Foundry releases Nuke 15.0, NukeX 15.0, Nuke Studio 15.0
Posted on 2 September 2023 for the public beta, and updated for the final release.
Foundry has released Nuke 15.0, the next major update to its family of compositing and editorial applications.
Key changes include native support for Apple Silicon processors, experimental support for new open standard OpenAssetIO, and updates to the new 3D system.
NukeX, the advanced edition of the software, also gets updates to AIR, Nuke’s machine learning framework, including the option to distribute CopyCat training sessions.
Nuke Studio, which includes editorial capabilities, gets updates to support a greater range of effects on the timeline.
In addition, Foundry has released Nuke 14.1: a parallel release based on the CY2022 VFX Reference Platform specification, rather than the CY2023 spec used in Nuke 15.0. It has the same new features, aside from native Apple Silicon support.
Nuke 15.0, NukeX 15.0 and Nuke Studio 15.0: CY2023, OpenAssetIO and Apple Silicon
Nuke 15.0 features a number of updates to key pipeline technologies, including support for the current CY2023 VFX Reference Platform specification, and for USD 23.05.
The release also introduces experimental support for OpenAssetIO, the Foundry-developed open standard for exchange of data between DCC and asset-management software, which was adopted by the Academy Software Foundation last year.
The documentation describes the initial implementation as a “very basic tech preview” introduced to let studios begin testing OpenAssetIO in their pipelines.
In addition, Nuke 15.0 introduces native support for the Apple Silicon processors in current Macs, improving general performance speeds by “up to 20%” on macOS.
The change makes Nuke the latest key application in VFX pipelines to support M1 and M2 processors natively, Autodesk now having introduced support in Maya and Arnold, and SideFX having introduced support in Houdini.
Nuke 15.0, NukeX 15.0 and Nuke Studio 15.0: updates to the new 3D system
The 15.0 releases also extend the USD-based 3D compositing system introduced in Nuke 14.0 last year.
UI and workflow updates include a dedicated 3D toolbar in the viewer, and two-tier selections – for example, to select faces within an object – for more precise control.
There are also accompanying updates to the Scanline Render system and to the GeoMerge node, used to merge stacks of objects into a single scene graph.
The latter gets four new merge modes, intended to give users more control over how data is merged when using the new 3D system.
The underlying USD implementation now supports the USD Python bindings, making it possible to manipulate USD data directly through Python; and gets structural changes intended to improve performance, to make it easier to inspect and filter complex scenes, and to provide greater user control in future export workflows.
NukeX 15.0 and Nuke Studio 15.0: distributed training in AIR
There are also further updates to AIR, Nuke’s machine learning framework, intended to enable users to train their own neural networks to automate repetive tasks like roto.
Training times when using the CopyCat node have been reduced by “up to 50%”, with key changes including the option to distribute training across multiple machines.
Nuke Studio 15.0: new timeline soft effects
Nuke Studio users get more complex Blink kernels available as soft effects in the editorial timeline, including Denoise, LensDistortion and blur effects.
AIR’s Inference node is also available as a soft effect.
Price and system requirements
Nuke 15.0 is compatible with Windows 10+, Rocky Linux 9.0 and macOS 12.0+, and supports Apple Silicon processors natively.
Nuke 14.1 is compatible with Windows 10+, CentOS 7.4-7.6 Linux and macOS 12.0+. It supports Apple Silicon using Rosetta emulation.
You can find pricing information here.
Read an overview of the new features in Nuke on Foundry’s website
Read a full list of new features in Nuke 15.0 in the online release notes
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