Hello everybody, this is Eric from finalcutstudioschool.com and I have a request for a Shake tutorial about—just how to do a simple sky replacement. I'm not going to get too detailed about this, I'm not going to do any fine tuning, I'm just going to show you the basic how-to’s so you all can go and experiment with the fine tuning yourself. It's fairly straightforward, takes a little bit to get your head wrapped around but the process is much better and more professional and more controllable with Shake because it's not based than with a layer based system. So, let’s just get started.

So the first thing I want to do is I want to patch up my picture. I want to look at it because I want a little pleasant node and I want to make sure nothing in my picture is going to interfere with my nodes. And I see this little white right here and I want to get rid of that because that’s going to cause problems. So I want to go into my image nodes and I’m going to select the Quick Paint and will bring my Quick Paint node down right there. So now, I'm going to go in, select it on persist or it wont work, persist means that this paint mark that I'm going to make will stay here the whole time, the whole range of the scene instead of putting it to frame, it would just be in one frame, the interpolate, it will animate in between strokes and persist which means the stroke will stay where it’s at.

So I'm going to click the clone button, little sheep back on, it’s what they are the little sheep. I’m going to use the shift and drag it around and the command key and shift to make the size smaller. I'm going to go in here like this and I’m going to paint out this white stuff with my clone brush. Just bear with me here. If I see anything else, I’m not—like this little piece white right here and I’m going to get rid of a little bit of white in here, spin this around, there. Now that we have most of this white to get—that’s what I really want to do, is just to touch up this white stuff here. Now that takes care of that, now we have that little blemish taken care of.

So now what we are going to do is I'm going to key this out, because our sky is so blue, we’re going to be able to use the key light, so go to my key tab, select the key light, add it to my Quick Paint node, there. And now our key light is added from our Quick Paint node and as you can see the sky changes color indicating that our node is active. So I'm going to go down here and click on my screen color, and I want to go back up here and I’m going to just swap, just click and swap. Like that. And there’s a little bit of noise right around in here, as you can see it. Let me switch to my alpha. I want to drag a little bit more, just drag around until you get something that looks pretty good, and you want to adjust your screen range to fill it out. Like that right there. Now, it looks like we’re getting a pretty good matte. As you can see, that kind of took out our blue sky and not much of a problem huh, pretty good key range in side shake if I’m not saying to my self.

So I want to ad a blur to the key light, I go to my Filters, Blur. Now when I blur this, I just want to blur the edges. So I'm going to change my channels to aaab, this means it's going to blur my alpha and blue channels. And I'm going to take my blur up a little bit, not much. Let me take it way out so I can show you what happens if you will over do it. You can see the blue will start to shine through the rocks there, so we don’t want that. We want to take it down. I just want to blur the edges a little bit, just to take away that hard edge. Okay, it looks like we’re getting a pretty good key. We will stop right there with that one.

Now, I need to go in and make a roto shape, a hold-out matte if you will. I’m going to go into my Image tab, I want to click on roto shape, I’m going to work in context by loading my clean plate into viewer and click in the right side of my roto shape to get the tools. And then I want to go in here and just lay some generic points down because I already have a roto shape made, I’m going to use that one. I just want to show to you how to do this. So I’ll just go in here and click along the rocks here, making sure not to get into the sky. Ring and round, and chop it off, and there, that’s our generic shape. You see what I’ve done here.

So now let me remove this one and bring the one I’ve done beforehand, it’s a little bit better. It is right here. As you can see, I’ve used a lot more points and I’ve been a lot more careful about what’s going on. So, what we’re going to do is, we are going to take this roto shape. And on the key light node, we are going to bring it down, not to the second one for the key light background, we’re going to bring it in into the third one which is a hold-out matte. This is the place for the hold-out matte. So bring your matte down into the third, click that right there and then we click on our blur node. Then our sky is keyed out, a pretty good key, look at this right here. I mean, yes you see a little bit but nothing that is not easily fixed, this is wonderful. Okay, we got a pretty good key going on here.

So now, we want to replace the sky, this is the whole point of this. So first, let me go over here to my blur, let me add a few more things. I want to add color brightness node and a color saturation node. The saturation, I will adjust this in a minute. I guess I could bring it down a little bit. Like that right there just to—because this saturation slider is going to affect our reflection of our clouds because we’re going to put some clouds in here and it's going to reflect down unto our rocks. So—set my saturation, let me adjust my brightness a little bit, back it down. Okay, now we got that.

So now let's start working on our clouds. And these are the four elements I have already, I have my clean plate, my picture, which is this, and I have my roto shape, then I have used a plain color, I’m going to use to blend into the sky then I have my clouds which were made in CINEMA 4D. So, let’s begin this.

And here we are back from normal sky replay, our sky has gone so let’s start working on our clouds. So bring our clouds in here, the first thing I'm going to do is add a flip node, I’m going to transform tab and add a flip, not flop but flip. As you can see, this flips it down. Now, this is also going to be used for our clouds up top, in the sky here. Let me show you. We’re going to use this one set of clouds to replace the sky and we also going to use this set of clouds to cast a shadow on this rocks when they go by. We are going to have a little bit of shadow from these clouds rolling over. So we’re going to use the same piece of clouds for both items. I could if I want to and make a copy of these clouds and use two separate copies of the clouds, one for the reflection and one for the sky but I’m not, I'm just going to use the same one and I’ll show you how to do that. So I have a flip and we’re working on our reflection right now, I’ll bring it over here.

And what we are going to do is select the clouds again and I’m going to shift-click on Move2D, when I do that this will branch out on Move2D node. Now as you can see, I have my Move2D node, which is the cloud up top. And now I have my flip node, which is the cloud on the bottom. I'm having two sets of clouds coming off this one piece of video. This is what’s wonderful about Shake, you don’t have to make two copies of the clouds, have the Move2D come in from one copy and the flip coming from the other copy. Use one copy for your reflection and one copy for your sky. No, you don’t have to do that in Shake. You use a one piece of source media for all your uses. As you can see, I have two coming out here, one for the top and one for the bottom and they are both coming from the same piece of media if that makes any sense.

So now what I'm going to do is I want to add a reorder node, I want to reorder my colors. So I'm going to go to my color tab and from the reorder node and I had the reorder node. Now my color here, rgba. I want to change it to rgbr, we don’t want to affect the alpha. We don’t want to reorder the alpha. Right there. We don’t want to add a ContrastLuma from the color, so come on to the color tab, add the ContrastLuma. And you can adjust with the values a little bit if you want to and make them darker, a little bit lighter. That looks pretty good to me right there.

Now, I want this blur and this brightness node that I applied to only affect the ContrastLuma, these clouds. I want this blur and this brightness to affect the clouds also. So what going to do is I want to bring this ContrastLuma down and hook it in to the side of my brightness and we bring another noodle down and hook it into my saturation. Now, when I adjust brightness and saturation, it's going to adjust my clouds along with it.