Bayou - Nuke Matte Painting Tool
quickly generate background matte paintings (e.g. forests) by scattering
input images on cards within the camera frustum in Nuke's 3D space
Year: 2019, Produced at: Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg
I started working on this tool during the production of Evangeline after I realized that I had worked on quite a few student projects over the last years, which needed forest backgrounds using a card setup in Nuke.
The tool randomly scatters sources on cards inside the camera frustum, controlled by parameters like size, number of elements, min./max. distance from the camera, and an additional angle (to make up for camera movement). There are two seed parameters that can be changed to randomize either the position or the input of each element. Changing these seeds quickly give very different visual results that can be viewed either in Nuke‘s 3D space or rendered in the 2D view. There are optional features to enhance the look like adding a textured ground with procedural displacement, built-in Z-defocus, and haze controls.
Production Examples
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The tool was used in two productions at Filmakademie in a number of different shots.
It really helped speed up the set up of these matte paintings and made the compositing process more efficient. Here you can see two examples from the shorts Evangeline and Pumpers Paradise: