Managing the size of your Comp’s bounding box is one of the lowest-effort things you can do to find massive performance gains in Nuke. There are a few things we can do to stop processing extra, unseen pixels, and speed up your comp.
Continue Reading "Ben, how do I manage my bbox size?"
I have just released the Nuke Icon Design Toolkit — a Nuke Script containing a style guide & examples, showing how to create icons that match Nuke’s theme.
It’s useful for recreating Nuke’s default icons at a higher resolution (for 4K monitors), or for creating future-proof icons of your own. It also includes 4K-friendly icon replacements for Nuke’s “Nodes” toolbar.
Icons are an incredibly useful design tool to enhance user experience and readability. In Nuke, we only see icons in the Nodes toolbar by default. However, there are other areas we can add icons to increase usability & Nuke script readability. In this tutorial, I’m going to show you five practical examples.
Continue Reading "Ben, how do I add icons to different areas in Nuke?"I’m excited to announce that I have just released a new course, aimed at introducing Compositors to GitHub!
If you are unfamiliar, Git is a powerful version control system, which supports the backbone of most modern VFX pipelines. Compositors like you are starting to embrace GitHub for finding and developing gizmos & python scripts, as well as version-controlling their .nuke directories.
Gone are the days where your Nuke preferences, toolsets, and menu.py have to be re-built at every new studio. Click here to get ahead of the curve, and introduce GitHub to your workflow today!
Nuke scripts often start out as well-intentioned, clutterless masterpieces that even Marie Kondo would be proud of. However, endless revisions and client notes in the heat of a deadline often cause tidy Nuke scripts to unravel into unintelligible, slow messes.
Compositors often lean into pre-comping to help wrangle these large, lethargic beasts, so Nuke will run at an interactive speed again. This article will cover best practices when pre-comping, to ensure you maintain optimal speed with your image processing.
Continue Reading "Back to Basics: Pre-comp more efficiently."The beginning of my Compositing career started with After Effects, and while I’m now living and breathing Nuke, there’s one thing I still miss — the ease of use of After Effects’ animation tools.
Coupled with a recent fascination with bezier curves, I decided to set out and see if I could bring the most basic functionality from After Effects, “easy ease”, into Nuke, with a way to control the smoothness of that curve.
To start out, I wanted to explore what was already possible. Selecting a keyframe and hitting “h” on your keyboard changes the keyframe type to “horizontal”. If you do that on the first and/or last keyframe of a curve, you get a smooth ramp in/out. However, if it’s not easing enough, grabbing one of the handles and trying to adjust the curve quickly results in frustration.
Over the last two parts of this series, we’ve talked about how the Coronavirus pandemic has impacted the VFX industry globally, how VFX vendors are adapting, and the opportunities presented to us to manage our own time, increase productivity, and gain greater flexibility in our lives. In this third and final part, we’ll discuss some of the potential pitfalls that working from home brings, how you can make the most of the situation, and even find an opportunity for growth.
Continue Reading "COVID-19 — An Opportunity for the VFX Industry: Part 3."
(In Part 1 of this series, we take 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 incredibly many folks have adapted to the new ways our industry has been forced to operate. If you haven’t yet read it, you can do so here.)
For the VFX industry and its workers, the global Coronavirus pandemic has presented an incredible opportunity to step up, and prove we can do better. Just like Movie studios, VFX vendors are first-and-foremost a business. Successful business growth requires many things, but the underlying tone of it all is: a constant increase in productivity generates more profit, which generates expansion and more work, which then needs greater productivity, and so on.
Over the past few years, I’ve enjoyed reading about intelligent folks’ systems, and how they manage their time and energy for maximum output every day. One of the primary benefits of working from home is having more control over managing our own time. In this article, I’ll be sharing some tips on how I leverage this flexibility to be a more effective member of my team.
Continue Reading "COVID-19 — An Opportunity for the VFX Industry: Part 2."If you’re like me, you’re always looking for ways to get an edge on efficiency in your workflow, and contribute more value to your team. A common thread between most Compositors is they see the value of utilizing Python, but are unsure how and where to start learning…
If this sounds like you, I have some great news — I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes, creating the solution to your problem! I’m incredibly excited to announce a new online course, comprising of 10 weeks of video tutorials, which is now available for pre-order!
I’ve put a ton of effort into making this course as valuable as possible, for an incredibly affordable price.
Click here to read more, and pre-order!
A common problem we face in visual effects is what DoPs might refer to as “dynamic” lighting; aka light sources that change colour and intensity throughout the shot. It makes our images look more interesting, but adding any VFX to these plates instantly becomes more complex. Common examples include flashing police lights, in-camera lens flares for dramatic effect, and shots lit entirely by flashing neon lights or a fire. The latter is most complex to manually animate, so it will be the example I’ll use in this article.
Continue Reading "Easily control CurveTool’s output to help match constantly-changing lights in your plate"