Nuke (software)

NUKE is a node-based digital compositing application developed by The Foundry, and used for film and television post-production. NUKE is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. NUKE's users include Digital Domain, Walt Disney Animation Studios, DreamWorks Animation,^[2] Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Pictures Animation, Framestore,^[3] Weta Digital^[4] and Industrial Light & Magic.^[5] NUKE has been used on productions such as Avatar,^[6] Mr. Nobody, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, King Kong, Jumper, I, Robot, Resident Evil: Extinction, Tron: Legacy,Alice in Wonderland, Black Swan and The Hobbit.

History

NUKE (the name deriving from 'New compositor')^[7] was originally developed by software engineer Phil Beffrey and later Bill Spitzak for in-house use at Digital Domain beginning in 1993. In addition to standard compositing, NUKE was used to render higher-resolution versions of composites from Autodesk Flame.^[8]

NUKE version 2 introduced a GUI in 1994, built with FLTK - an in-house GUI toolkit developed at Digital Domain. FLTK was subsequently released under the GNU LGPL in 1998.^[9]

NUKE won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2001.^[10]

In 2002, NUKE was made available to the public for the first time under the banner of D2 Software.^[11][12] In December 2005, D2 Software released NUKE 4.5,^[13] which introduced a new 3D subsystem.

In 2007, The Foundry, a London-based plug-in development house, took over development and marketing of NUKE from D2.^[14] The Foundry released NUKE 4.7 in June 2007,^[15] and NUKE 5 was released in early 2008, which replaced the interface with Qt and added Python scripting, and support for a stereoscopic workflow.^[16] NUKE supports use of The Foundry plug-ins via its support for the OpenFX standard (several built in nodes such as Keylight are OpenFX plugins)

References

External links

• Official product page
• Sourceforge site for the OpenFX effects plug-in standard