Foundry ships Nuke 11.3 with powerful collaboration and performance updates

Creative software developer, Foundry, today launches Nuke 11.3, introducing a raft of innovative features and updates to the industry-leading family of compositing and review tools. 

The latest instalment marks the next step in the continuous development of the Nuke family, reinforcing Foundry’s commitment to regularly delivering valuable updates for artists and studios. Nuke 11.3 is the fourth update to the Nuke 11 Series and brings attributes that will improve the user experience and speed up heavy processing tasks for pipelines and individual users. It offers unparalleled flexibility and collaborative workflows, helping artists to achieve their creative potential faster than ever before. 

Key features for Nuke 11.3 include:

Live Group improvements

Nuke 11.3 lands with major enhancements to the popular Live Groups feature. It introduces new functionality along with corresponding Python callbacks and UI notifications that will foster greater collaboration and offer more control. These updates make Live Groups easier for larger pipelines to integrate and give artists more visibility over the state of the Live Group and flexibility when using user knobs to override values within a Live Group. 

Performance boost to the particle system

The particle system in NukeX has been optimized to produce particle simulations up to six times faster than previous versions of the software, and up to four times faster for playback—allowing faster iteration when setting up particle systems.

Multi-file stereo workflows for Nuke Studio, Hiero and HieroPlayer

The new Timeline Multiview support provides an extension to stereo and VR workflows. Artists can now utilize the same multi-file stereo workflows that exist in Nuke on the Nuke Studio, Hiero and HieroPlayer timeline. The updated export structure can also be used to create multi-view Nuke scripts from the timeline in Nuke Studio and Hiero. 

There’s also support for full resolution stereo on monitor out to help make review sessions even easier and a new export preset to help with rendering of stereo projects.

Powerful UI updates for Nuke

New UI indications for changes in bounding box size and channel count help artists troubleshoot their scripts.  A visual indication identifies nodes that increase bounding box size to be greater than the image, helping artists to identify the state of the bounding box at a glance. Channel count is now displayed in the status bar and a warning will be triggered when the 1024 channel limit is exceeded. The appearance and threshold for triggering the bounding box and channel warnings can be set in the preferences. 

The selection tool has also been improved in both 2D and 3D views, as well as an updated marquee and new lasso tool making selecting shapes and points even easier. 

Christy Anzelmo, group product manager at Foundry, commented: “The Nuke team has delivered two substantial releases this year, with a renewed focus on deep customer collaboration and understanding real production challenges. We have ambitious plans for the future - especially around performance and the timeline-based tools. 

It’s really fantastic that the core features in this release were informed to a large extent by customer insights; we’re especially proud of the development we’ve done to features like multiview stereo in Nuke Studio, as well as Live Groups and the potential of this feature to transform how teams collaborate.”

Graham D. Clark, producer and stereographer at 9hole.com, added: "Super happy to have multi-view stereo support in Nuke Studio. Awesome work Foundry people!

Nuke Studio has been a wonderful app to manage dailies of feature films on, being able to play back entire features reel by reel at 4K. With just a little scripting and Nuke Studio's incredibly extensible SDK, integration with Nuke Studio and a pipeline allows us to quickly find shots by vendor, status, etc. Dailies have become very efficient. Now with multi-view stereo support, standard separate left and right image pairs come in to Nuke Studio, without translation, immediately. Thank you!"

Nuke 11.3 goes live today and will be available for purchase – alongside full release details – on Foundry’s website and via accredited resellers.