Week 4: Nuke My Life

This week I researched some different kinds of node in NukeX. The shuffle (copy) node acts as a duplicate node, but you can be selective about which channels you want to 'shuffle' over.

The multiply node is basically a glorified merge node that focuses on the multiply blending operation. It's useful for compositing ambient occlusion and texture masks over other layers.

The keymix node 'feeds' a seperate alpha channel (or mask) into another layer, say if you're working with footage that only has RGB. I also had a look at graphs that measure colour values in a shot... I don't know how useful that knowledge will be at present. #histogram #vectorscope

The most useful node I found was the colour match or grade match node. If you have a 'goal' image and you want to match the colours of another image to it, you can sample the highlights of the good (source) image and transfer it to the bad (target) image. Same with the mid-tones and shadows.

Cyan grading of Cloud#1 transferred to green Clouds#2. Result is Clouds #3.

This might be useful if we have two different artist working on seperate shots; if one of the shots is slightly off in colour can be easily fixed with the colour grade node.

The transform node in NukeX has motion blur features which is cool, and there is corner pin node that motion tracks simple frame-like objects, like TV screens. These are little things that might come in handy for Black Dog.

This week in Studio 13 we continued refining our concepts. The boss battle scene needed to most work, so I came up with these concepts below:

Going forward, we need to really nail down the look of the film once and for all!

As part of my individual study this trimester, I wanted to look into camera/motion tracking in NukeX, particularly with wide angle shots. I've come to understand the basic principles of these kinds of tools from using After Effects, but after some research I've found that it's possible to use these tools to create a huge variety of illusions. I've found some cool tutorials in Vimeo and short courses in Lynda.com.

I'd love to test these ideas out with different kinds of footage (hand-held camera, close-up shots, panning shots). I could source it myself or borrow some fooatge from the film students.

See you next week! #dontdrown