Even though it’s the compositor’s bread and butter, Keying can still be a particularly painful subject. I’ve been pulling keys for over a decade, yet it is often scarier than comping a full CG realistic shots with projected matte paintings and volumetric smoke. One can never have too many tools on their belt for pulling [...]
Last week we started playing with Higx PointRender, and we saw how it wasn’t really a particle system as we’re used to. Let’s dive a little deeper to understand what differs between this method and Nuke’s particle system, see how we can get our points to behave more like particles, and what are the limitations [...]
For the very few of you who have missed it, the talented Mads Hagbarth recently released his Higx PointRender. While the tool is not free, it’s pretty affordable compared to what some others might charge for tools that can accomplish this much. There are a few video tutorials on the official website, plus some experiments on [...]
This post if for the artists who have been dipping their toes in the water of Python development and are considering taking it to the next level. We will cover some of the points that differ between an artist/amateur level of development and an entry TD level. I’m covering quite a few subjects in this [...]
Between Avid’s Fluid Morph and Adobe’s Morph Cut, some of us Nuke users felt a little bit left behind. When one of our client started abusing Avid’s Fluid Morph in offline, only for us to struggle to even get something that matched the editor’s reference, let alone improve on it, I decided that it was [...]
Since I discovered that Nuke was concatenating Transform nodes for me, I liked to break out my transformations into multiple nodes to give me a bit more flexibility. I would do a stabilize, some keyframe animation, scale up a bit, rotate for a while, matchmove, re-scale, in different nodes. Nuke was smart about it, and [...]
While Vray is remarkably intuitive for some daily operations, others might require a much more convoluted process. The creation of non-standard render passes, and especially the “Pref” pass is one of these (read that P-ref, like you’d read T-Rex). A few tutorials cover how to render custom render passes (a.k.a. AOVs) such as this one [...]
While it may not sound like a big issue at first, I recently realized that having duplicate names in Maya can be more problematic than I originally thought. Maya handles these duplicate names by using a “long name” internally, but some other scripts (including some default scripts) will complain about it and constantly throw error [...]
Even though I usually like to post about Compositing, I’m doing a little exception this time. I recently had to help a student create Fur for her personal project, and I got surprised how few tutorials were present online for the Xgen/Vray Combo. Some sort of Bug prevented us to make any progress for a long [...]
Alright, that’s a long title, but that’s the shortest I could come up with to describe this tutorial. It’s not rare that someone, somewhere, provides us with an element (logo, UI, motion graphics, precomp, anything really) with a nice alpha, but with a white or colored background. Of course it’s not ideal, but that’s nothing [...]
