Tools
I build Nuke tools for problems I keep running into on shots. A few of them bring open AI models into Nuke. Those models belong to their authors, who are credited on each tool below. My part is the Nuke side: the node, the caching, the chunking and the installer.
AlphaGen for Nuke
Subject mattes from a Nuke node, using Lightricks' LTX-2.5 Alpha Gen model.
I adapted Lightricks' LTX-2.5 IC-LoRA Alpha Gen to run from inside Nuke. You click the subject (SAM 2.1 does the selection), the node sends the plate to a local ComfyUI, and the matte comes back as an EXR, in the alpha or in its own layer. Long shots are split into 121-frame chunks that overlap, so the matte doesn't jump between them. On an RTX 3090, 72 frames at 544 px took about two minutes.
A first pass for roto, not a final matte. Needs a 24 GB GPU and about 60 GB of disk.
Model: LTX-2.5 IC-LoRA Alpha Gen by Lightricks (LTX-2 Community License). Subject selection: SAM 2.1 by Meta. Footage: Tears of Steel, Blender Foundation (CC BY 3.0).
PlateAOVs
Albedo, normals, roughness, metallic and depth estimated from a live-action plate.
I wrapped NVIDIA's Cosmos DiffusionRenderer inverse model in a Nuke node. It works through the shot in 57-frame windows with a cross-fade and caches every frame. I added an int8 / low-VRAM mode that streams the model from system RAM. In my tests on a capped RTX 3090 it peaked at 4.4 GB of VRAM instead of 17.8 GB, at about the same speed.
The passes are estimates. Metallic and roughness can be wrong outdoors.
Model: Cosmos DiffusionRenderer by NVIDIA (NVIDIA Open Model License). Footage: Tears of Steel, Blender Foundation (CC BY 3.0). My code is Apache-2.0.
Rastro
One panel inside Nuke for every shot and every version of a show.
It finds, previews and opens versioned scripts. It compares two versions with wipe, flicker or blend, shows what changed between two scripts, builds review MP4s with a slate and checks a delivery before it goes out.
In beta, not released yet. Nuke 13+ on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Demo plates: Tears of Steel, Blender Foundation (CC BY 3.0).
Everyday tools
Small, used daily on my own shotsCtrl+T opens a second Viewer next to the active one, on the selected node, and removes only what it created when you close it.
Wraps a branch in a group that switches between the live nodes and a versioned EXR cache. A new cache only goes live after every frame checks out. If a render fails, the previous version stays.
Browse and solo a node's AOVs without making Shuffle nodes.
Read-only check for missing files and gaps in sequences.
Renders land in dated folders, and every Write gets Open Folder / Open Render buttons.
AI R&D
Open models wrapped as Nuke nodes for testing · not publicMotion vectors that plug into VectorDistort.
SEA-RAFT (Princeton VL)Loose boxes on a few frames become a tracked matte for the shot.
SAM 2.1 (Meta)Retimes and slow motion.
RIFE (hzwer)Depth that holds steady over time.
Video Depth Anything (ByteDance), MoGe-2 (Microsoft)Temporal denoise driven by the plate's own noise.
FastDVDnetA light probe from a single frame.
DiffusionLight