All the compositing is finished.

This gallery contains 8 photos.

…and I’m suffering the mother of all adrenaline crashes right now.  A day of Final Cut tomorrow, and then I’m done.

Another Nuke Script

My slightly more complicated script for the interior scenes. Same basic premise, just more Read nodes to mess around with.

Nuke Script

This will probably be the most gratuitously organised, pedantic and colourful Nuke script you have ever seen, or will see. It really works though! The comping is going super-fast as I know exactly where everything is, immediately (most likely because I gave it a Backdrop node in a silly colour).

Here Be Another Render!

This time I couldn’t resist adding some DOF. If anyone knows why the outline of the nuclear pores still looks abnormally clear through all the bokeh, please let me know. I’ve tried unpremulitplying it… shuffling out the alpha channel… neither work. It’s driving me to distraction.

Exterior Comping, Gnomon Underwater Scenes and Ed Whetstone

I have been putting together the lighting for the exterior scenes, with a little help from Gnomon Underwater Environments.

Including:

• Setting up “fake caustics” by attaching an image sequence to a directional light.
• Creating ambient light by setting up a “dome” of directional lights with no shadowing, which gives a kind of hazy, desaturated effect.
• [tutorial missing from DVD… no idea why] Setting up spotlight fog which moves by using the same image sequence I used for the caustics. I figured it out based on the provided final Quicktime. The most difficult part was figuring out how to attach a custom curve to control the falloff of the fog.

I have also been mainly watching Guerrilla Compositing Tactics in Maya and Nuke with Ed Whetstone, as well as his other tutorial, Creating Light Rigs in Maya, a truly fantistic initiation into 3-point CG lighting.  From Guerrilla Compositing Tactics I learned how the depth pass can be used for all kinds of things: creating depth-based fog and haze, which I already kind of knew about, but the true revelation was the idea of targeted colour correction, based on the depth pass.

In my own render, I have decreased the colour temperature based on distance from the camera.

In the end I found that simply emulating the underwater environment, while convincing in its realism, was a bit too hazy and would impair the clarity of the storytelling.  Therefore I used a combination of underwater and 3-point lighting techniques.  The only thing missing is particles, which I will do in Nuke now that the Bokeh effect has been improved.

Speaking of which, I recently bought NukeX 7, which has a fantastic upgrade to the ZBlur node: ZDefocus.  Instead of adjusting the image plane, it uses a “focal point” that I can drag, and it automatically recalculates.  It also vastly improves the quality of the blur: with ZBlur, the only options were “Gaussian” or “Disk” Filter – now, with ZDefocus I can create bokeh effects that are pentagonal or hexagonal or even heart-shaped.

In other news, Angus has approved the animation so far, so I shall be working on those renders today.

Fantastic.

Full steam ahead!

New Comp Test

The latest comp test of the nuclear interior. I’m really happy with this. Tried out a few new things today including Lens Blur and God-Rays (could there BE a cooler name for a node?). Digital Tutors’ Photorealistic Camera Lens Effects in NUKE course has been fantastic.

Also fantastic is the mia_bokeh node, which I used on top of some nParticles. It’s really versatile as you can add your own texture to it – taking inspiration from the Jellyfish Pictures reel I’ve connected a pentagon-shaped alpha to it. Although Nuke has its own particle system, the quality of the Bokeh effect within Maya/Mental Ray was way too good to pass up.

I hope to be able to post a moving version up tomorrow.