Week 2: Studio 13

Welcome back to my blog.

My twelve peers and I have decided to call ourselves Studio 13, appropriately.

During the week we looked at the interface of Nuke and explored some nodes that blend layers of film together and the order those nodes must be in to achieve the desired effect.

E.g. nodes to erode and blur hard lines around the alpha channels of 3D robots, nodes to correct the white and black colour grading of robots, nodes to merge them together.

It seems that the main way to learn all the nodes in Nuke, what their capabilities are and where they should fall in node hierarchy, will be with time and when necessity calls for it.

The Nuke Essential Training course went a bit more in depth on working with different channels and different kinds of merge nodes. I need to make Nuke my friend before we are heavy into post-production for Black Dog.

We have narrowed down the concept of Black Dog; the direction we will most likley be going in is having the narrative follow one persons experience of depression, the environment will be minimal white space, the characters will be 3D with 2D toon shaders and the black dog will be a 2D squiggly mess.

Moving forward from here, we will expand on a specific story, develop character concepts and explore how we will visually communicate the script.

Due to our inclination toward non-photorealistic rendering, we revisited some of the toon shading features in Maya 2018 with Maya's software renderer). #helpful.

Combining two or more textures (inc. linear colour ramp) with a merge node and then changing the blend mode:

Applying toon outlines to object:

In my own time I have been preparing briefs for drone flight paths over several other sites in VIC and SA, for GCA ... meaning more post -production work in the future. Yay.