The Composite

Week 1 – An introduction to compositing

Compositing helps artist do accurate replacements of effects and accomplish layers of effects coming from different sources into one frame seamlessly, every lighting, colour and roto-scoping must be compatible in order to achieve the elimination of the illusion effect or in some case, the uncanny valley.

A good resource for all things Nuke – Nukepedia

Compositing Practices 101 – Nukepedia

Examples in films

Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017)

Watch How Blade Runner 2049's VFX Masters Created A Perfect Digital Double Of Sean Young

Deckard meets ‘Rachael’ again after 30 years

Blade Runner 2049 VFX supervisor interview

Joi experiences rain for the first time

The 'Blade Runner 2049' VFX Reel Is a Sci-Fi Work of Art

Las vegas in 2049

Star Wars: The Last jedi (Johnson, 2017)

Rebel base attack

Rogue One: A star Wars Story (Edwards, 2016)

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story' VFX Breakdown | Hypebeast

Jyn infiltrating an empire base

Everything Everywhere All At Once (Daniels, 2022)

The invisible VFX of 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' - befores & afters

Evelyn confronts Joy

Tron: Legacy (Kosinski, 2010)

Tron: Legacy has a lot to live up to, but DD has raised its game to bring it into the 21st century.

The Grid

Week 2 – Organization & Roto

Rotoscoping is a frame by frame technique in animation to bring characters into layers of drawn backgrounds, in which evolved to becoming a VFX tool used to hide wires from stunt work and creating digitalised worlds.

Max Fleischer – Inventor of The Rotoscope Machine

The rotoscope machine being introduced by Fleischer in 1915.

Fleischer pioneered the development of cartoon animation and was responsible in bringing iconic characters to life such as Koko the Clown, Betty Boop and Popeye.

: Koko the Clown (1918)

: Betty Boop (1930)

: Popeye (1929)

Rotoscoping in Nuke

It’s always best to find the sharpest frame of what you’re trying to roto out, in this case the two balls in the center frame and the two glass roofs that doesn’t hinder with the the edge or any other objects that might interfere within the visibility of the subject.

It is also recommended to go in between frames using the command ‘Control + Left or Right’ that takes you to the halfway point of the frames (e.g.frame 90 to 45, 45 to 23, 23 to 12 etc.) to help with the auto-rotoscoping instead of doing every frame unless the object you’re trying to roto out is specifically small or in constant change in shapes when viewing from multiple perspectives, the balls below are the best example for this exercise.

Balls

Using the B-Spline tool to quickly make out the curved shape from the balls, the lesser points on each angle, the better.

Top view of the architectures

Using the Cusped Bezier tool as they both have straight lines and doesn’t shift to any curved lines on the edges

Week 3 – Complex Roto

Compared to last week’s exercise, we now move on rotoscoping out also a single object of a hand, but the finger movements and blur has become a much more complex process.

Instead of rotoscoping the outline of the entirety of an object like a ball or a roof, we’ve add different sections of rotoscoping in the finger because the different frames will have the finger moving sideways and each joint/pivot will have a slight shift so instead of doing a new roto, we can use the existing outline we’ve rotoscoped and rotate to help save time.

The nodes are identical to to previous exercises, the only difference comes in the rotoscoping, as we add more feathering to show the blur more effectively.