Compositing Complex Shadows in Nuke [Advanced]

This tutorial covers more advanced techniques, such as dealing with compositing double shadows and "shadow cleanplates".

The project files are available as a bonus in the NUKE Beginner Series (There are many bonus projects included for free in our series, and we're always adding to it):

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00:00 Traditional Methods for Shadows
02:58 Shadow Attenuation Explained
03:40 Other integration stuff
05:25 Shadow Cleanplate
09:40 Blending original plate
10:55 Other details

[curtissponsler]

Thank you. I’ve long wondered how blended shadows were created. It’s one of those subtle effects that really drive the realism to the next level.

[marioCazares]

Dude this is literally genius you're amazing! I always had hacky ways of dealing with double shadows and have never seen such a good method for dealing with this. Thank you so much

[pedrogarciagomez]

Really appreciate this tutorial. I found some cool tips for integration. Thanks a lot for your time!

[luten]

I usually work with blender + After effects and really want to learn nuke, i love the tracking tools in nuke, interested to see more 🙂

[leevfx]

I almost emailed you 2 days ago asking if you had any ideas about avoiding double shadows! it's like you read my mind.

[anurag]

Thank you so much for this.
Great Knowledge.

[KenedyTorcatt]

Dang Bro! amazing stuff here, this doubke shadows can be a huge nightmare to comp!

[Gwuill]

Thank you very much. This Flatten shadow technic was explain in a blog somewhere but could not replicate it correctly. Now I can. Thx again.

[glmstudiogh]

Thank you so much. Your tutorials are very good. Please could you make a tutorial on the noise node and it's goodness, cause I'm trying to understand that node very well. I know it's very powerful

[agusvillani]

great tutorial dude! this method of dealing with double shadows is awesome!!

[jakobkardoeus]

Awesome video! The technique with creating a shadow cleanplate in the hsv colorspace is really interesting!

[shaze]

Sorry if i'm asking something after too much time. I'm working on a shot, and I'm trying to create a "shadow cleanplate" similare to yours, but when I apply the keyer effect directly to the colorspace node it doesn't work as expected, it just make darker the dark areas. I get something similar deactivating the red and green colours on the node

[bliccer]

for crossing shadows I use a constant/voronoi gradient to fake the real one and min this with the cg mask as mask input.
The rest of implementation is neat though

[allandm]

Ohh this is awesome, thanks for sharing!

[soepdelsoep]

Hey Alexander, Thanks for you tutorial. Very interesting way of adding shadows.
This reminded me of a tutorial from FXPHD Tips and Tricks Volume 3, class 05.
This is also about adding shadows and this technique involves the exposure node.
I would love to know your take on that. Probably your way matches the attenuation of the shadows more.

[ardaevi]

Nice tutorial, I am kind of confused about the part where you set the colorspace to HSV but then used a regular luminance keyer to key the highlights in HSV.
Should not the keyer be set to blue keyer, or am I missing something?

[KenedyTorcatt]

BTW I saw you needed to use Idistort before Itransform, right? Is that needed to transform to work properly?

[michaelbonanno]

Thank you very much for posting this- great information here!
I was curious on another topic. If you're using a Nuke spotlight in a 3D scene, how do you get the spotlight to create soft cast shadows like you'd see in nature? So far all I've been able to get are hard shadows with the spot or directional light. Thanks in advance!

[artistad]

I PUT A LIGHT IN 3D SCENE AND THE OBJECT DONT PROJECT SHADOW ON THE PLANE WHY?CAN YOU HELP ME?

[soepdelsoep]

btw do you have a planning of your tutorials? I would love to see your take on colour matching Footage with CG elements