Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 049
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Hey,
I want to start by wishing a happy
Thanksgiving to my American friends.
Because you're a subscriber of
Ben's Comp Newsletter &
it's Cyber Monday, I'd like to offer
you 20% off Python
for Nuke 101 when you
use code: turkeycode19
at
checkout! Hurry, offer is only
valid until midnight December 3rd
(PST).
This issue of Ben's Comp
Newsletter includes a
couple of tools I created this year,
a brand new industry interview, and
a look at some future technologies.
Enjoy!
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Ben Kent
// Lead Research Engineer at
Foundry.
Hi,
I’m Ben Kent and
I’m a Lead Research Engineer at
Foundry, as well as a screenwriter,
producer and director. I first
joined Foundry in 2001 to work on
the original Furnace suite of
plug-ins, and I was one of the
recipients of the 2007 Academy Award
for Science and
Engineering...
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Making shot breakdowns easy.
We're
coming up on the end of the year,
which can coincide with being tasked
to create breakdowns for past shows.
Most of the time you don't need to
go full-beans, and just need some
simple wipes to demonstrate a shot's
creative process. Although in Nuke,
figuring out the right timing with
Retimes and TimeOffsets is always
slow and painful process.
There are plenty of gizmos out there
that aim to automate this process,
but in my experience they get quite
convoluted and often aim to
achieve too much. I wanted to make
my own tool that provides as much
functionality as possible, with only
a few simple controls that need to
be tweaked.
I recently made Breakdownerizationer --
you simply choose the type of
breakdown, then set a frame to run
the wipes on and your ideal timing
speeds, select all your layers (I
recommend precomping your layers for
speed) and the tool runs a Python
script that does the
rest!
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Node Sandwich.
Something I
find myself doing all the time is
converting a handful of nodes in a
Nuke script to log space, to deal
with highlights in a smoother
fashion. The process of converting
to/from log space is simple, but as
I mention a lot in this newsletter,
improving the small things you do
multiple times a day adds up to big
improvements long-term.
Rather than creating and positioning
these nodes manually, Node
Sandwich allows you to
select a group of nodes and hit a
simple CTRL+SHIFT+L
shortcut to convert a section of
your script to log space. Using the
same code, I can use CTRL+SHIFT+P to
wrap a selection of nodes in Unpremult /
Premult -- something else
we do a lot as Compositors.
To install, simply download the
Python file to your .nuke
directory, and add this line of
code:  to your
menu.py.
If you would prefer a different set
of nodes as the bread in your
sandwich, the code at the bottom of
the bm_NodeSandwich.py file
is fairly easy to read and
modify (click
the image below to view it
full-sized).
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The code
highlighted in green reads:
("Node Class to create for the top piece of bread", "Node Class to create for the bottom piece of bread")
And the code
highlighted in blue is the keyboard
shortcut.
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A look into the future with Autodesk
& Adobe's R&D projects.
Something we
frequently talk about in Ben's Comp
Newsletter is how our
industry is evolving, and where we
might see Compositing & VFX
heading into the future. Two events
recently took place, one hosted by
Autodesk and the other
by Adobe, where
speakers highlighted innovative new
tools in their early stages. There
are a handful of things that excited
me here, so I will share them
all!
AUTODESK
Artificial
Intelligence at Autodesk for 3D
and VFX Content Creation
talks about some inefficiencies in
the current VFX pipeline, and how
Autodesk is
using AI / Machine Learning to solve
them. This talk is mostly geared
towards some interesting 3D-specific
solutions, although skip to 6:05 to
check out a demo of Flame
automatically generating normals for
a human face, and creating a zDepth
pass for a shot. Crazy!
ADOBE
The Adobe Max conference was held a
few weeks ago. If you put the
painful presentation and unnecessary
cheering aside, these features have
a whole lot of potential...
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#ImageTango
combines the shape of one
image with the textural
quality of one or more other
images to synthesize a brand
new image.
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#GoFigureSneak offers
a new solution for tracking
the motion of a human without
a mocap suit, and enables an
artist to easily apply that
data to a 2D
character.
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#LightRightSneak allows
the user to relight photos
with semi-accurate shadow
fidelity, by creating a 3D
representation of a photo,
based off witness cameras
(or stock photos of the same
subject) under the
hood.
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#ProjectAboutFace can
identify if an image has
been modified or not, and
attempts to undo any
modification.
Lots of
exciting potential here!
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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 reply
to
this email, and I
will do my best to
include it in a
future issue of this
newsletter.
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Support on Patreon
Ben's Comp
Newsletter: Issue
049 is
sponsored by
Keegen
Douglas.
If you get value from
reading Ben's
Comp
Newsletter every
other week, please
consider contributing
via Patreon to
help keep it
running!
Thankyou
to the following
supporters
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Adam Kelway
Adrian Winter
Anton Moss
Gary Kelly
Hugo's Desk
Julien Laperdrix
Kim
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Lee Watson
Matt
Michael Loithaler
Tiscar Coig
Vincent Desgrippes
William Towle
+ 2
others...
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