smartRender for Nuke

smartRender is a multi-threaded background rendering tool for Nuke. It lets you reduce your rendering times and makes final rendering and preview rendering dramatically faster compared to the standard rendering process. It uses all your hardware resources efficiently to speed up the processing. In addition you can export a detailed render log.
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  • Trial
Description

Description

smartRender is a multi-threaded background rendering tool for Nuke. smartRender lets you reduce your rendering times and makes rendering dramatically faster compared to the standard rendering process. It uses all your hardware resources efficiently to speed up the processing.

smartRender supports the ability to speed up preview renderings. While your comp is work in progress where you want to get instant feedback you can use incremental renderings and down scalings to get your previews in seconds instead of waiting for some minutes.

smartRender lets you view a detailed log for the job which lets you also detect rendering errors. All job logs can be exported as text files.

smartRender works out of the box producing fast renderings but if you have some programing experience you can even edit, change and customize smartRender's processing commands so you can fully customize it to your needs.

Main features

• multi threaded background rendering for NUKE
• dramatically speed up your renderings
• batch render multiple jobs
• super fast feedback
• detailed job log information
• customize render commands to your needs

Rendering time comparisons

The following shows some direct 1:1 real time render comparisons between smartRender and Nuke's default rendering method. We tested different nuke scripts of different scale with different machines and different operating systems. Each test is a real time recording of the exact same nukescript on the same machine. In our tests rendering with smartRender was always faster, sometimes even incredibly 4 times faster. As these comparisons are quite long feel free to simply skip through them and have a look at the comparison chart at the end of each video. The brave ones watch the whole video in one go :-D


  • Nuke script size: large
  • MacPro 6,1 3GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon E5 32GB 1866 MHz DDR3
  • OS: MacOSX 10.9.5, Nuke version: Nuke9.0v5, Node count: 811 nodes
  • A large nuke script containing a lot of 2D and 3D nodes. nodes.
  • smartRender: 11:56
  • Standard rendering: 21:40
  • smartRender used only 54.5% of the standard rendering time.

  • Nuke script size: small
  • MacBook Pro 11,3 2,5GHz i7 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3
  • OS: Ubuntu 14.04.4 (trusty tahr), Nuke version: Nuke10.0v1, 68 nodes
  • A small size nuke script containing full cg compositing, inclusive vector blurs with high motion vector samples and a pretty render intensive TVI scale node to upscale the whole image in the end. nodes.
  • smartRender: 08:50
  • Standard rendering: 38:41
  • smartRender used only 22.9% of the standard rendering time.

  • Nuke script size: small
  • MacBook Pro 11,3 2,5GHz i7 16GB 1600 MHz DDR3
  • OS: MacOSX 10.10, Nuke version: Nuke8.0v1, 4 nodes
  • A simple nuke script using motion blur with a high sample rate and a median with a high size. nodes.
  • smartRender: 03:04
  • Standard rendering: 08:04
  • smartRender used only 38% of the standard rendering time.

  • Nuke script size: middle
  • HP Z800 2,67GHz 24 Core 64GB 1600 MHz DDR3
  • OS: Windows7, Nuke version: Nuke8.0v7, 383 nodes
  • A mid size nuke script including cg compositing into real shot footage. nodes.
  • smartRender: 07:55
  • Standard rendering: 24:57
  • smartRender used only 31.8% of the standard rendering time.

In Depth Tutorial

Which kinds of licenses do you offer?

We offer node locked licenses and site licenses for single products as well as annual subscription licenses to use ALL cragl products with one license. All products work online and offline.

license models

Additional

For additional info about smartRender please refer to https://www.cragl.com/smartRender

Discussions

Want to talk about it?

Head over to r/aescripts to chat with fellow users about this product.

Need Support?

Please open a support ticket to be connected directly with the author of this product

Version History

3.29 -

Aug 26, 2024

• Update to nuke-16

3.28 -

Jul 14, 2024

• Create API

• Add warning label when exceeding 75 percent of available threads

• Fix - Copy render command raises IndexError when used chunk size is larger than 1

3.27 -

Jan 31, 2024

• Fix batch rendering command did no longer trigger next job

3.26 -

Nov 19, 2023

• Implement smartCache integration

3.25 -

Aug 3, 2023

• Render preview - Implement nearest frame preview

• Fix continuously creating thumbnail

3.24 -

Jul 29, 2023

• Update to nuke-15

3.23 -

Jul 19, 2023

• Implement direct render preview

3.22 -

Jun 29, 2023

• Add additional transcode root directories via environment variable

• Add button to reveal all transcode template folder

3.21 -

May 1, 2023

• Implement chunk size

3.20 -

Apr 3, 2023

• Fix - filter jobs by time in Nuke-12 and below

3.19 -

Mar 13, 2023

• Implement auto clean job history

• Trigger custom callbacks after job has finished

3.18 -

Feb 26, 2023

• Add studio model

• Add help menu

3.17 -

Feb 5, 2023

• Add toggle to show thumbnail for each job in the render queue

• Filter jobs by time in job queue

• Hold ctrl and drag a rendering from the job queue into the DAG

• Add shortcuts for frequently used tasks

• Add button to show changelog, browse online docs and access support

• Various style adjustments

3.16 -

Dec 18, 2022

• Update to nuke-14

3.15 -

Dec 7, 2022

• Remove frame number from filename of transcoded media

• Auto check Write checkbox when there is one Write node in nodegraph

• Remember selected transcode template when closing smartRender

• Store selected transcode template with preset

3.14 -

Oct 10, 2022

• Add button to open settings in main window

• Add help button to browse to online documentation

• Make right click menu to render other job more visible using icon

• Darken all icons

• Toggle render history using Alt Key

• Render notifications window Add quick action to copy render path/dir to clipboard

• Render notifications window Add quick action transcode

• Render notifications window Add quick action Send mail with rendered file attached

• Render notifications window Show render time and rendered frame range

• Fix remove byte type string output from terminal output for Nuke-13

• Fix right click to render other working file not working in Nuke-13

• Fix job log window not displaying statistics in Nuke-13 correctly

3.13 -

Sep 28, 2022

• Implement auto transcoding after rendering has finished

3.12 -

Jan 19, 2021

• Fix dropping license into license window raises UnicodeDecodeError

3.11 -

Jan 11, 2021

• Add 'Export job log' to context menu in history

• Add 'copy terminal commands to clipboard' to context menu in history

• Fix reading trial license data fails decrypting

• Send email to license author when machine installs license

3.10 -

Dec 30, 2020

• Make Nuke-13 ready

3.9 -

Aug 6, 2020

• Add statistics to render log when exporting a job log

3.8 -

Jul 28, 2020

• Add render time estimation and average time for rendering one frame

• Add overall render time of job

3.7 -

Jul 9, 2020

• Fix rendering gets inserted multiple times after render finished

3.6 -

Jul 7, 2020

• Make the windows being always on top configurable

• Support multi selection in job queue

• Add logger to log information about render jobs in the background

• Process next waiting job in queue when current job has finished

3.5 -

May 18, 2020

- Register custom callable that run before/ after render submission

- Fix render crashes that were caused on some machines with AMD processors

3.4 -

Mar 7, 2020





• Bring back render finished sounds

• Fix bring back tooltips

• Use separate lines for each terminal input

• Save working file before rendering

• Pre-check existence of output node before rendering

• Add additional after render commands

3.3 -

Apr 30, 2019

• Added site license option

• Generate license by license file, login and install code

• Update internal package structure

3.2 -

Feb 25, 2019

• Collect executable nodes that are nested in Group nodes and Gizmos

• Ignore executable nodes where no file path has been set

• Add create render directory command to executable nodes context menu

• Open up render process for executable nodes that write to disk

• Add job log button for each job in the job queue

• Add sphinx documentation

3.1 -

Nov 7, 2018

• Evaluate expression paths in Write nodes

3.0 -

Jul 15, 2017

• Made Nuke11 ready

• Major code updates and code improvements

2.1 -

Nov 16, 2016

• fixed bug that caused an error when rendering using -keep existing frames- enabled

2.0 -

Aug 29, 2016

• Render info panel to quickly access and edit your renderings

• Batch render multiple shots

• Rendering external nuke scripts without opening them

1.1 -

Aug 29, 2016



• Added global node changer window

• Added automatic cache write node creator

• Added input mode to frame range in smartRender window

1.0 -

Jul 29, 2016

initial release

Compatibility

Nuke/NukeX

14.0, 13.2, 13.1, 13.0, 12.2, 12.1, 12.0, 11.3, 11.2, 11.1, 11.0, 10.0, 9.0, 8.0