Roadwork Sign

These are the pictures from the process of going through the roadwork sign tutorial, which I thought I had uploaded but I guess I forgot to, so here they are.

Here's the tracking points in Maya.

Here is those tracking points with the image plane.

This is placing a torus in the scene just to check how it would sit.

And here's the sign imported.

Creating a ground plane with the tracking points.

Here's a render of it so far.

This is working with the light and other things to render out.

This is adding the curb to break the shadow.

This is importing the surrounding light

Here's a problem I ran into with rendering... I decided to load up the next project file so I could continue working.

Here is the scene in After Effects.

The rest are just tweaks in After Effects for things like the shadows, sandbags, sign color, AO, etc.

10 Nodes

Here will be 10 examples of nodes in Nuke.

This is the base picture. Each node will change it somehow.

This is the Camera Shake node. It simulates a shaking camera and the motion blur that comes with it. I really cranked it up to show the effect, it can be much more subtle.

This is the Erode effect. I'm not entirely sure how to describe what it does... it drops the darks to get even darker and gives this weird orange-ness and blurry effect. It reminds me of the vision you get in Mass Effect 1 when you touch the artifact thing.

This is the godrays effect. It simulates godrays. Again, I cranked the settings pretty high to demonstrate what this does.

This is the Laplacian node. It adds this really cool effect where it basically makes a white-on-black outline/drawing of it.

This is a simple mirror node, it does exactly what it is.

This is the soften node. It softens the image, makes the edges seem softer and changes the lighting a bit. I like this one.

This is a text node, and again, it does exactly what you'd expect.

This is a tile node, which tiles the image. You can select if the tiles are rotated or flipped and stuff like that.

This is the Toe node. I can't really descrive what it does... It adds some lightness to the darker areas but that seems mostly to be it.

This is the Volume Rays node. It is kind of like the Godrays node, but I think it's cooler because it actually seems to cast light that sort of streaks from the lit areas of the picture. Very very cool.

Multi-channel Compositing in Nuke

These are just screenshots from my first tutorial in Nuke, "Multi-channel compositing in Nuke."

Right off the bat, the font on the screen is tiny and hard to read easily, so I found in the preferences that you can change the size of that.

After cranking that up to 18, it's a lot easier to look at.

Another thing that threw me off for a second was that, after bringing in a file, it doesn't display that until you link the node to the view node. I think the previous tutorial mentioned this when it was talking about the function of the view node. I kind of like the idea of your view being a node itself - it seems like that could be useful in the future.

Once you link the nodes, you can see the file.

Now I have to make a custom format to fit the image I brought in.

This here shows why I like Nuke already - all I had to do was link the .exr file to the merge node twice, change "over" to multiply, and change the B input to the indirect lighting channel and it looks pretty great. That's really cool that just a few clicks can make such a big change.

So this is what happens when you merge the reflection from earlier in with rgba, you get this really good looking reflection added to the previous picture. At this state, it already looks convincingly like a render from a 3d application, to me at least. It's really impressive what you can tweak with these .exr files.

This is what you get when you color correct before merging in. This will allow me to change the intensity of the reflection by setting the base to a darker color than the grey shown here. Also the sliders on the right look nuts. I don't know if that's because I changed the text size or what.

This is a weird problem I just ran into. I selected an area to get the average luminance and where I have circled is supposed to display that. But since I changed the text size to 18 from the default 11, it cut off with no way to change the window to see it. Seems like a bit of an oversight from a UI standpoint, but I got around it so whatever.

This is adding in the color correct node that will allow me to change the color of the yellow to pretty much anything.

Here you can see the amount of control over the color the color correct node gives you.

Here you can see some problem areas that got changed along with the main color of the car, so we have to go back and fix those.

The tutorial said to use the bezier tool to do this, but I couldn't find it. I think in this version of Nuke, it's called Roto so I used that and it seemed to work.

This is the backdrop nodes, useful for organizing your pipes. You can also control + click pipes to add joints, which I like a lot. Later on, I use these a ton to get really organized.

It was at this point where something I was doing was darkening the whole look and messing stuff up so I decided to continue from the project files included to make sure I was working from where I was supposed to and nothing would come back to bite me later on.

Here I decided to organize the pipeline horizontally, since that made a lot more sense to me. The monitor is wide, not tall so it kind of seems natural that you would organize your flow horizontally too. This made it a lot easier to keep track of what was going on since I could see pretty much everything.

Here is the composition after placing the backdrop. We still have to tweak stuff so it doesn't look like it's just sitting on a picture.

This is after moving the picture and doing some stuff with the shadows. You can also see the way I organized, by doubling back to basically organize it the same way you would read a page of paper.

Here is after adding a lightwrap. Adding it messed up my organization so I still have to fix that. Also the tutorial mentioned how there's still an outline around the car, so next video will address that.

This is after adding the lightwrap and some other effects. It messed up my node tree so I have to remake it.

Here is the node tree as of now and the full composition.

Here's the final node tree after cleaning it up.

And here is the final render of the composition.

I decided to go back to the hue shift node and play around and see how a green would come out. Looks like it's really easy to just go back and shift the color and leave the other tweaks the same, and it comes out pretty well!

Nuke is pretty cool. It seems to be pretty powerful and not too hard to use. Like with Zbrush, it's obvious how versatile the program is, but it has an absurd amount of things you can do and it's really overwhelming at the start. This isn't as bad like that. It's pretty simple to make a logical path of nodes to change the composition.