From the course: Nuke Essential Training (2014)

The EditGeo node - Nuke Tutorial

From the course: Nuke Essential Training (2014)

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The EditGeo node

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The EditGeo node allows you to edit vertices and faces of your 3D geometry. Not suitable for modeling a T-rex, of course, but it can come in handy, when you need to tweak the shape of a 3D object. We'll start by selecting the sphere and adding an EditGeo node from 3D>modify>EditGeo. So we'll start with a simple translation demonstration. I'm going to switch the viewer to ortho x, a side view. Zoom in a little bit. I'll set the viewer selection controls to vertex. Now, if I select all of these vertices here, I did not disable the occlusion, so if I switch back to a perspective view, I only got one quarter of a sphere. Let's try that again. Back to the side view, Deselect. Now, I'll disable occlusion testing. So that I can get both sides in one bite. All right, back to perspective. Now, I have the entire half of this sphere selected. Okay, back to an ortho view. The EditGeo node add these axis here. So, I can grab the z axis, for example, and pull them out like this. And now when I switch to Node Selection, the normal view and back to perspective, you can see I have a lovely capsule. Okay, let's disable that and look at this example here. Let's see how to do a scale. So again, an ortho side view, again with the occlusion testing turned off. Go to Vertex Selection. And I'll select the entire half of the sphere. Back to a perspective view. And we can see I got all my points here. Okay, back to the ortho side. This time, holding down Cmd and Shift, I get my scale on-screen controls. So, I can now scale this, then translate it back into position. Now, we'll disable that. Go back to Node Selection. Select that. Perspective. And we have a lovely egg shape. Next case. Let's take a look at this cube. We'll do an extrusion on just a piece of this cube. I'll type C to get a top view, after centering the frame. Let's select Faces. And I'll select these faces here. Back to the perspective view. So it also selected the faces on the other side of the cube. Because I had disabled the occlusion testing. Well, let's enable that again. And now I just have the faces on this side. All right. So let's see what we got here. Grabbing the y axis, I can pull it up in y. But we can also key frame the animation. So let's take a look at that. I'm going to jump to frame one of the timeline. Switch to the ortho top view. Set a key frame in my EditGeo node. I have a key frame on the timeline at frame one. I'll jump to the last frame. Hold down the Cmd key for the on screen rotation controls, and I'll just twist it like this, okay? Back to our perspective view. And now, I have an animated geometry edit. Of course, this isn't just constrained to geometric primitives. We can fire up the Hulk here. And let's say we would like to make a bigger head on this guy. So, I'll switch to ortho top view. Center him, we'll set it for Face Selection, and I'll grab the polygons here in the head. Back to perspective view. Using the onscreen scale command, Shift+Cmd, and I'll do a uniform scale. Deselect. And now, we have a much larger head. And by the way, you can always undo your work by clicking the Reset Geometry button. Okay, well, that was just too much fun. You can also work with merged geometry. So here we have this cube, center in frame, and this sphere. So now they're grouped together as one piece of geometry. We can add the EditGeo node to the merged geo node. And we can do EditGeo on the assembled geometry. I'll jump to an ortho top view. Make sure my selection is set for Phases, and I'll select some faces here, back to a perspective view. Here they are. Now, this is a good time to talk about the axis alignment feature. By default, the axis will be aligned to the object. That is, the original geometry that you have. So you can see y is straight up and x and z. However, you may also choose to align the axis with the average of the surface normals of your selection. So we'll select that, and you notice the axis jumps quite a bit. So I'll extrude this in z, relative to the average normals of my selection. Then I'll swing around here and use the Cmd key to put on the on-screen rotation controls. Give it a bit of rotation. Come around here, using Shift+Cmd, my on-screen scale controls. And scale it down to make an interesting thing. As you might expect, the EditGeo node can also edit point cloud meshes. If you want to model some terrain, the EditGeo node would be hopeless tedious. For that task, you really want to displace the vertices with an image, how to do that will be revealed in the next video.

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