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.

Paint

The other day I posted a 140 characters rant about paint in compositing packages. That got me thinking. What is the problem with Paint?

I have a saying.

Composite your way into a corner and paint your way out

I don't remember where i heard it as its not mine. but it stands true. Compositing and Paint go hand in hand. So why do all of the big comp packages have paint that is horrid. I am tired of compositors lieing to themselves and saying the Paint is fine. Is that because most compositors will do anything to stay away from paint, maybe. If the paint node is horrible then maybe they can pass it off to a paint artist. To my suprise Avid is the winner on this one. matador is old and you will have to find a SGI box but it works really well.

You know what I say.

Learn to paint its a skill that will make your comps look that much better.

More on Channels

When I start a shot, one of the first things I do is shuffle the source reads RGB channels into a src_plate layer. By doing this I have created a new layer in my compositing stream that i can now get to at anytime. I can also do this with pre-renders of denoised source plates or maybe just the red channel for tracking. These can be shuffle copied into the compositing stream as well. Now when I need the source plate down the compositing stream I can use a shuffle node to bring that layer front and center.

There is a flip side to all these layers and channels. If you work with folks that do not use this method of compositing then this might cause a problem. Above all else when working with others in compositing is to have everyone on the same page. Above all else if you are working within a group keep your scripts readable and organized as you can.

Take some time and understand what your doing. There is nothing worse than not knowing why a image or matte isn't showing in the viewer.

Here is an example script to look at. And also a link to Nukepedia.com explaining more in-depth layers and channels. In this script there is SRCPLATE and SRCPLATE_CC. Both layers containing RGBA channels. There is also a roto node that is plugged into a copy. I am coping the roto nodes matte into the stream for future use. 

        set cut_paste_input [stack 0]
version 6.2 v2
push $cut_paste_input
Roto {
 output alpha
 curves {AnimTree: "" {
 Version: 1.2
 Flag: 0
 RootNode: 1
 Node: {
  NodeName: "Root" {
   Flag: 512
   NodeType: 1
   Transform: 0 0 S 0 0 S 0 0 S 0 0 S 0 1 S 0 1 S 0 0 S 0 1024 S 0 778 
   NumOfAttributes: 10
   "vis" S 0 1 "opc" S 0 1 "mbo" S 0 1 "mb" S 0 1 "mbs" S 0 0.5 "fo" S 0 1 "fx" S 0 0 "fy" S 0 0 "ff" S 0 1 "ft" S 0 0 
  }
  NumOfChildren: 0
 }
}
}
 toolbox {createBezier {
  { createBezier ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 tt 4 }
  { createBSpline ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { createEllipse ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { createRectangle ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { brush ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { eraser src 2 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { clone src 1 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { reveal src 3 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { dodge src 1 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { burn src 1 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { blur src 1 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { sharpen src 1 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
  { smear src 1 ssx 1 ssy 1 sf 1 sb 1 }
} }
 toolbar_brush_hardness 0.200000003
 toolbar_lifetime_type all
 toolbar_source_transform_scale {1 1}
 toolbar_source_transform_center {1024 778}
 view {}
 motionblur_on true
 name Roto1
 selected true
 xpos 3614
 ypos -43
}
CheckerBoard2 {
 inputs 0
 name CheckerBoard1
 selected true
 xpos 3608
 ypos -205
}
ColorBars {
 inputs 0
 name ColorBars1
 selected true
 xpos 3775
 ypos -381
}
add_layer {SRC_PLATE SRC_PLATE.red SRC_PLATE.green SRC_PLATE.blue SRC_PLATE.alpha}
Shuffle {
 alpha black
 out SRC_PLATE
 name Shuffle1
 label "\[value out]"
 selected true
 xpos 3775
 ypos -298
}
add_layer {SRC_PLATE_CC SRC_PLATE_CC.red SRC_PLATE_CC.green SRC_PLATE_CC.blue SRC_PLATE_CC.alpha}
ShuffleCopy {
 inputs 2
 red red
 green green
 blue blue
 out SRC_PLATE_CC
 name ShuffleCopy1
 label "\[value out]"
 selected true
 xpos 3775
 ypos -184
}
add_layer {roto roto.matte}
Copy {
 inputs 2
 from0 rgba.alpha
 to0 roto.matte
 name Copy1
 selected true
 xpos 3775
 ypos -43
}

Enjoy,

michaelb

Backwards

I recently took off 3 weeks of work. It was a great time. [Look here] [1] for all the images you will ever need.

Right before I took time off I had upgraded my MacbookPro to Lion.

Most of the reason why i did this upgrade had everything to do with iOS 5 and iCloud. Not because I wanted versioning or reversed scrolling. That in itself is strange.

When I came back to work my MacPro is running Snow Leopard. Such a contrast previous versions of Mac OS X.

Nuke with reversed scrolling turned on? Navigating the DAG takes thought again. Up for out and down for in.

Apple, please do not forget about your pro users. We love our software. But only
When it gets work done.

[1]: http://mbfx.me/photoblog/month/november-2011 "Photos For Nov."