Website powered by

Learning until I’ve mastered Nuke

Making Of / 24 January 2021

The career I have chosen depends on a constant adaptation to new trends, so I should never stop learning.

With this in mind, I am starting a series of blogs narrating my progress in my Computer Animation MA.

You can check my progress with Media Specialist Practice here.

Narrating my progress for Perfecting the Look. 

Week 1: Introduction and Ideas

During this first week I have had to consider where to write my blog entries, usually to have a greater reach I would choose Blogger, being a Google platform and therefore they win special treatment in search engines.

However, considering that I can earn with this blog, beyond fulfilling an academic assignment; It is introducing my work in a new English-speaking market, with people who are on a similar learning path to my own and that if I am lucky, we will share knowledge and inspire each other.

Finally I concluded that ArtStation, being a platform positioned in this field of work and highly recommended by many of my colleagues, is without a doubt my best option.


IDEAS

In short, the project assigned in Perfecting the Look is to create:

  1. A video of at least 12 seconds with camera effects, light, Nuke nodes and composition.
  2. A video with my work progress in Maya and Nuke.
  3. Project must be delivered before April 22.

My main goal is to make a project that I not only enjoy, but take pride in showing as part of my portfolio, this is the result of this week's brainstorming.

  • A ladybug walking on a leaf in the park.
  • Something related to the cadejo (famous legend of a demonic dog in Honduras)
  • Something gloomy / monster coming up the stairs.
  • A spider sticking out of an ear.
  • Alien ship flying around a tree.
  • A puppy made of clouds jumping in the sky.
  • Monster sitting on a roof or on an electric wire.
  • A flower growing in a park that has a face.
  • Interview or newscast about monsters living in a house, with a scene of a little monster walking on the corners.

This week I have also started with the recommended tutorials from class (especially the ones on LinkedIn learning, Nuke essential training). For now I will dare to say that the program reminds me of photoshop but intended for video editing, since I’m just starting to use this program, I may be wrong.


Week 2: Nuke, much more interesting than I expected.

During this week I continued with the tutorials that LinkedIn educational has about Nuke, which I thought was another version of Adobe Premiere. Now I consider it to be superior.

Curious, I looked on Behance for projects in which Nuke has been used, a lot of CGI and 3D is what appeared but I also looked for famous works that were made with this program and among those that I recognized I can name Alice in Wonderland from Dreamworks and Pirates!

But the point that really blew my mind was the 3D functions, from working with elements made in programs like Maya and easily converting 2D backgrounds to 3D with masks. As you can see in this video. 

Between Maya and Nuke, I am a bit ashamed to say that in this past week, I practiced a lot more in Maya, the little that I practiced in Nuke was knowledge that I usually use in Photoshop for montages.

Finally, after a lot of thinking and checking free models online for the different ideas that I have for my project, I had choose to do the ladybug idea, ideally with a ladybug rendered walking in a piece of grass in the part.


Week 3: Getting done tons of exercises!

I believe this week I had started with my right foot in Nuke, complementary with what I have been learning so far with Nuke Essentials (LinkedIn Learning).


Color Correction!

A big, BIG! Step of learning how to do CGI, this time we had 2 documents per exercise, those could be the same image with different colour or two documents that are similar but have to give the illusion that we’re recorded with the same camera, or at least with the same colour temperature.

Beginning with this example, where we needed to match those two images into the colour range of “reference”.




At first it looks easy, but with more complex images (and differences in colours) more complex the exercise, like with this one.




Notice that I even had to play with the different colour channels RGB, but also I couldn’t get (for now) the perfect match. I’ll have to check some other tutorials about this, since I could not fit the large amount of red in my sky and too little blue in my clouds.

This was my final result.


In the next example, we had a building in two different angles and colour temperatures. At first look I believe I did a good job with the colours, but I noticed afterwards that my palms and yellow flowers are slightly darker.




Then, a video exercise, two different shots with very different temperatures.



Following the instructions in the class, I noticed that during the choice of whitepoint the professor didn’t choose a white colour, but more like a soft yellow, since with white the scene would look brighter than the reference, a very good thing to remember when assigning colour temperature.


However there’s one thing I wanted to do but until now I can’t, in the second shot I want to fix the lights in the background. I feel that in the first shot they’re whiter than in the second. I’ll update with a “before and after” when I experiment with some tutorials.


2D Matchmoving

Alright, after who knows how many cups of tea (and occasional hot chocolate), some of my results after following internal tutorials from the class.

First, learning how to Stabilize a shaking video, something I kinda know how to do it in premiere but not very good at it.

Creating around 4 tracks, I found this exercise with waaaay more steps than premiere, but with better results, at least for now I'm very happy with my final version.

In the following exercises It was necessary to use tracking for different reasons, we have a plane tracker for the wall so we can add 2D elements in a enviroment with perspective and movement. A VERY important point of view to take into consideration was the difference in the final effect that is obtained if you work with a sequence of images or a video, for this exercise and to obtain the best result you have to work with a sequence.

Later, in this exercise using some tracking, we add the always reliable (and incredibly loved by those who arrange photos in photoshop lol) CLONE TOOL !, very, very important to play a little with the cloning opacity, if not see a bit between cut, to eliminate the letters at least 4 trackings were used. 

In these cases, you usually work from front to back, since the point where you see all the element you want to delete is not at the beginning. Also take into account the light a little reflected from the ceiling in the metal part of the sign.

Finally in this exercise, it was a combination of planortracking on the cell phone, with a rotomask and to cut out the arm with the cell phone and place it on a new background.

And add a little color correction to it.

incredible exercise to continue evaluating the distribution of the nodes, which is what affects what and how to join them (merge).

I have added my final node tree, just please ignore the node write, since I only put it to export the video :)
  

Week 4 and 5: 3D Camera

3D Matchmoving

During this week we definitively entered 3D terrain, in class we did a quick exercise in converting a 2D image to a 3D environment using perspective and 3d elements such as cubes to '' replace '' geometric elements within the composition.

Happily, I got my sphere to move within this space :)


3Dmatchmoving exercise

In the following exercise we not only use what we learned in class in the creation and export of 3D elements in NUKE (cameras, shapes, etc.) but also the implementation of 3D elements in Maya and get to the point of seeing them in the video.

However, this is an exercise that does not end here. This workshop is continued in the Lighting and Multipass Rendering Workshop section.

So we will see how we move forward with this exercise in the future.

Anyway, after fixing the distortion of the lens, we add a 3D camera node to create various tracking points, but also with a tracking and rot node we create a mask to eliminate the points created in the window and in the background when the person passes.

This is when I had a little jam, my 3D camera was not detecting the ROTO1 mask, so I have added my magic checklist for when something that should work doesn't work.

  1. Check that all the configuration is exact to the tutorial.
  2. Check in forums if anyone has had the same error.
  3. Visit another tutorial, see if you get the same result.
  4. Open a new document and carry out the same procedure but with other assets.
  5. And finally (and solution haha) delete ROTO1 and Camera3D and simply perform the procedure again.

The last one I call '' This settings are cursed, it is better to burn it and rebuild it ''

Once this pothole is overcome, we prepare the document to be exported to Maya, for this we need to create a write Geo node; If you look at my node tree, 3D elements created in Nuke (cards) were added, these offer a better visualization of where we will place the elements in Maya.


This is why when we export, we take care that the geometries are selected and the camera.

Once in Maya, in a nutshell these were my next steps.

  • We check that the sequence of images is correctly placed as the background of your camera (the one exported from Nuke).
  • Put the padlock on Nuke's camera, believe me you don't want to move it by accident.
  • Skydome! we place the 360 image that we have from the initial recording, we rotate the Skydome to match Nuke's camera.
  • We select both cards (floor and window) and place the aiShadowMatte material on them, in this way it will not be displayed in the rendering but they can also be used as masks.
  • In this way, we also create elements that we need to be masks, such as light poles, with these masks we can place elements in the background.
  • For the window we can add a Pong or PongE texture to create a slight reflection. However, since we don't want the card to be looked at, in the aiShadowMatte texture go to the Specular section and activate the indirect specular. From this point it is playing a little with the configuration, I found this page that explains it PERFECTLY with examples. 
    • Keep in mind that reflections can also be created in Nuke.

The result after adding our textured 3D elements and masks with AiShadowMatte, is more or less like this:

Seen from Arnold RenderView:


Week 6 and 7: Rendering and Internal Tutorials

During these weeks we were exploring within the class the use of rendering with some types of lights, firstly creating an environment in which you would place 3D elements (background image in 2D, aligned with a plane in perspective and a skydome with HDR of the original image.

Something like this:

We continued with the creation of different materials, however I decided that I wanted to play a little more with the materials, so I was reviewing the Maya Support tutorials that the course offers, creating chrome, glass, brushed metal, marble, Iridescent material and something that was supposed to be Car Paint, but I got too much fun with the combination of textures.

Returning to the main rendering practice, placing more materials (and you can see the other materials in the sphere reflection lol) we started playing with Render Layers.

With Render Layers, you can create groupings of elements and / or specific effects for rendering. For example, if in my scene I only wanted to render the shadow of the cylinder, it would look like this:

Alpha Channel:

Extra tip: Noise problems have a lot to do with lights settings, more samples in the lights means least noise but also more time rendering.Here I mark exactly which is the layer that is working and this is how the shadow would be rendered.


Continued in ''Nuke! Never Gonna Give You Up PART 2''