Big Day →

By Jeff Heusser:

The Oscars are this weekend and by all rights should be dominating the news cycle. This week is different with multiple important visual effects business related stories hitting in a one day span.

I can't believe its been a year and almost nothing has changed. Not from lack of trying, I guess we just keep going hoping for change. We are a very smart group who loves what we do. I hope we can change the ideas that the non visual effects professional have. We need to edjucate not laugh when they say "CGI".

ILM’s scientific solutions →

Ian Failes:

ILM is no stranger to the SciTech Awards; numerous innovations crafted by its artists and engineers have been recognized with prestigious Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The studio’s latest two SciTech honors were awarded recently for ILM’s GPU-based simulation and volume renderer Plume and the Zeno application framework. fxguide spoke to key members of ILM’s team about these in-house visual effects tools.

Gravity VFX Supe: US Pros Not Young Or Hungry Enough To Compete →

vfxsoldier:

Yet statements like Mr. Webber’s go unchecked and what makes it particularly disappointing is how obviously wrong it is.

Visual effects work follows the money, not the talent. The artists follow the work. Some of the best work in the past years have come out of London and Vancouver. This will continue until the money goes somewhere else. Then the artists will move to that local. I personally know a lot of amazing artists that live and work in the USA. I also know a lot of amazing artists that work out the USA that would love to come back.

OpenCL →

Dave Girard:

The lackluster support of OpenCL is likely the biggest thing standing in the way of software transitioning from CUDA to OpenCL on OS X. Apple needs to stop just talking big about OpenCL and offer the aggressive support it needs to actually compete with CUDA. It’s a sad irony that Apple invented OpenCL only to see it better supported on competing platforms and that dealing with Apple to resolve problems is “unpleasant” because the company is so opaque. It is safe to say that the breakneck pace with which Final Cut Pro X 10.1 got its excellent dual GPU support wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t an Apple product with two teams in shouting distance of each other. Next time you read that some software isn’t optimized for the new Mac Pro or OpenCL on OS X, think twice before sticking the pitchfork in the developer—it might be Apple slowing it down.

I have been reading thru all the MacPro reviews and wondering where the The Foundry are with OpenCL. They where mentioned in by Apple in the WWDC keynote. But that doesn't mean they are getting help from Apple. I hear that an OpenCL version of Nuke is coming but how long and how good will it be. Having a GPU just for Nuke would be great but only if it works. In this same review a developer asks Apple to make Mac OS X versions of OpenCL comparable to the Linux and Windows versions.

The OS X version Mari is said to be pretty good, I hope it is going well with the Nuke code.

Nuke Support →

Daniel Eran:

Mac Pro at video editing, 3D modeling and animation, photography, graphic design, audio, and science and technology professionals.

The Foundry has not made it clear or official but the comunity would love to have a OpenCL version of Nuke. Having a GPU just for Nuke would be pretty huge.

Blink →

Nick Deboar:

This is a pretty cool development for Nuke. Think of it as a much faster version of the expression node. It allows you to write code directly in Nuke that can be multi-threaded via the GPU or CPU, with C++ like performance.

Busting Nuke Premultiplication Myths →

Lester Banks:

Quite often if an image is using an alpha channel, to save on additional multiplications during compositing, the color of the image is multiplied by the alpha value. This is what a premultiplied alpha is, and it needs to be treated differently than a regular alpha channel when compositing.

This is so offen a problem with a script.

Craft 1.3.0 →

They call it an interactive 3D toolkit for matte painting and compositing. It now works with Nuke 6.3 thru 8.0.

Sprut →

Theodor Groeneboom:

Sprut is a simple set of free tools for 2d fluid simulation work within The Foundry’s Nuke. Based on and around Jos Stam’s 1999 Siggraph paper “Stable Fluids”, it was created using standard Nuke 2D nodes , making it the first truly open, flexible and portable fluid toolkit within Nuke

Oh, well then.

Update:

Here is a disscussion on the nuke user fourm