You should have a look here
Nuke celebrated at the Sci-Tech Oscars →
Mike Seymour:
Nuke started life at Digital Domain (DD) and then moved to The Foundry. The awards honor both the early work and the continuing R&D that has made this software the cornerstone of so many serious pipelines. Today, Foundry's Nuke has become a ubiquitous tool used across the motion picture and visual effects industries. It's nodal approach to compositing and effects has enabled novel and sophisticated workflows at an unprecedented scale and is used the world over.
While I have complaints about Nuke and The Foundry, Nuke is a amazing piece of software. If you can think it you can do it with enough time and money.
Roto-brush point reduction
Mads writing over at hagbarth.net
One of the (many) things that can slow down Nuke scripts is a extensive use of Roto brushes. Nuke does not do any smart cleanup of brushes after you lay them out, and that sadly leads to a ton a redundant roto points, that does nothing but take up space and make your script slower to process and autosave.
I have always said that the RotoPaint node is very slow. I generally keep all RotoPaint nodes to 100 strokes or less. After 100 it really doesn't matter how much python you throw at it. Mads thanks for pointing out this script on GitHub it should be useful to some TD's that are building there own paint tools.
Just as a side note. Please, please don't hand animate your paint strokes. Use a tracker. Mads has some great tools for doing tracking for beauty work. Mocha and other Nuke tools will do a better job and it will be faster.
Nuke 11 Beta →
The Foundry:
We’re pleased to announce the beta of Nuke, NukeX and Nuke Studio 11.0 is now available for Nuke customers with current maintenance to test!
While I can't talk about what I have found in the Nuke 11 Beta I can point you over to the The Foundry's Beta Page so you too can try it out. Lots of cool things. I will also remind all FXPHD students that have the VPN setup can also try out the beta.
Running Nuke on Mac OS X(El Capitan- macOS Sierra)
Now I would like to begin with, if you are in a production environment you should not be using El Capitan or macOS Sierra on your machines. That being said there is a problem with the zooming in the viewer on El Capitan and macOS Sierra.
After OS X El Capitan was released we became aware of viewer performance issues when zooming or moving overlay elements (such as roto widgets or transform jacks). The engineers worked to fix these issues ahead of the NUKE 10 release but unfortunately the fixes were non-trivial and it wasn't possibly to safely fix these bugs without causing other issues in time for the NUKE 10 release.
Work is ongoing on these fixes but due to these open issues El Capitan is not a fully certified platform for NUKE. This remains a high priority for the Nuke team and we hope to be able to fix these issues in a future maintenance release. This article will be updated when we have more news to share.
It is currently possible to turn on the work in progress bug fixes for the El Capitan issues by setting a couple of environment variables for NUKE 10. Please note, these environment variables enables are experimental so please take caution if you need to use them in production.
The changes the engineers have made so far can be enabled by setting the following environment variable before running Nuke:
If your like me and run Nuke at home thru the FXPHD VPN and are running Mac OS X El Capitan for learning and training these two links might be helpfull.
Update: Ben Woodhall Software Engineer The Foundry writing on the Nuke mailing list.
Hi Ned,
Sorry for the delay in dealing with this issue. I know it’s been a long time coming but there is a fix in the pipeline for El Capitan.
Apologies on two fronts. Firstly, I can’t promise a release date/version (but, not speaking for The Foundry, I expect it to be in an imminent 10.5 release). Secondly, it has taken way longer than a usual performance fixes to solve this. This was a particularly troublesome issue because it involved an interaction between OS X changes and Qt only when there are regular input events and window updates at the same time.
Thanks, Ben
Good to hear. While there are fixes and work arounds, I'd rather just have it work and be able to use the newest drivers from wacom.
In and Out →
Conrad Olson:
I really dislike the "In" and "Out" operations in Nuke and in this video I explain why and give you four reasons why you should use "Mask" and "Stencil" instead.
NuBridge →
Nukepedia:
a bried teaser video showing the main features of teh upcoming nuBridge - a gateway to Nukepedia from right inside of Nuke.
This seems very cool for smaller places that don't have TD's or Policies in place to prevent this type of interaction with the outsiade world(internet). I have worked at places that also have worries about copy right. I'll install it for sure, because I am really who this tool is built for.
Nice work Frank and company.
Vote For Tools →
Frank Rueter:
I have set up an experimental voting system on nukepedia to let people suggest and vote for tools/enhancements that the user community could provide, since often there are cool ideas around here that would be worth collecting.
The idea is that people that are interested in creating custom tools (and have time to do so) can be inspired to tackle stuff that others need.
Depending on how this works out, we could even consider little sprints, where a bunch of people connect for a weekend or so to tackle the top suggestions, and help each other out in thee process.
As mentioned above, this is just a little experiment for now to see if there is enough interest in the community to contribute ideas and votes.
It's like having your own TD. Go vote for your favorite. So far Deconvolve tool (removes Motion Blur or Blur) has 42 votes.
Nuke 10 - Introduction & New Features Demo →
A demo of the new features in Nuke 10. The Nuke demo starts at 18 mins.Before that is all Nuke Studio features. If you haven't played with the betas you should.
Cragl Tools →
In February Cragl released a set of 4 tools that help Nuke/Maya artists communicate and work on projects. Cragl tools are made by Simon Jokuschies.
From the Cragl Website:
Connect with smartMessage
smartMessage gets you connected to your local artists and artists world wide. You can write messages and share node setups, images, files and much more.Connect locally and world wide
You can work with both - local storage of the data and storing everything on our server. The local option is interesting for companies that don't want to out source their communication data to the web. Everything is stored on a place on your server that all artists can access. So the machines don't need to be connected to the internet. The online option stores all data on our server.
One of the main topics that come up over and over is artist communication in the same post house and at a house on the other side of the world. Most places just use whatever the default messaging app is on the given platform. This means Messages on the Mac. Pidgin on Linux and Windows. I know there are others but these are the ones that I have found in most places. This tool can also be installed for Maya artists. If you have ever been waiting for asset from 3d and then 2 hours later you see the artist in the hallway only to find out that the asset has been there for hours. This tool might help. If you have ever run into the file size problem in Messaging apps sending cameras even big Nuke scripts can be problematic. This was a hard one to test. Meaning I didn't, but the idea of having a way to communicate with other artists right in Nuke/Maya would be huge.
From the Cragl Web site:
The project and shot managemet system – you will love it.
smartLib is a project and shot management system for NUKE. Do you find yourself oftten switching between several shots and projects? Then you will love this tool.
Keep track of all your work and collaborate
You can set shot status and write comments for each shot and thus keep track of your work. Everybody using smartLib in your company will also see each shot status and comments which makes collaborating among artists simple and fast.Create shot templates and setup render directories
smartLib lets you create fully customizable shot templates to create new shots with the folder structure you need. Besides you don't need to set up render locations manually anymore.
If you work at a place that still uses a spreadsheet to manage a project because the projects are just not big enough to warrant a license of fTrack or Shotgun, you might want to forward a link to smartLib onto a producer or supervisor. This tool doesn't replace those other tools if you are heavily invested but smartLib can move you from that spreadsheet.
From the Cragl Website:
Manage your node menus in a new way
smartShelves lets you manage you custom shelves including nodes and gizmos in NUKE in a simple fast and intuitive way. You can always add new nodes and gizmos, assign shortcuts to them and edit and delete items whenever you like. You can use smartShelves also for your custom repository. Just link to a custom folder and all gizmos are installed automatically on your machine.No need to script anything anymore
To set up custom shelves you usually need some python scripting. smartShelves does that job for you. You can create custom shelves and add nodes and gizmos and don't need to >script any line of code for that.
Managing tools in Nuke can be hard. SmartShelves solves this and does it in realtime. The stop and restart of Nuke is a killer. Most artist just want to create cool stuff not manage a growing set of gizmos, toolsets and other setups. SmartShelves makes that much easier.
From the Cragl Website:
Efficiently locate your recent scripts
Don't waste any time searching nuke scripts manually in your explorer. All your recent work is immediately accessible. You can also reveal a script directly in your explorer.Keep track of how many scripts you want to see
You can always decide how many scripts you want to see in the smartRecents window. If you need to you can also flush the list.Display on every startup. Or whenever you like
You can choose to automatically show the smartRecents window whenever you start a new NUKE session. Or use the hotkey to display the window whenever you like.
Recent scripts are also a topic. If you can manage them right its easy to move between Nuke scripts but managed wrong and everything goes bad. For a lead of Supervisor that is on the box having this tool is huge.
If you haven't yet had a look at these tools you should. Many tools are built with visual effects in mind but not just Nuke/Maya. The price of the tools seems very good and having a trial makes it a no brainer to at lest see if the Cragl tools are better than your spreadsheet or archaic method of dealing with Nuke if you don't have time or not a coder.