1 The idea
A hands-on drill: the director wants the robot further left and smaller. Check the target with "Show target" and adjust the Transform to match.
Notice that scaling also pulls the robot towards the frame centre, because that’s the pivot. In this drill you compensate with the move; in Nuke, moving the center is cleaner (see T1).
2 Hands-on in the mini compositor
Task: set the Transform to match the target (x in 1 px steps, scale in 0.01 steps)
Do the scale first, then the move
3 Deep dive
Why scale first, then move
In this lab, translate is added after the scale and isn’t scaled itself. Scaling pulls the robot towards the middle on its own, so if you move first and scale later you have to redo the translate every time scale changes.
Set the scale to match the target size first. After that, translate is a plain shift that doesn’t disturb the size.
- 1Look at the target
- 2Set scale to match size
- 3Shift x to match position
- 4Flip against the target
The cleaner Nuke way: move the center
Nuke’s Transform has a center knob. Put it on the robot’s feet and scaling no longer moves the feet at all. Position and size become independent: change one without disturbing the other.
This lab locks the center at the frame middle on purpose, so you can see scaling drag the position along.
The right size comes from the plate
Real shots have no target image; you read it from the plate. When the ground is below the camera, farther things get smaller and sit closer to the horizon. If you shrink the robot, raise it towards the horizon too, or it reads as a small robot rather than a distant one.
Compare with rocks at the same distance for size, sharpness and how colour fades with distance, then check the shadow still agrees with the sun.
Smaller means farther means higher towards the horizon
After the placement
Recap from T1: if the camera moves, make the placement on the track’s reference frame and put the match-move straight after it. The placement holds on every frame, and Nuke merges both into one resample.
The values from this drill (an x shift and a scale) only hold for a still frame. In a moving shot, the track does the rest.
4 In real work
In Nuke
- Transform: put the center on the robot’s feet first, then set scale.
- Use translate to place it, zooming the Viewer on where the feet touch the ground.
- Wipe or flip Viewer inputs to compare with the plate or a reference.
- Moving camera: Tracker → export a match-move Transform, placed right after the placement Transform.
Common mistakes → the fix
- ✗ Moving first, scaling later, and wondering why the position changed✓ Scaling pulls towards the center. Set scale first, or move the center to the feet.
- ✗ Shrinking the robot to look far away but leaving the feet at the same height✓ Farther things sit closer to the horizon; raise it as well.
- ✗ Placing the robot on any random frame of a tracked shot✓ Place it on the track’s reference frame, the one with zero movement.
Before you send the shot
- Size matched first, position second
- Feet exactly on the ground, not floating or sinking
- Size and height in frame fit the real distance in the plate
- Moving camera: match-move placed straight after the placement Transform
5 Check yourself
Why do you have to move the robot after scaling?
🔒 Answer the question above and this card opens
1. In Nuke you want to scale the robot without the feet moving at all. How?
2. You scale the robot to 0.6 to push it back, but it looks like a tiny robot standing close. What should you fix?
Where the numbers come from: Computed in your browser. Saturation, Multiply, Clamp, Invert, Keymix, Copy and Grade match Nuke 17.0v2 (checked). Blur, Defocus, Glow, Sharpen, ChromaticAberration, Vignette, LensDistort, Grain, Erode, Toe, the Keyer and Despill are teaching versions, not identical to Nuke’s nodes. Transform here is also a teaching version: bilinear filtering, no concatenation, cropped at the frame edge. Images are our own Blender renders (the green screen is fully code-built; the desert scene uses Gaea 2.3 hills, a Poly Haven CC0 HDRI sky, Poly Haven CC0 rocks and grass, Quixel sand and cliff textures and a Mixamo rig for the robot, with Quixel and Mixamo used in the renders only).