The Foundry launches NUKE 10

The Foundry has officially launched NUKE 10 to coincide with the NAB 2016 show, although The Foundry does not have a booth at NAB anymore.

The software also is isn’t quite shipping yet, but the focus for this release is on accelerating everyday workflows and more stability in the core of the product. NUKE 10 includes updates across the entire product range: NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO.

Colour management and colour science improvements
Colour management and colour science improvements to OpenColorIO.

Much of version 10 has already been pre-announced: the new ray tracing rendering (first seen at NAB 2015), advanced roto tools and the realtime keying on the timeline in NUKE Studio. NUKE 10 also includes a number of enhancements for TDs using it into major production pipelines: as a step toward supporting ACES, OpenColorIO has been integrated into NUKE’s root LUT management; Pyside and OpenEXR libraries have been updated; and Blink Script can now use a GLSL GPU path.

Smart Vector
Smart Vector.

Although there are specialist roto tools on the market, many facilities prefer to just use the paint and roto tools inside NUKE, and while this work may not be sexy, the complexity of NUKE’s paint, wire removal and cleanup tools is now vastly better than it was. In NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO artists can now use the new Smart Paint toolset which builds on R&D inside The Foundry with features such as the Smart Paint toolset. This lets you generate and use advanced motion vectors to automatically push or warp an input image sequence across a range of frames, replacing tedious and error-prone manual clean-up, beauty work and texture application with a simple and yet accurate automated process.

Smart Vector Tool sets
Smart Vector Tool sets

“It’s been almost a decade since The Foundry took over development of NUKE and in that time we’ve focused on consistently delivering new features that have broadened the scope of its user base and made it the global tool of choice for anyone delivering high-end media productions, no matter how big or small. We also expanded the NUKE family with the launch of NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO,” said Andy Whitmore, chief product officer at The Foundry.

“One of The Foundry’s aims is to make tools that help artists be more efficient, so they can focus their energy on using their creativity to achieve the highest quality results. With NUKE 10, we’re putting an emphasis on performance, stability and productivity to attain that goal.”

Improved Vector Blur
Improved Vector Blur

To help eliminate bottlenecks from common tasks, NUKE 10 improves performance across several areas: Roto Paint, Vector Blur, timeline manipulation and transcoding are all now significantly faster, while NVIDIA multi-GPU support speeds up processing time for GPU-accelerated nodes on appropriate hardware.

Realtime Keyer
Realtime Keyer

Sean Brice, NUKE product manager at The Foundry said, “Our priority, as always with the release of major updates to NUKE, is to answer our customer’s needs. With NUKE 10 we’ve really focused on NUKE’s day-to-day performance to help make artists’ lives easier. This year is a big milestone for us and we’re really pleased with the results, but most importantly we hope that our customers are too. ”

NUKE STUDIO 10’s editorial and finishing toolset also receives updates: in addition to faster performance, there are new in-timeline Soft Effects that include real-time chroma keying, color correction and the ability to create custom GPU-enabled effects, together with enhanced audio handling.

Audio Scrubing
Audio Scrubing

The Blink Script node lets developers write their own image processing operations inside of NUKE using the Blink Framework. To get the best possible performance from your team’s hardware, the Blink Framework ensures code can be written once and then run fully optimized on a variety of devices. The Blink Script node can translate image processing code into standard x86 or SIMD accelerated code to run on the CPU, or OpenCL to run on the GPU.

The Blink API allows C++ plug-in developers to harness the Foundry’s Blink technology. Image processing algorithms can now be implemented once and deployed on CPU and GPU devices. The API provides greater flexibility and exposes features of the Blink technology that are not available in the Blink Script Node. This results in the ability to create faster and more complex effects.

The Blink API now ships with NUKE and enables you to use the Blink framework inside an NDK plug-in.
The Blink API now ships with NUKE and enables you to use the Blink framework inside an NDK plug-in.

“NUKE 10 is a one-man studio powerhouse, and with Color Correct as a Soft Effect in NUKE STUDIO, I can do advanced grading on the fly,” says Hugo Guerra, cinematic director at Fire Without Smoke. “I can’t wait: bring it on!”

As the products are still in Beta, you might ask what an ‘official launch’ signifies that the pre-release did not, especially as we have been hearing about this release for some time? We can only guess that some last minute bugs have come up in Beta but The Foundry wanted to signal the product is RSN at NAB (Real Soon Now – Shipping after NAB Tradeshow). Officially: “NUKE 10, NUKEX 10 and NUKE STUDIO 10 are available in the coming weeks, together with HIERO 10 and HIEROPLAYER 10″.