Hydrant in Nuke

Well, my hydrant is about 90% rendered and I was really getting impatient to get onto compositing. So I decided to just give it a try to whatever I had so far. But instead of using Fusion, I decided to try Nuke this time and see how different or how similar it was to Fusion.

Well I guess I did have fun using this program. Just that I find pulling the wires out of the nodes to be a little troublesome as compared to that in Fusion. Also, Fusion has this drag and drop function regarding the nodes to display in the view. In Nuke, I would have to pull a wire from the viewer to a node everytime I want to preview it. Definitely troublesome, but I guess I would get used to it.

I did not follow any tutorial on how to composite in Nuke. Based on my knowledge of Fusion, I composited the several CG passes and got what I wanted. Below you can see the node graph. It would have been similar to that of Fusion.

I'm still extremely new to this program, so I couldn't quite figure out how to get my z-depth pass as a Z channel integrated with the rgba channels. In Fusion, I would have to make use of the channel boolean tool. In Nuke, I tried using channel merge but it didn't quite give me the results I wanted. Color correcting was also quite tricky and complicated. But I kind of figured out my way to get the result I wanted.

Overall, I was quite happy with the result. It's still incomplete though - I still have to match the grain of the raw plate, adjust my reflections and specular highlights, etc. But I would polish it up once my render has finished. Currently, about 100 frames or so left to render from the reflection pass.