At last, something exciting! This is a tool that admittedly, might not have a huge amount of use, but does have some fun features to play with. I’ve developed a set of nodes for generating, filling, lighting and rendering voxel grids in Nuke. You may also notice a new link above to a documentation page for the new nodes, as it includes quite a lot and could be confusing to use without a bit of an explanation.
The tool is available for download here on nukepedia.
This got pushed by the wayside a little as a number of other tools took up more time, but I’ve finally gotten it to a suitable standard to release it. There are a number of improvements and optimizations I plan to add over the coming days, but at the moment it’s pretty useful as is! The premise is simple: Effects can be saved out as 2D image sequences, and read in to render out 3D particle effects with considerable speed and easy customization.
Nuke is great, but it doesn’t always have what you want. For those coming from After Effects to Nuke, this is one of the tools you may be missing, the Beam. Simply specify a start and end position, animate the time and watch it shoot across your screen. The handy benefit of it over say, a roto paint, is that it can easily fake 3D movement at the press of a button. I made the tool to have the exact same settings as the AE version, so hopefully there should be no confusion.
It’s common enough that I find myself trying to fix a render issue and not knowing whether I’ve been given a mask or separate pass that would help. When this happens I find myself trudging back up through the tree looking for my read to check it’s layer contact sheet and see what I’ve got to work with. Apparently I wasn’t the only one bothered by this as someone asked me to make a script to make it easier. So, this is a very simple function that will allow you to quickly cycle through all LayerContactSheets in the tree.
This script is slightly flawed, but due to the way the Foundry handles certain naming structures, there isn’t a perfect solution just yet, but watch this space.
The script allows you to have two user preset files, one local, and one on a server (or any other location). The two have distinct differences, in that the ‘server’ files presets do not have the [User] tag that the local ones do. They also cannot be deleted without manually deleting the lines from the ‘server’ file, useful for preventing someone accidentally erasing all your hard work. Finally, the ‘server’ file will have a comment line for each preset stating when it was added to the file and by which user, so you can keep track of who’s been changing what. So, let’s look at how it works.
Alright, this is one that a couple of people have done for other programs that use an upwards Y-axis (Maya, SoftImage etc.), but this works for an upwards Z-axis for programs such as 3ds max, Blender etc.
The extra feature this offers is that it prevents camera rotations from flipping over, eg, instead of going from 359 to 1, it will now go from 359 to 361. This makes a significant difference if you plan on using the camera for motion blur, as otherwise you will get a frame of extreme rotational blur. So, that’s what it does, let’s see how it works.
Let’s get the ball rolling with a nice simple add-on for Nuke.
The alembic dropper allows you to drag and drop alembic (.abc) files into your node graph and have them read in correctly. The script makes a distinction between alembic Cameras and alembic Geometry by simply checking if the file contains any scene objects.
Gizmos and Games 