This past week The Foundry held the first ever Nuke master class in London with over 200 European artists packing the audience. You had presentations from The Foundry’s python scripting artist, Jon Waddleton. As well as VFXTalk forum god and gizmo wizard, Frank Rueter, and bunch of guys from FXPHD.

That alone is enough reason for us American artists to try and make the trip across the pond. But what I would have really killed to see is what the day closed with. That was when The Foundry talked about their short term plans for Nuke in the coming year. Including details for what to expect from upcoming version 5.2, and even Nuke 6!

Check out the link below for highlights and the full article.

LINK: The Foundry’s 2009 Nuke Roadmap

Nuke 5.2 (beta testing beginning this month!)

Video Output Support. Broadcast monitor support for the Blackmagic DeckLink card to be followed with supporting AJA IO/HD and Kona cards
Pre-comp External Scripts. Artists will be able to save sub portions of a comp as an external script, which the main script then references. This will effectively enables the first steps of collaboration in Nuke, since another artist could be modifying this external script. Functionality will also include a read-write cache. When a new render is created from this pre-comp script, the main script is notified of changes and can be updated if desired.
Python UI Panels and Callbacks. Extends the capability of creating custom dockable UI panels from within Nuke using Python. Callbacks can allow the UI to change based upon the buttons pressed or values in the fields.
Viewer/Flipbook Performance and Caching Improvements. Cache nodes can be inserted at any point in a graph so that intermediate renders can be done, saving reprocessing time when changes are made later in the graph.
New Metadata Support. Artists can have metadata flowing throughout the graph. For instance, read data could get data from dpx files and provide for use later in the graph. Burn-in would be a simple example of this. It could also read a script included in an image as n EXR channel and build a preliminary comp from it.
RED R3D Reader. Will be using the RED SDK to bring RED footage into Nuke. The standard SDK adjustments will be available for import

NUKE 6:

1) A new roto and paint node
2)Totally updated curve library starting with bezier and bsplines
multiple paint and vector strokes per node
3)A layer hierarchy for splines with editable attributes
4)A toolbox in the viewer to quickly change tools Integrated 3D Camera 5)Tracking, creating a camera and point cloud right in Nuke
6)Integrated Lens Distortion Tools