Volumetric light, art-directed in the comp.
Light rays with control over falloff, direction and colour, without going back to lighting.
- Download the aeTools repository from GitHub as a ZIP, or clone it. One download brings every tool.
- Copy the
Aitor_Echevestefolder into your.nukefolder. - Add
nuke.pluginAddPath("./Aitor_Echeveste")to.nuke/init.pyand restart Nuke.
In the gizmo
- Raymarched volumetric lighting
- GPU-accelerated processing
- Anisotropic light scattering
- Exponential light attenuation
- Shadow and occlusion control
- Atmospheric density control
- Procedural variation
- Interactive look development
A render can look empty when the light seems to hit objects but never the air between them. Volumetric light is expensive to render, and every change to direction, colour or density means another round trip to 3D. Yet the mood of a shot is usually decided in comp.
Not a flare. A volume.
aeVolumeRays brings that iteration into Nuke. It isn't a blurred flare drawn from a bright pixel: it uses the camera, the light and depth information to build light shafts you can shape alongside the rest of the composite.
Making a shaft believable
Real atmosphere isn't uniform. The tool layers low- and high-frequency volumetric noise, fades the cone edge, softens shafts with distance and adds haze. Extinction, light lost as it travels through the medium, controls how quickly shafts fall off, and an anisotropy control makes the scattering depend on the angle between the light and the view rather than spreading evenly in every direction. A cookie (gobo) alpha patterns the light itself, which is different from varying the density of the air.
Questions people ask
- Do I need a volume render from 3D?
- No, but the workflow needs camera, light and depth information. The shafts are built from those, not from the beauty render.
- Why does it look wrong in my scene?
- Scene scale and camera alignment matter. Tight near and far limits and units that match your scene make the most of the sampling.