Hasta La Motion!

Last week, FXGuideTV had the privelege of talking to Jon Wadelton, Nuke Product Manager from The Foundy, to discuss some new features in the upcoming release, Nuke 6.2 which should become available towards the end of the year.

List of features and improvements:

Dope Sheet

Allows the user to change the timing of Read nodes and keyframes as well as change in/out points to allow much more efficient retiming.
All Nodes opened in the properties bin appear in the Dope Sheet.

Image Modeler

Similar to PFTrack’s modeling tools, it uses a solved camera and the source image to allow you to mark features in 2D on multiple frames and use trigionometry to create the 3D geometry. It can extract textures from the source image and can be used to create cards, proxy geometry for projection or 3D reference.

Projection Solver

Using a still frame and a 3D model, the user matches at least 6 features between both inputs to allow the node to solve a camera position for projection.

Dense Point Cloud

Using a solved camera and the source image, it generates much denser and much more detailed point clouds than the camera tracker node to be a much better scene reference. This prevents having to bump up the feature count to extreme levels.

External 3D Rendering

Rather than just the Scanline Renderer, Nuke 6.2 will support (for now) Pixar’s Renderman to render. A few of the benefits is support for detailed shadows, reflections, refractions, simulated DOF and motion blur. This is most helpful for pipelines that have integrated PRman and need their renders to match 100%.

Rendering performance improvements

Particularly OFX processing has been improved

Flipbook workflow improvements

Canceled flipbook renders will still display frames rendered so far, Region of Interest added.

Filebrowser workflow improvements

Multiple file import

Expression editor (multi-line python)

Personally, I’m most excited about the addition of the Dope Sheet, which has been on my wishlist since day one, especially for shots that require stock footage to be comped in. No more cumbersome expressions or retime nodes just to offset the clip.
It will make Nuke’s superiority to Fusion even greater.