What's New in Nuke, Nuke Studio and Hiero 11

This page provides an overview of the updates included in Nuke, Nuke Studio, and Hiero 11 and links to the documentation, where appropriate.

Note:  See the navigation bar on the left for links to specific release notes by version.

VFX Platform 2017 Compliance

This is a significant update to Nuke's core libraries and numerous third party libraries, with the aim to provide a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry. For more information on the library versions shipped with Hiero 11, see Third-Party Libraries and Fonts.

AAF Import

Nuke Studio and Hiero now support non-linear retimes imported from Avid Media Composer in the .aaf format. Retimes exported from Media Composer are converted to TimeWarp soft effects in the timeline so that you can adjust them in the Curve Editor if necessary.

Expanded AMD GPU support

Nuke’s OpenCL support has been expanded on Windows and Linux operating systems. As a result, certain AMD GPUs are now compatible with Nuke, giving you more choice in the hardware you use.

ARRIRAW and RED SDK

The ARRIRAW and R3D SDKs have been updated as part of the VFX Platform 2017 work. The new library versions are ARRIRAW 5.3 and R3D 6.2.2.

Denoise

Denoise now includes a temporal processing option, which can help to improve results by averaging the noise reduction over several frames, instead of just a single frame.

Frame Server in Nuke

Nuke Studio's Frame Server is now available in Hiero and NukeX, allowing you to reduce render times by sharing work over the number of render processes specified in the Preferences. You can also use external machines as render workers. The Frame Server logs renders in the Background Renders panel, including information such as script name, Write node, frame range, progress, and whether or not the render produced errors. The Frame Server does not display a progress bar for individual Write nodes, but you can disable Render using frame server in the Render dialog to use the process from older versions of Hiero.

LensDistortion

NukeX and Nuke Studio's LensDistortion node has been improved and streamlined for ease of use. It includes support for spherical and anamorphic lenses and a number of presets and distortion models, and displays the Distortion Equations for the selected lens type. You can estimate the distortion in an image using automatic Grid Detection or draw curves in the Viewer manually to solve the lens. The node also allows you to output STMaps in the motion channel for use elsewhere in the script.

LiveGroups

LiveGroups are a type of container node that can be used in conjunction with LiveInput nodes so that multiple artists can work on different parts of the same shot as separate scripts, without the need for rendering. LiveGroups also offer all the functionality of Precomps, Groups, and Gizmos combining all the functionality that they lack individually.

Just like Precomps, LiveGroups can store independent .nk files, allowing you to save a subset of the node tree as a separate .nk script, render the output of this saved script, and read the rendered output back into the master comp as a single image input.

You can also use LiveGroups like Group nodes to nest multiple nodes inside a single node. The original nodes are replaced with the LiveGroup node. When you create a LiveGroup node, its internal structure is shown in a separate Node Graph tab.

Timeline Disk Caching

Timeline Disk Caching provides reliable playback for more complex timelines by rendering frames to disk using the GPU. The cache provides persistent frames per edit in the timeline that only needs updating for full changes on the edit, such as adding a soft effect. For editorial changes, only the new frames need to be cached.

New Toolsets

The ready-made example scripts in the Toolsets menu have been updated and split into two broad categories: 2D and 3D. The ToolSets give you access to several examples of common compositing tasks, such as multipass rendering from common third-party renderers, keying, particle systems, and rig removal.