Foundry updated its Nuke compositing software to v11.3 this week, offering enhancements to the Live Groups feature for collaborative workflow, an optimized particle system, and new stereo and VR workflow options.
The headline feature this time around seems to be improvements to Live Groups, a collaboration feature introduced in Nuke 11 to improve team-based workflow on comps being tackled by multiple artists. New elements on that front include Python hooks and UI notifications designed to offer more control over the process, especially when used on larger pipelines.
The NukeX particle system now generates sims at up to six times faster than previous versions, accelerating playback up to four times faster, Foundry said. This will obviously come in handy as artists iterate particle systems to dial in the desired effects, and new APIs should let third-party developers access similar performance gains.
Timeline Multiview allows artists to extend the same multifile stereo workflow supported by Nuke into Nuke Studio, Hiero and HieroPlayer, including the ability to create multiview Nuke scripts from Nuke Studio and Hiero. An option for full-resolution stereo playback via monitor out has been added, as well as a new export preset for stereo project rendering.
Some UI tweaks have been implemented as well, including indications related to bounding box size and channel count that are designed to help with troubleshooting and performance bottlenecks. The selection tool, marquee and lasso tools have also been rethought for use of use, Foundry said, with hotkeys now available to constrain rectangular or elliptical drawings to squares or circles.
On the support front, Foundry has implemented v3.1 of Sony’s raw SDK, supporting X-OCN footage from Sony’s Venice, F5 and F55 cameras; Arri’s SDK has been upgraded to v6; and support has been added for AMD cards in eGPU set-ups (including Sonnet’s eGFX Breakaway Box and Blackmagic’s eGPU) with Mac OS 10.13.5 or later.
“The Nuke team has delivered two substantial releases this year, with a renewed focus on deep customer collaboration and understanding real production challenges,” said Group Product Manager Christy Anzelmo in a prepared statement. “We have ambitious plans for the future – especially around performance and the timeline-based tools. It’s really fantastic that the core features in this release were informed to a large extent by customer insights; we’re especially proud of the development we’ve done to features like multiview stereo in Nuke Studio, as well as Live Groups and the potential of this feature to transform how teams collaborate.”
Nuke 11.3 is now live at Foundry’s website and through its reseller network.
