Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0 Now Shipping

January 25, 2010

Source: The Foundry

Leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry, is delighted to announce the much-awaited release of its powerful compositing applications Nuke and NukeX 6.0.

Led by artist feedback, The Foundry’s highly regarded research team has been analysing production problems and feeding in their innovations to evolve Nuke to meet the latest creative and workflow needs.

Nuke 6.0

Nuke 6.0 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 extends the range of tools usually found in the compositing environment adding an integrated 3D camera tracker, automated and manual lens distortion tools, FurnaceCore – The Foundry’s re-engineered set of Furnace plug-ins - and a DepthGenerator plug-in.

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 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.

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

Keylight

Now included as a standard feature, Keylight is an industry-proven blue/green screen keyer. It is simple to use and is particularly good at tackling reflections, semi-transparent areas and hair.


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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 Nuke's 3D and animation system
· Performs simultaneous solves for both eyes for data from stereo-3D capture

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

FurnaceCore

FurnaceCore contains the core plug-ins from The Foundry’s Academy® Award-Winning Furnace tool set. The set has undergone many enhancements, including improved parameter layouts and documentation.

· Kronos, high quality time warping based on optical flow technologies
· MatchGrade, copy the grade from one sequence to another
· MotionBlur, add realistic blur based on the motion in the scene
· DeNoise, removes or reduces all kinds of noise from your footage
· DeGrain, optimised removal of film grain from a plate
· ReGrain, add grain to your clean plates or graphics from stock or sample your own
· DeFlicker2, removes in-scene flicker from light sources of all kinds
· Steadiness, smooth a shots camera move, or lock off a shot completely
· RigRemoval, remove unwanted foreground objects from a shot
· Align, align similar shots automatically
· WireRemoval, quickly clean up wires
· VectorGenerator, generates motion vectors for use in other nodes

DepthGenerator

· Takes output from the CameraTracker, together with the tracked image sequence, and uses them to create a more accurate depth maps than previously possible inside Nuke
· Can be used to create a partial 3D model of a static scene, using some of Nuke’s existing 3D tools. This can be used to reproduce slight parallax differences not visible to the original camera, allowing you to stabilise camera wobbles and – more excitingly – create stereo views of sets from a single, live action stream

Richard Shackleton, Head of Product Development at The Foundry, said:

"I am extremely pleased to put Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0 into the hands of visual effects artists and production companies worldwide. Having watched our customers continue to push the boundaries of what has traditionally been possible inside compositing tools, we are continuously impressed by their creativity and clever use of our tools to deliver ground breaking visual effects shots."

"This major release of Nuke and launch of NukeX brings significant new capabilities and efficiencies within the core compositing environment allowing this trend to continue. We greatly look forward to seeing how the new features are put to use by our customers to deliver the next generation of film and television production."

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