Nuke Crying Effect

For R&D on The Big Top I have been looking into different ways to create crying in 3D. The first way I tried was hand animating a single tear, or several if needed, and creating the streak effect left by a tear within Nuke. It's a simple way of working but the technique worked. It also allows us to control exactly where the tear flows down as it is hand animated, rather than a simulated effect.


 I rendered the Face, the face with a high specular override, and the tear as 3 separate render layers from Arnold, using Maya's new powerful render layer setup.

 Once I had these I took them into Nuke. I fiddled with Time Offset, Time Blur and Time echo before deciding the latter did what I wanted. This let me make the streak which the tear leaves, I graded and blured this before merging the original tear back on top. I then used the resulting alpha to merge over the specular pass of the face, giving what would be the water left by the tear some reflection, I think this really helped the effect.

 Although this was good I think we want a more stop motion look result for the final film, more in line with that style, so the next step is for me or an FX artist to figure out how to create that look for the crying in the film, similar to Wallace and Grommit look rain.

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