Artixels releases Escher, a collection of plugins for Nuke

ARTIXELS is a small company that was founded last year in Hong Kong and is dedicated to developing software for VFX. They have now made their debut by announcing a collection of plugins called Escher, scheduled for official release in December 2012.

For the time being, this collection will only be available for The Foundry’s Nuke compositing system. Other compatible compositing and imaging platforms will be announced at a later date (with the possibility of opening up to Mac OS X, depending on demand).

Escher includes a total of 10 plugins, divided into 8 for advanced 2.5D lighting effects, and another 2 for image generation.

Among the first eight, processing nodes called SH (Spherical Harmonics) are offered for the projection of light and shadows on the image. Up to 6 of these SH can be combined and embedded in OpenEXR metadata and files.

We can also find “fake nodes” for skin shading, which work by using depth map image processing. There are several nodes included for 3D Normal and Depth data processing and morphological anti-aliasing.

For the generation of images there is a plugin called “Caustix” with which you can create animations that simulate the reflections that appear under water.

Escher will be available for Nuke 6.3 on Windows and Linux (64-bit on both), for a price of $399. Also included is one year of maintenance and technical support via e-mail.

In this video you have several examples of the plugins and a demonstration of the “Caustix” application.

http://vimeo.com/44098208