RotoPaint3

This week i had the pleasure of working with an artist that had a very good understanding of the the paint node RotoPaint in Nuke.

The gear in the upper left corner of the viewer has many options that have great appeal.

• Round check box: Paint from the nearest whole pixel.

• Shuffle a white alpha before your paint node: This fixes many problems that crop up with use of the onion skin feature.

Things that are still missing.

• "over" is the only transfer mode you can use, for onion skinning. I'd love to have a over and one layer inverted. This makes it easier to align plates for painting.

Progress, Yes!

Thanks for the lessons Josh.

RotoPaint2

A couple of weeks ago I posted a quick rant about how paint in compositing packages is so bad. I'd like to follow that post up with why I think it's so bad and what needs to be done about it.

Nuke from the The Foundry. Nuke is a fantastic compositing package and one that will remain great for a long time to come. Remember I'm not bashing nukes compositing features. I trust that The Foundry will maintain nuke and keep refining it and adding features.

One thing Nuke will never really have is good paint. Why, you ask. Big vfx facilities that have site licenses[the big places] of Nuke are not using Nuke for paint. Compositors dont do big paint jobs in Nuke period. Compositors will avoid paint at all costs. I know I used to. Here is the thing, if you are going to paint 1 frame or 1200 frames it helps to have paint that holds up. You want it to be an interactive fast flowing experience. Paint is hard enough. But even painting one frame in Nuke can be a slow pain in the ass. Here is the problem, I don't think The Foundry has any incentive to make the paint better, only to have good enough.

Now not to beat up on The Foundry. Nobody has done this. Shake didn't do it either. I have talked with many painters over the years and most of the real digital painters the last time paint was good was in Matador. That's right I said Avid Matador. This is software that was made in 1996. It ran on a SGI that was fast and interactive. The ram was limited and so was the cpu power. So why cant we get interactive and fast paint on todays 16 core, 16 gigs of RAM MacPro.[it doesn't really work that well in Linux either]

So here is the challenge for The Foundry.

Give us RotoPaint that works and doesn't slow your script to a crawl is fun and consistent to use.

I have always said paint is a huge part compositing.

Roto

This shot took 2 compositors and a team of 3d artists to complate. I headed up the rotoscoping part of the project. There was a ton.[Rotoscoping explained at vfxwiki.org]

First the shot.

The simple way to discribe this shot is a really complex wire removal. The cliff face had to be replaced. The climber had to be painted frame by frame and then place on top of the clean rock that was built in maya. That also meant the climber had to be rotoscoped threw out the whole shot.

I stopped the roto there so you can see how it kinda works. 10 days for this shot. A lot of work.

Always think about the shot before you shoot and commit to it. Once it is in the can it can be hard not to use it without a fix.

It might save you a ton of money. Nice work Maureen, Lee and Josh.