This is wonderful news for fellow Compositors out there.

The Foundry has officially acquired Sony Pictures Imageworks’ in-house lighting/compositing system, Katana! Why is this so big? Well not only will Nuke in the very near future feature a complete 3D lighting package, completely bypassing traditional pipelines of 3D software lighting and giving control straight over to comp. But it’s also yet another sign that the VFX industry is moving towards…wait for it…STANDARDS!

Crazy I know, but this means more job opportunities for freelancers out there. And it also means that there might actually be a day when VFX Compositors doesn’t have to be in an expert in at least 3 seperate software packages all at once to survive. Which I for one, am GREATLY looking forward to.

LINK: Foundry Acquires Katana from SPI for Nuke

Sony Pictures Imageworks, (SPI) developed Katana as their primary internal 3d lighting and compositing package. SPI has been using it constantly since Spiderman 3 and on almost every picture since then. It is a very solid and comprehensive package “it is a pretty fully featured suite of tools that handles almost all the backend of our pipeline – everything after the animation is done and any processes are simulated- really Katana takes over from there” explained Rob Bredow CTO of SPI. “It gets everything ready for the renderer and then does all the compositing”.

On the lighting side the package, while not writing shaders, does allow nodal based manipulation of the shaders and speaks to third party renderers such as Pixar’s Renderman and Arnold. It started life as a 3D lighting package some five to six years ago, it takes assets (geometry) “assigns materials, textures, – gets the lighting rigs set up – it is the primary 3D lighting interface that all of our lighting people use” Bredow explains. The system is node based, like Nuke but covering lighting in addition to compositing.

Nuke’s taking over the world, and I can’t wait!

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The program is called Sketch2Photo, and the name pretty much says exactly what it’s designed to do. The gist is you draw a sketch on a computer connected to the net, label those line drawings (i.e. a person=person), and then the program goes onto the web and finds candidate pictures that match the contours your draw. The next step uses some pretty slick auto-rotoscoping techniques to then match the composition you drew and, VUALA!

Too good to be true? Well watch the video below to decide for yourself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I really hope that it’s everything it promises to be and more, because I could think of a few uses for VFX artists out there that’s for sure!

LINK: Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage (PDF Paper)

LINK: Amazing Program Turns Sketches Into Photo Montages

PhotoSketch allows users to create photomontages from basic stick-figure sketches – you don’t even have to have any kind of artistic talent to convey your idea. As explained in the video below, the tool takes a simple sketch of the desired montage elements and pulls photographs that correspond to them from Google, Flickr and Yahoo.

The program then decides from a variety of matching results which ones work together the best and merges each disparate image element into a cohesive whole. It even matches them to the scene with the correct color tones and adds shadows as needed. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.

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MPC just recently completed work on a new Wrigleys 5 Gum campaign, and posted a bunch of great behind the scenes material on how the spots were done on their site.

What I love most about the Zing and Solstice campaign is how MPC used tried and true bluescreen compositing techniques, mixed with some nice matte painting and particle work to really create a whole CG world that feels unique and consitant. They kept it technically realitively simple, and wrapped it in a really cool and perfectly executed concept. Something that’s surprisingly very hard to accomplish under typically tight commercial schedules.

Anyways, enough of my chatter. Head on over to their site to check it out! They’ve got not only the full commercials but also a bunch of breakdown videos for each spot.

LINK: Wrigleys, 5 Gum

Fredrik Bond has directed the new campaign for Wrigley’s 5 gum. The Ad Agency was Energy BBDO/Chicago, with production handled by Pam Pietrowski. MPC LA provided 3D animation and compositing for the spot.

MPC was involved from pre-production with input into the design process, Duncan McWilliam and Dan Sanders attended the shoot at Paramount Studios supervising elements of the blue screen stage and the adjacent practical elements shoot.

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LINK: Photoshop Quick Tips #3 – Enhancing Photos with High Pass Filter

It’s a really cool effect. But what about us Nukers out there who want to give our comps that same love? Well that’s what this tutorial is going to show you, step by step. And at the end you’ll also be able to download a gizmo I made especially for this tutorial. So…let’s get to it.

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1) The first step is make three copies of your image’s Read node. I’m going to be using this image below, so feel free to download it to your computer so you can follow along.

2) Now you’re going to invert your image, so go to Color / Invert.

3) Now we’re going to create a Merge node by pressing ‘M’, and setting the operation to ‘Average’. What you’re going to get is a solid grey image. Why? Well when you boil it down it’s just simple math. What we’re doing is essentially canceling out the image by averaging inverse pixel values between 1 and 0. Where 1 is white and 0 is black, the average between is .5. Which is…you guessed it…grey.

4) Now what good does a grey image do us? Well not much. Not until we apply a blur to our inverted image to bring out the high pass detail. Or more exactly, bring out the highest pixel values and mute out the lowest. Which gives us…

5) This is starting to look a lot more like the Photoshop filter isn’t it? Now all that’s left is to De-saturate it (which is optional BTW), apply a Sharpen filter to it to get that last little bit of detail, and increase the contrast by manipulating the multiply and gamma sliders inside our Grade node. Then just create a new Merge node, putting our new image on top of our source and set the operation to Multiply. And we’re all done! Check out our results…

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That’s it really! And all in 5 easy steps.

You can get the gizmo I made for this tutorial as well by heading over to The Lab. Just follow the link below and download away!

LINK: The Lab – HighPass

As always, let me know what you think about this tutorial and the included HighPass gizmo in the comments below! If you have any requests for techniques or effects you’d like me to mess around with in Nuke, that’s the place to let me know! Since you guys asked for it, I’m currently getting a Color Correction for CG to live action integration tutorial put together. And I’m also playing around with the idea of starting to do some these as video tutorials. Is that something you all would be interested in?  I kind of hope so because I hate typing and I’m a horrible speller, so you’d be saving me from myself.

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Until next time…

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Some really great news has just come off the wire for all us Nuke Compositors out there! FXGuide is reporting that ILM has purchased a bunch of Nuke licenses. Raising the question, “Is ILM shelving their proprietary compositing system Saber?”

Well I’m sure they wouldn’t completely throw out their old pipeline, because the cost to do so would just be enormous. But it is very cool to see a major studio finally jumping on board the Nuke wagon! And promises for some exciting opportunities for the future.

Welcome to the family ILM!

LINK: ILM Purchases Nuke Site Licence

Hot on the heels of its management buyout, The Foundry has completed a major deal with Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm Ltd’s multiple Academy Award-winning visual effects studio. ILM has purchased a site licence for Nuke.
ILM’s visionary work has earned thirty-seven Academy Award® nominations for Best Visual Effects.

Lucasfilm’s chief technical officer, Richard Kerris, commented, “ILM has a history in providing breakthrough imagery for production, and to do that our artists need to be equipped with the best possible tools. We believe Nuke is a forerunner in the compositing field. The Foundry’s investment in research and development and its customer-focused approach have produced a flexible, artist-focused toolset. We are excited to work with The Foundry and to see where these new possibilities will take our work.”

“Nuke allows us to leverage our 3D pipeline while remaining in the compositing environment, which puts a great deal of power into the hands of the compositors,” explained Pat Tubach, ILM’s compositing department supervisor. “We work on very complex shots and the remarkable speed at which Nuke operates means our artists can focus on the art of visual effects and not have their creativity impeded by a software speed limit.”

Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry, commented, “ILM is a huge force in the world of visual effects and we are thrilled that they have chosen to add Nuke as a key tool in their compositing workflow. We are very excited to see where our working relationship takes us.”

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The online UK magazine, Digital Arts has published a story detailing all the work done by Frantic Films on John Woo’s ‘Red Cliff’. This film has been long in the making and I actually did some rotoscoping work on the ‘epic naval battle’ that the article talks about. And the final product really is a huge accomplishment. So it’s great to see the film finally getting some well deserved press!

LINK: Behind the scenes on the VFX of John Woo’s new epic movie, Red Cliff

Frantic Films VFX created visual effects shots for the forthcoming John Woo-directed epic, Red Cliff, including one of the film’s key naval battle scenes. The most expensive Chinese-language picture ever made, Red Cliff is based on the historic Battle of Red Cliffs and other events during the end of the Han Dynasty and immediately prior to the period of the Three Kingdoms in ancient China.

“The challenge of creating an entire pipeline for managing the water, fire, smoke, thousands of CG boats and tens of thousands of actors – not to mention cloth simulations for the flags – all in a time span measured in days and weeks, was an incredible effort,” concluded Chris Bond, creative director and president, Frantic Films. “I want to thank the team enormously for all of their work and applaud Jason and Bridgitte for their leadership.”

LINK: Doug Hogan Portfolio – Red Cliff 2

Rotoscoping is usually the red headed step child of Compositing. Everyone just wants to avoid it. But this rotoscoping job for John Woo’s epic ‘Red Cliff 2? was an absolute blast.

The shot I was tasked with was one of the more complicated. It was a scene depicting an epic navel battle in the dead of night…during a storm. Complete with ropes swaying the wind, explosions, and stuntmen falling off of the ships. All with the deadline of a week. A tall order to say the least, but luckily I got to team up with a team of 3 other very talented roto artists, and divided the shot off into sections.

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Until today that is!

So sit back and kick up your heels, because today I’m going to demo a quick and easy way to color match images using just a Grade node and the RGB luminance values in Nuke.

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Let’s begin with a real world example of how this is useful.

The first step of the typical shot development pipeline for a VFX studio is Previs (aka Previsualization). That includes story boards, 3D animatics, and tone boards. Storyboards and 3D animatics aren’t really that useful to us in Compositing, other than to get an idea of how the final piece will all fit together. What we’re going to get the most meat from however, is the tone boards.

Tone Boards are color palettes, reference photos, textures, you name it. It’s a big mash up of all the ingredients that will make up the over all look of the individual shots and sequences through out the rest of the VFX pipeline. Thus feeding the look development process in Compositing as well.

A perfect online tool for creating quick and easy color palettes is Adobe’s Kuler. It even lets you import your own images. And then uses those images to generate a color scheme based on it. Here’s an example I made using an image I found on Stock.Xchng.

LINK: Adobe’s Kuler

LINK: Stock.Xchng

Big broad swatches, samples from a wide range of colors in the image. This is the type of thing you’ll looking for in a good tone board.

Now lets get down to the nitty gritty. How do we use this? Well lets say you were just given a shot of a downtown city scene. With a note from the Art Director saying that he/she wants this shot to feel like the Sicily tone board. Now urban New York and the Sicilian Countryside couldn’t be more different, so how are you supposed to make these two opposites mix together easily?

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THE THEORY

Well it’s easy if you use RGB Luminance values.

RGB Luminace values is just a fancy way of saying black and white images that either brighter or darker than the next.

So let’s compare our source Sicily color palette with our target New York color palette using the different luminance value to really get a feel of how each palette is constructed.

Sicily

New York

Pretty huh? But what does this tell us? Well it gives us the finger print of these two images.

Our Sicily image’s Red and Green channels are pretty identical, but our Blue channel is really dark. Giving us both the obvious information that this is a very warm image, but also giving us a visual ratio of how each color mixes with the next to create the final source color palette.

The same goes for our New York image. The Red channel has bright sections in the green and orange, while our Green channel is much duller in those hues. And our Blue channel is less dark than our Sicily image telling us the obvious once again, that it’s a much cooler image. But again the important thing to see here is really the ratio between each color and each palette.

BRIGHTER = MORE , DARKER = LESS

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Now at this point you should be a bit confused. Maybe even a little cross-eyed from staring too long and hard at the differences between the color palattes above. The main thing however you need to remember is that you won’t be getting 1+1=2 answers when you’re deep into look development. These are just visual tools to give you the FEEL of how each color relates to the next. And then how the over all palette comes together. There’s no right answer, it just all comes down to feel.

With that being said, it’s now time to get into Nuke.

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THE PRACTICE

First I’m setting up a viewer with the target Sicily color palette plugged into 1, New York into 2, and then…you guessed it…Sicily into 3. This allows me to quickly switch between each image which will help me Grade the New York image to match the Sicily image closer.

Then I’m going to create a Grade node and just start grading each individual channel separately (RGB), each channel getting it’s own individual grade node. Now you could do it all in one but it’s just much easier to visually show you the process if I give each channel it’s own node.

While I’m grading each color it should be noted that I’m mainly using the Sicily image for reference. Only ocassionally going to the color swatches for when I need more exact colors. Like the yellow on the taxis for example.

After spending a few minutes adjusting the multiply and gamma sliders for each color channel, to match more closely with the Sicily image. This is the before and after result.

Now at this point I would be going back to the Art Director and seeing if we can’t dial it back a bit, ha. But you get the idea. And all of that was driven by the RGB Luminance values of each individual channel.

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The same technique can be applied to color matching. Which is a much more day to day task than Grading a plate to match a tone boards.

So say you have a Sky that needs to match a very specific color Blue. Well just use the R G and B channels of A (the Blue you need to match) and match the brightness of each channel of B (your original Sky) to dial in the source color to match the destination color.

Quick, easy, and precise. The holy trinity for a Compositor.

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Man that was long. I might need to just start doing video screencasts of these techniques to save me from so much typing!

Anyways, I hope this was helpful and that it shined the light on a dark corner of the VFX pipeline for most people. It’s a simple technique, that’s long to describe. But RGB Luminance Color Matching is the lynch pin of all photoreal Compositing.

If you have any questions, comments, really anything. Feel free like always to post a comment in this post’s thread below!

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It’s a really good quick guide for all you beginning Compositors out there. And details what to focus on, think about, and watch out for when working on a shot.

LINK: PERFECT Compositing

As we get closer to launching Action Essentials 2, I have been developing a simple guideline for better compositing that is broken down to 7 key points.  This is by no means a ‘complete’ guide for for every scenario but it should be a good place to start. I plan on detailing many of these techniques in the future but here is a basic overview.

Perspective:
When compositing a scene, you want to consider the perspective of your plate (raw footage) and carefully mix elements that align with your shot. A major perspective conflict can be a give-away that your shot was poorly composited.

Esthetics (aesthetics):
Make it look cool. Keep an eye on your composition and balance the elements in your scene evenly. Look at the composite as a whole and not just the area you are working on.

Randomize:
The world is unpredictable so you want to use variations in your compositing work. One example is when creating an army of soldiers from a small group of extras.  It is important to offset the individuals by time and space so they do not look mechanically duplicated. This is also important when adding muzzle flashes and ricochets. Don’t just reuse the same muzzle fire or ricochet, use multiple clips and alter the size and rotation so that your mind doesn’t pick up on the pattern of similarity.

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Today brings some good news for not only The Foundry but also Nuke artists out there in general. Read the full article over at FXGuide, but the nickel version is that The Foundry has successively negotiated a management buyout from Windcrest Holdings and are independent once again!

LINK: The Foundry Announces Management Buyout

Since NAB, we’ve heard rumors from around the world that The Foundry was no longer going to exist as a company due to financial problems at Digital Domain. However, to steal a quote from Mark Twain, the reports of The Foundry’s death are greatly exaggerated. Thankfully for artists and those who wish for a diverse software market, The Foundry has announced that they are independent once again….

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The next 12 to 18 months should be critical as several major players will most likely replace their Shake pipelines or begin the transition to a new compositing software package. On the Toxik side, an OSX version was supposed to ship in March and is now about two months overdue. Layoffs at Autodesk towards the end of last year and recently have impacted all areas, including each of their products’ development staff. Eyeon has been improving their Generation app while development continues on Fusion 6, which was announced at SIGGRAPH 2008 but hasn’t shipped yet. These aren’t easy economic times for any company, as spending on upgrades and purchases has declined dramatically in the last 6 months.

This is really great news. And I’m very excited to see The Foundry continue to thrive and dominate the market with Nuke.

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Ok, well I’m not actually sure if anyone is raising their hands or not. So I’ll just take a wild guess based on the box-office and say ‘Me too!’ Now normally this would be the point where I talked all about the VFX in the film, and give you a bunch of links to read further. But since this is generally a 90% recycled blog (because I’m lazy), I’m at the mercy of all the other VFX sites out there who have much more time to actually write articles about this stuff. So…we’ll save that for another day.

Anyways while we wait, I wanted to also write a post talking about all the tools that I use as a VFX artist day to day. Hell that MOST of the artists I know use actually. So to start off, lets talk about something that every VFX artist would kill for rather than be without…

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1) VLC Player / HULU / YouTube

After years and years of watching television, movies, and playing video games it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that VFX artists typically have a short attention span. Not in a bad way really. We’re constantly just multitasking between coding, rendering, comp’ing, you name it. And we do that for long hours at a time. So what keeps us from going insane? Streaming videos and DVD box sets. I’m not sure if everyone is like this, but for me personally when I have a good movie playing I swear I’m just more productive. Seriously! Ok well maybe not, but at least I’m happier. And in the end, isn’t that all that matters?

LINK: VLC Player

LINK: HULU

LINK: YouTube

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2) Sequence 911

Got a image sequence that’s all out of wack? Need to dump a bad frame but don’t want a sudden jump? Well Sequence 911 is coming to your rescue.

LINK: Sequence 911

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3) Google Reader

It’s important to say on top of what’s going on in the industry. And I have a lot of VFX blogs that I read each morning. And I mean A LOT. 80+. Which is a lot of content to sift through to say the least. Now I could open up every blog in a tab and just take the time to see what’s new. But that would take FOREVER, and I don’t think my supervisor would be all too happy if that’s what I spent most of my day doing. So thank God for Google Reader.

LINK: Google Reader

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4) DropBox

DropBox is a life saver. Plain and simple. It allows me to sync all the work I do at home with my computer at the studio. And saves me tons of time and frustration since I never have to deal with thumbdrives or wondering if I have the latest file. It’s all there. And as easy as dragging and dropping a file into a folder. So if you’re a VFX’er who does a lot of work at home as well as the studio…seriously get this program installed. It’s awesome.

LINK: DropBox

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5) Notepad ++

You wouldn’t think it, but a good code editor is pretty hard to find. Sure you have Notepad…but honestly, that program will cause you more headaches than anything when you’re writing python tools or tcl. Notepad ++ however is perfect. It highlights your syntax for debugging, suggests code based on the file extension of your project file, pretty much everything you need when coding. And you know what the best part about it is? It’s free!

LINK: Notepad++

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Now I know what you’re thinking. Only 5? Certainly you use more than just 5 tools! Well you’d be right!

And in next week’s ‘Do You Have The Tools’ post I’ll do another top 5 list of essential tools for every VFX artist out there. So stay tuned!

But in the mean time if you have any tools you use that I haven’t included please leave a comment! I’ll check it out and add it to one of the coming week’s lists!

Until then, remember…hugs not drugs.

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