I received a question the other day that was asking how I would approach painting out lights from LatLong HDRI’s that are near the bottom or the top of the image. Anything near those poles will usually be heavily distorted and are a pain to remove if you try to paint on the original map. However there’s quite an easy way to remove them in Nuke and at the same time get the lights to a nice and rectangular format for using them on area lights.
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.