Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 037

Hey,

In this week's newsletter, we're taking a look at some handy utilities to make your Compositing workflow a little less frustrating, and looking at some of the upcoming technological developments being showcased at Siggraph this year.

Inverse-Kinematics in Nuke

Johannes Masanz has created an example Nuke script which demonstrates how a simple IK rig can be achieved in Nuke. At first, this just seems like a fun little example, although there are actually a lot of practical uses for this!

Using Chappie as an example, there were a lot of shots where Die Antwoord would touch/grab/push Chappie, and vice versa. Some of the decisions made on set meant that these interactions looked incredibly realistic and gave matchmove & animation so much information & real-world reference to match to, although Compositors always have to bring that next level of sub-pixel accuracy.

There were plenty of shots I composited in the film where Chappie would grab a plate character, and I would need to warp elements of said plate to make it look like things were interacting in a life-like way. If I had this IK tool at my disposal when doing these shots, there would have been significantly fewer hours spent noodling a GridWarp or SplineWarp to do the right thing!

Johannes has created a demo video which you can watch here.

Click here to download the IK for Nuke example.

Rename Channels

Every studio has its own naming conventions for what they render and how they name AOVs. For larger, complex shots with many renders and many more sets of AOVs for those renders, things can get pretty cluttered and slow to work with. Part of this frustration comes from trying to find the channel you need in a big list of AOVs named something like, lgt_character3_noholdout_indirectspecular_denoised, as an extreme example.

Andrea Geremia has created a neat little solution for this problem, which helps you rename channels into clean, Compositor-friendly names. The Foundry already has a way of doing this, although as Andrea mentions in his description on Nukepedia, it can be buggy and unpredictable.

Click here to download Rename Channels from Nukepedia.

Reduce Noise Like A Pro

In the following video, Lars Wemmje explains how to properly use Reduce Noise to denoise your plates! If you've ever wanted to dive into Neat Video's Advanced Mode to make the most out of your denoise, this video tutorial is for you!

Click here to watch the Reduce Noise tutorial.

Siggraph 2019 Whitepapers

I found this list that links to all of this years' Siggraph papers. Enjoy an early sneak peek of what's to come!

A couple of my favourites are about Synthetic Defocus, Mocap from a monocular video source, Single-image portrait relighting, and Local light field fusion being used to reconstruct a scene -- like projection-mapping but with accurate reflections.

Click here to check out 2019's Siggraph papers.

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.

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