CG Beauty Rebuild (AOVs and Light Groups)

Objective

Rebuild the Beauty view using AOVs and light groups to be able to manipulate the scene with full control.

Shot Analysis

Since this is a static shot, I took a few minutes to analyze the scene and see what kind of visual storytelling was going on.

I then viewed the footage assets to see what kind of passes and light groups I was given.

Beauty Rebuild with AOVs

For the beauty rebuild using the AOVs, the thought process was: color is multiplied, light is additive.

Beauty Rebuild with Light Groups

Light groups were all added with a Merge node set to "Add".

Extra Touches

My mentality behind having a modular setup with the Nuke script is to be able to quickly iterate any changes that a supervisor might want. For example, if the VFX supe asked for a more plastic-looking main character, I could easily do so my increasing the gain on the specular/glossy pass.

Or if they needed a strong light source to come from screen right, I used the normals pass to grade the red channel (where it's mapped).

And what if the client wanted to add some dirt to the robot? I used a noise texture along with the position pass to add it specifically to the robot.