In the third week, we started learning about Nuke. As I mentioned before, composing and matte painting are the areas that interest me the most in VFX. We mainly reviewed the basics which helped me better understand Nuke’s various features and how to use the software. It was an excellent introduction to project settings and essential nodes in Nuke. I felt pretty confident in the first session and overall I found using this program quite similar to Adobe software. I am also considering exploring Katana in my spare time as I believe it can be helpful to learn about the lighting effects (and it can also open up new career paths for me).
We learned about pipelines in VFX and the different roles as a Digital Compositor, which combined with the VES Handbook of Visual Effects gives me a better look at the VFX industry and the roles available. I need to learn more about careers in this field, so I plan to watch tutorials on Gnomon, LinkedIn learning, 80lv and IAMAG. I also contacted the career team and received a handful of materials on networking events, workshops and recruiting tips.
Additional resources:
IAMAG: https://www.iamag.co/
80 Level: https://80.lv/
Gnomon: https://www.gnomon.edu/
Workshop notes:
Nodes are the basic building blocks of any composite. You can create a new compositing script by inserting and connecting nodes to form a network of operations. These operations concatenate and allow you to manipulate your images.
Node Based:
Node based software is handling the often complex compositing tasks by linking together several simple image operations. Each of these operations is referred to as a “node,” and together they make up a schematic node-tree that appears similar to a flowchart. Node-based compositing represents an entire composite as a tree graph, linking media objects and effects in a procedural map, intuitively laying out the progression from source input to final output, and is in fact the way all compositing applications internally handle composites.
This type of compositing interface allows great flexibility, including the ability to modify the parameters of an earlier image processing step “in context” (while viewing the final composite). Node-based compositing packages often handle keyframing and time effects poorly, as their workflow does not stem directly from a timeline, as do layer-based compositing packages.
Important:
Always remember to convert MOV files into sequences. Nuke does not work well with MOV files. Nuke is meant to work with IMAGE SEQUENCES. An image sequence is a series of sequential still images that represent frames of an animation. Commonly, the images are saved within one folder and are labelled with an incrementing file name in order to preserve the chronological order.
Import the video file. Customise the frame sequencing and frame range by using retime and frame range node. Be careful not to change the frame speed in the retime node. Call a write node and export out the video as an image sequence. Remember to use as file format either DPX or EXR. Remember to add the hashtags to allow nuke to write the sequences.