NUKE is a node-based digital compositing application developed by The Foundry, and used for television and film post-production. NUKE is available for Microsoft Windows 7, OS X 10.9, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and newer versions of these operating systems.^[3]

NUKE's users include Digital Domain, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Blizzard Entertainment,^[4] DreamWorks Animation,^[5] Sony Pictures Imageworks, Sony Pictures Animation, Framestore,^[6] Weta Digital^[7] and Industrial Light & Magic.^[8]

NUKE (the name deriving from 'New compositor')^[9] was originally developed by software engineer Phil Beffrey and later Bill Spitzak for in-house use at Digital Domain beginning in 1993. In addition to standard compositing, NUKE was used to render higher-resolution versions of composites from Autodesk Flame.^[10]

NUKE version 2 introduced a GUI in 1994, built with FLTK - an in-house GUI toolkit developed at Digital Domain. FLTK was subsequently released under the GNU LGPL in 1998.^[11]

NUKE won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2001.^[12]

In 2002, NUKE was made available to the public for the first time under the banner of D2 Software.^[13][14] In December 2005, D2 Software released NUKE 4.5,^[15] which introduced a new 3D subsystem developed by Jonathan Egstad.^[16]

In 2007, The Foundry, a London-based plug-in development house, took over development and marketing of NUKE from D2.^[17] The Foundry released NUKE 4.7 in June 2007,^[18] and NUKE 5 was released in early 2008, which replaced the interface with Qt and added Python scripting, and support for a stereoscopic workflow.^[19] In 2015, The Foundry released NUKE Non-commercial with some basic limitations.^[20] NUKE supports use of The Foundry plug-ins via its support for the OpenFX standard (several built in nodes such as Keylight are OpenFX plugins).

• Official website
• Sourceforge site for the OpenFX effects plug-in standard