The Foundry steps up its next-gen toolset with Nuke 8

Creative software house, The Foundry, has released a new version of its node-based compositor, Nuke.

Like its 3D art suite, Mari, Nuke has been heavily used by the film and visual effects sectors for its advanced compositing capabilities.

Compositing is drawing together the separate elements from different visual sources into a single image, and is one of the chief methods behind the CG monsters and fantastic acts of visual tricky that we frequently see in films and TV.

Nuke 8 itself includes a wealth of features that its creator believes will make it the go-to compositing tool for game developers and the rest of the digital sector.

Key improvements are the new Dope Sheet, which allows artists see and move keys around in the context of a timeline style view, and a brand new Text node letting artists compose, edit and animate directly in the viewer.

There has also been major updates to Nuke’s grading and colour correction tools with a new in-panel colour wheel to control hue, saturation and value, as well as Scope tools to help users analyse the picture, like Waveform, Vectorscope and Histogram viewers and a pixel analyser. There’s also a new Match Grade node to enhance Nuke’s grading capabilities.

In addition to these UI improvements, the overall speed and performance of the tool have been boosted, along with a new, intelligent context-specific help system.

Using Nuke 8, developers are able to write their own image processing operations inside of Nuke using the new Blink Script node.

Finally, a new Import Nuke function allows developers to use the composite tool as a module in any Python interpreter, and developers of C++ plug-ins can now output planar data in more flexible ways thanks to its new Planar Rendering Framework.

Hugo Guerra, head of Nuke at The Mill, said: “This update of NUKE cements it as the most powerful compositor in the market today. It doesn’t matter if you are making a film, a commercial, a TV show, game cinematics or creating an art installation, you will never be disappointed with its unique scalability and raw versatility”.

You can find out more about Nuke 8 on the Foundry’s website.