From the course: VFX Keying: Master Course

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Extra special keying techniques for fire

Extra special keying techniques for fire - Nuke Tutorial

From the course: VFX Keying: Master Course

Extra special keying techniques for fire

- [Voiceover] Keying fire often results in dark edges or semi-transparent fire. The fundamental problem with keying fire is that the luminas of the fire is not always the same as its opacity. Here, we'll see how to key and control the look of a fire composite. We'll start with a standard lumakey approach right here. I'll stop my play head, jump to frame one. Starting with our fire plate, which is going to be fire over black, we have a lumakey here, and there's our alpha channel, and pass that through a grade node so I can dial in my color, and then comp that over the background. This is sort of a classic workflow right here. If I try to increase the density of my alpha channel, I start to introduce those nasty, dark edges. It looks very unnatural. If I go the other way, I start introducing semi-transparent fire, and that doesn't look very good, either. I also lose the saturation around the edges. See how poopy those reds look? All right, so a more sophisticated solution is the…

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