Nuke Non-Commercial is now free to download

The Foundry has released Nuke Non-Commercial, its new free edition of Nuke for learning, personal projects and research work. The new version was released to coincide with NAB 2015.

No watermark, but still quite a few restrictions
First announced last October, Nuke Non-Commercial provides users with access to the complete feature sets of Nuke, NukeX and Nuke Studio 9.

Unlike the PLE edition it replaces, its output isn’t watermarked, although there are still quite a few restrictions, including a couple of new ones since the edition was originally announced.

First of all, everything the software saves or exports, including scripts and gizmos, and data copied to the clipboard, is encrypted; and cannot be loaded by the commercial editions.

Output is capped at HD resolution, there is no support for third-party plugins or Frame Server slave rendering, and Python scripting and use of Terminal mode are restricted.

In addition, 2D format support is disabled for MPEG-4 and H.264, as are the WriteGeo, Primatte, Ultimatte, BlinkScript and GenerateLUT nodes; and there is no video monitor output support.

As you might expect, users of the Non-Commercial edition don’t qualify for one-to-one support, but The Foundry has set up a dedicated product support forum.

So who can use it?
The new edition is descrbed as being for “anyone who wants to learn, explore and have fun with Nuke”.

That includes students wishing to learn the software, but unlike Autodesk’s educational licences, it can’t be used by educational institutions wishing to teach the software.

And unlike Pixar’s free edition of RenderMan, research use doesn’t include developing commercial plugins.

The Foundry has quite a detailed FAQs section on its website covering who is and isn’t eligible to use the software, so if you’re unsure, it’s worth checking that out first.

Availability
The free Nuke Non-Commercial edition is available now for 64-bit Windows 7 and 8, Mac OS X 10.8 and 10.9, CentOS/RHEL 5 and CentOS/RHEL 6.

The software is available as a rolling licence, so you’ll need to be online every 30 days to keep using it. You can run the software on up to two machines at a time.

Read more about Nuke Non-Commercial on The Foundry’s website
(Includes download link: registration required)