The Foundry promises that everything will be better now – and that Nuke 10, which should be ready in spring next year, will be faster, more stable, bug-free and packed with new great features, mainly in Paint, rendering, playback and export as well as a new OpenColorIO integration. Once again.
Nuke Studio will get extra features, including effects directly on the timeline, a realtime keyer (also on the timeline), more control over audio and more performance.
New raytracer / renderer
According to Foundry, a new ray render node adds a native ray tracing rendering engine – which should be better than the previous scanline renderer. The new engine is said to be faster and less resource-intensive, particularly for motion blur, point light shadows, non-linear spherical projection and with support for reflections and ambient occlusion.
Smart Paint
NukeX and Nuke Studio now have a “Smart Paint Toolset” which, according to the manufacturer, is intended to enable a completely new workflow for textures and paintings, even in scenes that contain complex movements or fine details. The toolset is designed to generate vectors that automatically calculate shifts and distortions in an image sequence across multiple frames, making manual cleaning partially superfluous.
Real-time keying
Nuke Studio is getting a new chroma keyer that, according to The Foundry, will work in real time directly on the timeline. Based on the new Blink Script GLSL interface, GPU-accelerated bluescreens and greenscreens are keyed fast enough to continue working immediately – but also with the quality needed for the final polish. If you combine this with the overlay track, context-sensitive changes and adjustments should be possible.
Further updates
GPU: Nuke is finally GPU-compatible – if several identical Nvidia GPU cores are available, these will now be used. In addition, AMD cards are now also supported and, together with the last announced Boltzmann initiative for GPUs, there will probably be some speed increases in the future. (Boltzmann summarised: AMD is building an interface that also allows AMD cards to be addressed by CUDA features, which would eliminate the separation of the GPU worlds – if everything works out.
Roto Paint: The stability and speed of the Roto Paint node is said to have been further improved, and so the need to split rotos across several nodes should be eliminated in future.
Pipeline: Nuke 10 gets the usual polishing of existing brakes and bottlenecks, including further ACES support, OpenColorIO in LUT management, updates in the Pyside and OpenEXR libraries and Blink Script can now address the GPU.
We’ll see which of these will make it into the final release – but we’ll have something to drool over until mid-January, won’t we?
