Foundry has released Nuke 14.0, the latest version of it node-based digital compositing and visual effects tool. Highlights including the completely new USD-based 3D system (beta), a free library for third-party machine learning models, Cattery, alone with other performance improvements. Check out more new features of Nuke 14.0 with XRender!
| A New USD-based 3D System
In Nuke 14.0, a new 3D system (in beta) that built on USD (Universal Scene Description) will work in parallel with the classic version that artists used to, allowing a more efficient creation workflow that “in line with modern standards”. Significant features introduced in Nuke’s new USD-based 3D system including a dedicated scene graph, new path and masking workflows, over 40 new nodes, and USD-based workflows.
The new scene graph comes with a dedicated Scene Graph panel to make it easier to view, navigate and manage large production 3D scenes.
Path and masking workflows are improved, with new path knob and mask knob to manipulate nodes that create or modify 3D geometry.
New material and light nodes were introduced in Nuke 14.0, allowing users to preview the materials and lights immediately once USD files are imported. The new USD-based 3D system is available in all four of the commercial editions of the software: Nuke 14.0, NukeX 14.0, Nuke Studio 14.0 and Nuke Indie 14.0 and currently in Beta. You may choose to use the classic version that you are used to or join the beta version and leave feedbacks in its 3D System Forum here.
| Update UnrealReader, Introduce Cattery & Improve AIR
UnrealReader, a node connects Nuke to Unreal Editor to generate live renders from Unreal Engine and have the result controlled in Nuke (earlier introduced in Nuke 13.1) also gets improved. In the new version, UnrealReader now supports OpenColorIO for matching of color spaces between Nuke. In addition, users may access custom render passes like Class and Post Process Material passes directly in Nuke 14.0
Foundry has launched Cattery, a library of free third-party machine learning models converted to .cat files to run natively in Nuke, designed to bridge the gap between academia and production, providing all communities access to different ML models that all run in Nuke. Users will have access to state-of-the-art models addressing segmentation, depth estimation, optical flow, upscaling, denoising, and style transfer, with plans to expand the models hosted in the future. Cattery is currently download-only, but Foundry plans to open the site up to user submissions.
Nuke’s machine learning framework, AIR, also get further extended of its UI and performances. Updates include a new checkpoint targeting human matting that has been added to CopyCat, speeding up training by up to ten times. In addition, training a network using the CopyCat node is now “20% faster” on Nvidia’s Ampere GPUs, and it is no longer necessary to wait for kernel compilation when running the tools for the first time.
| What’s More
The new releases also bring Nuke in line with the current VFX Reference Platform specification, CY2022, updating the software to Python 3.9.1, OCIO 2.1.2 and ACES 1.3. What’s more, the login-based licensing is now available across the entire product family, including plugins and render nodes.
Nuke, NukeX and Nuke Studio 14.0 are available for Windows 10+, CentOS 7.4-7.6 Linux, and macOS 11+. The releases support current Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 12.0+ only, and only via Rosetta emulation. You may read the release note of Nuke 14.0 from its product page for more details or click here to download.
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