WHY DO MY RENDERS LOOK DIFFERENT IN SEPARATE PARTS OF NUKE?

One of the toughest elements about learning new creative software is plodding your way through the essential elements to give a foundation for doing the fancy stuff.

- Mike Griggs 

This becomes even more frustrating if the software is already in a skill area the artist knows, and understands the underlying knowledge of the task or brief at hand. That often means finding a tutorial on a specific process can actually hamper more than help the overall software experience. 

Nuke is a piece of content creation software that, in many ways, can do too many things. It's imperative to cover as much of the basics as possible, as they can lead to potential time-sucking 'gotchas' later down the line. The fantastic thing about Nuke is that thanks to its nodal architecture and ability to open up nearly every available parameter for adjustment, it can mean there are too many choices for new artists, or those used to similar software that hides a lot of the complexity.

A great example is how the humble Nuke Viewer node works. The Nuke Viewer node is the only node that appears when a new Nuke comp is created, and therefore it's easy to ignore, but that does the node a disservice for its importance. For example, most new Nuke artists wouldn't know the Viewer is an item in the Panels tab of the overall Preferences.