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.
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.
Todd Vaziri:
Here are the nominees for Achievement in Visual Effects for the 89th Academy Awards. Congratulations to everyone involved in the creation of these magnificent images.
Thanks Todd I am being lazy this year. Also check out this article Todd wrote it's a good one for any Star Wars fan.
Mads:
Here is a little breakdown of a tool i created called TrackAssist. Based on the core of my StickIt toolset, this tool uses the CameraTracker node to generate relative motion to guide tracking points, in areas where the 2D tracker would fail. It has the option to triangulate or a full frame median. One of the major advantages is that you can use this tool with roto or keying, and that it can track areas that are off-frame.
For someone who does a lot of beauty work this looks very cool. Have a look at the video.
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.
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.
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.
Andrew Paxson:
WHAT LANGUAGE SHOULD I LEARN FIRST?
Python. Houdini, Maya, Nuke, Modo, and Blender all implement python and allow you to do some amazing things! Python is super easy to use and the support online and in studios is very vast! Later I recommend, if you are an Houdini Artist, C++ and VEX. For Maya artists, MEL and C++.
I agree with all of this. I sometimes wonder why Python isn't a requirment for jobs that have to do with any of the above software. I know many senior artists that have no coding skills at all. That doesn't make them bad artists it just means at some point they will run out of options for problem solving.
Every year you hear people talk about how the work wasn't ground breaking or new. This year it's hard to make that staement. In some way all of these films are making something really hard look easy. I havn't seen some of these movies but the ones I have seen the work is top notch.
Jeff Heusser:
In London recently BECTU (Broadcasting Entertainment Cinematograph and Theatre Union) formally requested recognition to represent the compositing department at MPC. fxguide spoke with Paul Evans from BECTU as well as Joe Pavlo, an artist who has been heavily involved in the effort.