Nuke 12.0 Beta .

The soft selection mechanism makes it easier to make subtle changes to geometry. You can now modify your selection of geometry faces or vertices, adding customizable soft falloff to the selection. Alterations to geometry made using EditGeo or ModelBuilder will be applied with the selection falloff, creating soft transitions in your geometry modifications. Nuke 12.0 has 7 built-in soft selection curves and provides a UI for you to make custom curves.

You can now enable Soft Selection at the top of the viewer or with the N hotkey, and then select points or faces while capturing surrounding points within a certain threshold to create a natural selection falloff.

You can utilize soft selection with the rectangle, elliptical or lasso selection tools, and it allows multiple selection areas with the use of the shift key.

By hitting ‘S’ in the viewer to open the viewer properties and switching across to the 3D tab, you now have access to advanced soft selection controls, such as the ability to set the soft selection falloff radius, the falloff curve shape and the ability to define your own custom shapes.

The Inpaint node is a new painting tool available inside of Nuke ideal for removing things such as tracking markers, blemishes, or wires and benefits from GPU acceleration to provide fast results.

With the Inpaint node you now have a way to create contextual paint strokes inside of Nuke that makes cleanup work even faster and the logic of the algorithm means that the performance of the node is independent of the size of the fill regions you are using to drive your Inpaint.

The stretch controls to bias the inpainting in a defined direction and the detail controls allow for greater control and the cloning of high frequency textures from another part of the source image, or even from a different image.

This provides a new paint and cleanup workflow in Nuke to create contextual paint stokes, or alpha shapes to drive quick and intuitive clean up work that can capture subtle changes across an image sequence such as changing lighting conditions.

A new GPU accelerated EdgeExtend node replaces the traditional edge extend workflow where you premult, blur, then unpremult and repeat as necessary. Edge Extend allow you to erode the sample region to pull pixels from deeper inside your alpha and the algorithm behind the node works independent of the size of the fill regions you are trying to extend, meaning that you will retain great performance regardless of the scale of the patch you are working with.

Additional controls allow users to erode or dilate the sample region, as well as the ability to recover the original high-frequency detail and noise. We also ensure that no artifacting is introduced with this node, which can sometimes be an unintended consequence of custom edge extend workflows.

The GridWarp Tracker node in NukeX is a new tool for helping create match moves, tracker warps and morphs.

This node provides an alternate solution to the manual tracking you previously had to do when utilising the planar tracker, which would constrain you to rigid transformations. WIth the GridWarpTracker you can warp across custom defined grid shapes and use Smart Vectors to drive the grids.

Within this node a To and From grid enables you to add and copy tracking data between grids, allowing you to retest or make amendments without losing your original data and without having to create a backup version of the node.

You can also add an adjustment grid where you can modify your To or From grid shapes without altering the original grid data. Because adjustment grids are driven either by the tracking data applied to the To or From grid, you can make changes to your adjustment grid on a single frame and have this propagate across the entire sequence. You can also set keyframes for finer adjustments and correction.

The majority of CaraVR’s nodes have now been integrated into NukeX (14 in total) making these tools available for VR and stereo workflows as well as enhancing standard workflows for clean up and camera solving.

This includes 14 GPU-accelerated nodes, including Cara VR’s:

• SphericalTransform: Additional options and GPU accelerated

• STMap and GenerateMap: Faster STMap results and the ability to use position pass generated by the CaraVR GenerateMap node instead of a STMap to help with artifacting in extreme cases.

• Camera Ingest:  Easily match your rig and offset the cameras or easily import 3D cameras.

Nuke 12.0 does not include: C_DisparityGenerator, C_VerticalAligner, C_NewView, and C_StereoColourMatcher. Please let us know if these are a valuable part of your workflow and worth adding in a future release of Cara VR.

Cara VR 2.1 will be built for Nuke 12.0, we are planning for this to be the last version of Nuke with support for the standalone version of Cara VR.

As part of this merge, VR Headset support will be available in Nuke, Nuke Studio, Hiero and NukeX.

*As of Beta#5 - C_DisparityGenerator is also included.

We have overhauled the way that Nuke redraws its UI, to improve performance at scale. Previously, as a script’s node count went above 1,000 nodes the frame rate of the UI would begin to drop, causing Nuke’s UI to feel unresponsive. We now expect the UI frame rate to be at (or near) the top performance of 30fps with node counts well above 10,000, maintaining interactivity and responsiveness for large scripts.  These benefits extend to scripts with many nodes encapsulated in Groups and LiveGroups. There is also a speed up in script loading time for scripts with more than 2,500 nodes.

While this improvement is very promising in our internal tests we are very interested to know what benefits are seen within production environments, so please share your experiences!

As part of this release we have optimised memory management and image initialization of Nuke’s EXR Reader, as well as further optimisations to Nuke’s EXR writer.

The result is improved performance using EXR, with the biggest gains seen on planar-based compression types including PIZ, Zip16, and DWAA.  EXR performance also benefits from upgrading to version 2.3 and being compiled with SSE4 (Streaming SIMD Extensions 4).

Below is a snapshot of our internal results for EXR Reads on Windows and Linux. Please let us know how this compares to your own internal testing.

The playback engine in Nuke Studio, Hiero, and HieroPlayer has received significant improvements aimed at supporting stable playback at higher resolutions and higher frame rate. In particular, we have optimized for playback of multichannel EXRs.

Avid DNxHR footage encoded with the following compression levels can now be read in .mxf containers*. 

• DNxHR LB - Low Bandwidth (8-bit 4:2:2) Offline Quality

• DNxHR SQ - Standard Quality (8-bit 4:2:2) (suitable for delivery format)

• DNxHR HQ - High Quality (8-bit 4:2:2)

• DNxHR HQX - High Quality (12-bit 4:2:2) (UHD/4K Broadcast-quality delivery)

• DNxHR 444 - Finishing Quality (12-bit 4:4:4) (Cinema-quality delivery)

*In previous betas (#1 & #2) reading DNxHR footage in mov containers was supported. This has been intentionally disabled in later betas as we continue to refine and develop this functionality. 

The RED SDK version has been upgraded to version 7.1.

This adds support for GPU accelerated decoding of RED footage in Nuke using CUDA-based GPUs as well as various bug fixes offered by the latest RED patch release. 

There is a known issue with RED support for Compute Capability 3 (Kepler generation) and below NVIDIA GPUs. We are working with RED to find a solution for this issue, but CC3 cards and below have been disabled for decoding and debayering RED footage.

Note that these fixes may lead to slight visual differences compared to Nuke 11.3.

Improved Sony footage processing on OpenCL-enabled GPUs.

Sony support has been upgraded to version 3.3, supporting v4 of the VENICE camera which introduces X-OCN XT

We have updated our monitor out to support the latest AJA (15.0) and BlackMagic SDKs.

AJA we now support 15.1 drivers and above.

BlackMagic we now support 10.11.4

“The VFX Reference Platform is a set of tool and library versions to be used as a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry.”-  http://www.vfxplatform.com/

In addition to upgrading these core libraries, Nuke uses numerous third party libraries, many of which had to be upgraded too. This is a broad and significant upgrade, that sees Nuke using the latest versions of technologies like Qt and OpenEXR.

This beta does not include the ACES 1.1 OCIO Config. We are hoping to add this in a future beta.

Nuke’s Viewer has been updated to bring the GPU modes in line with the CPU viewer. We have also introduced an optional high-frequency dithering algorithm for the GPU viewer.  While primarily a bug fix, we would appreciate testing and validation of this work.

OCIO roles provide a way to set an arbitrary name as an alias for a specific colorspace. This can make managing and selecting colorspaces more user-friendly and also make it easier to share scripts. 

WithOCIO roles you can set custom role names for different colorspaces to make it easier for artists to instinctively know which LUT to use, for any given piece of footage. For instance, if an element is coming from your matte painting department and should always be brought into Nuke as sRGB, you can simply create a matte painting role, with is associated with the sRGB colorspace for your artist to select.

This feature introduces a new colorspace knob which makes OCIO roles the primary method for selecting colorspaces. All of the colorspaces in the config will still be accessible but these have been grouped together into a colorspaces menu beneath the roles.

OCIO roles are set up within your OCIO.config. Error handling has also been improved, so that when artists are switching between shows there isn’t any mishandling of which roles or LUTs are available or should be used.

We now support UI scaling on high-resolution monitors and Retina displays for macOS. This resolves an issue in earlier betas where the viewer output was less accurate using macOS Mojave.

The ARRI Reader Plugin has been optimized to provide a better interactive experience when making adjustments to ARRIRAW (.ari) images