Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/115625
VITAL STATS PRODUCT: The Foundry's Nuke 7.0 V.2 WEBSITE: www.thefoundry.co.uk PRICING: NukeX: $8,070/license, includes maintenance, support and free upgrades for a year; Nuke: $4,155/ license, includes maintenance, support and free upgrades for one year; Render license only: $460/license. · GPU acceleration · RAM caching · keyframe-based tracking UVs nor normals. This can lead to problems using UVProject, or assigning textures or materials based off UV space. Speaking of building meshes, ModelBuilder is another new tool. Now within Nuke, you can model your own geometry from scratch! Within the node, you start with any of the primitive shapes, a plane, sphere, cylinder, etc. Or you can draw out a polygon. Then you can select edges, faces, or vertexes and push and pull them to deform the shape. From the right-click menu, you can access a split polygon tool ("Carve") for building in new detail, bevel edges, or extrude faces. It's exactly the same as using basic modeling tools from your favorite 3D application. Perhaps one of the longest-awaited changes has been a useful and predictable SplineWarp node. In Nuke 6, the SplineWarp operated like a single curve in a roto node. The source spline was the base curve, and the destination spline was the feather offset from base curve. If you had two independently moving images that you were trying to match or morph between, it made for some pretty tricky and tedious expression workarounds to get everything to operate correctly. If you have used Shake's warper or ReVison Effects's FlexWarp, the new SplineWarp will feel like familiar ground. Now in Nuke 7, it operates by pairing two separate curves, which can be animated and tracked independently. Each curve can even have a different number of points! The pairs are linked by Correspondent Points that can be added, subtracted or modified to your hear t's content. The Foundry used to hide the Relight node away inside the All Plugins->update menu. It was an interesting node, though a little buggy and not quite fully supported. It created essentially the same effect as ReVision's ShadeShape and ShadeNormals plugins, allowing you to "light" an object or layer based off a set of rendered or created normals. Though Relight takes things a step further, and with the inclusion of a world-position pass, will allow you to actually insert lighting into the rendered scene. If you position a light to a location that would be behind an object, then the light will not illuminate it. It is very cool. The one big drawback to this is that the world-position pass and normals are not anti-aliased. That means that the results from this tool are generally a little blocky and may not line up perfectly to the edges of your nice 3D render. I find a tool like this to be incredibly useful during those eleventh-hour emergencies. As this tool is really quick and interactive, it is also very useful for helping to develop additional lighting to pass back to 3D, without having to go into a 3D program. The Roto/RotoPaint system, which has mostly felt like a work-in-progress, has seen an overhaul, speeding it up significantly and reducing the size of your Nuke files. Especially when getting into paint work. The downside is that existing Nuke 6 scripts with Roto/RotoPaint need to be converted over, so they are not quite backwards-compatible. ZDefocus is the replacement for ZBlur. It is also GPU accelerated, so expect to see some major performance gains. ZBlur allowed you to change the shape of the kernel from being square to being circular.This new node defaults to the same, but also allows you to change it to a bladed iris, with control over the number of blades used for the kernel image. There is even a secondary input to plug in a completely custom image to use as the defocus kernel. With the ability to bloom the highlights too, and you no longer need a third-party plug-in to create pretty depth-of-field effects. Add in Primatte 5, EXR 2.0 support, updated R3D support, updated Pixar RenderMan support and what you end up with is a juggernaut of a release. FINAL THOUGHTS The Foundry has a reputation of delivering powerful tools for artists and leading the charge pushing the limits of what is achievable. They have certainly delivered with Nuke 7. Of course, there is always more work to do. It would be great to see some optimizations and accelerations done to the ScanlineRender node, or at least some viable options other than RenderMan. With so much 3D work being pushed into the compositing arena these days, especially with Mari, Nuke, Modo work-flows, the ScanlineRender nodes can become a huge bottleneck and take just as much time to render a frame as it would out of Maya. Nuke 7 makes some huge leaps, improving upon speed and power, revamping some important nodes like SplineWarp, and opening up more avenues to solve problems with tools like the Modeler. If you are doing projection work, timewarps, clean-up, or stereo compositing, upgrade now: it is worth it. Let us be honest, it is worth it no matter what you are working on. Nathan Overstrom, who was at Zoic for seven years prior to Look Effects, has credits that include Lawless, The Grey, Straw Dogs, Armored, The Stepfather, Obsessed, Quarantine and Step Brothers. His TV credits include Once Upon a Time, V, Human Target, (all of which garnered him VES nominations), Eli Stone and True Blood. www.postmagazine.com Post0313_046-47-Review NukeRAV3finalread.indd 47 Post • March 2013 47 2/28/13 3:44 PM