Stylize Node

While I have yet to find a reason to use it professionally, the results that the presets give are outstanding.

In a nutshell, it will give you what you always wanted Photoshop's "make it look like a painting/drawing/newspaper" plugins to give you.

Really really outstanding stuff, and if I was running a one-man flame show I would be attempting to blast out as many ads that use the basic presets as possible. Great looking jobs in three days or less!

Round Tripping with Color Balancing

I got involved in an interesting conversation on flame-news, the result of which is I have a few tips on how to balance footage and get it back to it's unbalanced state to film out or hand back to whoever gave it to you.

The easiest, and probably best way is with the histogram in the Color Corrector:

(note: all balancing and work done in 16 bit Float--if you work in 12 or 8 bit you run a risk of clipping out detail if you are not careful)

Set your black and white points on the R,G, and B to balance your image by sampling an area for blacks, and entering those values into the IN on the black levels, then sampling an area for whites and doing the same with the IN on the white levels.

to un-balance to the original put the IN values into the OUT values and reset the IN's back to 0 and 1 respectively.

Using Gain and Offset (separately) in Color Correctors:

--Use only the master controls (no highlights/mids/shadows) and use only gain and offset.

--Make two CC nodes if you're going to use both Gain and Offset. Have the Gain CC come first.

--Balance your shot

--At the tail of your batch tree add two more CC's to invert the Offset and Gain--in that order.

To unbalance use inverse of the upstream offset on the downstream one and use the 100/gain*100 math/expression to get your inverted gain values and your image will be back to where it was.

Advice Series 02

"Computers are a black hole into which we throw time." - Dennis Hlynsky.

There's a number of ways to interpret this. The main point I've taken away is if you don't have to do something in a computer you should avoid the computer. If you can shoot an element or use a clever editorial trick in lieu of a complex morph, then do it. VFX asks a lot of people and many times we miss the forest for the trees, feeling it necessary to show everything, because we can. Think about how much time you will spend with a computer and think of alternate ways to accomplish the same goal.

Advice Series: 01

"Remember to blink." - Ryan Lesser.

Ryan told this to my 1st CG class back in 1998, and while I learned a lot from Ryan, nothing comes back more than that phrase. Staring at computer screens encourages a lack of blinking in humans and after a while your eyes will dry out. So remember to blink.

How to Grab Individual Channels out of an EXR

Pretty easy actually, if somewhat hidden:

In the gateway, double click on the "Multi" icon and it'll crack open your EXR and allow you to just grab the passes you want.

My new favorite pass: the point depth pass--it's like having three depth passes.


Also of note: Ctrl Up and Ctrl Down will flick through your EXR layers in a Gateway Import.  Also works for Actions with multiple outputs.

Matte Edge is Wonderful

I've already covered the greatness of matte edge for it's ability to soften linear gradients and also add grain into them.

Today I was building my own light wrap setup when I noticed that I need to use far fewer steps now. In MatteEdge, change edges to "Advanced" and in there you can setup up a zero width edge and adjust the gradient for both inner and outer edges. It's very nice.

Top 5 Nodes November

5. Action Gmasks. There's still some bugs in them (I had one that refused to create any more keyframes last night, and when you manipulate the verts off-axis, say on a plane rotated 80 on the Y, they get gummy) but they've got a lot of promise and allow you to do some pretty clever things when combined with a camera track. Admittedly, you can do this with old gmasks, which are also 3d, but having everything live inside of Action makes 3d gmasking much more viable.

4. Matte Edge. I think I overuse this guy a bit, but it's so so useful.

3. Sapphire MatteBlur. No other node will do a blur inside a matte as nicely as this guy. I keep waiting for the day when i can not use it, but that day is not here, so it gets on the list.

2. Point Cloud. It's a damn shame this feature only works with flame generated camera tracks, because it is beyond useful. Hold Shift and drag an axis manipulator over it to snap the axis to the point cloud, or parent an axis and define how the point cloud places the axis. A very smart and very useful feature. Needs to be opened up so any axes can be converted into one.

1. Color Warper. A bug in the CC's curves sent me back to the warper and I remembered that it's curve function (which works on NURBS instead of bezier curves) has a live histogram that will warp as you push values around. Awesome.