Foundry At Siggraph with V-Ray + Speed tests

With SIGGRAPH 2014 opening in Vancouver, the announcements are flowing from all the major players – including The Foundry and Chaos Group. The two companies have been working together on the development of V-Ray for three of The Foundry products:

1. V-Ray for MODO,
2. V-Ray for NUKE and
3. V-Ray for KATANA.

The MODO and NUKE versions are being unveiled for the first time at SIGGRAPH and are immediately available as a free public beta, and the commercial version of V-Ray for KATANA is available for purchase.

“Chaos Group and The Foundry’s products have been cornerstones of Atomic Fiction’s workflow since day one,” said Kevin Baillie, co-founder and VFX supervisor at Atomic Fiction.“Both companies share an obvious passion for making amazing, production-focused tools, and are constantly looking towards the future. We’re excited that their futures are converging to unify our rendering pipeline across our favorite applications!”

Built on V-Ray’s latest 3.0 core rendering technology, the integration with The Foundry’s tools streamlines the workflow for studios with pipelines built around V-Ray, NUKE, MODO, and KATANA.

The products:

V-Ray | MODO – a big boost for MODO artists is now having V-Ray as an option: free public beta available from today.

V-Ray | NUKE – to unify the pipeline between NUKE artists and 3D artists for workflow improvements, while providing access to V-Ray’s advanced ray tracing capabilities. Again now in public beta.

V-Ray | KATANA – as was first used on “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” by Industrial Light & Magic, the lighting and look development package is now coupled with V-Ray. Available upon request.

Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry comments: “We have been working together with Chaos Group for a number of years and it’s great that we are now able to offer this integration between our products. V-Ray has a great user-base in our own key markets, VFX and design and we are excited to help our clients to access these technologies in a more streamlined and efficient workflow.”

Users looking to hear more about the V-Ray for The Foundry’s tools will get their chance at SIGGRAPH 2014, as both companies will be discussing this exciting new development as part of a series of joint events.

“Chaos Group and The Foundry products are staples of the VFX and broadcast industries, which makes every measure of efficiency or improvement a step forward for artists in the trenches,” said Peter Mitev, CEO of Chaos Group. “With this alliance, we will continue to give artists whatever they need to be successful at every stage of their pipeline.”

SIGGRAPH schedule if you are in Vancouver (or on the web!):

Chaos Group on-stage interview – Chaos Group’s Chief Commercial Officer Lon Grohs will join Brad Peebler (President of the Americas at The Foundry) in the Foundry Booth (#601, right next to the Chaos Booth) for a web-streamed discussion of the announcement on Wednesday, August 13 at 10 a.m.

MODO/MARI user group – Chaos Group will outline the new functionality of V-Ray for MODO at the Vancouver session of the user group meeting. It is open to anyone and will be held August 13 at the Georgia Ballroom A at The Hyatt Regency Hotel from 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.

 

MORE NUKE and faster…

The Foundry has announced that it will release its entire new NUKE range later this year and that existing NUKE users will be able to access open betas of all three applications in the coming weeks.

As seen at first at NAB in April:

At the top of the new range, NUKE STUDIO provides artists with a powerful node-based VFX, editorial and finishing studio that’s been designed to for creative individuals working independently as well as in collaborative teams working on quick-turnaround projects.

In addition to NUKE STUDIO, The Foundry has put a lot of work into NUKE’s core compositing functionality and toolkits. Version 9 of NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO will all be released together later this year.

 

“It’s a very exciting proposition for us to be able present this new ecosystem of NUKE products that each serve creative people looking for specific workflows and cater to the evolving way people work in post-production. Both existing NUKE and NUKEX users will see a wide range of feature updates and benefits in the NUKE 9 range,” comments Phillipa Carroll, NUKE Product Marketing Manager.

 

New NUKE range features:

Both existing NUKE and NUKEX users will see a wide range of feature updates and benefits in the NUKE 9 range.

“Sharing technology and core architecture, users will benefit from the features and toolsets that have become industry standard in visual effects, and also have the opportunity to opt for NUKE STUDIO to create, manage and control an entire project either individually or within a collaborative team. A really vast amount of engineering has also been dedicated to making huge performance boosts across the board,” says Jon Wadelton, NUKE Product Manager at The Foundry.

Here is a first fxguide exclusive look at the stats that Jon Wadelton will be showing publicly from tomorrow:

 

 

Core compositing updates in the whole NUKE 9 range include:      

• Native Flipbook tool – uses NUKE STUDIO technology to bring integrated and streamlined player capabilities to NUKE and NUKEX
• Huge performance updates – Covering NUKE’s EXR reader, Deep EXR reader, Particle system and Scanline Renderer to name a few
• Enhanced 2D format support – Adds support for MXF files, including read from MXF for DNxHD, MPEG2, Sony RAW (F55 and F65), AVCI and DV image files
• OFlow improvements – adds GPU acceleration

Key Open-EXR improvements and their speed benefits:

 

Updates exclusive to NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO include:

• Planar tracker overhaul – provides a single, integrated Planar Tracker node with new pattern matching algorithm to make tracking featureless planar surfaces possible
• Kronos, Vector Generator and Motion Blur 2 – adds a new motion estimation algorithm to improve the quality and temporal consistency of retimed image sequences based on OCULA technology. This engine vastly reduces the artefacts conventionally associated with optical flow, meaning you get the results you want with less tweaking.

NUKE STUDIO’s exclusive functionality:

• Complete online-editing toolkit – Intuitive and familiar editorial tools get the job done fast, whether its on set editing, online conform, or simply knocking out quick edits.
• In-timeline real-time effects – Powerful GPU accelerated effects can be added right in the timeline, letting artists quickly experiment, polish and achieve the high-end look they need.
• Fluid end-to-end workflow – Combined timeline and node-graph workflow lets artists work the way they want with all the power to create a project in one application from start to finish.
• Powerful collaborative control  – A hub for total project control lets artists share scripts, work collaboratively with annotations and version up and down with ease.
• Real-time 4K playback – Plays in-application and through SDI-Out Hardware giving confidence to client attended sessions.
• Intelligent built-in rendering – Built-in render farm functionality automatically uses all available resources to enhance speed and performance, either on a single machine or when connected to multiple.