SOFTWARE: NUKE
Mike Griggs replies
For many artists, having a node-based workflow such as the one in Foundry’s content creation application Nuke is a delight of bespoke workflows that lend themselves to the artist’s way of working, and speeds up their work exponentially. For many other artists, a node-based workflow is a nasty tangle of spaghetti only used by aliens. It continually gets in the way of them creating their work.
The thing about these opposing views is that both are true, the only difference being that the artist who likes a nodal workflow has accepted that the initial setup process can be slow. When it has been set up though, the node-based devotee saves and organises those tedious tasks in a way that creates a toolbox of custom nodes and workflows ready to go in just seconds when the need arises.
While there are many ways that individual artists can organise specific workflows within Nuke to suit them – for example, a compositor’s workflow that uses filmed footage would have a different set of requirements than a 3D artist working with rendered EXRs – the building blocks of organisation are the same no matter the task. In this tutorial, we’ll look at two of the most fundamental nodes to help artists organise themselves: the Backdrop node and the Group node, which support artists in multiple ways.
The Backdrop and Note nodes help to keep matters visually organised on the Node Graph, while the former can clearly denote the function of a set of nodes or a certain point in a node tree. What’s great about the Backdrop node is that the nodes within it move as well, making it easy to keep track of various stages of a Node Graph’s progression as it grows.
Meanwhile, the Group node is used to bundle together a set of nodes into a single node, with the advantage that that solitary node obviously makes the graph a lot less complex visually. Using these organisational nodes can help make sense of the Node Graph spaghetti, which will help any artist get the most from their time spent in Nuke.
