Bringing you the tech of tomorrow for over 20 years

If there’s one thing we can say for sure, it’s this: the visual effects industry isn’t slowing down.

Luckily, we aren’t either. As technology advances and schedules get tighter, creative work meets fresh challenges—so artists need new ways of working and tools that can keep pace.

Our goal is to provide exactly that. We’re constantly anticipating the challenges of tomorrow, so artists can do their best work today. 

We’ve had a lot of practice at this, too. Our inroads into innovation span back over twenty years as we strive to offer it throughout our product portfolio, technical expertise and research and developments efforts. Scroll to see more.

The founding of Foundry

1996: Foundry Founded

Picture the scene: at a borrowed desk in Rushes Post Production in Soho, England, Simon Robinson and Bruno Nicoletti formed The Foundry (later rebranded as Foundry in 2017). With Flame and Inferno standing as the era’s industry standard, Simon and Bruno spend their time creating plug-ins to improve the software and, by extension, artist workflows, pouring their love of post-production and visual effects into each new creation.

Nuke SciTech award

2002: Nuke wins Academy SciTech Award

Under the care of Digital Domain, Nuke is recognised for its technical achievement with an Academy SciTech award after becoming increasingly essential to the success of blockbusters like Titanic, True Lies and Apollo 13.

SciTech Award

2006: Furnace plug-ins receive SciTech Award

Designed to enhance workflow and boost productivity, the Furnace suite of tools allows VFX artists to tackle everyday compositing tasks with ease and speed. In 2006, their design and development gets much-deserved recognition with a SciTech award, having proved fundamental in enhancing VFX in motion picture sequences—and helping artists bring feature films to life in the coming years using Foundry tools.

Nuke logo

2007: Foundry takes over commercial development of Nuke from Digital Domain

Having reached the technical limits of what we can achieve purely through plug-ins, Foundry look for a software platform of our own to broaden our goal of offering the best-in-class tools and services to the visual effects industry. Enter Nuke: a post production powerhouse, and the perfect fit for Foundry’s forward-looking ambitions.

UI shot showing major Nuke releases

2008: Three major Nuke releases bring support for stereo, 64bit, Python, a new interface, multi-channel and FBX support

Nuke 4.8, 5 and 5.1 are released in quick succession, each one improving on the last to offer a host of fundamental features aimed at easing the burden on artists working in post-production. Amongst these releases came a brand new user interface, the addition of Python for scripting, support for stereoscoping workflows, and the industry’s broadest support for EXR images allowing Nuke to read, process and write over 1,000 channels per stream.

2010

2011

Modo logo

2012: Foundry expands product offering with 3D modeling tool Modo

Foundry merges with Luxology, known for their 3D creative software like flagship product Modo. The merger offers a combined portfolio that opens doors to new ways of working, providing artists and designers with increased creative choice.

Discover Modo

2013

2014

2016

Nuke 10 Smart Vectors

2016: Nuke 10 introduces the Smart Vector toolset in NukeX and Nuke Studio

Replacing tedious and error-prone common clean-up, replacement and augmentation tasks, Nuke 10’s new Smart Vector toolset draws on technology from Foundry’s research team to deliver a powerful new workflow to artists working in NukeX and Nuke Studio. With it, artists can generate high-quality motion vectors from image sequences and use them to automatically push or warp paint or textures across a range of frames.

2018

2019

Nuke team with Netflix PTA

2019: Nuke is awarded the Netflix Post Technology Alliance

Nuke is awarded the Netflix Post Technology Alliance (PTA) product designation after rigorous evaluation to ensure it meets the Netflix technical workflow requirements needed in the post production and delivery of Netflix Originals. The PTA program is designed specifically for technology partners, including software and hardware developers of tools such as Nuke.

Being awarded the PTA product designation is testament to Nuke’s success in creating binge-worthy episodic content as demand for streaming services continues to increase from consumers.