Who this talk is for: This talk is for those interested in learning more about what the pipeline looks like in post production for film and those who want a brief introduction to video compositing with Foundry’s Nuke and python.
2 minute intro: What is post-production pipeline? How VFX, animation, compositing and 3d conversion differ and what roles they play in making movie magic. • Vfx procedural processes. Examples of this are smoke, water, fire, crowds, anything that flows and moves in a procedural way. • Animation tracked objects moving through space. This often includes characters, or anything that takes up a discrete space and moves through a scene. • Compositing putting stuff in other stuff. If you need a character to be put on a background and move through it in a way that makes sense with the light and surroundings. That’s compositing. • 3d conversion also known as depth. This is turning 2d scenes into 3d movies.
1 minute: briefly talk about the node-based nature of a few key pieces of software: Houdini, Maya, Nuke, and how well this modularity lends itself to building custom tools with python. All these pieces of software work via visual node spaces that allow for modular abstraction of tasks. This means that artists are able to parse and use them, but they are also friendly to those who want to use apis to write custom tools. This means one can write a custom kind of blur, transform, merge, or other effect that can then be imported directly into the program. • Houdini is built by SideFx and is the premier software for procedural effects. • Nuke is built by foundry and is a compositing software that is also used for 3d conversion. • Maya is built by autodesk and is primarily used for animation.
6 minutes: compositing demonstration in Nuke. What can go wrong. What can go right. How custom tools help. • This demonstration will involve picking a particular node class in Nuke and exploring two different python implementations of it. For instance: two different ways to create and modify a blur node in a compositing scene, look at how they’re different, and weigh pros and cons… with shiny pictures.
1 minute outro: Wrap it up, talk about the importance of the role of technical artist, and how pythonic approaches lend themselves well to being parsable by technical people applying their skills to make art, and artists looking to become more technically fluent.
Victoria works in technical post-production for film and television. She got her start in technical support in animation at Arc Productions in Toronto where she worked on Netflix series such as Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters and Lego Marvel Super Heros, among others. She now does pipeline development and support for 3D conversion at Stereo D in Toronto, where she’s contributed to films like; Star Trek: Beyond; The Fate of the Furious; and Star Wars: Rogue One.