LONDON — The Foundry has announced at IBC 2013 that a brand-new version of its industry standard compositing software, Nuke, will launch later this year.
In Nuke 8 artists will notice huge enhancements to the Dope Sheet, allowing them see and move keys around in the context of a timeline style view. They will be able to see the results and each property of a node accurately displayed in context. The new viewing capability will make working with any scripts that involve time manipulation a much more simple process and give artists far greater visibility on their work.
One of Nuke's most hotly anticipated features, a brand new Text node will allow artists to compose, edit and animate directly in the viewer.
Enhancing Nuke's grading and color correction tools has been a big focus for the development team on this upcoming release. Updates to the UI will include a new intuitive in-panel color wheel. Nuke 8's wheel will control hue, saturation and value and offer artists an automatic precision mode or an optional absolute mode for finer tweaks.
There will also be a wide range of Scope tools to help users analyze the picture like Waveform, Vectorscope and Histogram viewers and a brand new Pixel Analyser. Other color innovations will include a Match Grade node that will enhance Nuke's grading capabilities to let artists get accurate results really fast.
Making environment work a faster and easier process, a further update to Nuke's Camera Tracker will add to the set solve functionality and let artists track and solve cameras from reference stills, helping to assist object or set modeling within one integrated environment. The Model Builder will also feature UV creation for even greater 3D control.
Brand new 3D tools will include Viewer Capture to allow users to flipbook images from the 2D and 3D Viewer, a new Edit Geo node for greater control, a Particle Cache node to speed up rendering times and the Wireframe Shader node for various visual effects and increased control over projection mapping.
Nuke 8 adds Deep Output to the Scanline Renderer, which will enhance the Deep Compositing workflow. Overall speed and performance will also be improved with the addition of OpenEXR 2.0 multi-part image read and write support, Alembic 1.5 and Planar Rendering. Nuke 8 also features a new intelligent in-context help system.
With Nuke 8 developers will be able to write their own image processing operations inside of Nuke using the new Blink Script node to ensure they get the best possible performance from their teams hardware. The Blink Framework has been pioneered by The Foundry to allow users to utilize the power of their GPUs, when available, to speed up interactive processing.
The new Import Nuke function will also let developers use Nuke as a module in any Python interpreter, and developers of C++ plugins will be able to output planar data in more flexible ways thanks to new Planar Rendering Framework.
Nuke's sister application Hiero, often described as Nuke's timeline, will also receive an update later this year. Hiero 1.8 will feature greatly enhanced playback performance, innovative quicktime color handling controls as well as new editing audio controls that will give users access to Per Track and Per Item Volume Controls to enable individual control over volume on differing tracks and differing items in the timeline.
Working together Nuke and Hiero offer a workflow that encompasses compositing, conform, review, editorial and shot management delivered across two advanced applications. They provide a comprehensive solution for artists and supervisors wearing many hats in the post-production process and taking on the challenge of whole projects and sequences.