Happy New Year 🎉
As you know, I’m all about sharing knowledge & continuously improving my skills. It has been great to see so many Compositors start to create in-depth Nuke content in 2020 & 2021 — something that has been missing in our community for so long. To kick off the new year, I wanted to celebrate my favourite creators from the Nuke community, and share the tools I’ve been using most often.
Creators & Websites I’m enjoying.
Comp Lair (Pedro Andrade)
Check out his tutorials on YouTube. Pedro’s “The Next Level” training for aspiring Comp Supes is unlike anything else out there, and is currently 20% off for January! Now is the best time to sign up if you’ve been thinking about learning skills to help progress your career into leadership roles.
Compositing Academy (Alex Hanneman)
Alex recently released his latest course, NK606 — Advanced CG Compositing & Look Development, which is an incredibly in-depth resource for learning to Comp a big shot from start to finish. I’m a big fan of Alex’s work, and how he teaches fundamental concepts as well as how to execute them in Nuke.
He has been consistently pumping out great content on the Compositing Academy YouTube channel as well.
Split the Diff (Sebastian Schütt)
Check it out on YouTube.
Compositing Mentor (Tony Lyons)
Tony’s Website. His latest series on YouTube is doing a deep dive into CG Compositing.
Conrad Olson
Check out his content on YouTube.
Are you following anyone else? Please reach out and let me know!
Top Nuke Tools I’m using every day.
Denoising plates — Neat Video / Reduce Noise
Adding Grain — DasGrain (what else!)
Despill — apDespill
EdgeExtend (when absolutely necessary) — Edge, apEdgePush is great too.
Creating mattes from CG — apMatte
Defocus — OpticalZDefocus. pgBokeh when I need the Deep input. Magic Defocus is best for CatsEye/Barndoor effects. All used with a photographed bokeh kernel (from a plate, or external image).
Chromatic Abberation — apChroma + apChromaMerge
Lens Flares — OpticalFlares, until a later version of SpotFlare is released.
Exponential Glow — bm_OpticalGlow
Lightwrap — bm_OpticalLightwrap
Camera Shake — bm_CameraShake
I’m also really digging Stamps, and fxt_PrecompController for speeding up my workflow.
Happy Comping!