Foundry is testing viewport optimization, procedural isolation, and selection tools for Gaussian splats in the Nuke 18.0 open beta.
Nuke 17.0 brought native splat import and rendering in February, and Nuke 17.1 added dynamic splats and relighting after a July open beta. The current build is Nuke 18.0v1 Beta 2, and Foundry is offering a Nuke 17.2v1 Beta 2 build alongside it.
Four viewport controls reduce the cost of dense splat assets. Artists can lower splat density, draw splats as simple colored points, render only the splats inside a chosen camera frustum, and switch spherical harmonics off. The controls apply to the 3D viewport only and do not change the final output of SplatRender. The 3D viewer's Color Correction setting can now be set to sRGB, the default, or disabled.
FieldThreshold is a new node that isolates splats by attribute. It builds a density or signed distance field from thresholds set on incoming attributes, and that field can mask nodes such as GeoDeletePoints and GeoGrade. Supported attributes are Position, Scale, Opacity, Color, HSV, Nearest Neighbour Distance, and Distance from Origin. A compositor cleaning up floaters can threshold on Nearest Neighbour Distance and feed the field into GeoDeletePoints, or grade only the low opacity splats in a capture through GeoGrade.
The 18.0 beta also lets artists select splats directly in the viewport in vertex selection mode and snap a FieldShape to the selected location.
The beta fixes a SplatRender crash when out of bounds Deep samples are requested, splats that looked noticeably worse when rendered in 2D through SplatRender, a brightness mismatch between the 3D viewer and SplatRender output, and two frustum culling bugs. The node can be slow on splats spread unevenly over a large area, and its edits can make upstream Geo operations disappear from the viewer. Foundry does not give knob names for the new viewport controls or a date for the final 18.0 release.
Outside splats, the beta adds Nuke-Griptape interop, automatic cut detection, and H.265 decoding. Foundry strongly recommends against using beta features in production. The Nuke 18.0 open beta is available now to licensed users and trial users.
