ENDA Episode 179→ The time when ENDA gets in a bullet fight with John Wick (Part 6)

Adding the shells from the muzzle flashes sounded simple enough…

Just grab an image of a shell case, animate it, and done.

Well… things aren’t quite that easy.

Yes, we can take an image of a bullet shell and animate it, but there are many more steps to consider. In some cases, we’ll even need to use a 3D shell. But let’s start from the beginning.

The first step is to create our 3D shell inside Nuke.

No, I haven’t lost my mind, we just need to think like compositors, not modellers.

We don’t need a shell that’s perfectly modelled down to the last tiny detail. What we need is something that clearly reads as a shell case, and we can achieve that with just three cylinders:

🔹One for the body

🔹Another for the base (scaled into a disc).

🔹The last one for a smaller interior cylinder that connects to the base.

With that, we can animate our shell inside a 3D scene, matching the camera’s position.

The best part?

We don’t even need to track the camera.

The shell moves independently from both the gun and the camera, so all we need is to position it correctly in the first frame.

This also means we can recycle the animation if the gun is fired multiple times. We just changed the starting position and reused the same motion.

After that, we add interactive lighting while preserving the sense of volume with a proper form shadow. And of course, we don’t forget the motion blur.

These two details together help the shells feel properly integrated into the plate.

And that brings us to the next element we need to integrate. Shells aren’t the only thing that comes out when a gun fires. Gun smoke is also part of the package, and its treatment is a bit familiar.

But that will be for a future episode.

The journey continues...