Nuke 12.0 Release notes
Soft Selection
The Soft Selection feature extends how you can interact with geometry and cards in the 3D viewer. Soft Selection gives you a customizable falloff to your geometry vertex, face, or edge selection. Combined with Nuke 11.3’s lasso selection mode, this feature makes modifying geometry for projection setups, last minute adjustments, or any number of 3D workflows more streamlined.
Edge Extend Node
Discover Edge Extend, the second of our new GPU accelerated nodes. Edge Extend speeds up artist’s everyday workflows, allowing you to erode or dilate your sample region to pull pixels from deeper inside your alpha. As well as giving you the ability to recover the original detail and noise with no introduction of artifacts.
Inpaint Node
Introducing Inpaint, one of our new GPU accelerated nodes for common compositing tasks. Our Inpaint node gives you the ability to create contextual paint strokes similar to Photoshop’s Healing Brush, whilst controlling the level of detail, or pulling this detail from another part of the source image, or a second image entirely.
Grid Warp Tracker
The Grid Warp Tracker helps create match moves, track warps and morphs, as well as allowing you to warp across custom defined grid shapes and use Smart Vectors to drive the grids. The 'To and From' grid workflow enables you to add and copy tracking data between grids, allowing you to retest or make amendments without losing your original data, or having to create a backup version. Exclusively in NukeX, you can use Smart Vectors to drive the grids or set multiple grids for finer adjustments.
Cara VR Node Integration in NukeX
The majority of Cara VR’s nodes are now integrated into NukeX. This includes a suite of GPU enabled tools for VR and stereo workflows, as well as enhancing traditional camera solving and clean up workflows. Multiple camera setups become easier to manage with Cara VR’s Camera Solver, allowing artists to easily toggle between custom camera setups and solve, to generate a single image. The CameraIngest nodes allows you to easily import cameras from CG or other packages, to use with the Camera Solver. As part of this merge, VR Headset support will be available across the Nuke family, including in Nuke, Nuke Studio, and Hiero.
Nuke Studio, Hiero & HieroPlayer Playback Performance
This release includes much more stable playback across the timeline-based tools in the Nuke family. The update comes as a result of new timing and control logic in the playback engine, optimized for the heavy I/O demands of color managed workflows with multichannel EXRs, especially at higher resolutions and frame rates.
Interactive Performance
Nuke 12.0 ships with a variety of optimizations, throughout the software, to improve performance, especially when working at scale. One key improvement offers a much smoother experience when working on large projects and noticeably maintains UI interactivity when working in scripts with over 1,000 nodes. This benefit extends to scripts with many nodes encapsulated in Groups and Live Groups and also results in faster loading of large scripts.
EXR Read and Write Performance
We’ve optimized performance of both reading and writing of EXRs. Some of the biggest improvements are seen when using planar-based compression types, such as PIZ, Zip16, DWAA and DWAB, allowing for faster reading of files, whether locally from disk or off a network. Reading in data can be a major performance bottleneck, improving read speeds adds to interactive performance and reduces processing time when rendering scripts.
OCIO Role Support
The Nuke family now supports OCIO roles, which allows you to set custom role names as an alias for a specific colorspace, making it easier for artists to know which LUT to use and to share scripts between projects or facilities. You still get access to all the colorspace options you always have, but now the roles can act as a quick way to understand the color workflow of a given show. We’ve also improved error handling, so when artists are switching between shows, there isn’t any mishandling of which roles or LUTs are available or should be used.
Industry Standards and File Format Updates
Nuke 12.0 supports VFX Reference Platform 2019, which sees Nuke using the latest versions of Qt and OpenEXR. The RED SDK has been upgraded to version 7.1, including support for CUDA-based GPU decoding of RED files in Nuke and NukeX. Sony SDK version 3.3 adds support for v4 of the VENICE camera and X-OCN XT files. SDKs for BlackMagic and AJA monitor out cards have also been upgraded to the latest major versions. Additionally, the Nuke family now supports reading of DNxHR encoded .mxf files. See the Tech specs and release notes for full details of updated format, GPU and operating system support.
