The Foundry dropped news today of a new tool in their collection called ‘Katana’, a 3d scene preparation tool that operates non-destructively and interactively on even very large datasets. Originally developed by Sony Imageworks for use in films like Beowulf, it’s now in use by several studios.
“Many brilliant technical innovations come out of production, but historically those breakthroughs remain only within the production company. The Foundry works with digital studios to make those innovations widespread, which benefits the entire industry. I look for KATANA to have a similar impact on the industry that Nuke has achieved.” – Cliff Plumer, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Domain.
Dreamworks Animation joins the ranks of Walt Disney Animation, Framestore, ILM, and Sony Imageworks by choosing The Foundry’s Nuke as their standard compositing tool, to be first used in their upcoming feature film “The Croods”.
“Nuke is an incredibly powerful tool that will enable our artists to more readily embrace compositing as part of our creative process,” added Darin Grant, Head of Production Technology at DreamWorks Animation, “The Foundry has impressed us with their commitment to advancing the product and we look forward to an ongoing relationship with their team.”
The Foundry has just released two new plugins for Adobe After Effects fans, adding impressive camera tracking and matchmoving directly into the popular compositing tool.
First up is ‘CameraTracker’ which can analyze a source sequence to extract the original camera information and motion, then enabling 3D compositing within the shot. Previously only available in NukeX, now it’s available directly within Adobe After Effects CS5.
The other plugins is Khronos5, the first plugin to be accelerated with the Foundry’s new GPU-accelerated ‘Blink’ technology that runs on either the CPU or a CUDA-compliant GPU for maximum performance. The new Khronos 5 offers realtime retiming and motion blur based on their popular Furnace algorithms.
Both plugins are available today, along with a special offer to get RollingShutter and CameraTracker together for After Effects for only $150. Hit up the Foundry Website for all the details.
The Foundry has just released new versions of NUKE and NUKEX with several minor and major features like OFX 1.2 support, FrameCycler Pro 2009 support, RED 3.1 support, and FBX support. Several new features aimed at improving interoperability with other applications and the entire workflow, along with some little tweaks to improve Nuke like a new Ultimatte keyer and 3D Snapping/Selection tools. However, if you were holding your breath for OSX 64-bit support, you’ll have to wait just a bit longer.
The NUKE team are aware that this is in hot demand, but are determined to get it right. This support will be added with NUKE 6.1v2 which we hope to release in a matter of weeks. In the interim there is a really stable beta build if you’d like to try it out.
Hit their website for all the details, and the opportunity to download beta licenses.
An article at CGSociety talks to the guys at The Foundry to discuss the new task-level parallelism they’ve exploited in the new Nuke framework named ‘BLINK’. Built by their HPC team Bruno Nicoletti and Jay Cornwall, they’ve been able to boost performance to process SD Footage at 200fps.
The Central Processing Unit in your desktop or laptop isn’t the only processing device. The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) was designed with fast processing and rendering of the 2D and 3D graphics in mind. They were hard-wired to perform common graphics operations. Now, these are changing. First was the introduction of the OpenGL programming language. The NVIDIA released the CUDA language, which gave programmers access to the massive computing resources inside their GPUs. Even though writing code for the CPU is easier, the sheer number of simultaneous actions a GPU can do makes it a much more attractive option. It is quite possible to win ten-fold to 100-fold speed increases in a GPU over an equivalent generation CPU.
Looks like The Foundry has begun a new initiative to ‘crowdsource’ some of their support functions with a website called ‘Nukepedia’. Collecting scripts, plugins, sample footage, and more, it’s a one-stop website for all things Nuke. In addition, they have feature articles and interview with industry big-names, such as this one with Bill Spitzak, where they discuss Nuke’s history with the FLTK library:
Nuke 2 used Mark Overmars’ Forms library, written for Irix GL. I had to rewrite this to use OpenGL and at the same time this was happening Linux started to be used and we realized that OpenGL was much too slow to use as the main interface (pretty much the opposite as today!) so the toolkit had to be rewritten to use X for all the non-3D parts. Since this was changing everything anyway, I thought changing the api to C++ and making widgets that matched our actual usage would be a good idea, and this is where FLTK came from. Wook, who was managing software at that time, gave me permission to release FLTK as open source, and it was therefore available just as open source took off. Open source was a big win, in particular we got, for free, a port to Windows.
(Nuke is QT now). The site still looks pretty young, but does have a nice selection of Python scripts available for download.
The Foundry has just rolled out their first version of MARI, a digital texturing and painting application for Linux and Windows.
MARI has a creative toolset which puts many stand-alone 2D paint systems to shame, allowing artists to concentrate on painting. The user interface is responsive and fluid. You can paint directly on to models and view the results immediately. Save time and take texturing way beyond what was previously possible.
Developed at Weta digital for use in District 9, Avatar, and The Lovely Bones, the system already has industry credibility. It offers impressive speed and workflow integration aspects, integrating with several of the tools available already.
Currently only available for Linux, a Windows build is on the way. Hit their website to buy it or get a free evaluation.
Southpaw technology has just announced their impressive asset management product TACTIC now integrates with The Foundry’s NUKE compositing software, giving you a 1-stop tool for asset management, workflow, and compositing.
“Securing, tracking and versioning shots is a complete headache for most artists and most productions,” said Dr. Bill Collis, CEO of The Foundry. “As productions grow in size, the headaches will only get worse. We’re really excited about this new integration because it will not only solve many of the file management problems that slow productions down; it will boost the quality of composites by freeing artists to spend more time on shot creation.”
They’ll be demonstrating it at SIGGRAPH in booth #205, and the product is available today. Full release after the break.
The Foundry dropped news today of a new tool in their collection called ‘Katana’, a 3d scene preparation tool that operates non-destructively and interactively on even very large datasets. Originally developed by Sony Imageworks for use in films like Beowulf, it’s now in use by several studios.
Dreamworks Animation joins the ranks of 
An article at CGSociety talks to the guys at The Foundry to discuss the new task-level parallelism they’ve exploited in the new Nuke framework named ‘BLINK’. Built by their HPC team Bruno Nicoletti and Jay Cornwall, they’ve been able to boost performance to process SD Footage at 200fps.
Looks like The Foundry has begun a new initiative to ‘crowdsource’ some of their support functions with a website called ‘Nukepedia’. Collecting scripts, plugins, sample footage, and more, it’s a one-stop website for all things Nuke. In addition, they have feature articles and interview with industry big-names, such as this one with Bill Spitzak, where they discuss Nuke’s history with the FLTK library:
The Foundry has just rolled out their first version of MARI, a digital texturing and painting application for Linux and Windows.
VizWorld.com 
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