Foundry’s Nuke 15
Foundry’s latest release of Nuke 15 (and 14.1) presents a slew of new features, which we’ll get into, but first a note about why there is a dual release of 15.0 and 14.1: There is a transition underway from VFX Reference Platform 2022 to VFX RP 2023, and along with it a replacement of Linux flavor CentOS 7 with Rocky 9. Since migrating operating systems is not trivial, especially in studio environments, Foundry wants to ensure that the transition is as seamless as possible, so projects can upgrade to 14.1 without breaking current projects and then switch to 15.0 when ready to upgrade to Rocky 9. Not the shiniest update, but supremely important.
CopyCat can be distributed across multiple machines, which is analogous to how you’d render frames on a farm. So, you can set up your training, throw it to other machines and get back to your comp while CopyCat learns. Furthermore, CopyCat has been reconfigured to automatically reduce image resolutions early in the learning process, which speeds up the training. On top of that, with Nuke Studio, you can propagate the training across a sequence, where you’re applying the same effects over multiple, similar shots.
Updates to the 3D environment Nuke have been (and still are) in beta as Universal Scene Description (USD) workflows are incorporated. In a similar fashion to the dual version release, Foundry has kept the previous 3D tools active while migrating things over to the newer system. Lots of features have been added in this round based on beta user feedback. There is a new selection system with a dedicated toolbar for interacting with the 3D objects in the scenes, allowing for selections at the object, face and vertex level, plus you can filter what kinds of objects you want to select.
When dealing with large USD scenes, there is a lot more data to manage. You already had an outliner-type scene explorer window, but it was cumbersome to find, select and apply objects to geo nodes — so Foundry added a pop-up scene graph next to the input field of the node, so you can easily select the object you wish to work with.
GeoMerge has also been updated to include numerous modes in which to merge USD objects into a stage: merging layers, duplicating prims, flattening the layers and flattening to a single layer (for use when exporting USD scenes out to external files).
The new Nukes have been updated to natively support Apple silicon, so running on Macs get a performance boost of up to 20%. This includes timeline and node UX response. In both Nuke Studio and Nuke, Blink scripts, soft effects, CopyCat learning and inference have all specifically been optimized for Apple silicon.
Nuke can now apply planar operations, such as distortions, spherical transforms and Cara VR nodes to up to 64K files. This probably doesn’t apply to us mere mortals who do comp work for films and streaming. But for those who work on exhibit installations and ride projects, this is, indeed, an essential update.
I’m running out of space, but to learn about all the new features, head over to the Foundry website to check them all out.
Website: foundry.com/products/nuke-family
Price: $3,469 (annual subscription); Other prices available (check website)
Mari 7.0
Mari 7.0 doesn’t quite have the breadth of new things as the Nuke 15.0 release, but the depth of the features is critical.
Probably the most substantial upgrade: Mari 7.0 has a new feature called “The Bakery,” which is something that Mari users have long been clamoring for. In 3D texture and shader development, artists frequently drive looks with procedurally derived textures that stem from the geometry of the model. In addition, many of these 3D-driven textures are used to apply looks from very high-resolution meshes onto lower-resolution versions — where you would lose all the fine detail that is in the hi-res model.
In the past, this process was most frequently done in Substance, which meant that artists would have to leave the Mari environment, go into Substance, bake out the maps, go back into Mari, import the maps and apply them. This also meant that the artist would have to learn how to use both Mari and Substance. The Bakery keeps it all in-house. The artist can bake directly in Mari and use the textures directly. Not only that — each exporter in the Bakery has parameters to dial in the look of the maps before exporting, which takes out a lot of the guesswork.
Significant attention has been given to the UX for Mari’s node graph. Decoupling multiple nodes from a network could be tedious before, since you had to detach each pipe. But Mari 7.0 has an edge-sever mode (which looks like a razor) that you can drag across the connections to detach them. Or you can select a group of nodes and detach as a group. Alternatively, just shake the node, à la Nuke or Houdini, to pull the node out of the network. Furthermore, your node parameters highlight in the panel as you click on your node or vice-versa — or you can double-click on a node to bring the parameters to the top of the panel, again, à la Nuke. And, the search tool, accessed via the tab key, is now fuzzy, so typos don’t break the search. You can also get to tools by typing known acronyms instead of typing out the full name of the tool (which is sometimes quite long).
Automatic Project Backups sound like something that has been around for a while, but Mari’s system is a little different as it saves time-stamped iterations, along with thumbnails, and establishes restore points. This is to accommodate for supervisor notes that would require the artist to go back to previous versions. The thumbnails make it easy to find, but to make it even easier, the API has open hooks for the project-management system to access the restored versions and tag the appropriate one with the notes. Once a version is restored, the textures can be baked out and migrated to the newest version of the project.
USD workflows continue to update and stay in line with Nuke and Katana. Most of Mari’s USD updates center around the organization of the USD prims. It now uses the scene tree view of a USD stage for visualization of the prims, which you can then select by clicking or even filtering by expressions. You can also switch between model variants, UV sets, mapping types and frame numbers for animated models.
Website: foundry.com/products/mari
Price: $54.91 (per month); $749 (quarterly rental license); $2,280 (permanent license)
Katana 7.0
You might think that Foundry is big on incorporating USD into their ecology — and you’d be right. Katana 7.0’s big updates focus on USD, the UX working with it and how it works with Katana’s native object system when assembling and lighting shots.
The Katana and Nuke 3D systems use the same architecture under the hood, so they perform in the same way. And the interfaces parallel one another, thus the user experience is very similar. This allows artists who work in both packages to feel comfortable in either. Or, even better, when lighting artists and compositors communicate with one another, they are speaking the same language. This same UX feeling is found in Mari 7.0 as well. So, the whole toolset feels like it lives in the same world.
“But USD has already been in Katana,” you might say. Again, you’d be right. But Foundry has overhauled the USD nodes to conform USD 23.05 with newer USD LIVRPS (Local, Inherits, Variants, References, Payloads, Specializes) standards. The new nodes allow you to establish the order of operations. An additional set of stage manipulation nodes provide non-destructive modifications of the scenes. And there are scheme and TD nodes for establishing paths and data manipulation.
Additionally, Foundry has made it a point to ensure that USD objects and scenes can inhabit the same space as Katana native objects. This is the same philosophy as Nuke’s dual version release or maintaining two 3D systems inside Nuke. Don’t throw away the older system as newer systems are implemented.
Performance and stability have been boosted in Katana 7.0 by taking Live Rendering, which is basically continuous rendering in the viewport as you modify parameters and make it multithreaded using Geolib3-MT runtime. And you can choose the type of caching that is happening, which Live Rendering uses to optimize memory management and speed. Live Rendering is not even really a choice in modern lighting pipelines. You have to be able to see, in real time, how your changes are affecting the scene, especially when you have things that aren’t represented in the GL viewport very well, if at all. Things like global illumination, reflections and refractions. Speeding up the Live Rendering is critical to an efficient lighting environment and reducing iterations.
Katana has generally been a tool for the larger studios as it once needed a broader pipeline. But as more and more studios have adopted it since Foundry took it over from its Sony Pictures Imageworks days, more and more artists are now familiar with it, so now more studios can utilize the growing base of Katana users.
Website: foundry.com/products/katana
Price: $4,199 (per year); Katana Render $323 (per year)
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose many credits include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at teaspoonvfx.com.
