Friday, June 6th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

The Foundry ships Ocula 4

The Foundry has released Ocula 4, a “complete overhaul” of its suite of Nuke plugins designed to address common problems in stereoscopic workflows.

As well as refinements to individual tools, the update adds support for GPU-acceleration: something that The Foundry has been implementing in Nuke itself since version 7.0. More details in the press release below.

Ocula 4 is available now for Nuke 8.0 on 64-bit Windows 7 and above, Linux or Mac OS X 10.7 and above. To make use of the new GPU-accelerated features, you’ll need a suitable CUDA graphics card.

A node-locked or floating licence costs $10,800 and a render licence costs $1,100, excluding tax.

PRESS RELEASE (Excerpts)
OCULA 4 introduces a complete overhaul of The Foundry’s industry standard stereo post production toolset. Rewritten engine tools and plugins provide a dramatic change in out-of-the-box quality, accuracy and pipeline automation, as well as simplified workflows to ensure fast turn-around times regardless of the number of shots.

The upgrade is the result of two years of dedicated work and collaboration with leading artists and facilities worldwide. The next generation of algorithms introduced in OCULA 4 deliver clean consistent data, rebuild sharp more accurate images, while ensuring greater fidelity to original plates and guaranteeing that disparity and depth are handled better than ever before. OCULA 4’s improved toolsets significantly reduce the amount of manual work required when dealing with color and focus matching, rebuilding and retiming views and vertical alignment.

Andy Whitmore, Chief Product Officer, The Foundry, says: “OCULA 4 steps up to meet the ever increasing demands of artists for quality results, efficient production workflows and enhanced project turnaround. The new features include quick and easy alignment correction and automation, which sees the simplification of Solver controls, updated feature matching and the ability to auto-analyze sequences.”

Other upgrades include changes to the Vertical Aligner tool, as well as a New View tool, Colour Matcher, Focus Matcher and new review tools. This update also includes GPU acceleration with the same results on CPU and GPU.

With the upgrade, OCULA 4 brings added flexibility, consistency and accuracy to the stereoscopic VFX workflow, which ultimately results in improved efficiency for artists.

Read more about Ocula 4 on The Foundry’s website