NUKE in The Road

The visualisation of this post-apocalyptic tale of a father and son’s struggle for salvation across a bleak and barren America was a huge success achieving critical acclaim for its faithful and uncompromising take on Cormac McCarthy’s narrative.

Lead VFX vendor Dive focused on removing all signs of life to reveal McCarthy’s vision of a world devastated by an unspecified global cataclysm that has scorched the landscape and reduced the sparse population of survivors to cannibalism.

Dive used NUKE to deliver 220 shots, enhancing the set and surrounding environment to create a desperation and desolation that matches the characters’ state of mind. Together with a handful of other VFX vendors they created deserted houses, dead trees and darkened skies choked by the pollution of distant burning buildings to add to the dismal atmosphere.

NUKE is Dive’s core compositing application. They run NUKE on Mac Pro 8-core workstations and their render nodes run on 64bit Linux workstations. “All Film jobs that require compositing, paint, roto, keying, and tracking are deployed through our NUKE pipeline. In addition to compositing, NUKE also serves as a vehicle for many production side services. It is a key component of Dive’s daily review and final submission systems along with Dive’s render manager and FFmpeg.” explains Tim Bowman, compositing artist and tool developer at Dive.

Mark Forker, VFX Supervisor at Dive comments “We bought NUKE after seeing it develop into a first class compositing tool. No other compositing software was becoming as robust by continually integrating more and more of what users were asking for.” Tim Bowman adds “NUKE is not single-purpose; it’s like a Swiss army knife. It is obviously a tool that was developed on actual productions.”

On The Road Dive relied on NUKE for set extension, matte paintings, colour correction and de-greening of the vegetation, 2D paint, the retiming of footage, green screen work and plate stabilisation.

Photographs of dead trees and shrubbery, taken from various locations during the shoot, were used to replace green trees and plants and the set dressing on sections of the road were continued along its entirety. Visible crew members were also removed from the plates.

Compositor Ryan Leonard’s stately home shots required the replacement and manipulation of the house, supplements of the set dressing, and removal of any living foliage. The process utilised in executing the stately home sequence relied heavily on manipulated photographic elements shot separately on set.

The first step was locking down a solid camera track. Ryan found a 2D solution using NUKE's tracker node was more than sufficient for this particular camera move. The house was created from over a dozen photographs of two separate houses - the base structure of one house and the brick and windows of the second. Digital masonry complete, color grading was applied, along with an effect to mimic the lens of a set of binoculars carried by the main character. Some of the original shot contained intact power lines. The director had asked that throughout the show, power lines and street signs be damaged, so a 3D element of a downed power line was generated and set into the shot.

“NUKE’s 3D space proved invaluable when the foreground elements required a 3D approach,” comments Tim, “ and this is where NUKE kicks ass. I was able to do most of my 3D without having to go to a separate application; most of it was done with NUKE camera projections.” The first element Tim needed to add to the Gas Station shots was the pile of wreckage beside the building. He created the structure using cards in NUKE's 3D space and UV-projected hand-painted textures onto them. He also dressed the area around the wreckage with digital stills of a porch roof and some brush and junk shot by Mark Forker on location. The digital stills were placed on cards scattered around the wreckage to help integrate the additions into the plate. The only 3D done outside of NUKE was the geometry and basic shading for the damaged sign on the building. Tim used the NUKE Paint node to add the snow, small details inside the sign and the watermarks on the wall.

The corpse in the foreground of the Gas Station started as footage of a prop skeleton from the VFX shoot - his geometry was a pair of cards with displacements on them to create the shape. Tim painted him up again using NUKE’s Paint node to make him look like he had sunk into the ash. He comments “I’m a compositing artist who understands 3D concepts, but becomes frustrated quickly when faced with an actual 3D application. The 3D space in NUKE works like my brain which makes it easy for me to create projections right in NUKE”. Tim used combinations of NUKE's 2D tracker along with beziers and colour correction and grade nodes for things like adding atmosphere behind a building, "dirtying" the clean white snow and overcast sky and making the color change on the signpost. The mountain and the tree-covered hillside were placed with 2D tracks as well.

Another goal for DIVE was to have their workstation monitors match their DI/Screening room. Ed Mendez Dive’s compositing supervisor says, “This was extremely important not only because we wanted to ensure our colour pipeline was solid, but John Hillcoat was working at DIVE and viewing work in our screening room. He was concerned about the look and colour of his film, and it was essential that wherever he reviewed shots they always looked consistent. With help from Support at The Foundry, we were able to import 3D LUTs and keep the director happy”.

Dive also relied heavily on NUKE for technical reviews of final shots. Ed adds, “John Hillcoat has a great eye for detail, and would notice edge grain, and colour issues. We really appreciate that when viewing images inside NUKE you are able to quickly bounce between different monitor LUTs, and you have the ability to adjust gamma and gain right in the viewer. This was extremely useful and a necessity for ensuring we were delivering shots without any technical issues. NUKE became our hub not only for compositing, but also as a tool to create our dailies and final submissions.”