In an effort to clean up the blog and make it more browseable, I’ve removed a lot of the newsletter-based posts.
You can find 3 years worth of Ben’s Comp Newsletter issues archived here: https://benmcewan.com/newsletter.html
There are plenty of tools & knowledge to learn from to improve your workflow in Nuke!
I just released a new course, and best of all, it’s free! Check out The Math of Comp here: https://learn.benmcewan.com/math_of_comp
This course aims to share knowledge that will deepen your technical understanding of Nuke in an easily digestible way, as we talk about some of the fundamentals behind what Nuke’s tools are actually doing to the pixels in your images. Enjoy!
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!
Compositing CG renders into a plate with a rack focus can sometimes be tricky to get right. However, your defocus has to match perfectly, otherwise the illusion falls apart! Manually creating keyframes and adjusting curve slopes can be a bit cumbersome, so I thought there had to be a better way to approach this. In this tutorial, I will share what I came up with!
We can learn a lot about what our CG needs by taking cues from our plate, and matching defocus is no exception. We can look at the size of our plate’s bokeh shapes, or how soft high-contrast edges are for reference. Animating a rack focus is a natural extension of this!
Continue Reading "Automatically matching a plate’s rack focus."
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Jedediah Smith"Jedediah Smith has been burning it at both ends in VFX for 10 years. He’s worked as a Compositor, a VFX Supervisor and many roles in between. Self-taught since his origins in the wilderness of Alaska, he has a massive fascination for the intersection of art and technology. Playing with code, fiddling with cameras, building nodes to create pretty pictures… That’s the best quality time.
Nuke’s merge node has 30 operations, and finding a Compositor who has utilized them all would be a difficult task. However, I want to shed some light on two merge operations that are incredibly useful, and don’t get as much love as they should.
The most common operation, Over, is pretty self-explanatory: The image in the A pipe goes over the top of the B pipe. So how and why would this concept need to be expanded upon?
When working with CG renders that have baked-in holdouts, or if you’re creating and precomping your own holdouts using Deeps, you might find that you get dark edges when merging everything back together. This is where disjoint-over can help! Let’s take a look at a quick example to demonstrate:
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."
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Josh Parks"Josh Parks is a Senior Compositor at Important Looking Pirates. He’s worked in Film, TV and Advertising. Since starting in the industry, alongside compositing, Josh has been privately coaching students to VFX supervisors, as well as lecturing at universities.
When adding a new gizmo to a menu inside of Nuke, I like to recycle the existing icons so I can keep everything thematically consistent. However, these icons are buried inside Nuke’s install directory, and I always forget exactly where they live…
Continue Reading "Quick Tip: Reusing Nuke’s default icons."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.
