2D to 3D in Nuke -- Surface_VOP Part I -- Revolutionary Surface Compositing in Nuke

 Hey guys actually I was wondering about posting a Blog. This blog is about converting or using attribute to force or manipulate another attribute. So in Houdini converting attribute is very common. So the first thing that came to my mind after using our manipulating attributes but why shouldn't we use this in Nuke to use to compose it or any kind of purpose so the thing what I did was to create a gizmo which uses a 2D image based on the 2D image it uses a 3D representation or a 3D surface which matches 90% accurate to all kinds of cloth or any surface type of shots a body a cloth or any kind of shots. 

For example we can convert the lighting attribute or a luminous Channel or red Channel green Channel blue Channel any channel to manipulate or Force another attribute like transform attribute or any color or anything that's professional in Nuke. So let's talk about Houdini for a bit, Houdini is a software which is very procedural and similar to new and can be used to attain many types of simulations in 3D workspace the main thing in Houdini is for example we can use a UV Channel to force a noise Channel or any Alpha Channel that gives us a very great simulation and stuff. So what I did was to create a gizmo that actually affects the transform data. 

This thing right here is very much useful and pretty much a very revolutionary thing for my career.  To understand this Gizmo let's talk about ST map a bit.  St maps are like storage spaces which is used to store transform data and warp data in the form of UV channels and motion vectors. 

For example we can use the Expression note to create a UV map or ST map. Through this method we can attain a general and procedural warping system which is way better than our professional masking transform technique usually in our traditional transform technique the mask gives us a strict line kind of thing which we used to blur our Alpha channel to make it rhythmic. But in here as we store our transform data,  so that we can use blur or any types of filters like  defocus, median, bilateral, Inpaint, etc... To affect the UV data so that our transform  thing becomes more rhythmic like we do stuff in Grid warp and spline Warp.  Of course we will see an uncover this Gizmo in a separate blog for sure. But I will give a basic idea what I did it here. 

 So basically what I did in this Gizmo is to drive our transform data through our luminance from our input. Together with this I added some Advanced procedural systems to give us more precision into itself. Underused stamps here to store our transform data and  to make it more natural and stuff so this is the basic idea of  our Gizmo.  To get more advanced in cloth compositing or any skin type of compositing including tattoos and stuff,  we do more than this.  

As we got our transform data our Clean Plate will be fine as we know we can use this to many videos like sliding along the surface or who knows humans creativity doesn't end.  Creativity is what drives humans or maybe what made humans.   Let's say our next step is to match the movement of a cloth or our skin or any muscle fiber kind of thing,  for that purpose we have such tools as mocha and smart vector. 

 As for mocha we got power in mocha pro software which is very useful  for surfaces such as cloth and muscle.  But to get into another extent of procedural pixel tracking we use Smart vectors and Vector distort. Everyone or every compositor knows how to use Smart factors to restart our plate we store our smart vectors or our Vector data into a ST map or an EXR file in motion channels. 

So we use a node called  Vector distort to warp power input tattoo or sticker or even clean plates in removal shots to attain our output. But in this case let's take a tattoo which shoots perfectly over the skin or a cloth using smart vectors. So the next thing is to matching our color and our surface exactly in a realistic manner. of course we use physics in this we use physics everywhere that's a uniqueness.I mean my uniqueness so let's say If You observe a tattoo or patch of skin  the bright areas of the skin produces a brighter effect over the tattoo vice versa for the dark. We get all the necessary data from our luminance channel from the input plate as you use a keyer node to get the brighter and darker areas separately we can use a great note and mask it with the luminance keyer.  

So for the next step we need the texture of our cloth and our skin for that purpose we use our frequency keyer.  To those, frequency care is nothing but we separate our frequencies from our input to get the fine details of the plate.  Of course I have a separate frequency care Gizmo made by myself but we can go with minus operation in merge node and default blur node from nuke.  As we get high values we can simply merge with our final this finally gives us our matched comp. 

So we can even tweak the texture thing with  with playing other operations in merge node as you know many composers do that.  And we can tweak some controls in smart Vector to get the Distortion level you need to your shot according to your supervisor. 

 Of course we have many applications of the Gizmo which I created we can do a blood dripping thing or any surface we can do a liquid dripping we can do many kinds of things I just think it's a pretty revolutionary. Maybe someone or many guys found this already. But you know finding a thing our self is Joy isn't it.  We can obtain a UV texture or UV map from input without even getting any kind of details from our Gizmo of course it's revolutionary. Anytime we can use explain more for a great work to Advanced transformations but this here reduces our job for 90% in this kind of shots.  If you don't need any clean tools or any rotation or at least any 3D model we just need a good lighting to the shot we can get a pretty precise  UV texture Thank you stay tuned for another blog.