3D-Compositing, Stereo-3D, Multi-Channel-Workflow and a brand new Interface.
Nuke is a great Tool for Film-Compositing. And now, Nuke is going into Round 5.
Introduction NUKE is digital compositing software application that provides artists
with the means to create photorealistic images of the highest quality.
From a non-proprietary hardware base, NUKE gives artists a flexible,
efficient, cost effective and full-featured tool set with which to
combine and manipulate scanned film, video plates and
computer-generated imagery. Refined for over ten years, and used to
date on over 35 movies and hundreds of commercials and music videos at
Digital Domain, NUKE advances the ability to deliver final visual
effects shots on film and video that integrate seamlessly with the
remainder of the project, regardless of the desired visual style or
complexity.
Heribert Raab works as VisualFX TD for Trixter Film
in Munich where he works on different TV commercials and feature film
productions. He has also worked as a supervising TD for Softmachine. In
the past he helped build a complete VFX Pipeline for a fulldome360
feature film and different motion rides. Before, that he worked on
several productions on feature films for CA Scanline, Pinewood Studios
and Ambient Entertaiment.
Heribert started compositing with
Digital Fusion and later switched to Shake in 2001. Then in 2006 he
began using Nuke and in 2007 made the switch completely to nuke. He has
also had experience with combustion and flame but prefers to use Nuke.
Heribert will be reviewing Nuke 5 and spotlighting some of its new features.
the Workflow overviewThe difference, between Nuke and other node based compositing tools, is the Multi-Channel-Worklflow. In compositing, the red, blue and green channels gets manipulated and masks by the alpha Channel. Nuke does not limit you to 4 channels (RGBA). In version 5, the limits are at 1023 channels per compositing script. Channels, that are not used have no effect on speed. For this resaon, the OpenEXR-Format for the first time really makes sense to use. In a OpenEXR file, you can store unlimited images (passes) and every pass can carry 8 channels. It's a great way to save harddisk space and hundreds of separate image files. The 3D Render-Artists also now have a good way to view and store the different renderpasses and it's much easier to handle the renderjobs.
In many other compositing tools, you have to switch different passes into the RGBA channels to manipulate them and you need a lot of nodes in order to change anything on the OpenEXR passes. In Nuke 5 you can change the passes directly and every node has access to every channel or pass. This saves you from having lots of extra nodes, wich makes the compositings tree much smaller and easier to read. For creating and managing passes or channels, Nuke provides you many tools and nodes. For example, you can add a second alpha or a mask to the RGBA channel of your Beauty-Pass or you can delete or draw new masks/passes and use them over in your compositing tree. Finally you have full controll over the passes or channels. The LayerContactSheet is a useful node for getting fast visible overview of your passes, which comes in. The viewer allows different multiple views, so , you can easily create something like a color-sheet for shots etc.
Nuke also provides you a lot of great features to organize and clean-up your compositings tree's. This helps you to get a good overview of your compositing and its also much easier for other operators to read.
for Example: You can add sticky-notes, change color of group backgrounds, change color, size or font for every single node. Little arrows show you which connection is going in or out of your nodes. You can even adjust the size of the arrows. Every node in the tree shows you little symbols or extra fonts to indicate the changes a node has. These changes can be a maniplulation by other channels, masks, keyframes or expressions. For important nodes, Nuke 5 allows you a put in an extra mask connection from an another node, which makes it easier for Shake users to get into the workflow. My favorite feature is tab key, if you hit the tab key a input line will show up under your mouse pointer and type in the first character and nuke will list all nodes of this character.
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