Mumbai Nuke Master Class Recap

As Nuke has increased in popularity around the world, The Foundry have been holding master classes around the world to help build up the user base. Their recent Nuke Master Class in Mumbai attracted over 250 visual effects artists from as far afield as Hyderabad and Chenai.

Attendees were treated to sessions on customization, colour workflow and production proven techniques that took advantage of Nuke’s current toolset. There were also demonstrations of the new features of Nuke 6.0 and the possibilities presented by NukeX. Presenters from Image Engine, Double Negative and EyeQube, India’s biggest Nuke site, joined The Foundry’s team.

Click through for a recap of the event from The Foundry.

Jon Wadelton, Lead Nuke Engineer, The Foundry

Jon Wadelton showed off Nuke’s customisability using python callbacks and panels. He then showed two new nodes for colour adjustment, toe for low end soft clip and a slice tool for analyzing pixels and applying the resulting LUT. Wadelton then moved on to real time colour correction in Nuke which he achieved by rewriting the grade node in GPU shader code.

He also showed a position pass to 3d point cloud node kindly donated by Image Engine as used on District 9, with tweaks done by the Foundry and finished off with a PyGeo example showing access to 3d geometry from Python.

Roy Stelzer, Technical Director, Double Negative

Roy put the tools built in Jon’s session to use. The SliceLookUp tool to was to match the fall off on a highlight and the Toe to adjust the blacks. He also talked through colour theory and relighting techniques.

Soumyadip Chakraborty, Associate Compositing Supervisor, EyeQube

EyeQube are India’s largest Nuke house. Soumyadip took us through the decision making process when picking Nuke over Fusion or Shake when setting up EyeQube’s 2D department less than two years ago.

Since then they’ve completed over 2000 VFX shots including 1600 on India’s biggest ever VFX feature, Aladin – released in October – and are very happy with their choice.

Ben Minall, Training Manager, The Foundry

Ben showcased Nuke 6.0’s RotoPaint node to applause from the crowd in attendence. He finished showing paint flying onto a 16K plate assisted by the uber-fast HP Z800, kindly loaned to The Foundry for the event.

Shervin Shoghian, Compositing Supervisor, Image Engine

Shervin showcased the possibilities presented by the new Lens Distortion tools and 3D camera tracker inherent in NukeX demonstrating dense point cloud, working with RED footage and the ability to attach 3D objects to geometry at a point level for the first time in Nuke.

You can also watch Shoghian’s IBC presentation, which was in episode #71 of fxguidetv.

Simon Robinson, Chief Scientist, The Foundry

Simon showed some of the current work of the Foundry’s Research team, including depth-field generation, updated stereo workflow with Ocula 2, multiple-camera calibration, virtual marker technology, and a prototype tool to simplify the generation of projection geometry through a point-and-click interface.

All the presentations used footage from a shoot done with One Red Pixel on RED by the team at a farm in Sussex featuring The Foundry’s own Ben Minall in the starring role.

The sessions were filmed and will be available online with assets when Nuke 6.0 and NukeX are released.

5 thoughts on “Mumbai Nuke Master Class Recap”

  1. Drool. . . Can’t wait to get a look at these presentations. So excited to see they are working with Image Engine and continuing to develop some of their in house tools.

  2. It was a great experience meeting each and everyone of the speakers personally. They were really helpful and gave excellent suggestions to each and every query I put forward. I too cant wait for the presentations… (I want to re-live the experience :P). Thanx Jon, Roy, Shervin, Simon and Lucy!!

  3. in the last Master Class, fxphd was filmed Master Class and shared them, but i want to know, did pxphd film the new Master Class ?
    excuse me for my bad english
    Thanks

  4. Hello All.
    Thanks for your comments. We did film the master class and will be posting most of the sessions and assets on our website in the near future.
    I’d say end of January to be safe. I’ll keep you posted.
    Thanks again for your interest in Nuke and The Foundry.
    Lucy

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