Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects, Second Edition

Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects, Second Edition

Released March 2014
Publisher(s): Peachpit Press
ISBN: 9780133811001

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Book description

This start-to-finish, complete guide to Nuke will give you the foundations on the state-of-the-art visual effects software used by professionals in the film and television industries. Along with the hard-won advice and techniques from expert compositor and teacher Ron Ganbar, each chapter covers a complete lesson in the fundamentals, with step-by-step instructions included so you can easily follow along and start using the program right away. The projects used throughout the book are based on real-world examples of professional productions and project files are included with each chapter so you can work through all the examples.

After discovering how to use the tools and understanding the compositing workflow, you’ll learn about basic and advanced compositing techniques, color correction, RotoPaint, keying, and tracking, as well as more advanced topics such as CGI and the 3D engine. In addition, you’ll learn about:

• Working with nodes and process trees

• Using CGI passes in Nuke to control 3D render looks

• Camera Tracking techniques to combine 2D and 3D elements

• Camera Projection to turn a single frame into moving images

• Gizmos and all about creating your own tools in Nuke

• Stereoscopic compositing

 Ron Ganbar has been a compositor since 1996 and visual effects instructor since 2001. He currently works on a variety of projects as a gun for hire as compositor, consultant, VFX supervisor, and trainer. Ron was made a “Teacher’s Trainer” by Apple for Shake in 2005 and has written, taught, and evaluated courses for the National Film and Television School, Apple, Peachpit Press, Westminster University, and others.

"As both a talented compositor (with years of in-the-trenches experience) and an excellent teacher, Ron Ganbar has the unique ability to make even the most difficult concepts crystal clear. If you want to get up and running with Nuke as quickly as possible then start by buying this book!" —Ron Brinkmann, author of The Art and Science of Digital Compositing

Table of contents

  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication page
  4. Contents
  5. Introduction
    1. About This Book
    2. Installing Nuke
    3. Additional Technical Requirements
    4. About the Media Files
    5. Acknowledgments
  6. 1. Getting Started with Nuke
    1. Components of the Graphic User Interface
    2. Nodes
    3. The Viewer
  7. 2. Touring the Interface with a Basic Composite
    1. Working with Process Trees
    2. Creating a Simple Process Tree
    3. Merging Images
    4. Inserting and Manipulating Nodes in the Tree
    5. Changing Properties
    6. Rendering
    7. Delving Deeper into the Merge Node
    8. Creating Animation with Keyframes
  8. 3. Compositing CGI with Bigger Node Trees
    1. Working with Channels
    2. Working with Contact Sheets
    3. Using the Bounding Box to Speed Up Processing
    4. Linking Properties with Expressions
    5. Slapping Things Together: Foreground over Background
    6. Building the Beauty Pass
    7. Using the ShuffleCopy Node
    8. Placing CGI over Live Background
    9. Manipulating Passes
    10. Using the Mask Input
    11. Using Auxiliary Passes
  9. 4. Color Correction
    1. Understanding Nuke’s Approach to Color
    2. Color Manipulation Building Blocks
    3. Using an I/O Graph to Visualize Color Operations
    4. Creating Curves with ColorLookup
    5. Color Matching with the Grade Node
    6. Achieving a “Look” with the ColorCorrect Node
  10. 5. 2D Tracking
    1. Tracker Node Basics
    2. Stabilizing a Shot
    3. Tracking Four Points
  11. 6. RotoPaint
    1. Introducing RotoPaint’s Interface
    2. The Curve Editor
    3. RotoPaint in Practice
    4. Combining RotoPaint and Animation
    5. Using the Dope Sheet
  12. 7. Keying
    1. Introducing Nuke’s Keying Nodes
    2. HueKeyer
    3. The Image Based Keyer
    4. Keylight
    5. Combining Keyer Nodes Using the Tree
  13. 8. Compositing Hi-Res Stereo Images
    1. Using the Project Settings Panel
    2. Setting Up a High-Res Stereo Script
    3. Compositing a Stereo Project
    4. Rendering and Viewing Stereo Trees
  14. 9. The Nuke 3D Engine
    1. 3D Scene Setups
    2. Viewing a 2D Image as a 3D Object
    3. Manipulating 3D Node Trees in 3D Space
    4. Turning 3D Objects into 2D Pixels
    5. Applying Materials to Objects
  15. 10. Camera Tracking
    1. Calculating Reflection Movement Using Camera Tracking
    2. 3D Tracking in Nuke
    3. Loading a Pre-generated CameraTracker Node
    4. Aligning the Scene
    5. Creating the Reflection
  16. 11. Camera Projection
    1. Building a Camera Projection Scene
    2. Animating the Camera
    3. Tweaking the Texture
    4. Using a SphericalTransform to Replace Sky
    5. Compositing Outside the ScanlineRender Node
    6. 2D Compositing Inside 3D Scenes
    7. Rendering the Scene
  17. 12. Customizing Nuke with Gizmos
    1. About Shape Creation Tools
    2. Building the Gizmo’s Tree
    3. Creating User Knobs
    4. Using Text to Create a Radial
    5. Using a Switch Node to Choose Branches
    6. Wrapping in Groups
    7. Manipulating the Nuke Script in a Text Editor
    8. Turning a Group into a Gizmo
    9. More about Gizmos
  18. Appendix. Customizing Nuke with Python
    1. Python Scripting Basics
    2. Creating a Button with Python
    3. Adding a Hot Key
    4. Making Customization Stick with the menu.py File
  19. Index

Product information

  • Title: Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects, Second Edition
  • Author(s):
  • Release date: March 2014
  • Publisher(s): Peachpit Press
  • ISBN: 9780133811001