Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 056
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Hey,
Wherever you are in the world during this challenging time, I hope you and the people you care for are safe, and are making the successful transition to working from home.
This weekend I wanted to do something small to help others, and help them to spread more positivity, so I doubled my contribution to some of my favourite content creators on Patreon, and pledged some money to a couple of new favourites.
Additionally, I want to give a special shoutout to two folks who are making a difference:
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COVID-19 — An Opportunity for the VFX Industry: Part 1.
For many of us, the past few weeks have brought some of the strangest, most uncertain times we've experienced in our lives. The Coronavirus has shut us in our homes and threatened our contract-based livelihoods for the foreseeable future. Movie studios are postponing productions, and VFX vendors worldwide are rapidly adapting both infrastructure and security protocols to enable artists to work from home and finish existing projects, where possible.
While the situation we're facing is dire, I felt it was important to start thinking and talking about the potential upsides that the Coronavirus pandemic has for our industry. Over the next few issues of Ben's Comp Newsletter, I'll be sharing thoughts on the opportunities we have to change the way we work for the better.
The first part in this series of articles takes a look at why security in our industry is water-tight, and the infrastructure challenges presented by working from home. It shines a bright light on how incredible the past couple weeks have been, as many folks have successfully adapted to the new ways our industry has been forced to operate.
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Curve Utilities.
Oftentimes we need to tweak animation curves in various ways to return a specific value. There are 3 things I do most often:
- Remap a curve from the CurveTool to values between 0 and 1.
- Zero-out an animation curve, essentially setting a "reference frame" for said animation.
- Framehold a curve on a specific value.
I recently put together this collection of Python scripts which creates shortcuts to help you do all three things with the click of a button! Once installed, you can access the scripts by right-clicking on any knob, and navigating to the Curve Utilities section.
Installing is as easy as dropping the python script in your ~/.nuke folder, and adding the line: import bm_CurveUtilities to your menu.py.
Do you have any ideas for other shortcuts in this category? Please reach out and let me know -- I'd love to hear them!
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12 Toolsets for a smarter and faster comp workflow.
Marcel Pichert got in touch to let me know he'd dropped 12 Toolsets for a smarter and faster comp workflow on his blog. Naturally, it caught my attention!
Marcel offers a few handy utilities such as setups for precomping heavy parts of your Nuke scripts, examples of which nodes concatenate, as well as some more involved templates for keying and uv-unwrapping / warping textures on geo.
It's worth your time to check out, as you may find a handy new technique to add to your toolkit!
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Vfxy News.
Everyone is too busy in this day and age, and there are enough news sites to keep up with that it's become difficult to stay on top of the latest and greatest in VFX. Lev Kolobov recently reached out to share his project, which aims to alleviate our time pressures.
Vfxy News provides a single website where you can quickly see headlines from your favourite sources such as Fxguide, Befores & Afters, Art of VFX, etc. in one place! It has already proven to be a useful resource for me to check a couple of times a week, and I'm better-informed for it.
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Did you find this newsletter informative?
Have you created, or do you know of any outstanding Gizmos, Python Scripts or Tutorials that you would like to share with the global Compositing community? Please reply to this email, and I will do my best to include it in a future issue of this newsletter.
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Support on Patreon
Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 056 is sponsored by Keegen Douglas.
Thankyou to the following supporters
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Adam Kelway
Adrian Winter
Anton Moss
Antonio Gabarrón
Brent Veal
Christian Morin
Ciaran O Neachtain
Dan McCarthy
David Ventura
Ed Englander
Gary Kelly
Hugo's Desk
Jan Stripek
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Julien Laperdrix
Kim
Kris Janssens
Lee Watson
Matt
Micheal Liuyu
Michael Loithaler
Shih Yi Peng
Tiscar Coig
Vincent Desgrippes
William Towle
+ 2 Anonymous others...
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If you get value from reading Ben's Comp Newsletter every other week, please consider contributing via Patreon to help keep it running!
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