and select some of these panels. And now once I've selected this, I'm actually going to go into Height mode so that we can see what we're working with here, and I'll switch over to my 2D view to make this really easy for us. And I see these are the panels that I've selected, so I'm just going to go ahead and select this whole line here...
So that we get a lip edge along this bottle like we were hoping for. So once I've done that, I have these lips painted in. And let me adjust the opacity of these so you can see what we're doing. And basically, I've painted one at the top here and then anywhere, there's a natural material break because any of those transitions in materials, it's a really nice spot to add that detail to get that transition looking really real. So let me go back into our material so you can see how this is looking like.
So we've got our lip. It's looking crazy right now, so I'm going to take this opacity way down. I think we're at something like 10. And I'm also going to add a blur. And what that's going to do is it's just going to soften this out because nothing is ever going to be or hardly ever going to be perfectly, perfectly crisp and smooth. So by adding that blur in there, it just softens that and you can start to see now we're getting that super nice light kick on that lip of the bottle that looks a lot more natural.
I've also added a little bit of bumpy texture here, maybe this was roughed around a tiny bit on its way in and, again, adding that blur so that it's not perfectly crisp and smooth.
Okay, so this is looking a lot better. I'm happy with where this is heading, but it's still looking a lot more metallic than glass. And one of the big problems and challenges that we knew we were going to have with this is working with glass, knowing that we're taking this into After Effects. So we're not taking this into a render that's going to have a full spectrum of transparency and refraction calculations, we're taking this into something that's going to be real-time for us. So our solution to this was to use what After Effects is really good at, which is compositing. So when I built this model, I built an interior model of this glass as well so that we can have something that when we're rotating around is giving us those interior reflections. So I'm going to turn on this Glass Opacity VIEW layer so that you can see the effect that we're getting when I'm turning that on. So you can see when we're changing the lighting, we're really now getting a much better glass look because of that interior layer. You can turn that on and off to see the before and after of what that's buying us. And what I really like about this is now when I hand this over to Stephen, he's going to have complete control in the comp of how much see through are we seeing, how much is the interior model coming in, and he will have total control to make it look amazing in the comp side since I'm going to be delivering him both of these models here.
If you're working in Substance and maybe you're new to Substance and you're having issues getting that opacity to work properly, make sure you're double-checking in here in your Shader Settings. I think Substance is going to default to pbr-metal-rough, and you just have to change it to this pbr-metal-rough-with-alpha-blending, and that'll give you access to the Opacity channel, which you can add in the Texture Set Settings. That'll pop-up right there, and then that should all be working really great for you.
Okay, so coming around to the back of this bottle, we have a label. And when we started working on this label, it was a very in-progress piece of art, and so I actually ended up building the layers for the label in After Effects and then importing them into Substance. So let's build that out.
So let me find.
Okay. So I have my label here. I've again, I've imported this, and I'm like, "Oh, I don't really want this in Word Projection." I'm going to put this back in UV Tiling so that I can go over to...
My 2D view here and get this into place and it's just a little easier than the Warp.
So I'm going to size this in and get this laid out exactly how I want it.
Sweet. I think that's looking pretty good. So I've piped this just into the base color here, but I can also go ahead and add height and roughness that I've already created. So I'm going to pipe in this height label, find the right one here.
And I'm also going to put in a roughness. And I'll show you in just one second what these are looking like.
So I can see I have my base color, which is just the pretty standard vector art combined over a paper label. I have my roughness which, again, is just going to distinguish the ink from the paper. And then I have my height which is going to give us that cool displacement effect. So let's go back into our material and we can see how this is looking.
And it's looking pretty wild, so I'm going to go into height and really take that down.
And this is also something that it's good to go back and forth if you can to see how is your height map looking in After Effects or in C4D Redshift, whatever software that you're taking it into renderer. How is it looking in that situation versus Substance? Because sometimes it can be just a tiny bit different. Luckily with After Effects, I think we were, excuse me, pretty one-to-one. So I think that's looking pretty cool here. We have our ink that's picking up a lot more glossiness than our paper.
And I could stop there, and that's pretty nice. But for this bottle, we really wanted a more handcrafted look. So the first thing I want to do here, and I'll show you this in 2D because it's a little easier to see, is I want to break up a lot of this vector imagery because to me, when you see these super clean lines, it just screams computer generated. So that's the first thing that we tackled here, was getting that breakup to where it feels a lot more natural and how the ink would actually be displayed if someone was hand stamping this into place. And we're going to do the same thing with the roughness. In here, we don't have a lot going on, especially in the ink layer, so we wanted to add something to where you would get that effect a stamp ultimately is a really tight sponge. And when it's absorbing that ink and go pressing, it's going to absorb a little bit more ink and put out a little bit more ink in certain layers. So let's see how that's looking in the 3D thing.
Okay. So now we get this really cool effect where we have our ink bleed, we have our texture on the ink, and I'm pretty happy with that. So looking at this bottle, I'm feeling pretty good about getting this over to Steve. We've added our glass detail. We have our depth effects that are happening and I'm going to hand it off to him to see his works in the comp side.
All right. Doing a little musical chairs here. We work every day and I've never seen that Pen Tool in Substance. - Really? - That's awesome. Yeah. It's sweet. How have I never seen that before? All right. Let me take glasses off so I can actually see. Got terrible eyesight. Okay. All right, let's jump into After Effects.
One of the key things that we run into time and time again is just speed, being able to be creative and moving around and making creative decisions at speed. So actually, you know what? I'm just going to restart After Effects right now because my menu is not showing.
And so jumping, there's our first inadvertent restart, didn't want to do that. Both in Substance and After Effects, when we're looking at these assets there, it really flies. So I'm going to open up one of the scenes that you saw in the piece that we were looking at earlier. And we'll bring in those assets and see how they're comped, how they're lit, how they're rendered.
When is the After Effects starts up? There we go.
We'll also just touch on Sampler for a second as well because I want to show you a couple of assets that we initially did for this piece but never used in the final piece for various reasons, but we did this little test. All right, let me open up our first scene...
And we'll go to this guy first.
All right, couple of small things that I'll touch on. Generally, we work in various sized teams at Cantina, but one thing we always have to be aware of is being tidy, just being tidy, naming convention, all that stuff. Boring as all get out, but it's really important when you're working in teams. Second thing I want to touch on here is color and color management.
Not going to go into this at all in-depth because that requires at least one session, maybe three or four. But we definitely suggest working in some color managed view, especially linear. You get much more photographic results that way. When you're looking at lens blurs and bokeh results, they just look so much better in linear space.
All right, before we get into the bottle, I'll just bring in that sampler piece. We use Substance Sampler to...
Process a bunch of photos that we took of this statue and then put it together in the Sampler. We didn't do any cleanup on this. But I want to show you the speed of this because that's one of the important things. Both working in Substance and in After Effects, the speed is absolutely fantastic. And that's what you need for not really to make good creative decisions. So I'm just going to drag this into a comp here.
Just for-- Give you some info on this thing. This is about 12.5 million poly model.
And you can see that just moving this thing around, it really flies. And I'm not even in draft mode. We'll go into that in just a second. So right now, I'm in just regular random mode. No lighting, but you can see that just moving these assets around, let me scale that down just a smidge too, there we go. That's a little easier. And then I'll zoom into it.
You can see just moving these guys around is just very easy. Let me just duplicate this guy up a couple of times.
And you can have as many of these in your scene as you really want.
And it still moves really fast. And that's, as I say, one of the important things. It's actually pretty staggering that you've got what? Actually, I think I said, did I say 12.5 million? I meant 2.5 million. What am I talking about? - So this is about-- - I was going to correct you just-- Yeah, yeah-- So this is about 7.5 million polys all-in-one scene. You can see, you just move around this scene without any problem at all. You can go to draft mode. If it starts getting sluggish, just go into draft mode. It's not going to calculate any shadows at this point, but you can still move around very, very, very quickly. So that's just a little piece. We didn't use it in the video that we just showed.
But it was certainly part of the process as we were going through this. All right, let's go back to our model. So I'm going to the stage comp here.
And what we have is a number of things here. And I want to go touch base on lighting and rendering and some of these settings.
So one of the main jobs here was not to destroy the beautiful work that Julianne did in here. So she did a fantastic job in Substance, so we want to honor that and make it look as rich and beautiful as possible.
So let's go into here first and see how these respond. Now I've got it in draft mode right now. Number of ways of visualizing this for speed, but as you can see when I'm in here, and let me go to a different camera view.
You can move around this object much like the sampler piece we were just looking at really fast.
So there's no kind of lag at this at all. You can get really creative. You don't have to sit and wait for a renderer or anything like that. You can just really get into setting up cameras and getting the right lighting in there.
All right, so let's go back to the original camera here.
And let's go up to the layer stack as well and go from the bottom to the top, see what we have here. We explored this, a number of different objects, so we could control it, and so we've got the bottle as itself here as a single item. And then we had the cork separated out...
And the top separated out. That just gave us some versatility animating them for the most part.
Then you can also incorporate pretty much any other 3D-Aware object in the scene, and that includes shape layers that you extrude, so all of those are honored within the 3D space that you'll be able to move objects through other objects and they're aware of each other, which is fantastic.
Let's go into a little bit of the lighting here. So I'm going to switch off our spotlight and switch off Environment Light for now, and we'll start from scratch. So this is the base model and setup that you can see that we imported directly into After Effects.
First thing we're going to do is add this Environment Light, which I had added earlier. Now one of the really interesting and cool things with Environment Lights...
Is that they give a really natural lighting source there, and they also deliver shadows too. And you can use any HDR. You can get many HDRs for free off the web, and you can shoot your own too. In this instance, we shot some of our own. This one is a roofTop in LA from a bracketed bunch of photos. You can do that with just a normal SLR, but we have one of those little 360 cameras that shoots the entire environment and brackets up and down.
And you can use that if I go down the Exposure here, you can see, it's got a huge range in Exposure so that's eight stops down, so you can really get into the shadows too as well which is great. So that's used as a lighting device for our scene.
And you can use any type of HDR in there. So once you've applied your Environment...
Your Environment Light that is, and you can use the Properties panels up here. Let me just zoom into the bottle here. You can rotate that HDR around and it will change the lighting for you.
So what you do is rotate it to the point where it feels aesthetically what you're going afterwards.
And you can rotate it both in the X and the Y, and you can obviously animate all of that too.
And then you can also add any other list. I think I'm using the Honolulu one here, but let's use the roofTop and you'll see the difference. So let me twirl down here and I'll select, instead of the Honolulu one, we'll select the roofTop, and you can see the difference in the lighting scheme there.
We'll rotate those guys around. You can see what those look like.
And by doing that, we can layer up the lighting scenario. So what we tend to do is have one base light for the entire scene. And then we'll have other comps with different lighting schemes in there and comp those together with holdout mask.
So let's take a little look at that. So we'll go into some of these other comps here.
We have one that's a different lighting scheme here. This is the roofTop lighting scheme. We also used-- This is what Julianne was talking about earlier with the different model. There's the interior glass model.
Has a completely different finish to it. And we're using a different lighting model here too. So when we comp all those together, various opacities, we get this really nice glassy effect. Actually, I'll show you-- Let me show you on that. We'll go back to one of these, so this one basically here.
So that is basically a bunch of layers of different type of lighting techniques all layered on top of each other with different opacities. You get this lovely glassy effect, and you also start pulling out all of the details in this glass that Julianne carefully manicured in Substance...
Which just looks-- It looks really fantastic.
All right, so that's the channel comp layering, lighting and rendering side.
I'm going to open up another comp for a second on that close-up of the label because that thing looks fantastic. Probably my favorite part of it because the paper structure in here is fantastic.
So again, going to the stage here, and we'll go to draft mode.
So we're not calculating shadows but this is the animation, just a simple camera move around this to really emphasize and get the best out of the materials that we were looking at in Substance. And you can see just the lovely detail in the paper texture and the way that the ink is bleeding as well. You want to highlight that as much as possible.
Yeah, that looks fantastic. And again, you can see the speed of which you can move around these scenes. It's really fast. And without that, it becomes just a slog.
Let's go up a few of the comps, look at some of the other effects that we are using here. Again, we're using all standard effects in After Effects. We're not using any third-party plug-ins. One of the things that we tend to do right now, although, is a standard feature in 3D and After Effects is depth map. So we faked a lot of these ones. But now you can preComps the entire 3D scene...
And you can extract the depth map from it. But for this one, we did a little fake-- I'm just going to keep this at Quarter rest just for the time being.
And we drive the Lens Blur is just on adjustment layer at the top here, and we drive it via a black and white depth map. All of this is a preComps and can be animated to your heart's content. And we tend to do that I've seen a lot of people where they add a blur and they use a mask on the blur. But what you don't get with that is a Dynamic Falloff. So we often use Lens Blurs with this Dynamic Falloff, and it is so much of a nicer effect and much more dynamic effect.
All right, I pre-rendered one of these out just for speed going up a level.
Other things that we add in here too are this Chrome effect, and we'll get to grain and assets like this. I'm going to expose up a little bit here so you can actually see what's going on. So this is a preset we built. Again, one of these is one of the funziest things that we did 'cause we set this task of just using standard effects.
So we built our own Chrome preset. And there's a number of ways of doing Chrome offsets. And usually, they're pretty straightforward. We wanted something that had a little bit more bleed to it.
So we set up all of these preComps with a different-- We separated everything out into their individual red, green and blue channels. And then we used the CC Glass and the CC Vector Blur effect to create this distortion. And you can increase the displacement here. So if I increase that, this one does take a little bit of a second to think about, but you can really push and pull that. And then you can increase the amount of Chrome. And these are the types of things that we tend to do a lot of in finishing of a product.
This again is all driven by a depth shape. And this one was just an amorphous shape, but also you can see it's feathered. So it honors all the gray scale values when it's calculating the Chrome offset and the displacement too.
It's just a fun extra thing. You don't usually want to push this far unless you're going for my own glassy effect or something. But it does give you-- There's a huge amount of control here. And all of it, again, can be animated too. So you can do some ripple effects.
And then going back up the stack in the comp, we have some basic color correction onto this. We have also included some Lens Blur in the quick type, and I'll go back to that so you could see it. We ended up shooting at the office...
Some lens flares that we included in there. They're just natural aberrations that add to the finish of the product.
And this is just one single layer. And let me expose up so you can see what that looks like.
And we're just animating the opacity in and out just to give it a little extra organic nature, a little bit more photographic.
And again...
I think Julianne was talking about this earlier where nothing ever is perfectly ever in focus or sharp, so we always add just a little touch, a small, small amount of blur to everything just to take the edge of the CGness of the scene.
And finally, we are adding grain...
Just a really small part of the process, but it really adds to the finish when you go in tight and you see that to grain structure. More often than not, we will do that graining in the log space. So that's what you see wrapped around here. So we take the color space from our Comping Color Space, it's a CG, into a Log space, apply the grain and then reverse, back out of it.
I whipped through that really pretty fast.
That is pretty much what we have for today. If anyone has any questions...
On any of those things, whether it be in Substance or After Effects.
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