[FXPHD.com] NUK231: NUKE Compositing Best Practices [2014, ENG]

Class 1: Understanding mind maps structures and organizing a nodal graphic representation of a compositing: from ideas to nodes. The complete guide to understand the Node Graph and its iconography. The art of backdropping and labeling. All the Merge operations explained.

Class 2: Concatenation of transformations: theory and practices for reducing the impact of filter and antialiasing issues. Bypassing nodes that break the concatenation. Applying transformations within other non-transformation nodes: Roto & RotoPaint.

Class 3: Implicit vs. explicit compositing streams: handling channels on a multichannel structure, masking procedures and issues, optimization of multistream parallel operations. Parallel vs. serial structure of a script, pros and cons.

Class 4: Handling a CG Multipass: implicit and explicit structures for building the Beauty: pros and cons. Single multichannel OpenEXR files vs. one-pass-per-file philosophy: Handling, compacting and expanding options. The additive and the subtractive synthesis of compositing the CG Beauty.

Class 5: The Boundary Box (BBox) demystified. How to handle it for optimal results. Nodes that modify the appearance of the Bbox: preserving or discarding, cropping and handling the information beyond the format. The Merge and the BBox. Autocrop unuseful areas. The BBox through the 3D space.

Class 6: FX and process extraction. Methods for blending separated grain structures and the overall grain workflow issues. Building a Luminance Keyer. The Fringe and the Solarisation curve.

Class 7: Node optimizations: presets and defaults. Task oriented open structures vs. Groups/Gizmos enclosed structures. Implementing Nuke original nodes: rebidding a LightWrap open structure. Python generators from given data in nodes: the standard projection setup automatized. Recommendations for creating templates (Coverage Map Template case study), creating script template menu calls, focus on the CG multipass “universal” template.

Class 8: Relink procedures for handling files and paths structures within the Read node: Search & Replace on text editors, python scripting for automatic replacement, building a Relink node and its Nuke Expressions, script-relative paths, Search & Replace panel (using Frank Rueter’s Nukepedia Python), OS-relative path replacements.

Class 9: ScanlineRender node optimizations: the “bg” input, creating ID passes, separating elements from renders, holdout operations and layering, integrating native deep image compositing options from Nuke 3D space renders, the disjoint-over operation. Channel optimization.

Class 10: 4K plates in a 2K workflow: data extraction and patch generation. The Python “loop’” for modifying knobs in several nodes at once. The Relight structure and the filtering issue: generating manual antialias, the double fusion relight pass merge method. Alpha masking for Merge operations. 3rd Party Python, Gizmos and Plugins.