OT: Natron as Nuke alternative

[Steve Davy]

We've just been asked to start using Natron instead of Nuke.

Anyone using it in production and have any feedback?

So far it seems like basically just a free version of Nuke, if somewhat stripped down (I'm not really a Nuker and haven't gone that deep yet so I'm not sure). The docs seem like they're pretty thin though....

[Deke Kincaid]

No multichannel workflow(RGBAZ only, everything else you have to remap to those channels).

No 3d system, I don't know a compositor that could live without the efficient use of camera projections, multiplane workflows these days.

No Deep Image compositing.

No Primatte/Keylight/Ultimatte/IBK keyer

No ML

It's essentially the feature set of Shake from 2007 but with undo that works and Roto/Paint that doesn't suck.  Fine for Roto but frankly even our Roto/Paint department uses the 3d features all the time in Nuke.

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[matt estela]

The other warning signal was when the main devs finished their time at whatever research place that was funding dev, the summary was pretty much 'this codebase is a big ball of mud, we're walking away, god help anyone who tries to work with this'.

I *think* I saw people picking up dev since then and actually doing useful stuff, but I haven't watching too closely. Mainly the vibes have been 'oh, it looks like nuke but with none of its stability, support, features'. 

Feels like a bit of a false economy to replace Nuke with a flakey open source emulation. Maybe do a test where you track hours in a week, extrapolate out, say to management 'ok we're saving $x in a year by using Natron, but wasting $y in artist hours on box'. 

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[matt estela]

To be clear, the foundry have no love from me re their prices, their stagnant feature set, their aggressive chasing of folk they accuse of piracy. But for most vfx work, its still the best and sharpest comp tool in the box.

[Steve Davy]

"No multichannel workflow(RGBAZ only, everything else you have to remap to those channels)."

Can you elaborate what you mean by this?

Nuke requires shuffling all channels out to RGB of course, so I'm not quite sure.....

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From: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Deke Kincaid <dekek...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2022 3:13 PM
To: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] OT: Natron as Nuke alternative

 

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[Steve Davy]

Thanks for the feedback (I guess! 😉)

To clarify a bit, serious comping will still be done in Nuke (and I think some artists are using Flame).

However the 3D team is now being asked to provide slap comps when publishing shots and to save on licenses they've decided we're going to do it in Natron. Most of the time it may be nothing more complex than A over B so I doubt we'll be taxing the feature set much and certainly unlikely to be doing advanced 3D stuff.

But, good to get an idea of what to expect (and what not to).

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From: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of matt estela <ma...@tokeru.com>
Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2022 4:14 PM

To: maya...@googlegroups.com <maya...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [maya_he3d] OT: Natron as Nuke alternative

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[Steve Davy]

Never mind, I see exactly what you mean now -- I hadn't even got as far as investigating channels.

Well, since as mentioned this is for slap comps only it probably isn't that important but in so far as this is a "free" Nuke, that certainly is a major difference.

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Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2022 9:07 AM

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[joiec...@gmail.com]

I'm not a professional comper, that's why I'm asking about a surely noob question..., What is a "slap comp"?

[matt estela]

A rough comp, otherwise known as an A-over-B comp or a bash comp.

Basically just slapping the cg renders together to prove they work, so that 'real' compers can sort it out later. :)

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[joie]

Thanks. So assume that comp is NOT used later on but only for reference, and that's why Natron just using RGBA channels is not a problem in such situation.

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[matt estela]

Wellllllllll..... depends.

I know at places I've worked the multichannel stuff is so key to how shots are setup, even the bash comps are fairly involved. The comp dept wil setup a template that says 'raw renders go in here', and the meat of the flow does all sorts of splitting and recombining. This is especially true for automated tech checks, so all the layers/aovs will be split into a mosaic, auto run on the farm, so that any missing passes or questionable techniques used by the lighters can be quickly identified.

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[Steve Davy]

Seems to be some confusion about this.... so far as we can tell it DOES support multichannel EXRs.

That said, I can otherwise say that having had to work with it for a few weeks now trying to just do basic slap comps to fulfill our internal publishing requirements, Natron is a pile of unreliable garbage that has done nothing but cost me time, and cause stress frustration and hair loss. And I'm barely even doing anything with it. It's clearly not production ready, and there's obviously a lot of very good reasons it's currently free.

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Sent: Monday, September 26, 2022 2:08 AM

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[Deke Kincaid]

It does support multi channel exr but it only supports them being remapped to rgbaz.  We often have EXR’s with 100-300 channels.  So we would have to make 50-100 read nodes for a single file to get all the channels in.

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[matt estela]

Sounds like a perfect search replace for my favourite linux quote:

"Natron is only free if your time has no value"

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[Steve Davy]

"It does support multi channel exr but it only supports them being remapped to rgbaz.  We often have EXR’s with 100-300 channels.  So we would have to make 50-100 read nodes for a single file to get all the channels in."

I remain confused about even this.

We've had some renders show all their AOVs in the channel selection menu or whatever it's called (top left), while other renders that definitely contain them don't show any.

The program seems to consist of approximately 90 percent bugs, and is slow as hell even when it does work.

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Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2022 4:41 PM

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