Blog Posts: tagged with Back To Basics

Nuke scripts often start out as well-intentioned, clutterless masterpieces that even Marie Kondo would be proud of. However, endless revisions and client notes in the heat of a deadline often cause tidy Nuke scripts to unravel into unintelligible, slow messes.

Compositors often lean into pre-comping to help wrangle these large, lethargic beasts, so Nuke will run at an interactive speed again. This article will cover best practices when pre-comping, to ensure you maintain optimal speed with your image processing.

Creating gizmos, no matter how simple, and even if just for your own use, is a good way to speed up the way you work. Saving one or two clicks on many tasks, on many shots adds up over the course of a day! Although, there are some things to keep in mind when doing so.

Image filtering is a necessary step in many tasks we do in computer graphics, but it often gets little cognisant attention from Compositors. When mentoring junior artists' recently, I discovered they rarely know of this fundamental knowledge at all! So I thought it would be beneficial to write this article so we can brush up on the basics, maybe learn a new thing or two, and have a resource to point others' towards if they're stuck with this concept.

$gui is a simple TCL expression that tells Nuke to process a value differently in the Viewer (or "gui") vs. when rendering on the render farm.

To use it, simply right-click on any knob in Nuke, choose "Add expression", and enter $gui in the expression field.

There is always more than one way to solve a problem in Nuke, although some ways are definitely better than others. The aim of this post is to make you aware of the things you should & shouldn't do, so you can retain as much image quality as possible in your final comp, and work speedily without Nuke grinding to a halt.