In this course we will learn how to successfully assemble and finalize a full CG shot. We will study how a CG beauty render can be reconstructed using its light components in order to have better control of every aspect of the image, tweaking the passes separately and aiming for a more photorealistic composite. We will learn how to rebuild a CG beauty render using both additive and subtractive methods and how to judge when to use one way or the other.
As Deep compositing has become more and more the new industry standard for all the major VFX Houses, an entire module will be dedicated to the use of deep data in Nuke. Deep Image Compositing introduces new possibilities that increase flexibility and solve old problems of depth-based compositing.

Compositing artists need to be able to combine and integrate multiple visual elements from separate sources into a single image or a sequence of images.
That’s all compositing is about.

We’ll take a look at how to integrate a digital matte painting into a full CG shot using 3d projections.
In addition to the beauty AOVs, more technical utility AOVs can also be used such as ID masks, which allow an artist to select and perform manipulations on a specific object in a large scene. We’ll look into some of the utility passes and how to use them.

As professional VFX compositors, we need to be able to manage our own time when working on a shot and often we are required to produce and deliver good looking images in tight deadlines. For this reason we need to be able to improve our efficiency and be able to create gizmos in Nuke is definitely part of the process. Gizmos are macros wrapped in a single node and they are provided with a custom user interface to control the internal nodes. We’ll dedicate a module to the creation of a gizmo in Nuke.
One of the last steps of a full CG shot composite is replicating artifacts of a real camera lens, such as lens flares, glares, Chromatic aberration etc. Computers don’t deal with imperfections but an image generated from a render engine is perfect. It is essential that a compositor knows how to recreate and apply a photographic look of a lens to CG renders.
The last part of the course is dedicated to tech checks. At the very final stage of the shot, when it is “creatively finalled”, tech check is the process that fixies any technical errors. We’ll look into the steps of tech checking a shot and rendering the final output clean of errors.