AMSTERDAM — The Foundry (www.thefoundry.co.uk), based in London, has announced that a brand new version of its Nuke compositing software will launch later this year. Nuke 8 will offer artists 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 scripts that involve time manipulation a more simple process and give artists greater visibility on their work.
A brand new text node will allow artists to compose, edit and animate directly in the viewer. The software’s grading and color correction tools will also see improvement, as will the user interface, which will include a new in-panel color wheel for the control of hue, saturation and value.
Nuke 8 will feature a wide range of scope tools to help users analyze the picture. These include waveform, vectorscope and histogram viewers, along with a brand new pixel analyzer. Other color innovations will include a match grade node that will enhance Nuke’s grading capabilities.
Nuke’s updated camera tracker will let artists track and solve cameras from reference stills. 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 VFX and increased control over projection mapping.
Version 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.