Nuke Software Foundry Nuke Motion Media, LLC

About Nuke
Features
Nuke - Plug-Ins
Nuke 6.0 & NukeX 6.0
Nuke - Training

Nuke

Nuke is a powerful compositing application that delivers unparalleled speed, an efficient multi-channel scanline rendering engine, and a first-class feature set that is unrivalled in the desktop market. If you are in the business of creating high-quality digital images Nuke is a production proven visual effects tool that brings speed, functionality and flexibility to your VFX pipeline.

Nuke 6.0v1 is now available to download. Nuke 6.0 incorporates a 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.

Nuke History

Nuke began as the in-house compositing and effects application at Digital Domain, where its development team were awarded a Technical Achievement Award® from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science®. It is an application focused on solving real issues faced by post production facilities all over the world and has been tried and tested on over 55 feature films and hundreds of commercials and music videos, including Speed Racer, The Golden Compass and King Kong.

In March 2007 Nuke 4.6 became part of The Foundry’s portfolio of visual effects products. In February 2008 Nuke 5 was released with an entirely new user interface, support for stereoscopic images and python scripting.

Features

Nuke is a powerful compositing application designed to work for you…

3D Compositing

Nuke's powerful 3D workspace supports OBJ import, projection mapping, geometry modifiers, and more. This true 3D environment creates powerful workflows and exciting new ways to approach compositing.

Stereoscopic Support

Nuke 5 has included support for working with stereoscopic and multi-view projects.

Multi-channel, high dynamic range compositing

Nuke delivers the industry's broadest support for EXR images. Read, process and write over a thousand channels per stream, improving data management and workflow.

Keying

Nuke’s exclusive Image Based Keyer (IBK) gives artists powerful tools for dealing with uneven backings. Primatte is built-in and Keylight is available as an optional extra.

Flexible User Interface

Savable layouts, dockable panels, GUI customization capabilities and features like the 'bullseye' and 'input' buttons make managing large, complex composites easier than ever.

Fast Rendering

Even when processing high resolution footage at 32-bit floating point precision on modest hardware, Nuke's multi-threaded, scanline-based rendering engine gives rapid feedback.

Scripting

Nuke offers an extremely open architecture. Both its node graph and user interface are accessible through the Python and TCL scripting languages, making it possible to customize Nuke in innumerable ways. If you really want to drill down, Nuke supports the industry standard OFX plug-in API as well as a native developers’ kit (NDK) for creating your own tightly integrated plug-ins.

Plug-ins

All of The Foundry's OpenFX™ (OFX) plug-ins are fully compatible with Nuke. Currently, the Keylight keyer, the Tinder collection (which includes lens flares, warpers, and lens blurs), and the Furnace collection (which includes motion vector retiming, wire removal, clean plate creation, grain, and texture tools) are available for OFX, with more collections added all the time.

Supported Operating Systems

Nuke is available on Windows®, Linux® and Mac OS X® platforms – all at equal cost. Licenses float across operating systems, so every artist can work where they are most comfortable and creative.

A cost effective solution

Not only does Nuke run on relatively modest hardware it comes with an economical price tag, so even on a fairly tight production budget you can gain access to a functional, fast and intuitive compositing solution.

Nuke - Plug-Ins

Furnace

Furnace for Nuke is a sophisticated suite of 2D image processing (OFX) plug-ins, designed to enhance workflow and boost productivity for digital artists. Taking advantage of over seven years' research into advanced image processing algorithms, notably motion estimation technology, Furnace has a wealth of tools to quickly and effectively tackle a diverse range of everyday compositing tasks. Wire, rig and flicker removal, a world class retimer, grain reduction, dust busting, image stabilisation, auto rotoscoping, image segmentation and much more, Furnace delivers scores of plug-ins that you'll find yourself using on a daily basis.

Keylight

Keylight is an Academy award winning keyer. It is simple to use and is particularly good at tackling reflections, semi-transparent areas and hair. Because spill suppression is built-in, often selecting the screen colour is all you need to do to pull the matte and seat the foreground into the background so it looks photographed rather than composited.

Tinderbox 1

Tinderbox 1 is a collection of 18 plug-ins for Nuke. There are tools to manipulate mattes with sub-pixel precision, distortion effects, background generators, lights rays and features the fastest software blurs available.

Tinderbox 2

Tinderbox 2 plug-ins include LensBlur for simulating the true defocusing characteristics of a camera. Newsprint to give images a half tone look. Render the brightest 9000 stars visible from Earth with NightSky or simulate viewing images through a layer of distorting Glass. Get a hand painted acrylic look with Paint. Crash zoom with RadialBlur or distort your image with Ripple and Swirl.

Tinderbox 3

Tinderbox 3 is a collection of 18 plug-ins for Nuke. There are tools to erode and despot mattes, effects to simulate poor television reception and old film, and sparks, lightning, plasma and starfield generators and much more.

Tinderbox 4

Tinderbox 4 plug-ins include Security for simulating a security camera feed. Reveal the layers in an image by flowing colour through a matte with Flow and give images a hand drawn look with Cartoon and LineDrawing. Achieve limitless zoom with InfiniteZoom. Generate clean and really effective 2D Rain or go for a winter look with Snow. Wrap background light around foreground objects with LightWrap and apply fast elegant glow effects with SoftGlow.

Ocula

Ocula is a unique collection of plug-in tools that solve common problems with stereoscopic imagery, boost productivity in post production, and ultimately help to deliver a more rewarding stereoscopic viewing experience. The plug-ins are designed to automatically replicate key processes on left and right channels and help artists polish and refine stereoscopic material, literally, removing headaches from the final viewing experience.

Sapphire Plug-ins

Sapphire Plug-ins provides sophisticated, organic visual effects, which integrate natively with leading editing, compositing and finishing systems. The entire collection of more than 200 Sapphire effects includes everyday tools such as Glows, LensFlares, Glint, FilmDamage, and ZDefocus, to more exotic effects such as Lightning, FlysEye, and JpegDamage. With Sapphire Plug-ins for OFX, these effects can be applied easily by users of The Foundry’s Nuke.

Nuke 6.0 and NukeX 6.0

Nuke 6.0 is due for release later this year.

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.

In addition, The Foundry’s highly acclaimed Keylight keyer will be a standard feature included with Nuke 6.0.

Simultaneously, The Foundry plan to launch NukeX 6.0.

NukeX 6.0 has all of the tools and features of Nuke 6.0, but also aims to bring additional, powerful, technologies within the reach of visual effects artists.

Many of these tools and technologies are expensive to purchase and maintain, but would make a considerable difference to the overall speed, efficiency and quality of work produced by artists if they had access to them.

This first release includes a fully integrated 3D camera tracker. You can do your own camera solves, create 3D geometry and position objects and cards at the right place in the scene whenever you need to.

Lens distortion tools are another example of the advanced technology we are adding to NukeX 6.0 giving you multiple ways to analyse image sequences and lens grids resulting in a lens model and the ability to warp and un-warp in order to compensate for lens distortion.

NukeX will also incorporate FurnaceCore - 12 of The Foundry’s best Furnace tools including Kronos, the optical flow re-timer, grain and de-grain tools, rig-removal and more.

There are many more advances planned for NukeX.

Nuke - Training

User Guide (PDF, 14.71 MB)
Tutorials & Example Images
Videos and Other Training

Problems with Nuke on Mac OS X 10.5.7