The Foundry ships Nuke 6 and Nuke X visual effects software

The Foundry has released version 6 of its Nuke visual effects compositing software, which sees the debut of the expanded NukeX software too. As before, the software runs across Linux, Mac and Windows.

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.

The Foundry's highly acclaimed Keylight keyer is now a standard feature included with Nuke 6.0.

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The Foundry has released version 6 of its Nuke visual effects compositing software, which sees the debut of the expanded NukeX software too. As before, the software runs across Linux, Mac and Windows.

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.

The Foundry's highly acclaimed Keylight keyer is now a standard feature included with Nuke 6.0.

NukeX 6.0 extends the range of tools usually found in the compositing environment adding an integrated 3D camera tracker, automated and manual lens distortion tools, FurnaceCore -- The Foundry's re-engineered set of Furnace plug-ins -- and a DepthGenerator plug-in.

The Foundry says that 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 and NukeX are fully script compatible, with Nuke capable of editing supported parts of projects created in Nuke X -- ie all nodes except those found only in NukeX.

The company says that the key new capabilities in Nuke 6.0 include:

RotoPaintAny number of shapes and paint strokes with a flexible layer/group hierarchyPer-point and global featherPer-shape motion blurIndividual shape, stroke and group attributes and transformationsAnimation key frame and tracker supportRecursive clone and other brush effectsBlending modes and layer operations

KeylightNow included as a standard feature, Keylight is a widely-used blue/green screen keyer (and bundled with tools such as Adobe After Effects). It is designed to be simple to use and is particularly good at tackling reflections, semi-transparent areas and hair.

Key new capabilities found in NukeX 6.0 only include:

3D Camera TrackerIntegrates directly into Nuke's 2D/3D image processing environment providing live and in context access to Nuke's powerful pre and post processing toolsAnalyze 2D image sequences and automatically solve to re-construct the 3D camera with unknown, approximate or known, constant or varying constraintsControl automatic track selection and distribution and add user generated track dataAutomatic geometry creation for 3D point cloud and camera scene native to Nuke's 3D and animation systemPerforms simultaneous solves for both eyes for data from stereo-3D capture

Camera Lens Distortion ToolsIntegrates directly into Nuke's 2D image processing environmentUn-warp and warp image sequences using a parametric lens modelLens modeling through automatic analysis or manual feature identification

FurnaceCore contains the core plug-ins from The Foundry's Academy Award-Winning Furnace tool set. The set has undergone many enhancements, including improved parameter layouts and documentation.Kronos, high quality time warping based on optical flow technologiesMatchGrade, copy the grade from one sequence to anotherMotionBlur, add realistic blur based on the motion in the sceneDeNoise, removes or reduces all kinds of noise from your footageDeGrain, optimised removal of film grain from a plateReGrain, add grain to your clean plates or graphics from stock or sample your ownDeFlicker2, removes in-scene flicker from light sources of all kindsSteadiness, smooth a shots camera move, or lock off a shot completelyRigRemoval, remove unwanted foreground objects from a shotAlign, align similar shots automaticallyWireRemoval, quickly clean up wiresVectorGenerator, generates motion vectors for use in other nodes