Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects, Second Edition

6. RotoPaint

Roto and paint are two tools I thought would be long gone by now. In fact, I thought that back in 1995 when I started compositing. Nowadays I realize these tools are always going to be with us—at least until computers can think the way we do. Fortunately, the tools for roto and paint are getting better and better all the time and are being used more and more often. Learning how to use these two techniques is even more important today than it used to be.

Roto, short for rotoscoping, is a technique in which you follow the outline and movement of an object to extract it from the shot, usually with some kind of shape-generation tool. Normally that tool is called a spline, which generates a matte, that you use to extract the object from ...