Animate!

[EDIT: ADD MORE IMAGES. (I forgot my pendrive)]


On Friday Matt Cameron came up from London to give us a lesson on NUKE. I have used it very briefly before to camera track but that was like 3 years ago and I really couldn't remember much about it. We had a talk about the kind of work Matt had been doing in London and his experiences working in both London and Scotland before we moved on to the practical class. Matt showed us around the interface then showed us how to comp out a tracking marker with a plate from a short film he had worked on. In the afternoon we showed Matt the one of our renders with our new lighting set up and he went through how he would composite that in NUKE. He showed us how to use our depth pass to blur the background and give our shots a sense of scale. He also went through how to add grain to our shots to make them look less cg. The results we managed to get from NUKE were a lot better than we had managed with after effects and after briefly talking it over we decided to comp our Going Live shots in NUKE.

I really enjoyed working with NUKE, i thought I would be more intimidated by the node based interface as i'm much more used to working with timelines but after a little while getting used to it I actually found it much easier to see what I was doing using the nodes. I think I'm going to, if I have time, maybe do some NUKE tutorials and try some more compositing stuff out.

In our final tutorial of 2015 (that went by so quick!) we learned how to render out our model and composite it into a scene.  We used image based lighting which I had never used before, I have seen the like mirror ball things you use for it but no one had ever explained how the lights from there are applied in 3D so that was cool. We then set up our render passes and layers for compositing.

After it was all rendered out we moved it into after effects to set up our layers and create the final result.

So today we had a quick tutorial on after effects. I have used it before for little things but I haven't really done much with it so this was really useful for me. We looked at how to key out green screen, how to rotoscope (which apparently we will be doing a lot of in entry level vfx positions), how to camera track and how to insert a 3d object into a scene or an object into a 3d scene.



I'm actually quite interested in compositing, I might try some nuke tutorials over the Christmas break if I have time to try and get a feel for it.