With the release of NukeX 7.0v6, the Foundry is including two copies of it’s new Assist product, a stripped down version of Nuke that only “includes tools for the tasks of roto, paint, and tracking.”
This is a value added move to try to make the pricing hit of a NukeX license a bit more easy to swallow for smaller shops. Historically, companies like Eyeon offered limited versions of their software (in that case, “Rotation” to compliment Fusion) with the hopes of unseating Flame and the Flame assistant’s license of Flint/Flare/Combustion/Silhouette/AE in commercial heavy pipelines. On a base level, it makes a lot of sense to parcel these out when even boutique VFX shops have departmentalized paint/roto aside from compositing. Why have a bazooka like NukeX aimed at a molehill? And perhaps Diet Nuke/Nuke Lite/Nuke Dime/Nuke Nuked (I could go on…) is a good way to boost the amount of firepower you can throw at a shot, and give the powers that be one less excuse to pony up some extra NukeX coin.
Offering Assist has immediate value for the company pocketbook when it comes to frame by frame type work, but from the artist standpoint there’s not much to know or get excited about here. Assist is highly crippled and quickly deteriorates for higher level tasks, and as is, there will probably be a juggling act associated with using it in production. SplineWarp was not included in the toolset, nor were any 3D tools for geometry assisted paint work, which is to be expected – but that’s the bread and butter area of most higher level artists. In fact, not even the Grade node was included – which, as you can imagine, makes it hard to grab a clone source from another frame or do any sort of relighting to your paint work. I can’t think of the last paint shot I had that didn’t have a grade node. Assist can open any Nuke script, and unsupported nodes will render but be outlined in red and their controls grayed out. Write nodes are disabled in Assist.
For this to have real value outside of a press release, The Foundry might want to rethink the scope of what it’s definition of especially paint includes – but worth noting that this wasn’t beta tested widely and should be considered a v1.0 release. The Foundry may decide to change what’s offered in the toolset based on initial reaction. In my opinion, they also have a couple of line items out of whack as far as what’s offered in NukeX vs. regular Nuke, like GPU accelerated rendering. But hopefully these things will iron out given more time to digest. Ahhh, whatever… whaddya gonna do… it’s “free.”
For more info, catch the press release here.
Nodes included in this initial Assist toolset:
Did someone say Assist? Dame can help with that.
Image
Checkerboard ColorBars ColorWheel Constant
Read Viewer
Draw
Radial Ramp Rectangle Roto RotoPaint
Time
FrameBlend FrameHold FrameRange TimeEcho
TimeOffset
Channel
Add Copy ChannelMerge Remove
Shuffle ShuffleCopy
Color
Invert OCIO CDLTransform OCIO Colorspace OCIO Display
OCIO FileTransform OCIO LogConvert
Keyer
Keyer
Merge
AddMix Dissolve KeyMix Merge
Premult Switch Unpremult
Transform
Crop CornerPin PlanarTracker Reformat
Tracker Transform TransformMasked
Views
JoinViews OneView ShuffleView Split and Join
Stereo Anaglyph Stereo MixViews Stereo ReConverge Stereo SideBySide
Metadata
AddTimeCode CompareMetadata CopyMetadata ModifyMetadata
ViewMetadata
Other
Backdrop Dot Group Input
Output PostageStamp StickyNote
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