Lighting in Comping

Say it ain't so! Lightinng and compositing have always gone hand in hand, and as such, many facilities have lighters do the comping on their shot. While this definitely makes things go quicker, you may not always get the best results like from an independent lighter/comper team. The reason? There are few lighters who excel at comping, and few compers who excel at lighting.

Last week there was an updated Nuke tool posted over at FXshare called Relight. It basically allows you to add lights and shadows to an already rendered scene, using a number of alternative passes. Marco wrote it, check it out over at FXshare and his lowrez page. What will this help us compositors do? Well, occasionally there isn't time to re-render certain bits, or add a little nuance that the supervisor might want. This tool allows us to quickly add a light from another direction and use that, all from within Nuke. It's pretty quick, and very effective. There was a lighting tool originally planned for Nuke a long time ago, but that has since fallen by the wayside. I'm hoping that the next versions of Nuke have something like this built in, since having a 3D compositing environment only begs for a tool to light objects! This does not replace the work that lighters do for us. It does however help us add more detail into our shot that is called for at the last minute, which happens more often than not. Marco is also on VFXTalk as user makal, so be sure and head over there to see what else is going on!

In a day or two the VFXTalk newsletter going out, which details many of the upcoming plans that we have for the site.