Destruction Compositing Techniques in NUKEX

All right, in this lesson we're going to track a sequence. But first, we're going to do a lens distortion. Every time if you have a shot and you shot it with a camera and you know it has some lens distortion-- and most of the cameras out there has a lens distortion. Why do I know is because if you see this line, see, it's not straight. The horizontal line is not straight. If we put a line holding Control Shift, it's not straight. It looks straight, but it's not, because it's over here. So what we're going to do here is we're going to do a lens distortion. And I know this is only in NUKEX, though, based out of NUKEX. And we're going to do an image analysis. So let's analyze the image. It seems like this isl tracking, but it's not tracking. It's just gathering all the information from the shot, know where the lines is. And it will correct it the right way. So I'm just going to cancel this because I have already done it. Back to the lens distortion. Image analysis-- I do this because I don't have a grid analysis. A grid analysis is just like a checkerboard. It looks like this. You just stick sharp with your camera. And it will look something like this. I'm just going to make it weird. That's a little bit too much. It'll look something just like this. And if you capture this with your grid analysis, you can just analyse your grid. And it knows exactly where the distortion is. And it will undistort it. But as we don't have it now in our shot, we just do an image analysis. But remember, grid analysis is the best way. But I've already done this. So let's delete this. And there is another one in here. You can find this in your folder called lens distortion. It's in the overall color space. But I fix it using a color space node and put it as RGB in here. All right, let's start camera tracking. We're going to load up our camera tracking. And this is a powerful tool. We're mainly going to use NUKE. We don't want to jump around between Boujou or SynthEyes because staying NUKE is just easier and simpler and efficient. I'm not saying that Boujou or SynthEyes is bad. Those are great applications. But I think for standard stuff like this and shots on the camera tracker is good enough. And you can even track really hard shots. Let's just do a track and see where we're at. As you can see right away, it takes all of the points here nicely in a building. Over here we've got some nice points on the stairs. The only thing I don't see is some tracking points here in the middle ground. And we do want it, because we're going to put fire and smoke. And the robots are going to stand over here. So we need a lot of points in here. And we're also going to export it out to Maya. So we really need points. We're just going to see where we're at with this tracking and hope the max error is around 1. That will be great. And I'm just going to pause it and be right back. All right, we're back with shot. And tracking is always done, two seconds left. And we're going to see where we're at. All right, track nicely. We do have to take out all of these points in the sky, because it doesn't know where this is in space. And because there is no parallax between the sky, so we are going to key out the sky. And then we'll just track. But first, let's see where we're at. If we go to the refine tab and solve the camera, it's going to be fast. And look at this, 0.9. That is awesome. That's really great for your first track, of course. This is really nice. First of all, because we know this is going to work, first of all we're going to create a keyer and key out a sky. Locking key into color space. All right, let's just do something. [INAUDIBLE]. Yeah, that's great. Come and hide this one. Yeah, this is better. So we're going to read from this one right now. And let's call this lens corrected. 1080. All right, we're going to create key. Because the sky is blue-- there is already a key. Well, I think I've already done a key and exported it out. So you guys are lucky. You don't have to do a key. But if you have to do a key, make a keyer, go to your blue keyer. Because if you know the sky is blue, you can just bring keyer and just pull this down. I'm just going to show you, because I know how to use this. And something like this. You can see there's a lot of white dots. That's because it's also blue. You see, these dots are the same color as the sky. So you're going to do it with just simple garbage matte. And we're going to just do something like this. Bring it to the alpha channel. View your alpha channel. Push save to black. Select the keys plane. And we just do a simple roto, something like this. And then you can just invert your alpha and risk it. But because we already have an alpha channel-- which is awesome for you guys also-- is we are going to go through your tracking, preview your features. And you can still see your features in the sky. We don't want it. So we go to your source alpha. And now they're gone. Because I want more points on the ground, we're going to bump up our number features to 400. Sounds a lot, but we need it for the fire, smoke, the robot standing here, foreground smoke. On the building, we want some destroy, everything we want to damage the building. And we're going to put some mountains in the back and a hole in the sky. So you really need a good, solid track. I'm going to put my Detection Threshold to 0.01. And that will detect better. So let's track the features again. And proceeding-- yes, I'm sure. So just going to try again. The red dots, that's nothing. That's just because it's overriding the old track. So don't worry about that. I'm just going to pause it and be right back. All right. We're back. And the track, when you're through. As you can see, we have a lot of trackers for buildings on the ground. And let's solve the camera. It's going to take a long time, I think. Nope, it's fast. And look at this, 0.7. That's a great start. And normally this is where we can just grid our scene and just go. But let's refine a little bit more. So we're going to do our refinement in the next lessons. In this lesson, we checked how to do a lens correction before we're going to track. We used the keyer to key out a sky for a better track. We bumped up our tracking. We refined it a little bit. And in the lesson, we're going deeper into the refinement. All right, see you later.