Artists can use those tools to set up textures and pull data from the shot they’re working on to feed into the system. Similarly, if you’ve added additional information - like light information with Nuke’s Relight node - you can have the Particle System influenced by these additional comp elements.Īs well as harnessing the power of Nuke’s nodes to influence particles’ look or behavior, all of Nuke’s tools are available for setting up the Particle System. Having a particle system within Nuke is great for compositors, because it means artists can more easily setup particle systems that match the plate they’re working with - whether that’s in the placement and alignment of particles, or in the interactions with card projection setups and geometry in Nuke’s 3D environment. How does Nuke’s Particle System help compositors? You attach lifespan information, color information, temperature, and then for each particle in that system, you pull that data and derive what the particle will look like.įor a look at the Nuke Particle System in action, check out this video between 14:13 - 17:00, in which Ari Rubenstein gives an overview of how he used the system to create flotsam in his animated short, The Blues Crab. You can also do things like attach a piece of geometry to your particle, or a sprite, which is a 2D image that always faces the camera.įor example, you might want to create an explosion: it starts off with a point in space and you spawn a bunch of particles which burst very rapidly outwards. The particle system tracks all of the particle information over a set time period and displays that in a way that’s interesting. You can include attributes specific to the type of particle simulation you’re running, like temperature (if you were doing an explosion), or viscosity (if you were doing a water splash). This point has certain attributes attached to it: typically they include things like how long the particle has been alive, what size it might be, and what it’s position and trajectory is. Particle systems are environments which spawn and then track specific points (particles).Ī particle is a dot or a point that exists in the 3D coordinate system.
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In this article, we take a look at the Nuke Particle System and explain how to get the most out of it.
With decisions increasingly being pushed into comp, using Nuke’s Particle System enables you to wait until you know what’s required before you invest time into specific elements of a shot: great when there's no time to go back to the FX department and get a new particle render for a non-hero effect.
Some of the biggest studios in the industry already use the Particle System to get a significant speed advantage in their workflows. The use of particle work inside of Nuke is growing, so it's well worth learning how to make the best use of particles across your shots to stand out as a compositing artist who can offer solutions right up to a deadline. If you're not sure how to start, particle example toolsets have been included in Nuke 11 with setups for effects like snow and fog, each with their own tutorials to get you started (more on that at the end of this article). Need to knock up a blood spurt from a gunshot wound, or the splash of raindrops on a pond? You can quickly and easily generate these kind of effects, right then and there in Nuke. Once you’ve got to grips with it, the Particle System in NukeX has a set of use-cases and corresponding benefits that can make it a valuable tool to have in your compositing armoury. Using Nuke’s Particle System to speed up artist workflows