3 posts tagged with "AI"

This post covers the custom lightsaber-building world, specifically back around 2009, and how it makes me feel about knowledge, learning, and community today.

Rewind to 2009​

It was 2009 and near the start of my freshman year of high school. Twilight was in theaters and Guitar Hero was still huge. Coming back from summer I had a lot on my mind. Mainly my cousin Zach's Master Replicas Darth Vader lightsaber that he'd showed off all summer. I couldn't get over it. Here we were, 30 years after Star Wars' release. It was the future, lightsabers existed. Zach had one, I did not.

My dad had this system where if we really wanted to purchase something, we'd have to research it and put together a pitch to present. By the time school started, I was deep in the research phase. It was during this time that me and my Dell OptiPlex GX50 found our way onto FX-Sabers.com.

This is an exploration of a VFX shot creation workflow that uses AI.

A Novel Approach​

The Visual Effects Society chapter in New York City did a deep dive on AI about a year ago. One of the panelists was there to showcase a workflow that involved feeding a model with what were essentially previs renders to then create a final shot. Leading up to the panel, I had been incredibly skeptical about AI's utility in the realm of video generation (I still am, but more on that later). However, seeing the ways in which a low polygon pass at a scene could be turned into a final shot was intriguing (mainly for that workflow's potential for granular control, something so rare in AI.)

TLDR: This is about a storage clean-up tool and why your Gen-Z coordinators need to be using Nuke Assist.

Why Nuke Assist Actually Slaps​

Nuke Assist is a limited version of Nuke that comes packaged twice with each NukeX or Studio license. This extra version of the software is extremely useful in a large studio pipeline because it lets you break up work and licenses in a way that is efficient and cost effective. The limitations (no write nodes, limited comp nodes, gizmos etc...) are a feature and not a bug. You can use nuke --assist for paint, roto and tracking work, while breaking out final comp and render work for regular nuke. Similarly, certain coordinator tasks like ingesting, as well as some supervisor tasks like node tree hygiene checks, can also be done using nuke --assist. This article is going to focus on the coordinator's use-case and how Nuke Assist can help act as a connection layer between Autodesk ShotGrid and a filesystem. First, a little history.