Transform images - Nuke Tutorial

- [Instructor] The transform node is one of the most important nodes in Nuke, as it's the one that moves, scales, and rotates images. It can be controlled interactively in the viewer or by entering numbers into the property panel fields. Let's start by adding a transform node. We'll select the read node, come up to the transform tab, and it's the first node in the list. And because you see the T here, you know there's a hot key T to get this node. So I'll select that, and it inserts itself into the data stream. Let's take a look at the onscreen controls first. This is the onscreen transform control. And you'll notice the cursor changes shape when I approach sensitive areas. There's my rotate control, okay. If I put the cursor inside, you see it gets the plus sign with the arrowheads anywhere in here? Well, that's your translation cursor. If I move off to the ring, I get the X. That's your uniform scale. So it'll scale equally in X and Y. Here, I'll undo that. Putting the cursor on the knot here or over here, you get the constrained scale in X, undo, or up here, down there, a constrained scale in Y, undo. If you want to skew horizontally, you see how the cursor has changed to this little arrowhead? Just grab this guy and shift him left and right. And if you want to skew vertically, grab this guy here and shift that left and right. Frequently, you'll want to change the position of the pivot point. So, I'll hold down the Command or Control key, click and drag to a new location. And now that'll become the center of your pivot. If you want to hide the onscreen control, you can either put the cursor in the viewer and type Q on the keyboard, type it again to turn it back on, or close the transform property panel. Either way, it'll get rid of that onscreen control. Keep in mind if you have multiple transform property panels open, every single of them will put their transform control on the screen and you could layer up quite a few of them. It gets kind of confusing. Now let's take a look at how to control the transform node over here in the property panel. I'll reset this back to default. We'll start with a translate X and Y. We actually have three ways of editing these numbers. Of course I can type in a number like 100. Or I can click in a field and use the thumb wheel up and down. Or I can use a slider or I can use the virtual slider, ALT, middle mouse click and drag. I'll undo that. I'll reset the node back to default. So here's the scale factor. If I move the slider or type a number, I get a uniform scale. If I want a different scale in width and height, click on the number two to open up separate width from separate height. Fold it back up and it'll become a uniform scale again. Here are the skew X and skew Y sliders. I'll undo those two. And if you want to move the pivot point, you can do that also from here. You can just dial this number and that'll move the pivot point for you just as though you had used the Command and drag from onscreen. The transform node also has motion blur. I'll show you that. I'm going to reset the node back to default. Set my play head on one. I'll set a key frame here, and on frame one, I'll set the translate X for minus 400. Then I'll jump to the last frame, set the translate X for plus 400. So I now have a translation animation. If I slide in here, we can see what happens when we turn on the motion blur. The first parameter here, motion blur. Default is zero, I'll set it for one and bang, we get our motion blur. Key point: This is not how much motion blur. This number is the quality of the calculation. Normally, you'll use the number one and if you crank it up, you'll get progressively higher quality calculations, but they become very expensive. If you want to change the amount of motion blur, that's the shutter control here. This controls how long the shutter is open. If I increase this, you can see it's dramatically increasing the amount of motion blur. And let me set all these back to default so show you an interesting attribute of the transform node. I'll rehone the viewer. If I hook my viewer up to the original read node and then I show you the alpha channel, you see this is a three channel image. However, after the transform node, suddenly the alpha channel is filled with white. This is the way of the transform node. After every transform node, it flood fills the alpha channel with white if there is no alpha channel. If it already has an alpha channel, the transform node will not corrupt it. Use the transform node to translate, rotate, scale, and skew your 2D images and add motion blur if they're animated. However, if you want to do a corner pin, you must choose the corner pin node, the subject of the next video.