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.

Good Work

A friend of mine posted this on Twitter the other day.

Miles Lauridsen:

Despite current labor struggles, #vfx has been and will be an industry that thrives on creativity, intellect, and gut instinct. #jobsecurity

Could not have said it better myself. Be great do good work the rest will fall into place.

Scrabble

A couple weeks ago I did a cell phone comp. I changed what the display of a cell phone said to better tell a story.

I went to the vfx producer and said I needed a font to match the font of the display.

He went on to breakdown the combination of all the letters i needed to spell the words I needed for the comp. All from what was supplied from the SRC plate.

Talk about producing.

I need to play more scrabble.

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.

Hiero

HIERO is a desktop application for collaborative VFX workflow - a scriptable timeline tool that conforms edit decision lists and parcels out VFX shots to artists, allows progress to be viewed in context, and liberates your finishing systems and artists for more creative tasks.

One of the biggest hurdles we as artist can face is where and what.

Arri Alexa Meta-Data Extraction

Mike Seymour:

Snehal Patel, Sales Associate (Pro Camera Accessories) at ARRI, has been working with Bill Bennett, ASC to test out a workflow for VFX to extract Lens Data and Tilt/Roll information from the Log-C Quicktime files coming out of an Alexa Plus. He posted this information which allows one to extract dynamic per frame Alexa metadata from Alexa files.

The dream is getting closer. I'd love to have camera data for all shots in house in a simple csv file.