The Foundry Offers Cara VR Toolset

Cara VR adds a new set of tools that builds on Nuke’s existing native support for the compositing of multi-camera live-action footage and enables artists to create seamless immersive experiences with 360-degree video content. 

“Virtual reality presents an exciting challenge for us and for the industry. In order to make sure we developed tools that actually helped our customers tackle that challenge, we worked in close collaboration with them to understand their requirements and the challenges they face in working with this new medium. Our customers were already using Nuke on VR projects, but Cara VR streamlines those workflows, making high-quality VR content creation faster and easier without leaving the Nuke environment.”

CARA VR comprises four key areas of development:

• Stitching tools that enable artists to solve the physical layout of the cameras in multi-camera rigs, calculate their focal length and lens distortion, and use depth-dependent warping to merge the multiple video sequences into an uninterrupted 360-degree view.
• Tools for making plate corrections that include the ability to match exposure and color balance between cameras, stabilize footage to remove horizon roll that can cause motion sickness, and manually correct stitches to create a seamless immersive experience.
• Compositing workflows that enable artists to work in a spherical image space, including tracking, paint for rig removal, and ray-trace rendering to place virtual elements into the real-world environment.
• An integrated live review process for the Oculus Rift headset that enables artists to evaluate their work in the context of the end viewing platform directly from within Nuke, including timeline playback in Nuke Studio.

The public beta of Cara VR is available now. Customers with a current Nuke license or who download the Nuke 15-day trial are invited to sign up to participate in the program.

Cara VR will be available to buy in the coming months.