SOFTWARE: NUKE
Mike Griggs replies
One of the toughest elements about learning new creative software is plodding your way through the essential elements to give a foundation for doing the fancy stuff. This becomes even more frustrating if the software is already in a skill area the artist knows, and understands the underlying knowledge of the task or brief at hand. That often means finding a tutorial on a specific process can actually hamper more than help the overall software experience.
Nuke is a piece of content creation software that, in many ways, can do too many things. It’s imperative to cover as much of the basics as possible, as they can lead to potential time-sucking ‘gotchas’ later down the line. The fantastic thing about Nuke is that thanks to its nodal architecture and ability to open up nearly every available parameter for adjustment, it can mean there are too many choices for new artists, or those used to similar software that hides a lot of the complexity.
A great example is how the humble Nuke Viewer node works. The Nuke Viewer node is the only node that appears when a new Nuke comp is created, and therefore it’s easy to ignore, but that does the node a disservice for its importance. For example, most new Nuke artists wouldn’t know the Viewer is an item in the Panels tab of the overall Preferences.
Artists can become a bit confused with the Viewer node as each can display different variations of the same footage.
EXPERT TIP
MORE THAN ONE SOURCE Using two Viewer nodes can be a great way of looking at multiple versions of the same shot, for example, a specular pass loaded into Viewer2 to compare with the main beauty pass. Making extra Viewers is a handy way to work with a lot of footage.
STEP BY STEP SET UP TWO VIEWERS IN NUKE
This happened to me recently when I grouped a range of renders in Nuke. The colour settings in the View Transform of the Viewer in the group were different from the Viewer in the main node graph. Still, I quickly realised that it was the Viewer node, which meant seconds of confusion rather than hours of panic. This quick tutorial for artists new to Nuke will set up a simple two-viewer comp, showing how one render can be used to create an sRGB and HDR workflow concurr
