Nuke 6/NukeX 6 Released

home-nukeThe Foundry has released two new versions of their Nuke compositing software, Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0. Nuke 6.0 includes a completely new shape rotoscope and paint toolset and also bundles Keylight as a standard feature. NukeX 6.0 contains a new 3D camera tracker, lens distortion tools, depth generator, and Furnace Core — 12 Furnace plugins which are bundled with the higher end Nuke offering.

Downloads can be found for Linux, Mac and Windows at The Foundry download page. However, enjoy the weekend, as licenses for customers entitled to the upgrade are due to be mailed out on Monday.

For the full press release, click through….



London, UK. January 2010. 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.

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
  • 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.

  1. Kronos, high quality time warping based on optical flow technologies
  2. MatchGrade, copy the grade from one sequence to another
  3. MotionBlur, add realistic blur based on the motion in the scene
  4. DeNoise, removes or reduces all kinds of noise from your footage
  5. DeGrain, optimised removal of film grain from a plate
  6. ReGrain, add grain to your clean plates or graphics from stock or sample your own
  7. DeFlicker2, removes in-scene flicker from light sources of all kinds
  8. Steadiness, smooth a shots camera move, or lock off a shot completely
  9. RigRemoval, remove unwanted foreground objects from a shot
  10. Align, align similar shots automatically
  11. WireRemoval, quickly clean up wires
  12. 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.”

17 thoughts on “Nuke 6/NukeX 6 Released”

  1. The only thing I miss is that Mac version is still 32bit.
    Thank you for the quick update, Jeff.

  2. The 64bit OSX Flavor is still too fresh, give them a few months and I bet you’ll see a version for Snow Leopard.

    Now Apple really needs to fix those bugs in their OS that have been affecting (limiting) some functions in Nuke for years now.

    And hopefully give us a QTX Pro with a “inner core” that isn’t 32bit 😉

  3. Finally much awaited NukeX package is in the industry…..

    Hopefully the revolutionary change in Compositing & VFX …..

    Thanks n all the best >

  4. Even though cross-platform availability is a great feature, most professional feature film users won’t care much about Windows or OSX, almost all big studios are on Linux anyway – and I hope TheFoundry rather invests their time in improving core functionality things, a particle system or bringing the 3D-space up to par with Fusion.

    Quicktime is definitely a thing I would not want to have to deal with. Great for web video, way too problematic in film – with things like baked-in fps, gamma-flags, legal range truncation, different codecs etc. Yes, even if RED uses Quicktime as container format – as soon as it comes to comp, it is more than wise to go for an image sequence-based exr or dpx workflow.

    1. you know I am personally very anti-mac cause as a platform it takes away your freedom and forces you to do it the way one single company wants… but… or better therefor I would hate if the foundry gave up their multiplattform approach cause that gives you exactly what I value, choice.
      I agree though on the quicktime thing. This should not be a priority. Quicktime is bad as it is. And it really has minor importance in Nuke’s core market better concentrate on other things.

      -k

  5. Pingback: the foundry releases nuke 6.0

  6. It is just me or is this a very thin update for a X.0 (5->6) update? There are some great features in the non X version and looking forward to play with the 3d camera tracker. It sounds more like a 5.5 update than 6.0… While everyone else is combining there software versions (Like autodesk) The foundry split Nuke up in a confusing way!! Nuke X 6.0 – or is it Nuke 10.6.0 and the other version is stuck at Nuke 6.0 🙂

    And 64bit for OS X would be nice – that would be a 6.0 update!

    1. this is a huge release. I dont think you understand how much has been changed and updated in this new version. 5 major new tools and a host of smaller ones plus many many additions via furnace core. If that is not a big release what is?

  7. @CEA: NukeX is not Nuke 10. It’s Nuke 6 with the X tools (Camera Tracker, Furnace Core). Don’t know what is so confusing about it.

    @vfxdude: Do you mean that “professional feature films comopsitor” only run Linux?
    Stop that. Linux is a neglected OS, huge facilities only use it because it’s cheap. I’ve been working in feature films exclusively for the past 10 years and I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I’ve used Linux throughout these years.
    ore functionalities

    And The Foundry is indeed investing their time on core functionalities. Believe it or not a Particle systems is not that essential or that useful for most professional compositors. Roto, Paint, scripting language support, those are core features that any professional compositor wouldn’t survive without and they have been improved.

    The 3D tracker is a huge bonus it’s something that I will find my self using more, more often in tricky, problematic shots.

    As for Fusions 3D env I admit that it has some nice features and all, but when it comes set extensions I would certainly rather be in Nuke.

    1. Huh? I can count on one hand the times I have NOT been working on Linux. Companies only use it cause its cheap? Nonsense. For companies that still had inhouse tools on IRIX it was easy to port them over, it is easy to administrate on a large scale, it is stable and flexible and customizable to an extend that no other mainstream OS is.

      -k

      1. You’re now talking about companies. First time you’ve formed your sentence you’ve used “professional film compositors won’t care…” you were talking about artists and not the companies that employ them. The reason a artist would choose Linux is way too different than the reason a company would choose it. Companies choose it mainly because it’s maintenance costs are way lower than OSX or Windows and because their R&D departments are or were IRIX oriented. This has nothing to do with the artist end of the story.

        Personally if I can choose a OS to work on I would certainly not choose Linux, it is stable, it has fantastic administration features for those who do network administration and all that stuff. But it is a pain in the butt as soon as you find yourself in the need of more ordinary tools that almost always run exclusively in both OSX or Windows.

  8. You’re kidding.. right!? Have you read about what has gone into Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0? 🙂 . These are not small changes.. but massive new features requiring a lot of work. Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0 are essentially the same (they contain the same stuff under the hood), the only difference is that the NukeX license key will let you use the NukeX features to their full extent (i.e. you can twiddle the knobs, and not leave them at default setting). So its not really two versions 🙂 .

  9. Yea I dont know where CEA got that this is a small update. Ive been waiting for this forever. Finally it has Flame and Avid DS customers thinking about what they are paying for. Also the roto and paint tools update is hug not to mention all the other features and free plugs they have in there. It seams there is a node for everything now.

    1. Agreed!

      Best Nuke update so far, and I’m pretty sure the ones from now on will be even better.

      I just wish Furnace, Keylight and most of the core things that are OFX based were turned into standard Nuke plugins instead. I still have my issues with OFX based plugins.

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