I finally had a chance to tryout Nuke. For those of you who are not familiar with the program, it’s a node based compositing tool. Think of After Effects on steroids. Nuke looks unconventional at first but then quickly grows on you. I was surprised how fast and responsive it is when compared to AE. The clever design by the Foundry (company that created Nuke) has made is so that when you learn one tool(node) you pretty much learn them all, and there are tons of them. So how do you put things together without layers? Well you have one time line which plays out everything in your node system, think of it like a family tree. Where other nodes connect to each other and finally trickle down to that one time line (viewer) node. Each node has properties and settings that can be animated using the main time line. And I think that’s the strenght of Nuke. In AE each movie you imported had it’s own frame rate and kind of handled itself as a self contained system. Not in nuke, nuke thinks of everything as a series of images and that’s about as deep as it goes. Everything else is handled by nodes. It you want to change the color of something, just drop in a node that is designed to do that and connect it to whatever you want it to effect. Doesn’t really get any harder then that and that is the beauty of it.

Ok enough with the software crap, lets bring something back from the past. Recently we had a user post a film on animationForum that brought back memories of the Policce Quest games by Sierra. If you had a PC in the early 90’s you know what I’m talking about. Simple point and click adventure games that sucked you in because of the characters and animations. How come they don’t make games like that anymore. Back in the days because of hardware limitations most game focused on character development. (I’m not talking about stats and RPG type of development) I’m talking about wanting to know whats in store next for the protagonist as we often do when watching a good movie. I feel that died when technology race took over. At the same time I also hope that we are at a point where photo realism reached a point where the race can slow it’s pace and games can once again focus on content. I think Heavy Rain did a decent job of taking things back to the Police Quest vibe, although maybe it tried to bite a bit too much then it could chew. Sometimes less protagonists is more.