SOFTWARE: NUKE
Mike Griggs replies
The Foundry’s Nuke is one of the most powerful pieces of software that a digital content creator can work with. It’s used by everyone, from freelancers wanting to make the highest-quality imagery they can, to the world’s leading VFX houses to create and combine the mind-bending imagery we see in most modern blockbusters.
The issue with Nuke has been that it can be an intimidating piece of software for new artists to get into, especially when coming from applications like After Effects. However, there are some instances where Nuke is actually more straightforward than its peers, especially when handling files.
A great example is how it processes multi-part EXR files. A folder full of rendered files can be dragged directly into the Node Graph, where Nuke intelligently organises them into sequences of files, all set to the native project settings. If the artist has been using OCIO or ACES colour for their 3D render settings, Nuke will usually adapt the colour input of the footage to the correct settings so the artist doesn’t get confused with the renders not looking the accurate colour; an issue that can arise with applications such as After Effects.
Multi-part EXRs are great for saving a lot of information such as separate passes. However, some passes such as Cryptomattes and those used for deep compositing may still need a separate render file due to their data requirements. A standard multi-part EXR can contain conventional compositing passes such as Beauty, Speculative and Volumes.
A multi-part EXR appears as a single Read File node in the Nuke Node Graph.
Still, it’s another node that’s going to work the extraction magic for the various passes: the Shuffle node, which when connected to the Multi-part EXR node, can identify the separate passes and be used to connect them either directly to a Viewer node or out to other node groups. What’s brilliant about a node-based workflow is that multiple Shuffle nodes can come from a single multi-part EXR. Each can be labelled by changing the name or using the variety of Notation nodes to create a simple workflow that can be saved to work with multiple file sequences.
