Creating lightening flash with curve tool

For this (Below) shot from Valiant I was asked to add some lightning flashes in the clouds. Thought about it for a second and realized I am not the best animator so i turned to the curve tool.  

First thing I did was go to youtube and find reference that I liked. I picked this video.

I brought my footage into nuke from youtube hooked up the curvetool and picked an area I liked.

I added the time offset just to get the footage to frame 1.

Picked the area I liked for the curve tool to calculate

Then I hit go in the CurveTool tab and let it calculate.

Here is the image we will add the curve to.

Added a keyer to my clouds background to create an alpha of the area I wanted to have effected.

I copied and pasted the CurveTool Intensity Data tab into an exposure node in all three channels RGB.

This was my result!

You can also change your keyer to get different results or add an expression to the exposure tool to make it brighter or darker.

simple expression multiplying it by 2

Valiant Trailer

Did a few shots for this short.  After DI and sounds looking really nice!

Might do a quick tutorial on how I created the lightening with the curves tool.

Three wanted Air Pirates embark on a dangerous mission after discovering a lost child princess who may hold the ticket to their freedom. ------------------------------------ http://www.valiantfilm.com http://www.facebook.com/ValiantFilm https://twitter.com/ValiantFilm

Obama Visits Dreamworks Animation - Full Speech

Seems kind of sad that he thinks there are so many jobs in the US for VFX artists. Hopefully he has been mad aware of the subsidies that are killing the visual effects industry. I hope the protest was successful today! If you are interested in the VFX war against subsidies go to VFX Soldier.

President Obama speaks to film industry workers about the economy after touring Dreamworks Animation studio

Nuke relink

I have seen a few gizmos that relink your read nodes in nuke. I prefer to use a StickyNote, that way I don't have to rely on anything being installed if I switch to a new computer. 

Create a StickyNote and in the name field type filepath . In the label field type your file path to your project mine is: volumes/SSD_Video/FISK/Fruitvale. My computer is a mac so I have volumes/. If you have a windows machine this could be D:

As a work flow I usually create a couple of StickyNotes and copy and paste the text from one to the main StickyNote.  So I have my home computer which the label is work/work/ and I have my work computer /SSD_video/Fisk. When Im at home I paste the work/work/  in the main StickyNote and vise versa when I go to work I paste /SSD_video/Fisk.

Now all you need to do is and some text into each read node you bring in. 

In the read node add [knob filepath.label].  This path is a continuation from the StickyNote so really your path is split in half. First half on the StickyNote then the read node picks up the other half. So [knob filepath.label]   is taking the place of volumes/SSD_Video/FISK/Fruitvale and files it in from the StickyNote. 

Some ILM love

Did not see battleship but the effects look pretty dang good.  A Lot of debris everywhere!

The Other Guys VFX

The Other Guys was on tonight and the drinking scene was on.  I was wondering how they did it and found this breakdown.

The scene from The Other Guys is the same concept from the Philips 21:9 Carousel video.  Check it out its pretty amazing.

CXL

Before the big CXL shoot Sean was trying to prep everything he could and that included the greenscreen. He didn't have the time do the full screen so he only painted from just above the waste down, including the floor. With only half of the room being painted this created some concerns for myself as the Visual Effects Supervisor.  Its hard enough lighting a GS evenly, but its even harder to do so when it isn't painted evenly.

I will be posting some shots of the finished comps soon!

Launch NukeX from MacOS Terminal

I decided to write this simple and quick tutorial on how to Launch NukeX from the terminal since it took me a while to figure it out.  I am not very good with command-lines which is why it took my some time to figure this out. hopefully this will save you a lot of time.

Open terminal and type: sudo nano /etc/profile

(Might ask for a password)

After you type the above, a new screen will pop up that looks like this

Under # System-wide... is where I put my alias, Here is what I typed:

alias nukex="/Applications/Nuke6.0v7-32/Nuke6.0v7.app/Nuke6.0v7 --nukex"

And your terminal should look like this.

On this screen you can add as many alias as you like just change the version(Nuke6.0v6 or Nuke6.1v1).  I had one with no --nukex just to launch regular Nuke and I also have a few others for different versions of Nuke that I have on my computer.  Just remember to change the name of the alias for each version you add.  

This is a per machine bases so if you are on a network this will NOT follow your profile.  Each time you move and log on to a new machine you will have to redo this. 

Hit Control and X to quit then hit Y to save and enter.  Close the Terminal and reopen it and type it nukex (or what ever you put as the alias) and NukeX should launch.

Special thanks to the Foundry, Brian, and Tahl Niran