Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 036
|
|
Hey,
Hope you've had a productive week!
This weeks' newsletter is packed
with a bunch of handy utilities, and
some insightful knowledge from one
of the Nuke community's
leaders.
|
|
ERWAN LEROY //
Head of 2D
“I didn’t know the name at the time, but I
always was a bit of a nerdy kid. I was into
cartoons, video games, and fantastic worlds.
I learned to use a computer and started
playing with some graphics software before I
learned to ride a bike. When I was 10, I
wanted to become a “video game maker”, but
didn’t quite know what it was. Grown-ups
told me I could choose to learn programming
or CG, so I started playing with both a
little. Not knowing English at the time made
it a bit trickier to pursue programming, so
I went the CG route instead.
I started professionally as a compositor in
2008. Little by little I started including
programming into my work day, and it now
overtook the amount of compositing I do. I
have been working for SPINVFX since late
2016, first as a lead compositor, then head
of comp, and now head of 2D.”
|
|
Quick Tip: Programmatically Dealing with
Hex Colour in Nuke
Something
I'm endlessly frustrated by is
having to work around the way Nuke
uses confusing hex colour values in
Python to do things such as set a
node's 'tile_color' knob. For
example, how are we supposed to
remember that 0xff000ff
= green?
I wrote two simple functions to get
around this, which I hope you can
make use of too:
def hex_color_to_int(hexValue):
return int(hexValue+'00', 16)
The hexValue argument
still expects a hexadecimal colour
value, although rather than an
arbitrary string of characters, you
can input a web-based colour which
is easily found by Googling
"hex colour
picker".
For example, I can sample a gold
colour as
#ffd700 from
Google, and then set the
'tile_color' knob on a selected node
with the following:
nuke.selectedNode()['tile_color'].setValue(hex_color_to_int('ffd700'))
Similarly,
if you prefer to just use float
values like in Nuke's RGB sliders,
this works great:
def hex_color_to_rgb(red, green, blue):
return int('%02x%02x%02x%02x' % (red*255,green*255,blue*255,255),16)
...and then setting 'tile_color'
with:
nuke.selectedNode()['tile_color'].setValue(hex_color_to_rgb(1,0.6,0))
This one works by converting the
strange hex colour to RGB values
(0 to 255) and using our 3
arguments to multiply red, green and
blue values in a way a Compositor
would find more intuitive.
Regardless of your favourite method,
either option is far simpler and
more controllable!
|
|
dg_PerspLines
It's funny
how specific problems come up more
than once within a short window of
time. Recently, a handful of people
have asked me a variation of the
question, "how do I tell if my
perspective / horizon / vanishing
point is correct?"
I was sure someone had already
solved this problem, and so I went
on a search. What I found was a
simple, but surprisingly useful utility
gizmo for Nuke, created by
Den Gheiko, that
helps you with all of the
above!
|
|
Python-based Machine Learning Frame
Server for Nuke
Foundry quietly released this repository on
their GitHub a couple weeks ago. It's a
functional machine learning framework for
Nuke, containing examples that:
-
Blurs your image
-
Detects objects (Mask-RCNN)
-
Maps "human pixels" into a 3D
surface-based model (DensePose)
In Foundry's
own words:
"This repository contains the
client-server system enabling Machine
Learning (ML) inference in Nuke. This
work is split into two parts: a client
Nuke plug-in Plugins/Client/ and
the Python frame server Plugins/Server."
This is the beginning of something huge.
|
|
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 send
me an
email, and I
will do my best to
include it in a future
issue of this
newsletter.
If you find value in
Ben's
Comp Newsletter,
please consider
pledging
a small amount
on
Patreon to help
keep this project
running! Contributions
are always appreciated
but not expected.
|
|
|
|
|
|
