Alrighty guys. I have been spending a bit more time with Nuke, getting myself acquainted with it’s way of doing things. This isn’t going to be a review, or even a “which app should I use” post (more on that in the future), but more my first impressions.
- Firstly, it’s great to see Nuke going ahead with a strong development team, something that obviously was not happening with Shake in the last few years and will not happen (Shake not being developed for, in case you didn’t know.
- Following on from this, with it’s sale to The Foundry, the Nuke team has made a lot of effort to make the software more friendly to artists who are moving from different packages, especially Shake. I used the PLE (Personal Learning Edition) of Nuke back around 4.7 or so, and while it was obviously powerful, I felt the interface was completely utilitarian and not very obvious.
- Lots of on screen controls soon become very intuitive. The ability to have more than 2 viewers, ala Shake, is a god-send. The onscreen scale/rotate tools and proxies for objects when you translate them are excellent.
- The layout is completely customizable, letting you set up your workspace.
- Very logical way to set up proxies for hi-def and film-res elements.
- Am just getting into gizmos (essentially macros) and the use of python scripting is great.
- The use of channels instead of piping masks in everywhere is a great concept and one I am still getting my head around. Seeing as it is one of the most powerful features of Nuke, I need to spend more time with this.
- Roto tools seem a bit clunky, but frankly Shake was nothing to shout about either.
So far I have only really scratched the surface, but the more I use Nuke, the more comfortable I will be with it. It is still tempting to go back to what I know in Shake when I need to get something done quickly, but I am consciously trying to do more work in Nuke.
If you wanted to get started, The Foundry have a PLE version of Nuke for download and have a tonne of training materials, including a bunch of great introductory videos from the guys at FXPhD.