Wednesday 28 Mar 2007 - 10:41
GridIron has announced Nucleo Pro 2, an upgrade to the performance enhancement tool that optimizes the workflow for artists using Adobe After Effects. Nucleo Pro offers speculative and background rendering capabilities that allow motion graphics artists to render and work at the same time.
Nucleo Pro 2 will support After Effects CS3 Professional, which was announced yesterday, and all versions of After Effects 7 -- on both Mac OS X and Windows. New features of Nucleo Pro 2 include the ability specify how nested compositions are rendered and run renders of their favorite 3D applications in the Nucleo Pro Background Render Queue.
The plug-in will ship in the summer, according to GridIron.
Nucleo Render Proxies customize how nested compositions are rendered to streamline render times even further. Now users can flag a nested comp to render sub-compositions to an internal “cache file” format, and have the main composition render to the user specified output format. By doing this, subsequent spec-render times for the main composition are improved because the rendering engine no longer has to render the frames for proxied sub-compositions. Those frames are simply read from disk.
With Nucleo Pro 2, motion graphics artists can manage After Effects and 3D renders from one convenient spot. Simply drag projects for any of the supported applications into the Background Render Queue. Then specify the appropriate render settings and allow Nucleo Pro to initiate and manage the render in the background. Support is available for most popular 3D rendering applications, including: Maxon Cinema 4D, Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Autodesk Maya, Softimage XSI, Apple Shake, Side Effects Software Houdini, Mental Images Metal Ray, and SplutterFish Brazil.
Nucleo Pro 2 will cost $395 (£200), though from April 6, users can pre-order for $295 (£150). Upgrades from Nucleo Pro are $99 (£50), while owners of the standard version of Nucleo can upgrade for $350 (£180).
Digit Staff
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