If you’re going to use Blender in a professional environment, especially to compliment your work as a compositor (as I do), then moving your 3D scene from Blender and into The Foundry’s Nuke is more or less a necessity at some point. Thankfully, this has gotten much easier than it used to be.
The scene in Blender
In the videos below, I show two different ways to move your matchmoved scene, with basic geometry, into Nuke. Because this is more of a quick tip rather than a full tutorial, I’m not going to cover animated geometry, UV maps, lights, and other things that may or may not transfer over properly. Only the camera and some basic geometry, so you’ve got your basic scene layout in Nuke. Perhaps later, if there’s a demand, we can get into the more complex things, but for the time being, this will at least let you bring your camera in. I do this all the time at work, and it works great.
The same scene in Nuke
I realize Nuke isn’t free or open source, but one of my goals with this blog was to help bridge the gap between free and commercial software.
Do you know another way to bring your scene into Nuke? Please share in the comments!
Assets required:
- Tires footage (thanks Sebastian!)
- Project files (not required)
Part 1 – The better way, using Alembic.
Part 2 – Using FBX and manual input.
does any of the blender shaders come across to nuke at all? or how would you set up materials in nuke? Great tutorial btw!
Thanks! To be honest, I’m not sure if the materials come over, I’ve not yet had a need for the materials in what I use this for at work, which is mainly just matchmoving and bringing the camera in. I would bet that it does, though, since Alembic is currently getting a lot of development attention. Setting up materials in Nuke is a whole other tutorial, and honestly, isn’t exactly what is covered by my blog (since Nuke is commercial software, and I’m trying to focus on free and open source). I jumped over to Youtube just now and searched “materials in Nuke”, and there’s tons of videos, so maybe that’s a good place to start? However, if there’s more feedback that this is something people here would like to see, I’d certainly cover it.
Good job Sean, Is there any way to export lens distortion data from blender to nuke?
Oh, sorry for the late response! I’ll have to do some tests, but it should be possible.
Hey Sean, did you ever find a way to do this? I’d love to know if it’s possible. Thanks!
This is definitely something I’d still like to figure out (and share)!
Cool thank you, great for card placement etc..
On lens distortion : Have you done tests on Nuke/Blender to see if it matches up?
If not you could just export the un-distorted footage from Blender to Nuke, then bring the finals back into blender for distortion.
Anyway great read.
I haven’t done any tests, actually, but I should, just to follow this up and make sure it’s complete. I’ll make a post once I’ve done it. Thanks!!
Is anyone else finding that in blender 2.8 the camera is not being exported when using alembic file? Geo seems to be fine but I’m having no luck with the camera.
I’ll have to test this, I haven’t run into this issue yet.
Are you still having problems bringing a camera from Nuke into Blender using Alembic? I’ve been doing it a lot lately and haven’t had a problem at all.
I was just looking for this!
Thank you so much!
Of course, glad it helped!