Ben's Comp
Newsletter: Issue 063
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Hey,
This week's newsletter has an interview with
one of the leading comp-based machine
learning practitioners, a couple of
technical Nuke tutorials, and an incredible
lens reference to help you when compositing
with anamorphic plates.
I also recently took part in an "Artist
Spotlight" interview with Foundry, which
went live a couple weeks ago. You can read
it here.
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Interview: Thiago Porto // VFX
Supervisor, MPC New York.
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Thiago Porto is a VFX Supervisor, and Senior
Flame & Nuke Artist for MPC Advertising
in New York. He is also one of the leading
forces behind researching Machine Learning
for 2D-based applications in our
industry.
If you have ever considered investing time
into learning more about ML, this interview
is packed with resources to help you get
started!
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Relighting Real Footage in Nuke.
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Last month, Alex
Hanneman uploaded this great
tutorial to show how you can relight plates
in Nuke. Using the DepthGenerator
node, you are able to generate depth,
position and normals passes from your plate,
and then use the Relight node in
Nuke (as you would with your CG
renders) to create new light
sources.
This technique works best for shots with
static subject matter & a lot of
parallax. If you have a shot of a character
or crowd moving about, you may have to find
another approach, such as creating
normals from luminance.
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Quick Tip: Add accurate motion blur to
your warps.
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When warping, I always use ST
Maps as the base, as they provide so
much extra control. Nuke's built-in
"MotionBlur" node, RSMB, and other nodes are
available to generate motion blur from our
warped input images, however, these nodes
are generating new motion vectors,
essentially making their best guess at where
the pixels are travelling.
Wouldn't it be better to use our warp data
to drive this instead?
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The Ultimate Anamorphic Lens Reference.
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If you ever need reference for any popular
anamorphic lens, this website is worth a
visit.
This
page outlines the history and
technology of anamorphic (which is
required reading for any
Compositor), and diving into the
website provides a ton of useful
information.
For example, if you know your plate was shot
with a 50mm Zeiss lens and need to throw
your CG out of focus, you can look
at this chart and see exactly
what bokeh shape the lens creates.
If you're crafty, perhaps you can isolate
the exact bokeh from the chart to use with
your favourite defocus node in Nuke.
Maybe this shot needs a lens flare too, in
which case you can check
out this page, which shows a visual
example of the exact flares each lens
creates. It's incredibly handy to have when
recreating flares using Optical Flares!
But that doesn't even scratch the surface.
The Ultimate
Lens Library lets you compare up to
4 different lenses side by side, with individual
videos showing characteristics such
as:
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How the lens distorts an image,
using a person and lens grids
for examples.
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How the lens breathes through a rack
focus.
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What flares look like when light
shines on different parts of the
lens (or goes out of frame).
I would highly recommend keeping this
incredible resource in your back pocket.
Cheers to Dan
Bigaj for the tip!
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Do you have something to
share?
If
you have any
feedback on how this
newsletter could
provide more value
to you or others, or
just want to share
your creations,
please reply to this
email -- I'd love to
hear it all!
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Thanks to my Patreon
Supporters.
This issue
of Ben's
Comp
Newsletter is
sponsored by
Keegen
Douglas.
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Aaron Bradford
Adam Kelway
Adrian Winter
Aman Arora
Anton Moss
Antonio Gabarrón
Attila Gasparetz
Ben Cecioni
Brent Veal
Christian Morin
Ciaran O Neachtain
Dan McCarthy
David Ventura
Denys Holovyanko
Eduardo Cardoso
Ed Englander
Federico
Fredrik Larsson
Gary Kelly
Hugo's Desk
Ian Failes
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Igor Majdandzic
Ivan Sorgente
Jan Stripek
Julien Laperdrix
Kim
Kris Janssens
Lee Watson
Matt
Micheal Liuyu
Michael Loithaler
Mikhail Shilin
MMM
Pablo Mereu
Santosh Seshabhattar
Seth Weber
Shih Yi Peng
Stu Maschwitz
Suresh Pandi
Tiscar Coig
Vincent Desgrippes
William Towle
+ 2 Anonymous
others...
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If you get value from
reading Ben's Comp
Newsletter every other
week, please consider contributing via
Patreon to help keep it running!
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