Manipulating lights in V-ray for Nuke
In his second tutorial, Josh Parks reveals how to set up lights in V-ray for Nuke
In my last article I covered the questions that I was initially faced with answering when starting out with V-ray for Nuke. In this article I’m going to show you different ways of setting up lights within the V-ray for Nuke plug-in, and a use for the values in the Position pass that we can get V-ray to output.
As a compositor, I feel most comfortable working in the world of 2D, manipulating AOVS (Arbitary Output Variables) to give me the desired look I want. Adjusting V-ray nodes in Nuke’s 3D space is fairly simple, but it’s nice to have it feel as familiar There are a variety of ways to set up lights within the V-ray for Nuke plug-in as possible. I spoke with Shahin Toosi, an experienced compositor working with Chaos Group, who cleverly uses the Position pass in order to sample an area to point your light at. This allows us compositors to use our 2D passes in order to affect our 3D scene. This is pretty smart, especially as it can be fiddly aiming your lights at the exact point you want. As well as this, it’s always a good idea to have a better understanding of just what information we can get out of V-ray render and how it can be used.
In this tutorial I’m going to cover how to set up your own
training with chaos
group Chaos Group have
got a range of tutorials on their Youtube channel covering Nuke. You can view
them at: www.bit.ly/ 206
vraynuke scene that will allow you to utilise the position AOV, using some clever maths and expressions between nodes. It will also give us a better understanding of how to use the position pass and exactly what the values mean.
You could use the following information for regular Nuke lights; it doesn’t have to be set up with V-ray. This will allow us to use our Position pass in order to point a light at a point that we sample.
Thanks go to Andrew Hodgson at ILM who let me play around with his spaceship model. For all the assets you need go to creativebloq.com/vault/3dw206