Volumizer

A tool for creating fake volumetric smoke in Nuke.

I love adding atmospheric smoke to scenes. I can take an element such as this one by Action VFX…

…grab a still frame and drop it over my footage.

However, with a moving camera this can quickly look flat due to there being no parallax within the smoke.

Volumizer takes the smoke element input and creates a stack of 3D Cards, each with a FrameHold that is slightly offset from the one before…

…and distributes them along the Z axis.

The result is smoke that has texture in not only X and Y but also the Z axis.

And the comped output will have a more natural looking density towards the centre of the element, as well as parallax when the camera moves

This will hold up to a moving camera that remains flat on to the volume, but is less suited for an orbiting camera move that will reveal the sides.

I’ve wrapped all of this up in a gizmo to automate the process.

Here is the GitHub link for the node – just select the text, copy it then, then paste it into Nuke.