JP3 shows off a new tool they have created for the Foundry’s Nuke that consists of a custom extensible frame buffer node in Nuke that will allow you to send renders to Nuke from Maya, Softimage, or any 3D application to preview renders in composite right in Nuke.

So Essentially you are using Nuke to preview renders directly from Maya, ICE/XSI/Soft Image, Houdini, etc. and eliminating the need to use the respective rendering applications native render viewers. JP3 has also developed a Nuke utility that will load an exported scene file into Nuke (i.e. a RIB or an Arnold scene file) and detect the AOVs which includes any custom AOVs that may be there – giving the ability to interactively activate/deactivate AOVs so that you are able to tune the comp in Nuke on the fly, as the scene preview render is completed.

At J3P we recently took advantage of the cortex open source libraries for VFX to develop an ‘open framebuffer’ in Nuke which allows us to port practically any renderer to a Nuke framebuffer — we then donated it back to the cortex project. This is *not* a read node that loads an image, it’s a LIVE connection to the render stream! This means using Nuke to preview renders directly from Maya, ICE/XSI/Soft Image, Houdini, etc. and eliminating the need to use their render viewers… Taking it one step further, we built a Nuke utility to load an exported scene file into Nuke (i.e. a RIB or an Arnold scene file), detect all AOVs (including any custom AOVs) and interactively activate/deactivate AOVs to finely tune our comp on the fly, as the scene preview render is completed. This means more efficient compositing because we can develop a comp plan using all our render passes from square one — we only render what we need so we save on disk space and network traffic. It also means, as long as workstations are on the same network, we can use Nuke to aggregate preview renders from multiple packages in real time and give instant feedback to the lighters in terms of what we’ll passed we’ll need for the final comp… pretty cool. Pardon the spelling mistakes and lack of production polish — we were so excited about the capabilities that we wanted to get this news out there… I’m sure we’ll be cleaning this up soon. Enjoy and please email us with any questions!

Summary:

  • Creates a LIVE connection to one OR MORE 3D renderer’s/3D package’s render stream
  • This is NOT a read node loading image passes from disk, it’s an open framebuffer
  • Start building your comp immediately in Nuke with test render preview framebufers.
  • No need to save out images from your 3D package’s test render view.
  • Launch preview renders from your 3D package directly into a Nuke framebuffer.
  • Render exported scenes directly into Nuke framebuffers (Ribs, Arnold, etc…).
  • Preview render all AOV’s simultaneously and plan which passes you’ll need
  • Automatically detect all AOVs in scene file — including custom AOVs
  • Turn AOVs on and off *EVEN* if they aren’t part of the exported scene file.
  • Preview CG elements from different lighters/renderers on same network simultaneously.
  • Plan your renders and comps much more efficiently.
  • Let lighters know exactly which passes you need before they kick of renders.
  • Harness the power of different packages without interrupting workflow.
  • Allows for a package agnostic pipeline — allows lighters to work the way they choose.
  • Framebuffers automatically update as soon as a new preview render is kicked off
  • Write out comp’d test framebuffers

1 comment

  1. Hey, great work

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