compositing | Julius Ihle

Digital Tutors/Pluralsight Training Release

February 20, 2016 Uncategorized 5

A few months back Digital Tutors/Pluralsight have picked me up to release a training series with them. It’s entitled Intermediate to Advanced AOV Manipulation Techniques in NUKE. In it I will be showing some tips/tricks to work as efficiently as possible with multipass renders. It starts by giving a brief introduction to AOV’s for newcomers, just so that everyone is on the same page but will quickly ramp up into more advanced topics.
After the introductions I prepared a small project to integrate a CG car into a live action environment. Tweaking it to make it look good in the shot and an indepth rundown on why I do what are just a few of the things I will be discussing.

Also check out some before/after screenshots of the CG slapcomp vs the final composite to get a rough idea:

Ground Contact Masks

August 3, 2014 Uncategorized

Integrating CG into uneven soil is an interesting challenge. On a recent show we had to integrate CG characters into plates which often had a grassy ground. For Comp it’s benefitial if you get masks from Rendering to aid the blending of the CG elements into the grass. If the ground the characters are walking on is flat this can easily be achieved with a standard PWorld AOV. It get’s a bit trickier though if the characters are walking up a hill or a similarly uneven surface, because the coordinates at which the character comes in contact with the ground are constantly changing. I’ve been trying to come up with a system to make a Comper’s life easier and found a relatively simple solution.

HDR Prepper Nuke Gizmo for IBL (Updated!)

November 10, 2013 Uncategorized 4

Image based lighting often times simplifies getting started with a good lighting setup when trying to integrate CG into life action. Often times it’s beneficial to have the IBL sphere to just contain the ambient lights from the environment and therefore to paint out any actual light sources from the set. Those can then be used on separate lights to give the main illumination from the set lights, while the IBL sphere contributes ambient environment light. Now, if you have a lot of different environments and consequently a lot of different HDR’s it can be tedious to paint out the lights and output them after that…

Prep Work Tips

March 29, 2013 Uncategorized

Sooner or later there’s always a project where lot’s of things have to be removed. Sometimes there’s not only the quantity but also the quality of work required to get good looking results. There are probably not a lot of people out there who love doing this, but it has to be done, so here are a few snippets of tips I learned over the last few months.