We introduce Animal Logic’s advanced 3D matte painting toolset AL_USDNuke, which seamlessly integrates Nuke into our USD-centric pipeline. We detail the integration of numerous components such as our path-traced GlimpseViewport for instant representation of large USD stages, a user-friendly node-based toolset to modify USD stages, visualisation by our in-house renderer Glimpse for high-fidelity ground-truth feedback, and additional views to efficiently manage USD stages inside Nuke. This was achieved by a specialised Nuke to USD translator and our brand-new framework Plasma, an enhancement of Animal Logic’s in-house Nucleus framework for large-scale application development, tailored to Nuke. These developments improve matte painting artists’ efficiency on complex USD stages and allow them to publish their work back into shots for the benefit of all other upstream as well as downstream departments.

Paper in the ACM Digital Library