VFX artist Mads Hagbarth Damsbo, known as Higx, has unveiled Point Render, an innovative and affordable new point rendering engine designed specifically for Nuke.
Built using BlinkScript and leveraging only native Nuke nodes, this renderer offers a unique method for crafting, adjusting, and rendering intricate energy effects.
A Powerful Particle Renderer Built with Native Nuke Tools
Point Render lives up to its name by rendering millions of single-pixel points to produce diverse particle effects tailored for VFX and motion graphics applications.
It’s crafted using Nuke’s BlinkScript scripting language, relying exclusively on native Nuke nodes, ensuring compatibility with future software releases.
Create, Modify, and Shade Point Clouds for Complex Energy Effects
Point Render comes with a variety of point cloud generators, including basic planes and 3D primitives, with the added option to use imported 3D geometry as a point source.
Once generated, point clouds can be transformed into more complex formations using Point Render’s range of pre-built modifiers, and shaded according to properties such as motion velocity or inter-point density.
Unlike the majority of Nuke renderers, Point Render processes 2D data rather than 3D geometry, preventing the use of Nuke’s built-in shaders.
However, the BlinkScript nodes are accessible, giving users the flexibility to personalize their output.
By default, the renderer operates additively, resulting in increased brightness where points overlap in screen space. There is also experimental support for conventional depth sorting.
These combined tools enable the creation of a wide array of energy effects, as demonstrated in the teaser video at the beginning of the article.
In Ben McEwan’s Nuke resource, “Ben’s Comp Newsletter”, Image Engine’s lead compositor describes Point Render as a rare example of “a particle system in Nuke that doesn’t suck”.
Pricing and System Requirements
Point Render is available for Nuke 9+ on Windows, and Nuke 10+ on Linux and macOS. Note that it is only compatible with the commercial versions of the software. It costs €30 (approximately $34).
- How to Fix the “Error Loading LUT File in Corona for 3ds Max”
- Corona 12 Update 1 released
- Crashes or freezes when rendering with V-Ray in 3ds Max
- Foundry updates Mari 7.1
