What's Coming in Nuke 6.3?

At The Foundry’s Stereo Masterclass, held yesterday inside one of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinema theaters, Nuke and Ocula users and beta testers detailed compositing techniques used in their recent work, which included Digital Domain’s comps for TRON: The Legacy, The Mill/New York’s first 3D spot for Honda, and the early award-winning work of Paradise FX and freelance VFX supe John Gajdecki on the 3D film The Hole. The Foundry product managers and specialists showed off additional techniques using Nuke, Ocula and MARI, from 2D-to-3D conversion to painting with textures and pictures. But the highlight of the day came when Nuke product manager Jon Wadelton spent half an hour outlining the top-level features coming to the next version of Nuke, which is due to ship this summer.

With a mock-serious tone (and some effective use of the mic), Wadelton spoke first about v 6.3’s  deep compositing, which he explained as a way to spend less initial time rendering depth samples from 3D renders. “When you render something in 3D, there are a whole bunch of z-depth layers. In the renderer, it actually composites those layers all together to give you your final 3D picture,” he said. “Deep compositing is about not splitting up those z-depths and leaving them separated out. So what it means is you can do things like render a forest or a volumetric effect, and have that come into the compositor and not have to render out all your elements but do that z-depth copy later in your compositing package.”

The audience, which included a range of compositor and effects artists who work in commercial production and feature film, applauded when Wadelton demoed the new planar tracker and showed in a matter of minutes how to insert a logo on a building in a piece of test footage. The speed of the tracker also underscores the faster playback and caching Wadelton promised inside the new version. The Foundry says it plans to showcase Nuke 6.3 at its booth at NAB 2011. To help users keep track on its progress until then, the company recently launched its own Nuke Wiki called Nukepedia.

New versions of Ocula and MARI are on the way as well. New features in Ocula 2.2, now in beta, include the ability to lock the camera data in the solver, of particular interest to one attendee during the lengthy Q + A session. The Foundry co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Bruno Nicoletti said that the development team is already working on Ocula 3.0, which will feature significant improvements to GPU-assisted renders.

In his closing remarks at the end of the day, Nicoletti also hinted at much more to come. “Nuke will always be a single shot compositor, though we’re looking at ways to better integrate Nuke and STORM,” the company’s new RED/Final Cut Pro camera workflow tool. “But more details on that is best saved for another day.”