Andy Rea's VFX/Compositing Related Ramblings

A blog showing my work, old and new, work in progress pieces, software and plugins that I use and such.

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Was working on Nuke sky setup that included stars a while back and due to some camera settings ended up with this! Looks like some crazy lightning/lazer fx so I grabbed a screenshot

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<em>Kubo and the Two Strings</em>: water effects

A look at the development process for the water effects in 'Kubo and the Two Strings', which broke new ground for the Portland-based LAIKA.

Kubo is a lovely mix of old school stop motion and digital fx, great film to boot.

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Nuke has a lot of hidden nodes, some useful and some depreciated, this is my favourite

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The Art and Science of Green Screen Keying, Part 1.

Another great, in depth Nuke course from Victor Perez, he explains how each keyer works in real detail ,well worth watching

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CBeebies: Go Jetters - Theme Song

Watch and sing along to the Go Jetter theme song. Visit CBeebies at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies to find even more fun games and videos for your pre-schoole...

Titles for the show I am currently working on as lead compositor at Boulder Media

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#StarWarsVine #TieFighterTraffic #StarWarsIreland #tiefighters

Vine by Andy Rea

Those signposts do look a bit like Tie Fighters....

Model from: scifi3d.com/details.asp?intGenreID=10&intCatID=8&key=160 Tie Fighter SFX from: youtube.com/watch?v=TGLoQmMFnIs

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Anyone with interest in vfx or animation should go to this, student and professionals alike, brilliant event that gets better every year

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In this series of NUKE tutorials, we will learn about the physics of light travel inside a real camera lens and how to apply those effects to our own...

I wouldn't often recommend Digital Tutors courses as they are usually a bit lightweight but I found this one very good with in depth explanations of everything to do with cameras, which is, of course, pretty fundamental to all compositing.

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fxphd course: Production Nuke Finishing

In this advanced level NUKE course, members explore what it takes to truly take a shot to final, from a film visual effects perspective. Professor Alex Fry, fresh off his stint as lead compositor at Animal Logic for The Great Gatsby, works through several scenes of a recent independent project and show advanced techniques for getting great composites in NUKE. Many artists are under the impression that getting a shot to final relies merely on technical correctness and creative polish. While those are obviously two major factors, an often-overlooked influenced can be the most critical: the client. And by client that could be a paying client or -- at a facility -- the person the artist is working for: a sequence supervisor, vfx supervisor, director, or even the studio. The reality is that finalling a shot isn't really about any particular skill, but rather responding to feedback correctly and giving people up the chain what they want.

The last fxphd Nuke course I will recommend, this one is by Alex Fry and has plenty of great workflows and finishing tips and tricks

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fxphd course: Painting and Reconstruction Techniques with NUKE X

Removals and digital matte painting fundamentals are essential skills for a compositor, but mastering these techniques requires a high level of technical understanding in order to facilitate the work, increase the speed and improve the results. Professor Victor Perez has designed this course to show you the hard craft of painting and removing elements from a shot in a simple still technically advanced way.

Another fxphd Nuke course by victor Perez that I highly recommend for any aspiring compositor, packed full of practical workflows, useful information and in depth explanations of fundamental concepts

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fxphd course: NUKE Compositing Best Practices

Sometimes the creative process of digital compositing can be extremely complex specially when artists have too many technical tasks to focus on at the same time. In order to preserve an efficient workflow within a shot and across a whole project a smart methodology is required. Preserving high quality standards is as much important as deliver your best shot on-time. Being efficient should be as natural as breath, you don’t need to focus on it: you just do it without even thinking about that while your focus is where you really need it the most.

One of the best Nuke online courses I have some across, anything by Victor Perez is worth watching, he explains everything in such great detail leaving you with no questions and so many answers, highly recommended.

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Pixelfudger

Pixelfudger: Rich, creamy pixel fudging tools.

And some more from Xavier Bourque

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And more gizmo goodness from Bertrand Lempereur

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LumaNukeGizmos - Gizmos for nuke

Been spending a lot of time recently looking for useful gizmos at work. Some very useful stuff here courtesy of Luma Pictures.

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A script for Nuke to replace the default backdrop node. This version has a lot more options and helps maintain a tidier script

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disconnect_wiggle - NodeGraph - Python As requested by a few Shake and Houdini artists, a little python script to disconnect a node by shaking it. To install, copy to your plugin path and add 'import disconnect_wiggle' to your menu.

As a Nuke and Houdini user this is a godsend, enables the “shake to free” a node that exists in Houdini, within Nuke.

[andyreablog]

This is a useful little bit of Nuke scripting that helps make your Nuke script a bit easier to read, it will set all shuffle nodes to have postage stamp on by default and will have the name of the selected channel displayed in the label.

Copy the following into your init.py file:

the nuke.knobDefault("Shuffle.postage_stamp", "True") nuke.knobDefault("Shuffle.label", '<font size = "5"> [value in]')