The Foundry announces Nuke 5.2 and 6/6x

The Foundry announced new versions of their Nuke compositing software at NAB this week. The first, Nuke 5.2, has workflow improvements  with Python scripting, stereo workflow, overhaul of the UI, performance improvements, bug fixes and artist/pipeline efficiency enhancers including disk cache, pre-comp, and 3D LUTs in the GPU. The release is expected to ship in Q2 of this year.

They also announced version 6, which is expected to ship in Q3. It comes in two flavors, one of which includes the Furnace plugin suite and 3D camera tracking. Click through to read more…

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Nuke 6.0

Nuke 6.0’s direction has been led by artist feedback and 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 is a new compositing product incorporating an integrated 3D camera tracker, lens distortion tools and FurnaceCore – The Foundry’s just-announced revamped set of Furnace plug-ins.

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 unaccessible 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.

All Nuke users with a valid maintenance contract at the time of Nuke 6.0’s release in Q3 will get a free upgrade to NukeX.

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

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 Nukeʼs 3D and animation system

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

Furnace Core
Furnace Core contains the core plug-ins from The Foundry’s Award Winning Furnace tool set. The set have 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