Tag: vfx

GradMagic Tool

June 11, 2019

GradMagic is an interactive 4 point gradient tool, which can link to cornerpin nodes, and can toggle between live sampling from the plate or baking the color values of the corners.

Can be used for various tasks in prep and DMP,or if you just need a quick 4 point gradient map.

GradMagic_Properties_Screenshot.png

Quick Overview of the properties:

It’s pretty straight forward, heres some basic written steps:
1.) Set your cornerpoints manually or by pressing one of the ‘snap to’ buttons.  Or alternatively you can link or bake your cornerpoints to an existing cornerpin node (or any node with 4 “to” knobs).

2.) If you need to adjust the points once they are baked/linked/ in place, then show the adjust knobs, set the reference frame to snap the adjust points near the main points, and you can then move each cornerpoint while it still retains its animation path.

3.) You can either keep the node live, bake the corner colors on a single frame, or bake the colors over a framerange.  once baked you can adjust the cornerpoints further if you need to cover up more area.  You can adjust the ‘sample size’ at the top if you want to average more colors under each corner point.

4.) Finally you can apply a blur to the edges to help with transition, and you can select the output at the top, whether to show the gradient over the BG input, or just the gradient itself.

Hope you find it useful

A full tutorial video on how to use the tool can be found here on youtube:
https://youtu.be/oge8jMR0LRw

Or here on vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/341514150

Download the tool from nukepedia with this link:
http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/draw/gradmagic

You can also download GradMagic from my github link:
https://github.com/CreativeLyons/Lyons_Tools_Public/blob/master/02_Draw/GradMagic.nk

Stay tuned for more tools and tutorials.

Advanced Keying Breakdown: 4.1 – Template

December 18, 2015

0:00 – Introduction
4:30 – CC and transform after key
6:49 – CC and transform before key
12:03 – Advanced Keying Template flowchart
15:25 – Advanced Keying Template
40:10 – Advanced Keying Template Compressed
40:55 – Advanced Keying walkthrough script
41:59 – outro

Hey guys,

Sorry for the long overdue tutorial wrapping up this keying series. Here is the advanced keying template video, along with a flowchart and download link to the template scripts, which you can save to your toolsets for your own use in your nuke scripts.

advanced_keying_template_flowchart_3

Here is the Template Flow Chart from the video for you to download and review:

Here is the download to the Advanced Keying Template Package:

Advanced Keying Template Package Download

Or download from Nukepedia

Package contains:
Advanced_Keying_Template_v06_.nk
Advanced_Keying_Template_Compressed_v06_.nk
Advanced_Keying_Template_Walkthrough_v01_.nk

Some of you have asked for source materials for keying practice.  I can provide you with a few free downloads so you can practice.

https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/support/user-guides/#nuke  – download the nuke keying assets

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/learn1/ – scroll down to 2d compositing | Compositing Basics.  Click on the link that says Download Assets for Basic Workflows (535 MB).  Here you will find the girl and desert  BG found in this tutorial.

https://mango.blender.org/ – Tears of steal open source project.  Free 4K footage for people to download and practice.  Highly recommended.  scroll down to the blog post called ALL 4K FRAMES – NOW AVAILABLE ON XIPH.ORG.


Finally, I want to thank everyone for your continued support, views, shares, comments, and emails.  It all means a lot to me and you’ve certainly motivated me to keep going. Thank you.

As always, if there are any questions, just leave a comment or shoot me an email and I will try my best to respond.  Hopefully with this series of tutorials, and now this template, you guys will be fully equipped to handle even the toughest of keys.

Until next time!

Advanced Keying Breakdown – ALPHA 1.1: pre-processing the GS

April 12, 2014

Here is the first part in the advanced keying series.  I’ve started with the ALPHA section, and made a custom slide for just ALPHA, where you can see the many topics I plan on covering in future videos, but for now I am just covering 1.1 Pre-processing the Green Screen.  Here is the slide for ALPHA:

Advanced Keying Breakdown_ALPHA_detail_v01

It’s a long video, but it’s full of useful tips and techniques.  I recommend watching the whole thing if you get a chance, but if you’re in a rush and want to skip to certain sections here are the Timecodes for you:

0:00 Intro

1:12   Denoising

5:56  Colorspaces

13:11 White Balancing

21:28 Saturation

25:33 Evening out the GS

35:21 Outro Recap

here is the Neat Video plugin website I mentioned for reducing noise on an image:

http://neatvideo.com/

here is the link to some keying tutorials from nuke station for you guys to look through if you need them, most all of them are excellent:

http://nukestation.com/category/keying/

Please guys, I know I covered a lot but if you have any questions, or if you would like me to do a written recap on all the sections here in this blog post, please just let me know and I’d be happy to write it up for you.   Leave a comment with any questions, or if you think I messed something up, or if you’d like to contribute to the conversation and have anything to add to this tutorial.  I enjoyed putting this together and look forward to the rest of the keying tutorials I plan on putting together.  Please share if you learned something =)

Cheers,

Tony

Advanced Keying Breakdown Series: Introduction

April 12, 2014

Advanced Keying Breakdown Series: Introduction

Hi all,

So  I knew I wanted to do a keying tutorial awhile back,  but I didn’t want it to be the same old crappy keying tutorial that you always see online.  The teacher always talks about how to use the tools, and not about the main concepts or techniques behind them, the end result, what we are actually after.

I have put together this introduction video, and a part 1 video  “ALPHA 1.1 Pre-Processing Greenscreen”, as a push to get this stuff out to you guys.  Here is the Slide in the video for you guys to save for your own use:

Advanced Keying Breakdown

The 3 main parts are ALPHA, DESPILL, and MERGE OPERATION.

Here are some time codes to skip to in the video if you so please:

2:50   ALPHA section

4:49    DESPILL section

7:27    MERGE section

I will go into all of these in far more details, this video is just me talking and doing a rundown of what to expect in upcoming videos.

I recommend you guys browse through the following videos on Nukestation (a GREAT website and central location for nuke tutorials) if you are new to keying or compositing.  The video I am doing is quite advanced, and you’re probably going to want to get a firm grip on the keying tools in nuke before watching.
http://nukestation.com/category/keying/

In particular, I think you guys should watch this video by victor perez:
http://nukestation.com/vkeyer-tutorial/

CompositingMentor.com Online!

April 12, 2014

Hi everyone,

I have some exciting news!!

The blog is now CompositingMentor.com

A new name accompanied with some new tutorials to christen the site.

It’s been a few months, I’ve been working hard both at work and on side projects, one of which is the daunting task of categorizing and analyzing all of the gizmos and tools on Nukepedia.com.   I came up with a good workflow to check the tools, and I am going 1 category at a time, but it is pretty time consuming.

I’ve also been working on an Advanced Keying Breakdown, which I will be posting for the next month or so.  It is very in depth, more than I have seen from any other keying tutorial yet.  It focuses on the concepts and techniques of keying, rather than specific tools.

If you like what you have been seeing on this website, please share with others, I’d like to get these tutorials out to anyone who needs them.  Thanks!
Without further adieu,

Welcome to CompositingMentor.com

AE to Nuke: 01 Basic Sky Replacement

July 16, 2013

For the assets to follow along yourself, go to the following link and select “project”:
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/basic_sky_replacement/

It’s a good Idea to deinterlace the video and to convert the .mov provided into an image sequence, and I will tell you guys how to do that in the next video.

This is my first tutorial, I am sure I will get better as I go along, but please let me know some feedback.  Too fast? too slow? to boring?  etc.  I’d be glad to hear.  Thanks and I look forward to posting more videos.

Cheers,

Tony Lyons

AE to Nuke tutorials: The Mission

July 15, 2013

I will keep this a brief mission statement.  For awhile now I have heard the many arguments of artists on which program is better, after effects, or nuke, and how there seems to be a very fine line and not too many artists who cross over to both worlds.

I decided to bridge that gap, it is obvious the power of both nuke and after effects.  I think one thing after effects has a leg up on is the ease of access to great tutorials, specifically from VideoCopilot.net.  Andrew Kramer and his team did an amazing job letting people like me and others learn AE easily.

I’d like to take the VideoCopilot tutorials and “convert” them into nuke tutorials.  I will start at the bottom and go all the way through.  so those familiar with after effects from Andrew’s videos will have no more excuse to jump into nuke and vice versa.

I must say I have not touched after effects much in the past few years, so it will be a Journey for me to not only learn the VideoCopilot’s tuts and techniques for after effects, but to then figure out the best way to get similar results using Nuke.

I think it will be fun and I hope everyone will learn a thing or two.

I will post the first videos shortly.

Cheers,

Tony Lyons

First Blog Post: An Brief Introduction

February 11, 2013

Introduction

Hello all!

My name is Tony Lyons, and I am a compositor in the VFX industry.  I’ve been working in Los Angeles (and abroad) for over 3 years now.  In that time I have gained a lot of knowledge that I feel I should give back to the community that has helped me.

I have put off starting a blog for quite some time. But alas!  I have so many ideas, tips, gizmos, techniques, opinions, shout outs, questions, images, and notes, that I finally need a place to put them all.  I hope they will find a home here on https://compositingmentor.wordpress.com.  And I hope all of you find a place where you can learn and contribute as you please!

My Goal:

My goal is to learn as much about compositing and visual effects as humanly possible. It will take several years to accomplish, I have no doubt about that, but in the end I hope to achieve it.  This blog will record my journey, as well as inspire and educate others as best I can.  I would like for people to be able to follow and learn off of my site if they’d like.

I’ll end with a quote a great instructor once taught me:

“What we do for ourselves dies with us, it’s what we do for others that’s immortal.”