Hey gang!
So this week was quite a hassle in DRC, getting content ready for Rough Render turnin. Not like I wasn't done, however, I felt like I needed something to do. So on Monday and Tuesday I worked on another digimatte. I'll explain more about it and each other my assets at another time, but for now I'll mention the fact that when I completed the camera move, it still felt dead. So I decided to add a helicopter into the shot, and it felt a lot better, feeling more like there was movement and life in the overall shot.
After finishing the setup for the helicopter I thought, "Wow, that was tedious, I'd hate to do that again" Not that it was difficult, but it kind of took long to do while I could have done something else. So here's version one of my Nuke Gizmo, which allows the user to create a 2D Helicopter on two cards with controllers for the speed of the blades, scale of the helicopter, and what kind of helicopter. Included with the Gizmo is a PSD file that it references to use the helicopters. If you'd like, you can drag the gizmo into a text editor and find where the Read1 part is and change the file directory to change your directory to the image to anywhere you like, but you have the option to locate it by hand when you load the Gizmo. If you don't do this the node will be presented to and Error and you will have to relocate the file anyway.
Other than that, it's pretty straight-forward. Just add this to a Scene node or a basic 3D setup in Nuke and you're good to go! If you need to change any helicopters or blades or add more,be my guest, this is for you to speed up your workflow!
Enjoy!