Let me start this one with a story.
Once there was a kid who loved to play games, after a while, he wanted to make games of his own and tada a programmer was born.
End of the story.
Wasn’t that a pretty lame one? It is the most common story of anyone who loves to code, well I hope you are not one among the people who chose to code just because the job openings looked delicious. Anyway let’s continue, I always wanted to make a game of my own when I was in school and since I was a loner( at that time) I had to do everything myself, from designing the assets to writing code. Honestly, you don’t expect a full blown AAA quality game from a high school kid who just started out but at least it made me learn something which changed my focus from programming to computer graphics, Blender, an open source beast. Of course, setting up a development environment in Windows was difficult for a 7th-grade kid but playing with Blender was easy though making something cool with it was not. Anyways fast forward some years, I got to learn about multiple Visual Effects packages, mostly proprietary ones and a couple of steps which my fingers picked up while dancing over the keyboard.
PS : The main content begins here
Half a year ago, something struck my mind, I had a fever of creating the old marvel intro, why? I don’t know, I am not even a great fan of Marvel Comics either but probably because it looked easy and eye-catchy. I set out to look for how-to-s and all I find is a bunch of After Effects tutorials, I know After Effects is the go-to program for doing that kind of Motion Graphics but being a Linux evangelist, I was not ready to give up so easily, Adobe you suck. ( Photoshop is nice but still )
BlackMagicDesign’s Fusion 9 to rescue, it was easy to recreate the effect on Fusion but I had to do the same thing with a lot of pictures, given that a picture stays on the screen for around 3 to 4 frames and there were 25 frames a second, end of the day, a lot of work for just 3 seconds. Fortunately Fusion supported Python 2, Python 3 and Lua, was free too but unfortunately it can’t find either of the python versions on my system and I was stuck with Lua, a scripting language which I don’t know why decided to start its array indexes from 1, left me wondering for a night why my script was failing. Anyway, it was easy to make one thanks to the scripting manual which came with Fusion and the task being not so daunting. Here is the final script which I wrote,
--[[
Author: Kuntal Majumder
Description: Lua script to create an animation sequence with pictures,
similar to Marvel's old intro.
--]]
--[[ Getting the List of Loaders, if there are multiple of them,
select the specific loaders and replace false with true --]]
loaderList = comp:GetToolList(false,"Loader")
--[[ Deselecting everything --]]
flow = comp.CurrentFrame.FlowView
flow:Select()
numberOfPictures = 0
for i,loader in ipairs(loaderList) do
transform = comp:AddTool("Transform")
--[[ Adding high quality motion blur --]]
transform.MotionBlur = 1
transform.Quality = 10
--[[ Adding the animation to the pictures --]]
transform:AddModifier("Center","XYPath")
transform.Center[0] = {0.5,1.5}
transform.Center[3] = {0.5,0.5}
--[[ Offsetting every picture by 4 frames compared to last picture --]]
timespeed = comp:AddTool("TimeSpeed")
timespeed.Delay = (i-1) * 4
--[[ Connecting respective inputs and outputs --]]
timespeed.Input = transform.Output
transform.Input = loader.Output
--[[ Arranging the merges properly --]]
if i > 2 then
--[[ One merge node is already there in the node graph which was
selected in the last iteration, so we connect its output
with the background of the current --]]
table = comp:GetToolList(true,"Merge")
prevMerge = table[1]
flow:Select()
merge = comp:AddTool("Merge")
merge.Foreground = timespeed.Output
merge.Background = prevMerge.Output
flow:Select(merge, true)
elseif i > 1 then
--[[ Required nodes are added to the second picture so make new
merge node and connect the first picture's timespeed to it
which was selected last time --]]
merge = comp:AddTool("Merge")
table = comp:GetToolList(true,"TimeSpeed")
prevTimeSpeed = table[1]
merge.Foreground = timespeed.Output
merge.Background = prevTimeSpeed.Output
flow:Select(merge, true)
else
--[[ Required nodes added to the first picture, so no merges
are created, instead the timespeed node is selected --]]
flow:Select()
flow:Select(timespeed, true)
end
numberOfPictures = numberOfPictures + 1
end
--[[ Getting the last Merge node --]]
table = comp:GetToolList(true,"Merge")
toSaveMerge = table[1]
--[[ Adding a Saver node --]]
comp:Lock()
saver = comp:AddTool("Saver")
comp:Unlock()
saver.Input = toSaveMerge.Output
--[[ If the file location is predetermined we can enter the file location
into the saver and render the whole comp instantly --]]
--[[
saver.Clip = '<file location>'
comp:Render(false,0,numberOfPictures * 4, 1,1)
--]]
The script is really simple all it does it get all the image loaders from the node graph and attaches a Transform node which does the animation, adds TimeSpeed node which adds an offset of 4 seconds to the image based on its position and merges it with the rest. Tada, you have a marvel like animation ready in seconds.
A couple days ago I landed at The Foundry’s website which said they were offering Nuke for free to students up to a year. I have tried Nuke earlier but it was pretty costly and the non-commercial version was pretty limiting for learning but this time, I got a full-fledged copy of Nuke for me, thanks to The Foundry. And the first thing I did with it was to recreate the Marvel Intro animation and cause Nuke supported Python, it was really easy for me to do though I am not the best guy in the town when it comes to writing python, probably the worst one but a couple of extra control statements won’t hurt the performance (I am not writing another CRUD app with Django at least). So with Py-27 (smile if you get the reference), I went to fight the battle, a little did I know it will be over by a couple of hours. Thus the next day I went a mile ahead and made added a couple of more things, voila you have a robust & organized script which could generate flawless Marvel Intros from any set of images you throw at it. Here is the final version:
"""
Filename: marvel.py
Author: Kuntal Majumder
"""
import nuke
def get_transform(height):
"""The transform node does the animation of dropping the image"""
transform = nuke.nodes.Transform()
transform['translate'].setAnimated()
transform['translate'].setValue([0,height],time=1)
transform['translate'].setValue([0,0],time=3)
return transform
def get_reformat():
"""Resizes the image according to the project settings"""
reformat = nuke.nodes.Reformat()
reformat['resize'].setValue('fill')
return reformat
def get_timeoffset(pos):
"""Shifts the image to the given position in the timeline"""
timeoffset = nuke.nodes.TimeOffset()
timeoffset['time_offset'].setValue(pos*4)
return timeoffset
def manipulate_node(filename,pos):
"""The man who generates the node graph"""
read = nuke.nodes.Read(file=filename,auto_alpha=True,premultiplied=True)
reformat = get_reformat()
reformat.setInput(0,read)
"""Crops the node if it is larger to avoid residue while it is off the screen"""
crop = nuke.nodes.Crop()
crop.setInput(0,reformat)
transform = get_transform(read['format'].value().height())
transform.setInput(0,crop)
timeoffset = get_timeoffset(pos)
timeoffset.setInput(0,transform)
return timeoffset
def main():
images = nuke.getFilename("Select Images",'*.png *.jpg *.jpeg',multiple=True)
length = len(images)
if length < 2 :
nuke.warning("At least 2 images required to create the effect")
nuke.message("At least 2 images required to create the effect")
return
merge = manipulate_node(images[0],0)
i = 1
while i < length:
node = manipulate_node(images[i],i)
merge = nuke.nodes.Merge(inputs=[merge, node])
i += 1
# A generic touch to make it similar to the original one,
# a trick which really makes difference, have to play with
# the shutter samples for more accuracy
motionblur = nuke.nodes.MotionBlur()
motionblur.setInput(0,merge)
# For keeping track of the node graph if you have too many pictures
motionblur.setSelected(True)
if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
This is an upgraded version of previous script which I wrote for Fusion, the script asks for selecting the pictures with a file dialog and adjusts the size of the picture according to the project settings before attaching the Transform and TimeOffset nodes.
And to impress you all, the final output of it:
:wq for today