Many of these drew on Foundry's core image-processing expertise which had proven so valuable in the plug-in market, including Foundry’s own Academy Award winner, Furnace. That same year, Nuke expanded its range to include NukeX ®, which combined the core functionality of Nuke with an out-of-the-box toolkit of exclusive features. Having joined Foundry in 2007, after being tempted over from his native Australia, he began working as Lead Software Engineer and later became Foundry’s CTO in 2015. In 2010, Jon Wadelton became Nuke’s Product Manager. It was soon a standard fixture in film pipelines across the globe. Throughout the next few years, starting under the guidance of product manager Matt Plec, Nuke improved in leaps and bounds, as Foundry added hundreds of new features-including a built-in camera tracker, denoise, deep compositing and stereo tools-and extended its core with Python, Qt, 64-bit and multi-platform support. ![]() “It looked like a fun way to expand what we did, and to further our interest in continuing to do ‘more stuff’.” ![]() “We'd all been aware of it for a while, and knew it was highly regarded,” recalls Simon. Foundry were looking for a software platform of their own, having reached the technical limits of what they could achieve purely through plug-ins. In 2007, Foundry took over the development of Nuke from Digital Domain. “I think everybody was pretty happy about that,” says Bill, although he adds that having to make a speech “caused some panic.” In 2002, Nuke was honored with an Academy Award for technical achievement. Simon Robinson remembers, “Being software people in London just when digital effects really started to take off was great all we wanted to do was get together to do more stuff.”įor the next five years or so, Foundry and Digital Domain marched on in parallel as the industry matured, and visual effects became increasingly essential to the success of films at the box office. Together, they poured their love of post-production and visual effects into creating plug-ins for Flame and Inferno. Both came from computing backgrounds, with Robinson studying Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Cambridge, and Nicoletti receiving a Bsc in Computer Science and Mathematics, at the University of Sydney. Meanwhile, in a garage somewhere in England, Simon Robinson and Bruno Nicoletti were forming The Foundry, later rebranded as Foundry, in 2017. In 1993, Bill started to develop a visual, node-based version of the system, and Nuke as we know it today was born it was quickly put to use on films such as True Lies, Apollo 13 and Titanic. At Digital Domain, the creative team were using a command-line script-based compositor to handle the more laborious work, alongside their expensive and-at the time-fixed-resolution Flame and Inferno systems. We caught up with Bill Spitzak, the original author of Nuke at Digital Domain, Simon Robinson, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Foundry, and Christy Anzelmo, Director of Product - Compositing and Finishing, to uncover the story of Nuke.Ī graduate of both the Computer Science program at MIT and USC School of Cinematic Arts, and with several years of software development already under his belt, Bill was perfectly placed in the early 90s to become one of the pioneers of the still adolescent CG industry. ![]() With the recent release of Nuke 12.1, it seemed only fitting to look back at where it all started, and at the journey Foundry has taken over the years. With a history of over 20 years, Nuke ® has long established itself as the industry-standard toolset for compositing, editorial and review.
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