Escher-Suite-of-Plugins-released-for-NUKE

Mike Wong of Artixels, creator of the Escher Suite for Nuke, recently handed me a press kit announcing the release of Escher 1.0 plugin suite for Nuke. Although admittedly spending a more time on the final version of Escher, pushing back the release date by a month in order to release Escher for Nuke to all platforms including Windows 64, Linux 64, and OS X.

What is Escher for Nuke?

Escher is a suite of image generators and 2.5D creative tools designed for Nuke compositors who are looking for tools to explore the creative possibilities stashed between 2D and 3D. The goal of Escher is to enable creative 3D image making in a different way and at the same time taking full advantage of the organic nature of 2D image processing and manipulation.

Escher 1.0 for Nuke is a suite of image generators and 2.5D creative tools designed for Nuke compositors who are looking for tools to explore the creative possibilities stashed between 2D and 3D. The goal of Escher is to enable creative 3D image making in a different way and at the same time taking full advantage of the organic nature of 2D image processing and manipulation

Previously posted here, we had a look at the skyWalker and depthVader in the Escher for Nuke suite, where skyWalker can create physically accurate daylight providing standard daylight system controls such as details for sun azimuth, turbidity, and ground reflection, and depthVader allows you to explore depth map creation creatively.

Details

Escher offers highly interactive animated image generators which are perfect light sources for image-based lighting in Nuke’s 3D system or Escher’s 2.5D shaders. Spherical Harmonics based processing nodes and high-performance 2.5D shaders of Escher have turned image- based lighting a real-time experience for Nuke compers. By evaluating depth gradient information available inside depth maps, Escher’s image-space ambient occlusion shader allows Nuke compers to fake ambient occlusion quickly without using any CGI renderer. Since 2.5D image making relies on unfiltered images, Escher has an efficient morphological anti- aliasing node which allows artists to polish and finish their 2.5D elements quickly.

In all the Escher Suite is broken down into segmented tools, such as Image Generators, Technical Operators, and 2.5D Shaders. The Escher Image Generators include an animated caustics generator great for abstract experimentation, or pragmatic practical uses, and skyWalker for quickly creating a daylight system in Nuke.

Escher_caustix

The Technical Operators in Escher include depthOp, normalOP, aaOp, and SHOp, which are nodes that will allow you to process depth, normals, anti-ailiasing and spherical harmonics in Nuke.

Lastly, the 2.5D shaders in the Escher Suite include SHader, a SH Based labertian / Phong Shader, glossy which is a glossy shader with importance sampling and pre-filtered samples, depthTrooper which can create image space Ambient Occlusion, and depthVader.

Escher_Workflow_02

Availability

Escher 1.0 for Nuke is compatible with The Foundry’s Nuke 6.3 on all Nuke’s supported 64-bit platforms which include Windows 7, Linux (CentOS 5.X) and Mac OSX (10.5 & 10.6). License Fee starts from US$ 399 for a standalone license and complete pricing information available at http://www.artixels.com.

Founded in year 2011, Artixels is a boutique vfx software developer based in Hong Kong that targets worldwide visual effects production and broadcast design industries as primary markets. Our mission is to create artist-friendly effects software that fuels the creative process