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(c)2009 Fox. All rights reserved. Image courtesy of Weta Digital.

Avatar has broken all box office records. Read how and why Weta Digital, ILM and Framestore utilised The Foundry's software on the project. You can also see The Foundry's Simon Robinson on BBC London News discussing their involvement.

Sony Pictures Imageworks and The Foundry Share Technologies

The Foundry formed a unique collaboration with Sony Pictures Imageworks in 2009. Read the press release. A few months in, Richard Shackleton, Head of Product Development at The Foundry answers your questions and gives his perspective.

Screenshot of Katana.

Soho VFX Finalise Nuke Roll-out

London, 20 January 2010. The Foundry is pleased to announce that Soho VFX, a world-class visual effects facility with studios in Toronto and Los Angeles, has invested heavily in Nuke. Read the press release.

Allan Magled, CEO, Soho VFX, said, "Soho VFX, like many facilities today, has spent years building a scalable workflow to satisfy the growing demands of the visual effects industry. This is not a simple task. Ideally we need to ensure that the compositing tools that we use are fast, reliable, extremely customizable and that they enable us to push the boundaries of creativity. Most importantly they need to run on a variety of hardware platforms and work seamlessly with a multitude of other applications that are used across our facilities daily. Our Nuke evaluation was quite lengthy. We looked very closely at render and desktop performance over several iterations of the product. Integration into our current environment from both a developers and 2D Artists' standpoint was very important to us and, as such, we spent a lot of time looking at scripting and internal development tools in Nuke as well as ease of use in transitioning from our previous compositing application. Lastly we took a strong look at the development history and future road map of Nuke to ensure its direction matched our own. In doing so we have found Nuke to be a polished compositing suite with a long and bright future."

Nuke Tutorials Now Online

Over the last few months The Foundry have enlisted the help of industry professional Frank Rueter (Weta Digital, Digital Domain, www.ohufx.com) and renowned trainer, Steve Wright (www.swdfx.com), to assist our in house demo team in producing a comprehensive set of Nuke tutorials available FREE.

Basic Workflows, General UI, Python, Keying and Colour Space are all covered in this series of more than 50 tutorials. We hope that you'll find them useful.

You can find them on the Nuke page and selecting the Tutorials & Example Images link from the right hand menu. They are also available on our YouTube channel.

Nuke's a Smash with Rise

Image courtesy of Rise and fxguidetv.

See how Rise|FX tackled the compositing on a 14 second long car crash shot filmed hand held from the back seat of the car. This 20 minute presentation by Florian Gellinger of Rise|FX and courtesy of fxguidetv shows how the road intersection was built in Nuke as a 3D environment. The shot was completed for director Matthias Glasner in the film "This is Love". Download the breakdown here.

Image Engine Nukes District 9

Image courtesy of ImageEngine and fxguidetv.

Armed with The Foundry’s Nuke compositing software, Image Engine was the lead VFX vendor on District 9 - the debut feature from director Neill Blomkamp. The Vancouver based VFX studio completed 311 shots on the film, which grossed $130m worldwide in its first five weeks. The quality of the work was such that Blomkamp declared, “Image Engine has done absolutely top tier, brilliant work that far exceeded my expectations. Read the full case study or download a 17 minute video breakdown of various shots in District 9 by Shervin Shoghian, Compositing Supervisor at Image Engine, pictured above.

Tinderbox 4 for Nuke

There are 19 plug-ins in this new collection for Nuke. More.

Nuke Breakdowns

Ever wondered how they did that shot? Here's a breakdown of Nuke comps on our YouTube Channel. Thanks to Intelligent Creatures, Furious FX, Filmgate, Entity FX, Rising Sun Pictures, Elephant Studios, Mikros Image, Mad Crew and Passion Pictures.

Passion Pictures Harness Nuke for Audi Spot

© 2009 Audi. Image courtesy of Passion Pictures

"The 3D space is a really impressive feature of Nuke." says Neil Riley, VFX Supervisor at Passion Pictures. Go to the case study. View the Audi Q5 spot.

Support for Avid DS 10.2

A maintenance release of Furnace, Tinder, Keylight and Anvil is now available for Avid DS 10.2. This release is free to all existing customers running the previous build.

VES Award Nominated Compositing with Nuke on Iron Man

The Foundry were lucky enough to be have Dav Rauch from the Orphanage on their stand at NAB, demonstrating the work they did on Iron Man. The Orphanage were responsible for the HUD sequence and it's impressive stuff, but don't just take our word for it, see for yourself here.

Iron Man © 2008 MVLFFLLC. TM & © 2009 Marvel. Images courtesy of The Orphanage.

Weta Digital Purchase Site License of Nuke

Weta Digital, New Zealand's multi award-winning VFX studio has purchased a site license of Nuke to enhance their in-house pipeline.

Paul Ryan, Chief Technology Officer at Weta Digital, comments: "With ambitious projects on the slate, we need to ensure we have the best tools at our disposal. Our long-standing relationship with The Foundry and our faith in their product development, support and focus on producing a truly useful artist tool set has given us the confidence to make this investment." Read the full press release

Nuke Hits the Blot on Watchmen at Intelligent Creatures

Read why Intelligent Creatures switched their pipeline to Nuke and the experiences they've had working on productions like Watchmen.
Read the case study.

© 2009 Warner Bros. Images courtesy of Intelligent Creatures

You can also watch Greg Astles' Watchmen demo from our stand at NAB here detailing the work that went into Rorshcach's mask.

The Foundry MBO

The Foundry announces a management buyout led by Advent Venture Partners. For more information, please read the Press Release.