How To Create A Force Emanating From A Point In Nuke
How to create a force that is continuously emanating from, or is absorbed into, a point…
A while back, my friend Reuben was looking for ideas to create a force emanating from a point in Nuke. I came up with a 3D setup that generates a textured matte that endlessly emanates outward, or absorbs inward, depending on the direction you animate it.
The idea is simple: Create a Cylinder and animate a Noise texture along the length of the Cylinder. Then, add a DisplaceGeo with a Ramp to the Cylinder to make a wide cone, and point a camera straight down the funnel.
💡 By animating the texture using the Transform tab in the Noise properties you can achieve infinite scrolling.
The result when viewed through the camera:
Notice the seam at the bottom where the UVs wrap around the Cylinder. In order to patch that area, I created a second Cylinder with a slightly smaller radius, rotated and time offset the Noise texture, and masked it off to only patch over the seam. The completed matte looks like this:
This matte can be used to drive grades, IDistorts, the Glass node, and much more.
💡 If you do not need the 3D functionality, you can create essentially the same matte in 2D by using a SphericalTransform node. Connect the SphericalTransform node to your Noise, set the input to Latlong, the output to Mirror Ball, and rotate the output 90 degrees around the Y axis. (If you are using the old SphericalTransform node, set the input to Lat Long map, the output to Mirror Ball, and rotate the output 90 degrees around the Z axis).
Here, the matte is applied through an IDistort onto a rotating Noise texture:
Here, the matte is reversed and applied through a Glass node onto a different Noise texture:
And here, the matte is slowed down and applied through a Glass node onto a random picture I took of All Souls Langham Place:
The above are only a few examples of what you can do with it. You could also create black holes, nebulas, many different types of energy effects, and all sorts of cool stuff. Animate the camera, change the speed, size and look of the Noise texture. Change, animate, or add effects to the input image sequence going into the IDistort or Glass node, etc. There are a ton of options. Experiment and have fun with it!
You can download the setup for the matte here:
I hope you found this tutorial useful. For more Nuke tips & tricks, see Nuke.
