Hi, my name is Liam Taylor, I hope you enjoyed my little intro there, and today I’ll be
taking you through the process of installing one of the coolest Nuke gizmo packs I’ve
ever come across, the Nuke Survival Toolkit, and how some of the features can be used to
create one of the most common staples in VFX editing – lightning.
Well, what is it?
And who made it?
The Nuke Survival Toolkit was created in September 2020 by Tony Lyons, a former lead compositor
at Iloura and ILM who has worked on such films as Thor: Ragnarök (2017), Kong: Skull Island
(2017) and Star Trek: Beyond (2016), and most recently worked on Black Widow (2021) at Trixter
VFX.
As Tony describes it; The Nuke Survival Toolkit is a portable tool menu for the Foundry’s
Nuke with a hand-picked selection of Nuke Gizmos collected from all over the web, organized
into one, easy-to-install-toolbar.
Most of, if not all these Nuke gizmos can be found on Nukepedia - a free online repository
of over 1000 custom Nuke tools, which can be downloaded individually as needs be, but
Tony has made a selection of more than 200 Nuke Gizmos that can be accessed whenever
you need something cool.
Why would we want to install the toolkit?
Well if you’ve ever used Nuke, you know that to create cool effects, you will need
to merge, blend and combine your nodes into a complex network to achieve this.
One of the effects we’ll look at, the X_Tesla tool, was built from 99 individual nodes,
which as you can see here, is a bit of a mess to look at, and would be very confusing if
you had several of these in your nuke script while editing footage.
What these gizmos do is essentially consolidating those 99 complex nodes into 1 simple tool,
which not only looks better, but feels less overwhelming.
The Nuke Survival Toolkit can be downloaded by clicking the link I’ve provided in the
description below, or by following the links on Tony Lyon’s blog; compositingmentor.com.
Simply click the link to the GitHub page, downloading the zip file, unzip the contents
and place them into your .nuke folder which is located here on Windows PC’s under the
C drive/users/your username/.nuke.
You will now need to edit your init.py file within this folder to include the file path
of the Toolkit (this is so Nuke know where to find the Toolkit).
If you don’t have an init.py file, you can easily create one in notepad.
Now you can launch Nuke, and if you see the little Swiss-army-knife on your shelf you’re
good to go.
Once you click on the Toolkit’s icon, at the top you will see Documentation.
This will open a pdf, which acts as an index for every tool in the kit, with some information
on who made the tool, where it can be found, and how the tool can be used.
All the different tools have been sorted into easy to find categories, which mirrors the
layout of Nuke’s default tools; Image, Draw, Time, Channel, Colour, Filter, Keyer, Merge,
Transform, 3D, Particles, Deep, CG, Curves, Utilities and Templates, so navigating the
toolkit is a breeze.
Now let’s locate the tool I mentioned earlier; the X_Tesla tool.
Here we can see the tool was created by Xavier Martin, with a link to his website, where
it is on Nukepedia, and a brief explanation of what the tool does.
We’ll now have a bit more of an in depth look at the X-Tesla tool, as well as have
a look at a few other interesting tools such as the SpotFlare, NoiseAdvanced and Halation
nodes, which is a tiny selection of what the toolkit has to offer.
I’ll see you shortly in Nuke!
Firstly, we’ll need to read in some footage I’ve already formatted to HD 1080.
So, let’s press “R” for read, and import our backplate.
We can see a young and handsome man doing his best impersonation of a being a wizard.
Now let’s use the X_Tesla Node to give him some lightning magic.
Press TAB, then start typing X_Tesla, or we can come over to the toolkit, go to draw,
then select X_Tesla.
You can see it has created two points, a beginning and an end, which we can move around the frame
to change its trajectory.
So, let’s place the first point where the graphics tablet pen/magic wand is, and place
the second point out of scene to make it look like he’s trying to hit something.
You can play with the settings here if you like, from changing how many main bolts of
lightning you would like to see, how crazy the amount of amplification the waveform has,
whether you want it to have a soft or harsh look, the frequency of the waves and how complex
they can be, and how wide you would like your effect to be.
For example, having one bolt of lightning with zero branches, and little to no amplitude
creates what could be used as a solid base for a lightsaber or any other kind of off-brand
energy/laser sword, however that’s not what I want to go for, so I’ve changed my lightning
to have three main bolts, five branches, with a medium level of frequency and width.
Now, since I don’t have a tracking marker to automate the positional animation of the
lightning, I’ll have to manually track the first point to my hand.
We can do this by coming over to the Base tab of the X_Tesla Node, right clicking on
the Animation Menu marked by the squiggly line next to point one and hitting set key.
I’ll now have to go frame-by-frame and manually change the position of point one on every
frame, so bear with me for a second while I quickly track this.
Now that we’ve tracked the X_Tesla and made the footage look much better, I want to quickly
go over a few other useful gizmos that come included with the toolkit, keeping in mind,
this is a tutorial on how to install the Nuke Survival Toolkit and not a tutorial on how
to make lightning effects.
I will make another video in the future that is a full-length tutorial on how to create
some awesome lightning, but for now let’s introduce some of the nodes I’ve used.
The SpotFlare node, created by Mads Hagbarth Lund, creates a lens flare effect with some
flickering animation.
I’ve used three of these as masks to create additional lighting by first copying the tracking
animation from the X_Tesla and pasting into the positional information of the SpotFlare
so it follows the lightning, and then adjusting the angle and gain, adding a slight blur,
feeding it into a Keyer node, and using that key as a mask for the backplate
The NoiseAdvanced node (created by Tony Lyons himself) is pretty self-explanatory; it’s
a Noise node with more advanced controls.
I’ve used this in combination with the X_Tesla node and a Glint node to generate some small,
randomized flashes, and used a NoiseAdvanced node in conjunction with a MergeAtmos node
(also by Tony), which is a merge for smoke, dust and atmospheric effects, so I’ve done
just that and created some small amount of smoke effects.
To add some tweaks to the lighting, I’ve used a Glow_Exponential node (created by SPIN
FX), a Halation node (from Tony Lyons) and a default nuke GodRays node to make a few
adjustments.
The Glow_Exponential node allows me to re-colour and adjust the glow’s falloff.
The Halation node allows me to tweak the RGB values and my black/white points of my luminance,
and the GodRays node to add additional lighting and blur effects.
And lastly, to polish it off I’ve used a LumaGrain node (made by Luma Pictures) to
add a little film grain, which I think brings it all together.
All these tools come with the toolkit and can be used to really tweak and refine your
effects.
And if wizards are not really your thing, you can use these cool tools to turn our handsome
man into a Norse god of Hammers, or even a masterful guitar virtuoso, shredding away
at lightning speed.
I hope this has been an informative and useful guide on how to install some interesting tools
and how you can have fun by playing around with them.
Special thanks to Tony Lyons for compiling together such a neat little package of gizmos
for free and sharing it with the world, I’ve been Liam Taylor, thanks for watching, and
happy compositing.