Nuke feather/expansion

#1

Hey all, I have seen this exact question posted many times in different forums and across the internet, but I have yet find a real solution to my problem.

Basically, I don’t like the feather options in RotoPaint. When feathering, the feather does not appear to be very smooth as opposed to say using a blur node after a rotopaint. Many people have suggested changing my viewer to none instead of sRGB or Rec709 in addition to changing the feather falloff options. This seems to yield acceptable results, although at the expense of clicking a bunch of different things.

The problem I run into now, is that the feather only feathers inward/outward from the spline. Also, there are no options for expanding/choking the mask like there would be in After Effects. The result is that I end up having node graphs that look like the attached picture. This is because I need to be able to choke/expand masks separate from one another, thus they can’t be in the same rotopaint node. This tends to clog up my scripts and makes it difficult for other artists to come in and decipher what’s going on.

I was really just hoping I could get some input on how some of you more professional than myself handle this sort of issue. Or is what I’m doing the only real work around?

Thanks for the help!

#2

Hi Bill,
Indeed, feathering only inward or outward is a very disappointing feature.
It would take a long text to explain all the issues connected to motion blurred objects, rack focus effect, multiple shapes visualized over a zoom-in region, inverting the shapes etc.
But The Foundry have received such a text with illustrations from me as a request in favour of a double-sided smoothing of the masks.
For now, the Blur seems to be the way around, although this method eliminates a possibility to create multiple shapes with different softness in a single Roto node.

#3

Hey Gregory,

Thanks for the reply so quick. It surprises me that even by Nuke 8 this is still an issue. One of the issues I run into is that different artists may come in to work on or finish a project I have started and it sometimes takes them a while to understand whats going on in the script because of the large number of blurs/erodes/rotopaints. Do you have any advice on combining different rotoshapes with different erodes/blurs that is more easily understood at first glance? I’m asking in relation to the attached image from my first post.

Thanks!

Bill

#4

Your setup makes perfect sense to me, most people do the same tricks, as I know.

The roto tools in Nuke leave a lot to be desired, especially since there have been good examples of how roto should work in other compositing packages for decades.

But the tech support of the Foundry sound like they are particularly interested in improving the situation with Roto(Paint), which gives some hope for better :slight_smile: