A couple of weeks ago I posted a quick rant about how paint in compositing packages is so bad. I'd like to follow that post up with why I think it's so bad and what needs to be done about it.

Nuke from the The Foundry. Nuke is a fantastic compositing package and one that will remain great for a long time to come. Remember I'm not bashing nukes compositing features. I trust that The Foundry will maintain nuke and keep refining it and adding features.

One thing Nuke will never really have is good paint. Why, you ask. Big vfx facilities that have site licenses[the big places] of Nuke are not using Nuke for paint. Compositors dont do big paint jobs in Nuke period. Compositors will avoid paint at all costs. I know I used to. Here is the thing, if you are going to paint 1 frame or 1200 frames it helps to have paint that holds up. You want it to be an interactive fast flowing experience. Paint is hard enough. But even painting one frame in Nuke can be a slow pain in the ass. Here is the problem, I don't think The Foundry has any incentive to make the paint better, only to have good enough.

Now not to beat up on The Foundry. Nobody has done this. Shake didn't do it either. I have talked with many painters over the years and most of the real digital painters the last time paint was good was in Matador. That's right I said Avid Matador. This is software that was made in 1996. It ran on a SGI that was fast and interactive. The ram was limited and so was the cpu power. So why cant we get interactive and fast paint on todays 16 core, 16 gigs of RAM MacPro.[it doesn't really work that well in Linux either]

So here is the challenge for The Foundry.

Give us RotoPaint that works and doesn't slow your script to a crawl is fun and consistent to use.

I have always said paint is a huge part compositing.