Leading software developer The Foundry has announced at IBC that a brand new version of its industry standard compositing software Nuke will launch later this year.
“The really great thing about this release is that there will be something for everyone,” says Jon Wadelton, Nuke product manager at The Foundry. “The update will have features and improvements that will benefit users working on commercials, in film, television as well as developers and pipeline TD’s responsible for integrating Nuke at a facility.”
Among the new features in Nuke 8:
- In Nuke 8, artists will notice huge enhancements to the Dope Sheet, allowing them see and move keys around in the context of a timeline style view. They will be able to see the results and each property of a node accurately displayed in context. The new viewing capability will make working with any scripts that involve time manipulation a much more simple process and give artists far greater visibility on their work.
- One of Nuke’s most hotly anticipated features, a brand new Text node will allow artists to compose, edit and animate directly in the viewer.
- Updates to the UI will include a new intuitive in-panel color wheel. Nuke 8’s wheel will control hue, saturation and value and offer artists an automatic precision mode or an optional absolute mode for finer tweaks.
- There will also be a wide range of Scope tools to help users analyze the picture like Waveform, Vectorscope and Histogram viewers and a brand new Pixel Analyser.
- A further update to Nuke’s Camera Tracker will add to the set solve functionality and let artists track and solve cameras from reference stills, helping to assist object or set modeling within one integrated environment. The Model Builder will also feature UV creation for even greater 3D control.
- Brand new 3D tools will include Viewer Capture to allow users to flipbook images from the 2D and 3D Viewer, a new Edit Geo node for greater control, a Particle Cache node to speed up rendering times and the Wireframe Shader node for various visual effects and increased control over projection mapping.
- Nuke 8 adds Deep Output to the Scanline Renderer which will enhance the Deep Compositing workflow. Overall speed and performance will also be improved with the addition of OpenEXR 2.0 multi-part image read and write support, Alembic 1.5 and Planar Rendering. Nuke 8 also features a new intelligent in-context help system.
Details on the release of Nuke 8 can be found on www.thefoundry.co.uk as they are finalized.
