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Nuke<>Mari Bridge

Typically, visual effects involves creating digital environments, adding generated imagery and matte paintings to live action scenes, and creating clean plates by removing blemishes, wires, or rigs from existing footage. Building shots using a combination of these techniques can be a laborious task, especially if there is no effective bridge between applications.

Using the 2D and 3D environment in Nuke has helped speed up this process, but when composite projections need to be extended, blended, or recreated it becomes increasingly complex. Some projections may need to be warped to match other projections, or new projections may need to be created to fill in areas that are completely occluded by objects that have been removed from entire shots. Even when sufficient projection information exists, multiple projections may need to be blended together using paint tools to create a seamless composite.

A typical example of this is with matte painting. Once completed, a matte painting is often imported into a 3D system and projected onto a scenic model (such as a building or landscape). Unfortunately, as the 3D model stretches the painting, the projection only works well from the angle of the projection camera. Fixing this in a 3D system requires the creation of new projections where the stretching occurs and in turn, blending these projections with the original painting for every frame in a shot. Creating new projections in this manner and manipulating them on the fly is both technically and artistically difficult to achieve.

The Nuke<>Mari Bridge offers you a quick and easy way for fixing projection problems, converting projection textures to UV textures, and editing multiple projections in context using the rich and natural toolset of Mari.

Once installed, it’s as simple as sending one or more Project3D nodes from Nuke to Mari (transferring all of the models, textures and projections in a shot) and using the Mari toolset to fix, enhance, or create projection setups. Once the work is finished in Mari, projection setups are sent back to Nuke where they appear immediately in the node tree.

The Nuke<>Mari Bridge handles all of the data management in the background and links both applications whether they are on the same machine, or on different machines on the same network.