Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 052
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Hey,
I hope you've had a productive start
to the year so far.
This week's newsletter focuses on a
handful of neat things that will
help streamline your workflow, and
help you create better
comps!
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Quick Tip: Decorate nodes that
cause an oversized bbox.
This
has been a feature since Nuke
11.3v1, but I had no idea
it existed until recently! In
Preferences > Node
Graph, there is a setting
that enables a warning on a node
when its bounding box is larger than
a certain preset
threshold. When enabled, the
erroneous node will display a thick
red border with a black dotted line
around it; any downstream nodes that
carry the large bbox will only
display the black dotted line.
If you haven't already, I recommend
switching this feature on and paying
attention to any warnings, to ensure
your Nuke scripts remain speedy and
efficient! Additionally, think about
some knob
defaults you can set on
certain nodes to ensure your bbox
stays small
(e.g. create a shortcut that
creates a Merge node, sets its
'operation' to mask and it's
bbox to A)
Lastly, with any node selected, you
can run nukescripts.autocrop()
in Nuke's Script Editor to
automatically reduce the size of
your bbox to its optimal size.
Thanks to Conrad
Olson for the
tip!
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P_Blood_Hit.
Finding
great blood elements that travel
with the same momentum as characters
in your shot, and are lit under
similar lighting conditions as the
shot's environment, can sometimes be
a tricky task. Adam
Kelway has come up with a
neat particle-based gizmo that helps
us with this conundrum.
P_Blood_Hit offers
an abundance of control when needed,
but a general setup is as easy
as:
-
Choosing
the most accurate
preset.
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Tweaking
the amount, direction &
speed of the
particles.
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Roughly
replicating the
lighting in your shot
with Nuke's 3D
system.
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Rendering
a pre-comp with plenty of
motionblur samples!
Layer up a
few variations of this gizmo with
your blood elements that don't quite
work, and you'll quickly have a
pretty nifty solution!
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De-hazing in Nuke.
Last
month, Mads
Hagbarth
Damsbo released a quick
tutorial on a technique that mimics
Lightroom's de-hazing feature using
standard Nuke nodes. Simple
technique, impressive results!
Unrelated: if you
haven't been following Mads' Point
Render project, you really
should check it out. There are some
groundbreaking
new
features
in the latest
update!
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DeepFakes, upgraded.
A VFX
Producer recently posed the
question: "If DeepFakes are so good,
why are the best studios in the
world investing so much money to
create photorealistic
digi-doubles?"
It's a great question, with an easy
answer. Put simply, DeepFakes are
automatically generated by training
an algorithm with a dense set of
reference imagery. After training,
all a user can do is hit "go" and
hope for the best. Although with no
extra control, what happens when a
client wants to subtly change parts
of a character's performance? This
has been the gold standard of
DeepFakes, until now...
As a personal project, Thiago
Porto set out to see what
could be possible to do in comp with
the help of AI / Deep Learning
models. What he came up with can
only be described as DeepFakes on
steroids. Using enhanced Deep
Learning algorithms, Thiago has
managed to add morph targets &
relighting capabilities to DeepFaked
faces, offering a ton of
flexibility, and getting closer to
changing my answer to the VFX
Producer's original question.
These results are nothing short of
astounding.
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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
052 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
Brent Veal
David Ventura
Gary Kelly
Hugo's Desk
Jan Stripek
Julien Laperdrix
Kim
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Kris Janssens
Lee Watson
Matt
Micheal Liuyu
Michael Loithaler
Shih Yi Peng
Tiscar Coig
Vincent Desgrippes
William Towle
+ 2
others...
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