NUKE WORKSHOPS @ CGSOCIETY

Join Steve Wright, a twenty year VFX veteran and master compositing trainer, for his two new 6 week long Nuke workshops, and learn the powerful new visual effects compositing program that is taking the visual effects industry by storm. Join your fellow students in this closed forum workshop where you will get training from Steve's Telly Award winning videos. Turn in your assigments and you will get an audio review recorded by Steve containing valuable feedback! Learn about these workshops and how to enroll below.

Nuke 2D Workshop

This is where to start on your path to learning to Nuke. This workshop introduces the Nuke interface and shows how to navigate between the viewer, node graph, curve editor, and property panels. Keyframe animation, expressions, and linking between nodes are covered in detail. You will get extensive training on Nuke’s unique 32 bit float “linear lightspace” color management and the major color correcting nodes. The RotoPaint node is covered in great detail with nearly and hour’s worth of tutorials for this very sophistiated roto and procedural paint system.

The topics then move on to compositing Multi-pass CGI and point tracking, including corner pinning. Nuke comes with four world-class bluescreen/greenscreen keyers - Ultimatte, Keylight, Primatte, and Nuke’s own IBK keyer. Every one of these keyers are covered along with the KeyMix and AddMix nodes. There are multiple examples to illustrate how to merge/join/subtract mattes, keys and alpha channels to create professional keys in addition to workflow examples for the GridWarp and SplineWarp nodes. How to use the very important MotionBlur2D and Zblur nodes are also covered.

Nuke 3D Workshop

This is part two of the overall Nuke Compositing Workshop for those artists that want to go beyond 2D compositing and advance to 3D compositing. This workshop dives into Nuke’s awesome 3D compositing capability and covers the several major new features introduced in Nuke 6.3.

Of course this workshop will thoroughly cover the basics like creating 3D geometric primitives, adding lights, cameras and shaders, plus texture mapping and animating geometry. The workshop then pulls it all together with several examples of classic 3D compositing workflow techniques, including the all-important camera projection.

Finally, the huge new features that were released with Nuke 6.3 will be covered. This list is long, but just a few of the highlights would be a new displacement shader that creates adaptive geometry at render time, Deep Compositing, a built-in planar tracker, and a full blown fully integrated 3D particle system. This is can’t-miss training for Nuke artists.

**** Prerequisites for these workshops are a solid background in compositing visual effects using programs such as Shake, Combustion, Digital Fusion, Motion, Flame, Toxik or After Effects.

Who Should Take These Workshops

These workshops assume that you already have a basic understanding of the concepts of 2D compositing of visual effects using one of the packages mentioned above and want to learn about Nuke's powerful capabilities including its 3D compositing workflow. Compositors should also have at least a basic understanding of 3D vocabulary and core concepts such as XYZ space, 3D geometry, and surface properties such as diffuse and specular lighting.

These courses are also ideal for 3D animators that want to get a great overview of the Nuke workflow and how it integrates into a modern 3D production pipeline. Many shops actually require their 3D artists to do “slap comps” in Nuke to make sure their rendered elements are suitable for the 2D department down the line.

Why Take These Workshops

Nuke’s importance to the VFX industry is how it moves compositing to the next level as an extension of the 3D department. This is the current trend in visual effects where more and more of the shot development is moved from the 3D department to the 2D department where they are faster and cheaper to produce and revise. This trend will only increase over time, so compositors who want to stay current will need to learn 3D compositing. The addition of 3D compositing skills also upgrades the importance of the compositor in the VFX pipeline with a commensurate increase in prestige and pay.

Many large VFX studios are also looking at ways to transition from their in-house legacy software that requires a steep learning curve to a broader market pool of talented VFX professionals and are acquiring Nuke site licenses.  The latest examples being ILM, Weta Digital and Intelligent Creatures. (Read Steve's article: Legacy Software Conundrum).

To future-proof your career in visual effects compositing sign up for Steve's Nuke workshop today!

Price

The cost is only $499US for each 6-week online workshop. Participants will be issued a fully licensed version of Nuke for the duration of the workshop.

How to Sign Up

To sign up for a workshop just click on the appropriate link below and you will be taken to the CGSociety web site where you will be able to enroll and pay for the course. If the enrollment is not open yet, you can sign up to be the first on the list to guarantee your spot in the workshop.

About Nuke

Nuke runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms. Students can take advantage of Nuke’s FREE Personal Learning Edition that can be downloaded and used before and after the class to get a head start or perfect their new found knowledge afterwards. Click here to go to the Nuke page on The Foundry’s website to download the free Personal Learning Edition. Download and install apropos your machine type/OS and it will automatically run in the PLE mode. Class participants will be issued a fully licensed version of Nuke for the duration of this workshop.

Testimonials

Thanks so much for teaching this class!  I really appreciate your clear and concise teaching style as it made following along that much easier.  I've gained a solid foundation of Nuke and feel comfortable enough to start mixing it into our pipeline.  Well worth the money!

- Colin Trenter
Autofuss
 Senior VFX Artist

Thanks so much for your amazing instruction. The other day, right before my Nuke license expired on me, I wanted to play around with a friend's music video and try out some ideas. I suddenly felt like the Karate Kid... all those mind-numbing hours spent on tedious, abstract homework suddenly had such clear purpose! I could do all these tricks and I knew the many steps to make it look just like I wanted!  :)

-Scott Dickson
Alchemy360
Stereoscopic 3D Artist