announced at NAB in April, and the management buyout deal in June, led by Dr Bill Collis and the original company founders, returned the company to British ownership. This news was well received around the world, and was quickly followed by Nuke site license deals with ILM and Weta Digital.
The Foundry team will showcase Nuke 6.0, a major release of its acclaimed compositing software, which delivers a totally re-written Paint and Roto toolset resulting in significant performance improvements and shape flexibility. Nuke 6.0 also includes Keylight ‘ The Foundry’s industry renowned keyer that is particularly good at tackling reflections and hair.
The release of Nuke 6.0 coincides with the launch of NukeX, a brand new compositing application. Building on Nuke’s award-winning toolset, NukeX gives digital artists integrated access to sophisticated lens tools, 3D camera tracking as well as image and motion analysis.
Building a family of Nuke products enables The Foundry to offer a Nuke workflow to facilities of all sizes ‘ a pipeline that not only fits their requirements now, but can also accommodate whatever the future brings. Nuke will continue to evolve and be a flexible VFX tool ideal for a multitude of tasks, whilst NukeX brings previously inaccessible 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.
Fresh plug-in developments
The Foundry’s newly expanded plug-in development team has been canvassing community need and
then cracking the engineering whip. Following chief scientist, Simon Robinson’s discovery of a possible fix for CMOS chip rolling shutter problems prior to NAB, The Foundry will launch RollingShutter, a new product available on After Effects and Nuke. RollingShutter compensates for skewing in the scene, improving the look and enabling trackers to work on a wide range of affected footage.
Tinderbox 4 will also be available on Nuke completing the set. Tinderbox 4 includes a variety of organic effects such as Snow, Rain, Fire and Water as well as interesting looks such as Cartoon, Security and InfiniteZoom.
The Foundry team has also been working closely with Avid to ensure that Furnace for OFX will work well on Avid DS 10.2 due for release at the show.
Last, but not least, The Foundry will release Ocula2 at IBC. Ocula, the company’s range of stereoscopic plug-ins, and a TVB Europe IBC Award-winner last year, has had a serious makeover to encompass suggestions driven by production feedback. Ocula 2 enables artists to manipulate aspects of live action stereoscopic footage such as the vertical alignment and interocular shift, as well as labour saving by replicating paint and roto shapes applied to one eye directly onto the second. Ocula is currently being put through its paces by Weta Digital and Framestore on James Cameron’s Avatar.
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