What's New in Nuke, Nuke Studio, and Hiero 14.0

Nuke 14.0 presents a beta 3D system with greater performance, over 40 nodes and new workflows, alongside updates to UnrealReader, login-based licensing, and the Cattery.

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

New USD-Based 3D Architecture (Beta)

We’re completely revamping Nuke’s 3D system introducing a new beta USD-based system to allow artists to efficiently work with modern 3D scenes at scale.

The new USD architecture brings Nuke’s 3D in line with modern standards and introduces a dedicated scene graph, new path and masking workflows, over 40 nodes, and new USD-based workflows. We’ll be continuing to develop the new 3D system across the Nuke 14 series and, to ensure artists don't lose access to any workflows they are used to, the new system will work in parallel with the classic 3D system.

See New 3D System Nodes (Beta) for more information on the nodes available in the new 3D system.

New 3D System: Scene Graph

With the new 3D system comes the introduction of a dedicated scene graph that allows users to easily view, navigate and manage large, complex 3D scenes. Artists will get a clear, visual overview of a scene and experience the intuitive drag-and-drop functionality to new path masks in nodes. This advanced scene graph is consistent with modern 3D workflows and ensures every primitive inside the new system will have a unique ID path that will exist in a scene graph hierarchy.

See New 3D System Nodes (Beta) for more information.

New 3D System: Paths and Masking

We’re giving artists greater control with new path and masking workflows. All nodes that create geometry will have a new path knob that enables users to determine where the geometry they’re creating lives in the scene hierarchy and how it's named. Similarly, any nodes that modify geometry will have a new mask knob that allows artists to specify which part of the 3D scene that node should affect. These knobs are based on a simplified CEL expression language that allows the use of tokens and expressions. For artists, this means that the knobs can default to intuitive workflows with minimal input, but also allow for complex selections if you want to go deeper.

See Paths and Masks Control the Scene for more information.

New 3D System: Lights and Materials

Introducing new material and light nodes in Nuke 14.0. With support for USD material networks, a new PreviewSurface material node allows for USD-based specular or metallic workflows and materials can display immediately in the viewer when working with USD files with their own looks. This gives artists a way to quickly see their assets in a more accurate representation inside Nuke’s 3D viewer. New USD lights mean that when importing lights from other USD-based applications, you will have the exact same lights inside Nuke and when combined with Hydra and potential future support of additional renderers in Nuke’s viewport, this means artists could see a more consistent image across applications going forward.

See Light Your Scene and Assign Textures to Objects for more information.

New 3D System: Feedback Forum

So that you can help continue to shape the new 3D system across the 14 series, we are introducing a dedicated community forum to enable discussions and feedback with the 3D team. We’re interested in hearing from you in regards to all areas, from existing nodes and workflow improvements, new node or workflow suggestions, feedback on performance, the API, or new features such as the scene graph or path and masking workflows.

Join us to help develop the future of 3D compositing workflows in Nuke: https://community.foundry.com/discuss/nuke3d

UnrealReader

In Nuke 14.0, UnrealReader features support for Unreal Custom Render Passes allowing for effects like non-photorealistic rendering, OpenColorIO to allow matching of color spaces between Nuke and Unreal, easier picking of Sequences, and access to Unreal Sequence metadata to retrieve info on objects like lights.

See Visualize Unreal Scenes in NukeX and Nuke Indie for more information.

CopyCat Performance Improvements

Nuke 14.0 ships with UI and performance improvements to Nuke’s AIR tools. These updates include a new checkpoint targeting human matting that has been added to CopyCat, speeding up training by up to ten times. We’ve also upgraded to PyTorch 1.12.1 which widens the range of support for models converted to .cat via the CatFileCreator node and sped up CopyCat training by 20% on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs.

See Train Neural Networks to Replicate Effects Using Machine Learning for more information.

Introducing the Cattery

The Cattery is a library of free third-party, open source machine learning models converted to .cat files to run natively in Nuke. Cattery aims to bridge the gap between academia and production, giving everyone access to a range of ML models that all run in Nuke. We’ll be giving you access to state-of-the-art models addressing segmentation, depth estimation, optical flow, upscaling, denoising, and style transfer, with plans to expand the models hosted in the future and open the site up to user submissions.

Head straight over to Cattery and start making use of the ML models here: https://community.foundry.com/cattery

Timeline Updates

You now have access to full OCIO soft effect support in HieroPlayer. This means projects imported from Studio or Hiero can be opened and all the OCIO soft effects can be accessed and adjusted. New instances of OCIO soft effects can be added on new tracks or clips, giving you even greater control over how you work in HieroPlayer and allowing you to review in the context of a sequence. We’ve also updated OTIO to the latest 0.15 version so that pipelines can continue to explore this new format for moving editorial data throughout your pipeline.

Colorimetry Metadata in Monitor Out

For artists working with HDR data, we are including colorimetry metadata support to allow for users to have an easier and quicker setup for their monitoring devices. You can now enable and control metadata passed over HDMI or SDI, so that their video content is automatically displayed in HDR on their appropriate monitor, helping to reduce setup time and providing greater workflow efficiencies.

OCIOv2.1 and ACES 1.3

We’ve updated Nuke to support OCIO 2.1.2 and, as part of that, users will also be able to use the latest ACES version 1.3. This includes new color space conversion transforms for supporting ARRI, Sony, Red and BMD cameras as well as the ACES Reference Gamut Compression algorithm for fixing highly saturated images lit with LED light sources.

We are also pleased to announce that we have also added two new configs:

  • studio-config-v0.1.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.1.2 - The ACES Studio config is geared toward studios that require a config that includes a wide variety of camera colorspaces, displays and looks. In spirit it is close to the ACES 1.2 config whilst leveraging the new OCIO 2 features and being smaller. As of this release, it does not contain any external dependencies such as LUT files.
  • cg-v0.2.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.1.2 - The ACES CG config is intended for use in CG lookdev, lighting, and rendering applications. It implements a fully-featured ACES color pipeline without the many camera input transforms that make up the bulk of the OCIO v1 ACES configs. The CG config is completely self-contained (no external LUT files), providing a single file color pipeline with minimal clutter. It has robust support for the most common texture and working color spaces, and SDR and HDR output transforms used in high-end CG production environments.

See Consistent and Accurate Color Management with OCIO and ACES for more information.

Login-Based Team Licensing

We have extended support for login based licensing to the entire Nuke Family (including render licenses and plug-ins) and expanded it to include new features and functionality for teams and organizations.

Login-based team licensing allows you to manage your pool of licenses, with a number of new tools and features for administrators to control who has access to them, giving you more control and greater flexibility over how you administer and use your software and licenses.

Note:  Login-based team licensing is entirely opt-in, you can continue using the existing RLM licensing system if that covers your licensing needs.

For more information on licensing Foundry products, see https://learn.foundry.com/licensing/.

VFX Reference Platform 2022

The VFX Reference Platform is a set of tool and library versions to be used as a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry. See https://www.vfxplatform.com/ for more information.

In addition to upgrading these core libraries, Nuke uses numerous third-party libraries, many of which were also upgraded. This is a broad and significant upgrade, that sees Nuke using the latest versions of technologies like Python and OpenEXR.

Linux Only

  • GCC → 9.3.1

macOS Only

  • Min Deployment Target → macOs 10.15 (Catalina)

Windows Only

  • Min Platform Toolset  → Visual Studio 2019
  • Windows SDK → 10.0.19041

Common Components

  • Python → 3.9.1
  • Qt → 5.15.2
  • Qt Python (Pyside2) → 5.15
  • OpenEXR → 3.1.4
  • Alembic → 1.8.3
  • OpenColorIO → 2.1.2
  • ACES → 1.3
  • Boost → 1.7.6
  • Intel TBB → 2020 Update 3
  • Intel MKL → 2020
  • C++ API/SDK → 2017

ARRI Image SDK version 7.0.0

Support for the new ARRI Alexa 35 camera using the ARRI IMAGE 7.0.0 SDK is now out of the beta phase and supported in Nuke 14.0.

Note:  Legacy ARRI files including .ari, .arx, and .mxf files load using the older ARRI RAW 6.2 SDK.

Sony and R3D SDK Updates

The Sony and R3D SDKs have been updated to 4.21.0 and 8.3.0, respectively. These SDK updates also contain bug fixes for previous releases and include support for new camera:

  • Sony Venice 2
  • Red V-RAPTOR XL