Second Year Summer: Nuke Development

For this project I wasted to further develop my skills with Nuke

The footage was taken from Action VFX

https://www.actionvfx.com/practice-footage/aerials-of-modern-building

At the start of the project I wanted to develop my cleanplating skills. I first researched different techniques key strategies included:

- Multi Cam Projection

- Projecting only edits.

- Camera Projecting Basics

Cleanplating Workflow:

I firstly followed the traditional method of cleanplating live footage using camera projections used RotoPaints for the smaller areas I needed to paint over. for the larger parking lot I used nuke to cleanplate the top row of cars then I used photoshop to quickly copy and edit that row down creating the rest of the parking lot. I also ended up using small amount of photoshops new generative fill tool to straighten out the curbs of the parking lot and add the rest of the oil spill. after projecting I rotoed around the trees in the live plate and brought them back into the comp as anything tall would be warped in the projected footage.

I then repeated this process later creating a multi camera projection setup to stop the footage from warping too much

Grading to a night shot:

I wanted to experiment with environment editing next, I did some research into fog and wanted to try add it to this shot but first I had to grade the shot to look like it was filmed at night, this would make the fog look better as well

I desaturated the image and made it slightly more blue in the gamma and gain. I then gained up the highlights of the shot using a Luma key as a mask to give it the night time feel

DepthGenerator node: Creating Fog:

I looked online and found a tutorial by Compositing Academy on YouTube

https://youtu.be/VYjmvB6d9NA?si=PP6dxPn1BCh6lOnb

This tutorial showed the foundations for re lighting live footage in nuke however I was more interested in the main driving node of the process the DepthGenerator node using his tutorial as a guide I generated a depth channel to use as a mask for the fog however I ran into a fair few issues with the channel, in the end I found that generating a channel for both the original footage and the cleanplated footage produced the best results, I merged them together and uses rotos to select each area that gave better responses and fixed and bugs that popped up during the process with RotoPaints after all that graded the fog with a high lift that was pushed slightly into the blue creating the final effect

Home