We will learn how to deal with issues importing our passes and how to create a missing pass. From there we will learn the basic shuffle and compositing techniques, along with some novel uses of various passes to enhance our composite. We will color correct the foreground and background to match. To ground the vehicle we will create particle effects in NUKEX. Finally we will finish the shot with post effects like flares, lens reflections, lens distortion, blooms, grain, etc. In the end we will have our completed shot in NUKE.

Throughout the tutorial, we'll cover all of the hidden details that are needed to use HDR imagery for lighting in Maya. We'll start with physically based lighting, world scene scale, color management, proper render preview and verification of valid floating point linear color images. Once the rules for using HDR images are clearly laid out, we will take a look at how you can create your own HDR images at home using a DSLR camera, tripod, nodal head and software. Lastly, we'll go over examples of using and editing these images for a variety of indoor and outdoor lighting situations as well as covering light extraction and making HDR kooks from an HDR photo of a light.

Some of these tips will be obvious, like using proxies and the region of interest to speed up viewer performance. Others will be a bit more complex like building an expensive node disable-enable expression control system tied into our write nodes using Python commands. We'll also learn how most 3D applications create EXR files and ways we can increase performance by re-rendering them out of NUKE in its' preferred format. Finally we'll look at a cheap way to improve our motion blur from NUKE's 3D system using a combination of samples and vector blurs.

We're going to be covering many topics, such as why we break Maya scenes into layers, getting the most information out of Maya for high dynamic range composites and how to process EXRs for much faster interaction in NUKE. From there we'll examine some render pass and layer workflows that will eliminate errors and give us much more flexibility in NUKE. Finally we'll jump completely into NUKE and look at some compositing techniques for CG renders and finally unravel the proper premultiply workflow.

We'll begin the tutorials by manually tracking our sequence in MatchMover and exporting it for use in Maya. We'll then take our solved camera into our Maya scene and move our object into place. We'll then learn how to capture our 3D environment reflections and create some helpful matte layers. Once we've rendered our Maya sequence, wecll learn how to combine all of our images in NUKE. We'll learn about processing our background footage to capture traveling mattes, as well as many different ways to combine our various mattes to create effects. We'll finish the tutorials by adding a silhouette and color correcting our images.

We'll begin the tutorial by learning about the theories behind camera projection what makes a good image to project. We'll then set-up our camera in Maya for match moving and look at a technique to get our camera in the correct position. We'll then model the our buildings and animate a new camera. Then we'll export our Maya data and bring it in to NUKE's 3D toolset and set-up our projections. We'll finish the scene in NUKE by creating a sky dome and using it's 2d tools to create appealing effects. Finally, we'll use Maya's mental ray renderer to create realistic reflections and composite them on top of our NUKE projections to create our final composite.

We'll begin the tutorial by solving four of our shots in MatchMover and combining them in Maya into a cohesive 3D scene. Then we'll create our last camera in Maya and match it. Once all our camera are set up, we'll learn how to model our object, create dynamics, animate, texture and render our scene. We'll then jump into NUKE to do some color treatment on our backgrounds and then composite our layers together. Now, this is a long project that will take some time to complete. If you get stuck or have any questions, please join our forums and ask. We check the forums often and have a very active and helpful community.

We'll begin this project by setting up our motion tracked scene by adding the original footage and aligning everything to make working easier. We'll then bring in our 3d object and learn how to place it in our scene. We'll then learn how to create ground geometry and create lighting that matches our original shot. We'll then create multiple render passes and layers to make compositing much easier. After we render, we'll jump into NUKE and learn about such topics as shadow matching, color matte usage and various techniques to match our 3d render with our live action back-plate. We'll finish with a global color correct and add realistic motion blur to finish our shot.

We will dedicate the first portion of this course to using Render Passes in Maya to separate various elements of our scene at render time. We'll use mental ray's render passes, contribution maps, custom framebuffers, and render layers to create the necessary render passes for our scene. In the second portion of this course we will begin with some quick compositing similar to our Multi-Channel Compositing in NUKE course, but we will quickly get into more advanced topics such as Depth-of-Field, Depth-based compositing, working with HDR data, painting fixes and chromatic aberration.