NUKE’s 3D System

Introduction

Nuke’s current 3D system has been supporting artists for many years and allowing for amazing workflows in the compositing space. Originally designed for small-scale workflows in a fixed or flattened structure, we’re now looking to overhaul the 3D system for Nuke 14.0 to help support artists working with modern workflows involving very large scenes with rich structure.

The goal of the new 3D system is to provide a new 3D Geometry System without losing the ease-of-use or simplicity artists currently enjoy, all while providing greater performance at scale. We’re not looking to replace other modelling packages, the focus is on giving artists a faster and more scalable 3D system for what we do in comp, while allowing for new workflows to emerge.

With that in mind a completely new 3D system was introduced which replaces the classic system and is based on the industry standard USD. This allows Nuke the ability to support native USD workflows as well as existing Nuke workflows, provide greater performance and scalability as we reduce the need for complex translation layers for importing 3D scene data and a hierarchical scene graph structure with access to raw USD for easy customization.

Due to the scope of this work we will be looking to implement the new 3D system in stages across the 14 series. This first stage for 14.0 is about implementing the core architecture and getting as close to feature parity as possible. This means that not all nodes or workflows will exist in the new 3D system, so to ensure there is no detriment to artists we will be including the new 3D system alongside the classic 3D system. The two systems will not interact, so you can’t connect nodes from one to the other and once we have developed the new system to a stage we are happy with, we would look to deprecate the classic 3D system.