London, UK. Last week leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry, gave NAB attendees a preview of Nuke 6.0, which it announced officially on April 21. It is expected for release in Q3 2009.

Since it began developing and supporting Nuke in 2006, The Foundry has been actively engaging with customers and the wider VFX community, evolving Nuke to meet their creative and workflow needs. Simultaneously, The Foundry’s highly regarded research team has been analysing production problems and feeding their innovations and discoveries into intelligent product solutions.

Nuke 5.2, shipping Q2, tackles infrastructure challenges with Python scripting, stereo workflow, overhaul of the UI, performance improvements, bug fixes and artist/pipeline efficiency enhancers including disk cache, pre-comp, and 3D LUTs in the GPU.

Nuke 6.0
Nuke 6.0’s direction has been led by artist feedback and incorporates a completely new shape rotoscope and paint toolset based on a rewritten core curve library and new RotoPaint node. This release introduces a flexible, non-destructive, layer based paint hierarchy integrated with Nuke’s animation and tracking capabilities and supporting per-object attributes such as blending modes and motion blur.

As an additional benefit, The Foundry’s highly acclaimed Keylight keyer is now a standard feature included with Nuke 6.0.

NukeX 6.0
NukeX 6.0 is a new compositing product incorporating an integrated 3D camera tracker, lens distortion tools and FurnaceCore – The Foundry’s just-announced revamped set of Furnace plug-ins.

Offering VFX users two different Nuke products enables facilities of all sizes to implement a Nuke solution to fit a range of artist and customer needs. Nuke continues to be an evolving, flexible solution ideal for a multitude of VFX tasks, while NukeX brings previously unaccessible tools and workflow options to compositing artists, saving time and increasing the quality of their work. Nuke and NukeX are fully script compatible, with Nuke capable of viewing and rendering nodes created using the extended NukeX toolset.

All Nuke users with a valid maintenance contract at the time of Nuke 6.0’s release in Q3 will get a free upgrade to NukeX.

Key new capabilities in Nuke 6.0:

RotoPaint
• Any number of shapes and paint strokes with a flexible layer/group hierarchy
• Per-point and global feather
• Per shape motion blur
• Individual shape, stroke and group attributes and transformations
• Animation key frame and tracker support
• Recursive clone and other brush effects
• Blending modes and layer operations

Key new capabilities in NukeX 6.0:

3D Camera Tracker
• Integrates directly into Nuke’s 2D/3D image processing environment providing live and in context access to Nuke’s powerful pre and post processing tools
• Analyze 2D image sequences and automatically solve to re-construct the 3D camera with unknown, approximate or known, constant or varying constraints
• Control automatic track selection and distribution and add user generated track data
• Automatic geometry creation for 3D point cloud and camera scene native to Nukeʼs 3D and animation system

Camera Lens Distortion Tools
• Integrates directly into Nuke’s 2D image processing environment
• Un-warp and warp image sequences using a parametric lens model
• Lens modeling through automatic analysis or manual feature identification

www.thefoundry.co.uk