Aton Adds New Features, Support For Nuke 10

A while back, FrameStore’s Lighting Technical Director, Vahan Sosoyan released ATON, a free open source Arnold to Nuke display plugin that allowed you to push an Arnold IPR preview right into Nuke. Recently, ATON has seen an update that has a few new and welcome features, including support for the Nuke 10 beta.

Aton is Arnold Interface-compatible display driver and Nuke plug-in for direct rendering into the Nuke

The plugin works as an Arnold Interface-compatible display driver and Nuke plug-in for direct rendering into the Nuke interface. This means that you can push an interactive render preview to Nuke from any 3D application that is using Arnold for rendering, MtoA’s native IPR directly in Nuke.

The latest release adds multiple frame support, an AOV toggle, support for using multiple nodes in the same Nuke script, some frame stamp enhancements, a new “capture all frames” feature, and receives some performance improvements which include memory optimizations and bug fixes.

The minimum software requirements for ATON includes Nuke9.0v7 and MtoA 1.2.4.0 at Windows 7, OS X 10.6, Linux GCC 4.2.1 As always it will remain free and open source under New BSD License.

ATON 1.1 Features:

  • Multiple frames support: By default it is enabled, meaning Aton is now taking into account the frame attribute supplied by MtoA and syncing Nuke’s timeline accordingly, so you can have a sequence of rendered different frames cached in a single Aton node.
  • Enable AOVs toggle: If you Disable AOVs, Aton will start to ignore and not cache them for you. This can come useful if you want to render multiple frames, at the same time keeping the memory usage low.
  • Multiple nodes support: It’s now possible to create a multiple Aton nodes either in the same Nuke script or in the separate instance, as well as run renders from a different instances of Maya simultaneously. In order to get this to work, make sure that your Aton node’s Port number is matching with the one which has been added to the Aton for Maya GUI.
  • Frame Stamp enhancements: Arnold version and Frame numbers have been added to the Status bar, and the Time is now resetting after every IPR iteration.
  • Capture All Frames: It’s possible to capture all the rendered frames at once, as a sequence. In this mode the frame number will be inserted in the file names instead of the current date.
  • Increased Performance, Memory optimizations and bug fixes: White scan-lines are no longer visible during rendering, meaning the buffer is now reading by a single thread, which gives a better performance at IPR. All the cached buffers have only 3 channels instead of 4 while the Alpha is a special case for the RGBA channel only.