Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 023
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Hey,
Here is your bite-sized chunk of
comptastic knowledge for the week. I
hope these tools & tips save you some
time & energy!
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Quick Tip: If you've done it more than
twice, template it!
Classic financial advice tells us, "to save
a dollar, you first have to save some
cents". The same can be said about your
time. Those extra few clicks per shot might
only cost you 5 seconds. Although 3 shots
per day = 15 seconds per day = 1 minute, 15
seconds per week = 1 hour, 31 minutes and 15
seconds per year. Share that with your
10-person compositing team, and the results
are obviously ten-fold! The numbers add up
quickly, so as you can see, it pays dearly
to create your own tools & save time and
clicks wherever you can!
My rule of thumb is as the title says:
If I do something more than twice, I
know I need to template it.
Templating could mean a collection of nodes
that I save as a toolset (e.g. a 3D
projection setup on a ground plane), or it
could mean creating a gizmo to automate a
particular effect (e.g. an
exponential glow, made up of lots of
Blur nodes).
This advice isn't limited to Toolsets
or Gizmos. It also extends to
setting
knob defaults via your menu.py. For
example, if you find you're always adjusting
your Blur node's value to
10, why not set that as a default,
and save some manual labour!
Do you have a unique way you save time every
day? Please let
me know!
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sb_RandomTimeOffset
Every studio has that one awesome
atmospheric smoke element that's 1000+
frames long, and has characteristics that
you just can't find in the rest of the
elements library. But adding atmosphere to
your shot is never as easy as just slapping
one element in and calling it a day...
I found a tool, created by Simon
Bjork, which simplifies
the process of grabbing random clips of time
from that one brilliant element, so you're
able to rapidly prototype your shot.
sb_RandomTimeOffset can be
run on a selection of TimeOffset nodes, and
asks you for a minimum and maximum value to
be sure you constrain your elements' frame
range to the usable area.
If you need to place each of the element's
instances in 3D space, consider using a
simple Nuke Particle setup to randomly place
them!
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Wiener Deconvolve
After you've finished giggling at the name,
think about potential uses for tools like
this! Wiener Deconvolve is
a tool written by Jeremy
Peacock, which uses the Wiener
filter to un-defocus your image.
From Wikipedia,
"The goal of the Wiener filter is to
compute a statistical estimate of an
unknown signal using a related signal as
an input and filtering that known signal
to produce the estimate as an
output".
The results aren't perfect, but given how
complex this problem is to solve, I think
it's doing quite a good job! It's a great
solution for shots where you may have to
reduce how defocused your plate is
(removing defocus completely and
then re-adding a smaller amount would
ensure you don't see any
artefacting).
Click the button below to head over to
Nukepedia, and read more about how this tool
is working, alongside a couple more example
images...
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Free PDF of The VES Handbook of Visual
Effects
This book, now in its second
edition, is a great reference
whether you're just starting out, or already
have some experience in VFX and want to know
more. If you're interested in taking a look
but would prefer not to fork out the money,
you're in luck; The first edition is
now available online, for
free!
I know you're curious what the second
edition covers that the first edition
excludes, so I pulled a list from the VES'
website to explain:
-
On-set stereography
-
The Academy Color Encoding
System (ACES)
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Whether to shoot or convert to
3D
-
Virtual productions
-
Editorial workflow in an
animated feature
-
3D matte painting
-
General geometry instancing
If you find the downloadable first edition
version of this book useful, I encourage you
to buy the second edition, and support the
writers who gave their time to write
this book!
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Did you find this
newsletter informative?
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Thank you to the following supporters, who
help make this newsletter possible:
Premium Contributor: Seb
Tran
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