Atomkraft FAQ
Welcome to our Frequently Asked Questions, we hope this answers any wonders you may have about AtomKraft, while being entertained by the explicit lyrics.
Updated on August 2011.
Please have a look at this document before firing any mail to us as we are quite busy spending our future expected licensing revenues on hookers and drugs (while pretending to write code).
But if you can’t find the answer here, don’t hesitate and direct your questions to atomkraft@jupiter-jazz.com
- What is AtomKraft?
- When will the shit be available?
- How much does it cost?
- What is the difference between Katana & AtomKraft?
- What does AtomRender output?
- What shading capabilities does AtomKraft offer?
- What lighting tools are included?
- What does the Studio version offer?
- When will the Studio version be available?
- What hardware do I need?
- What geometry formats can be imported?
- What about data from Alembic?
- What geometry types can be rendered?
- Does is support deformation motion blur?
- Which render does AtomKraft use, internally?
- Do I need to purchase 3Delight separately?
- Is AtomKraft a RIB exporter?
- Do you plan to support other renderers?
- Which compositing applications does AtomKraft support?
- Do you plan to support other compositing Applications?
- Is AtomKraft multi-threaded? Does it use all cores and threads?
- Is AtomKraft cross-architecture and/or cross-platform?
- Which Linux distribution will AtomKraft need?
- How can I get my paws on a beta?
- Is there a personal learning edition?
- What about documentation & tutorials?
- Where can I buy it? And Can I rent it?
- How does the licensing work?
- Which version of Nuke do I need to run AtomKraft?
- What’s the road map?
- Who it the target audience?
- Where does the name come from?
What is AtomKraft?
AtomKraft is a compositor-friendly set of rendering plugins for The Foundry’s Nuke that allows you to move look development, lighting and rendering from your DCC application (eg: Houdini, Maya, Softimage…) to the compositing stage in Nuke. Man, what a nice marketing wank sentence!
This alleviates *going back to 3D* whenever a change is required: with AtomKraft you can perform interactive look development, (re-)lighting and (re-)rendering inside Nuke (more wank). Kindly note that we put the ‘re-’ in brackets for a reason!
The core of AtomKraft is AtomRender. AtomRender works similar to Nuke’s ScanlineRender node. It recognizes all Nuke nodes attached to it and does the right thing™.
Oh, and did we mention it also adds a bunch of mind-opening new nodes to your toolbox? No? Ah well, use your imagination.
As an added benefit, you can take any Nuke comp that uses the ScanlineRender node and replace it with AtomRender. Why would you do that? Well, your render will look the same same but different (=better). Nuke geometry, lights, materials ‘n shit are all supported.
When will the shit be available?
It /is/ available right now, AtomKraft v1.0 shipped at Siggraph Asia 2011 Hong Kong! It is also used in production, and you can download it right away, it is a full working version with a watermark: check our Changelog!
How much does the shit cost?
The full pricing scheme for the AtomKraft product line is available here. It’s so cheap you could be shocked! In fact we even provide the first license for FREE, even for commercial usage. Note that we limit one free license per site (with site being a person or a company), and it works in two threads only. Still we believe this is a great thing!
Note that customers on support get access to new weekly releases, latest development builds (on average one build per week) and direct email support straight from Jupiter Jazz’s underground R&D bunker which sports a pool with bar, sauna and in general all sorts of naughty distractions.
What is the difference between Katana & AtomKraft?
In one sentence Katana is an interface to renderers while AtomKraft *IS* a renderer.
More in detail:
- Katana manages assets & their dependencies and we heard it deals particularly well with shitloads of geometry.
- AtomKraft has rendering assets (AtomReadAsset and AtomTweakAsset) flowing in our procedural, demand-loaded, geometry pipeline (codenamed “Hattori Hanzo”) targeted to fast (re-)rendering.
- Katana is an external application.
- AtomKraft is a fully integrated Nuke plugin which adds a bunch of nodes to Nuke itself. With AtomKraft you are always comfy in Nuke.
What does AtomRender output?
AtomRender outputs pixels in channels (elementary, Watson) in the same way that the ScanlineRender node does — any number of ‘em.
It analyses all shaders used in a comp (built-in, as well as custom ones). All outputs found in any shader become automatically available as outputs of the AtomRender node: Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice! I laaaaaaik!
For readers with a RenderMan background: output = AOV
For readers without a RenderMan background (AOV = Arbitrary Output Variable and *not* Adult Only Video…)
What shading capabilities does AtomKraft offer?
All built-in Nuke material nodes are supported. This includes also the prmanrender material nodes added in Nuke 6.2.
We also threw in a physically plausible material, AtomBasicMaterial, that can be pimped using Nuke’s network editor. I.e. you can build trees of AtombasicMaterial just as you would using Nuke built-in Material nodes. AtomBasicMaterial has pluggable physically plausible BSDFs, based on the latest papers crazy scientists presented at Eurographics and SIGGRAPH. Last but not least we also offer a powerful toon shader.
What lighting tools are included?
All built-in Nuke light nodes are supported. We offer advanced importance sampled HDRI-based lighting via AtomEnvironment. An advanced importance sampled area light, AtomLight, is provided too.
It’s worth mentioning here that we also support using HDRI-textured set geometry as light sources. We believe this feature is unprecedented in commercial software and allows for rapid replication of complex real world lighting setups. Elements can be placed anywhere inside the virtual set and receive plausible lighting & shadowing. Fuckin—A! Traditional HDR sphere setups do not exhibit proper changes of lighting, when geometry moves through a scene.
What does the Studio version offer?
Full RIB reading and writing, ability to render with 3Delight standalone (and any 3rd party renderer that we
will decide to support), full scripting of every aspect, a shitload of pipeline hooks, getting laid easily™, direct phone line to the beer fairy, you name it™.
When will the Studio version be available?
Within 2011, we are also working on a quantic wormhole time-space device bender to respect our impossible self-imposed deadlines.
What hardware do I need?
Any machine that runs Nuke well will run AtomKraft just fine, even under a virtual machine in HAL9000 (64bit). Go figure! AtomKraft provides interactive feedback — even on a dual core consumer laptops. Of course, being fully multi-threaded, the more cores the merrier.
AtomKraft does not require nor make any use of specific GPU hardware, at the moment.
BTW, we found that the more drugs you take before comping, the faster AtomKraft seems to render! In fact, if you take enough, time will run backwards and your render will have finished before you started it even!
What geometry formats can be imported?
AtomKraft reads all geometry supported by Nuke, using a standard Nuke ReadGeo node. However, this node does not support querying sequences properly for rendering motion blur (oh no!).
Because of this we provide an AtomReadGeo node which reads sequences of Wavefront OBJ, Houdini (B)GEO, RenderMan RIB (whew!) and Alembic 1.0! This node can properly query geometry for motion blur rendering. Additionally it supports sub-frame motion re-targeting with bi-cubic interpolation. WTF does this mean? Just ask’ some animation TD dude (or chick) in shouting proximity.
We are also looking into a bunch of other formats, based on customer feedback.
What about data from Alembic?
We are already supporting Alembic 1.0, as a matter of fact we were the first commercial application supporting Alembic before everyone else jumped in. And it makes total sense!
What geometry types can be rendered?
Polygons, subdivision surfaces (Catmull-Clark), spline patches, NURBS, curves, points (particles), Utah teapots™, female curves.
Does is support deformation motion blur?
Yes, AtomKraft does support per-vertex motion blur. E.g. for rendering creature animation with correct 3D motion blur. Also see the motion-retargeting information in the geometry import answer.
Which render does AtomKraft use, internally?
AtomKraft uses DNA Research’s 3Delight. AtomKraft Studio uses 3Delight and additionally supports external standalone command line renderers. Basically, if it can render RIB, chances are you can use it with AtomKraft Studio.
Do I need to purchase 3Delight separately?
Nope. You only need an AtomKraft license and you are set.
We use a special version of 3Delight to ignite a critical mass of unlimited threads when you render with AtomKraft. This license works solely from within Nuke.
The Studio version allows the 3Delight renderer to run separately, or launch a third party renderer that reads RIBs, which e.g. allows distributed rendering and more advanced workflows (yeah, whatever).
Is AtomKraft a RIB exporter?
No, AtomKraft is a renderer, *not* an exporter. All geometry is sent *straight* to the renderer, and in our new geometry pipeline (codenamed Hattori Hanzo) this works in a completely procedural and on-demand way (so we can load the geometry just when it’s really necessary, at render time. We can even decide multiple ways to load fragments of the geometry in Nuke!
AtomKraft Studio additionally allows to export RIBs and launch the renderer standalone. However, we still fully avoid using interprocess communication as long as the renderer is running on the same host as Nuke.
Do you plan to support other renderers?
We are open to the idea, and closely monitoring the products out there, we think we already chosen wisely.
Which compositing application does AtomKraft support?
AtomKraft is currently available for The Foundry’s Nuke. Can we have some of the stuff you must be on to ask such questions?
Do you plan to support other compositing Applications?
We are working on an edition for After Effects which will target the broadcast/motion graphics markets.
Is AtomKraft multi-threaded? Does it use all cores and threads?
Yes, we do not punish you for having a powerful machine. AtomKraft is fully multi-threaded and each license supports rendering with unlimited threads on a single host. Yay!
Is AtomKraft cross-architecture and/or cross-platform?
Both. AtomKraft is a 64 bit software and it runs cross-platform (Linux, Mac OSX 10.5+, Windows). Support for Mac OSX PowerPC CPUs is not available (Foundry has ended PowerPC support as of November 2009 and Apple, in another bout of lamedom™, has not provided a Snow Leopard version for PowerPC-based Macs anyway).
Which Linux distribution will AtomKraft need?
We run under any distribution Nuke runs under. Specifically we can safely say that AtomKraft works fine on (K)ubuntu and Gentoo which are the two main distributions our horde of code monkeys R&D team uses.
How can I get my paws on a beta?
AtomKraft is currently released as v 1.0. A beta testing for 2.0 will start somewhere in 2012, you will be then able to submit a request, if our criteria matches your data we will provide you access to you. Persuade us!
So, if you think you are a kick ass comper that must play with this shit™, please kindly mail to atomkraft@jupiter-jazz.com specifying details about yourself, your company, the primary OS for Nuke and the primary render in use at your facility. Also specify you are experienced with the RenderMan standard and if you have the rare ability to smuggle wine through customs. Or just fill in the beta form.
If you think AtomKraft is gonna be awesome, send us back a cool quote for the website and you’ll receive a (broken but
still equally awesome) pair of Joo Janta™ 2000™ Super-Chromatic™ Peril-Sensitive™ sunglasses in return.
Personal learning edition
You can download from the foundry a 15 days evaluation of Nuke which will run 3rd part plugins just fine.
We are in talks with Foundry and hope to have a PLE version of AtomKraft running in the PLE version of Nuke at some point. Feel free to persuade them too!
What about documentation & tutorials?
Documentation is available in English. We are working on Kazakh, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian translations of the tooltips. Tutorials and documentation will eventually follow. And yes, we are thinking to match the FAQ style. Ah, our greatest invention, the “RTFM” trademarked button, is available on any of our nodes.
Where can I buy it? And can I rent it?
We have setup deals with all major supermarket chains around the galaxy. For off-galaxy fellaz we are thinking some faster-than-light shipment solutions.
AtomKraft is sold worldwide via our Store or via e-mail order at sales@jupiter-jazz.com, with the following exceptions: if you live in one of these countries please contact our local reseller!
- Japan: Crescent Inc.
- China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore: Jadason Technology Limited
- Russian Federation: Sergey Tsyptsyn
- India: FX Graphics
- Taiwan: MIRAX
- : Coming soon!
If you are located in these countries please contact our local reseller.
If you need any number of licenses for a limited period we offer competitive rental pricing at a fraction of the cost of ownership, including support.
How does the licensing work?
Every AtomKraft license if floating and cross-platform (Linux, Mac OSX, Windows).
The license server, quite surprisingly, is cross-platform as well. Evaluation licenses are available on request.
Which version of Nuke do I need to run AtomKraft?
Nuke/NukeX 6.2+
- AtomKraft Alpha: November 2009
- AtomKraft Beta1: May 2010
- AtomKraft Beta2: February 2011
- AtomKraft Beta3: July 2011
- AtomKraft 1.0 Release: December 2011
- AtomKraft 2.0 Release: late 2012 / early 2013
Mostly beautiful chicks who like surfing in exotic beaches. But since the Nuke version of AtomKraft is primarily designed for use in feature film VFX, we expect also some interest in that area :)
That being said, it also has some very useful non-photorealistic rendering capabilites (toon shading, outlines & feature lines).
Where does the name come from?
“Atomkraft” is German for ‘nuclear power’. “AtomKraft, nein danke!” (“Nuclear power, no thanks!”) was a famous quote during the 80’s anti-nuclear power movement in Germany. However, we think our version of AtomKraft is harmless enough to pass judgment with the anoraks. Just never accumulate more than 11kg of AtomKraft in the same location!
Coincidentally it is also ambiguous enough these days since, according to Wikipedia, “AtomKraft are an English proto-thrash metal band who were part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement.” We were not influenced by their tunes while developing this product, but we are seriously considering inviting them on stage for our wrap up bar-destruction party which coincidentally sets on the Mayan calendar ending.