Built-in geometric primitives - Nuke Tutorial

- [Instructor] Nuke has built-in geometry comprised of four geometric primitives, a card, cube, cylinder, and sphere, that you'll use frequently in 3D compositing. Here we'll take a look at what's common to all four of them. Now you'll find them over here in the 3D tool tab, geometry, card, cube, cylinder, and sphere. I've already got 'em all set up here for you so that we can move quickly through this. I'll hook up to the card and we get a card, and we click on it. You can see the polygons there. And then we can just hook up an image, and the card is the thing you'll be using most of all, frankly. Next, we have a cube. I'll hook up an image to that. There you go, you got your cube. There you can see your polygons. Okay, and we have a cylinder. Okay, there ya go. By default, it's open on the top and bottom, but we'll see later how we can close the top and the bottom. Next, we have a sphere. Hook up texture map to that, and there we go. There is our sphere. All right, so let's open up the property panel for the sphere by double-clicking on the sphere node. Get a little bit of room here. Now, this top portion up here and this bottom section down here are common to all the geometry. It's the middle section that's unique to each type of geometry. So we're going to cover these common areas that are identical for all four geometries, starting up here at the top with the display. Now this means, what does it look like in the viewer when you're in the 3D mode? So, by default, it's textured. But you can say, I want to turn it off, which means you're not seeing it in the 3D view. Just show me the wire frame. Show me just solid geometry. Give me the solid geometry and the wire frame. And of course we have our textured view there. And textured plus wire frame. Back to the default of textured. Now the render is what it looks like when you do the 2D render. So we're hooked up here to a scan line render nodes. Switch over to the 2D view and there is our rendered geometry. So the render features here are how will it be displayed when you render it. So again, we can turn it off so its hidden. Do a wire frame render, a solid geometry render, solid plus wire frame, the original textured, and of course textured plus wire frame. Back to the default of textured. Now these shadow controls, we'll be looking at later after we have done some lighting. Now, again, it is this middle section here that is unique to each type of geometry. So down here, this is the transform area. And again, this is identical to all of them. So we'll start with this guy here. Now this is the import and export chan files menu and this is for importing and exporting channel files, which are an old form of animation data that's obsolete today, but it's in here for legacy purposes. This is the snap to menu, but we'll be looking at that later after we've learned to manipulate some of our geometry. Here's the transform order. So scale, rotate, and translate, in that order. First it scales, then it rotates, then it translates, based on whatever values you have down here. You have the option of changing that to anything you want, but this is the industry standard. Next is the rotation order. Again, it'll rotate in Z then X then Y and you can change that, of course, to anything you want. Okay, so let's look at the translate, rotate, and scale here. For that, we'll jump back to 3D. Okay, then translate then, I can translate it in X, I can translate it in Y, I can translate it in Z by editing the property panel data field. Or I can go to the onscreen controls. You see this Z, X, and Y cardinal axes here? I can grab the Y axes and move it only in Y or only in X, only in Z. If I grab the center point, I'm going to be moving it in all three directions, based on the plane that's perpendicular to my point of view. So I'm going to reset that back to default. Okay, next is the rotates. A rotate in X, a rotate in Y, and a rotate in Z. And if I hold down the Command or Control keys, I get these little rings here, onscreen rotate rings. Okay, so I can grab a ring and rotate it using an onscreen control. So all of these transforms have property panel or onscreen controls, okay? So let's set those knobs back to default. Next is the scale in X, a scale in Y, and a scale in Z. And again, we have onscreen controls. To see them for scale, it's Shift + Command, click, and you get the little blocky guys. A scale in X only, a restricted scale in Y, Z. If I hit the middle guy, I get a uniform scale. Okay, back to default. And again, all four geometries share this identical transform panel. Now the uniform scale does exactly what you would think, a uniform scale of the geometry. We'll put that back to default. And of course we now have a skew in X, a skew in Y, and a skew in Z. No onscreen controls, sorry about that. Let's set that back to default. Okay, the pivot point. That is the point here around which all your rotates and scales are going to pivot. So let me punch up a front view here and let's adjust this pivot point. Right now it's sitting at origin, at the center of the sphere. So if I do any scaling operations, you can see the scale is around pivot point. Let's reset that back to default and now I'm going to move the pivot point down here to the bottom of the sphere by selecting it and then adjusting my Y pivot value. There, so by moving the Y value to minus one, I move the pivot point from the center down to the bottom of the sphere and now, not surprisingly, all of my scales and rotations are going to happen relative to that pivot point. So let's put everything back to default. And again, these features are common to all four of Nuke's geometric primitives. In the next several videos, we'll take a closeup at the unique features of each primitive in turn.