The Briefing Room

Leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk), is previewing Nuke 6.0, the next major release of it’s powerful VFX compositing software, expected for release in Q3 2009.

Since it began developing and supporting Nuke in 2006, The Foundry has been actively engaging with customers and the wider VFX community, evolving Nuke to meet their creative and workflow needs. Simultaneously, The Foundry’s highly regarded research team has been analysing production problems and feeding their innovations and discoveries into intelligent product solutions.

Nuke 5.2, shipping Q2, tackles infrastructure challenges 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.

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.

Customer Demonstrations

On the stand at NAB there are also live demos providing an insight into how Nuke was used on: Watchmen, Iron Man and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. A full demo schedule is available at www.thefoundry.co.uk.

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 Nuke_s 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

The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video post production. On February 10th 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Sci-Tech Award® to The Foundry’s development team for the Furnace image processing suite. The company now holds two products with AMPAS Sci-Tech Award® winning technology including high-end compositing system Nuke.

The Foundry’s products support a wide range of host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk® Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, Nuke, Scratch, Shake and Final Cut Pro.

Customers include: Digital Domain, The Moving Picture Company, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Warner Bros and Weta Digital Ltd. The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles. For more information please visit The Foundry’s website at www.thefoundry.co.uk