Compositing 0140 in Nuke

Once again it was time to step right out of my comfort zone, but this time it was a bit more daunting than UV mapping and texturing because I've never used Nuke in my life! It doesn't even resemble any kind of software I've been familiar with in the past so I was completely fresh going into the process. The fast paced sequence, as we had already decided, was going to be filled with shots with were blue. Oddly enough this actually makes things a little less complicated, so Steph ran me through what I needed to be doing and I made a start.


I'm not going to pretend I made this easy on Steph, nearly everything she said I didn't understand but she was incredibly patient with me and it did all start to make sense eventually. The way I understood it, I had to separate elements in the scene I had to comp: the lift and the zombie. I had to split each layer up into its render layers. Within the scene there were two lights (top and bottom) which produced different set of images. So the layers I was left with for the lift were:

 Bottom diffuse and shadow

 Bottom specular

 Top diffuse and shadow

Top specular

The reason for splitting it up into all its layers instead of just merging them all in as one is that it gives the operator complete control over every single aspect of a shot which makes Nuke an incredibly powerful tool. The next thing I had to do was create a 'merge' to combine all the layers above which looked like this:

The bottom camera was also split up into a load of others layers that then needed organising and merging in much the same way:

 This first image is the the previous image merged with the ambient occlusion pass.

 I then added blur to the background as we wanted the characters to be the main focus of each of the shots.

The image above was the grade we added in which the colours can be changed. This was really the trickiest bit because I had to try and get it as close to Stephs good previous comps as I could and it took a lot of tweaking in the settings for a long time before the imagine above revealed itself.

The next layer was obviously the zombie, which began with the same procedure as the lift.

 Bottom diffuse and shadow

Bottom specular

 Top diffuse and shadow

Top specular

Top and bottom merge

 Added in the tie!

Then slapped a bit of ambient occlusion in there

Also had to added in a hue correct before I started the blue grade just so we'd get the right colours out

And then I spent easily double the time playing around with the settings to get the zombie to be an acceptable blue but in the end it all worked out nicely! I've gotta say I'm pretty happy with myself that I actually managed to get anywhere near what Steph was doing. Not that it's near the quality she's been producing! But I'm just happy that I didn't completely mess it up on my first go, and it's nice to occasionally step out of Maya and try something new!