May-June ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 350).
Wacom’s Intuos Pro
Most of my Wacom reviews in the past few years have been about the Cintiqs, since those are the splashier, fancier display tablets. But I’ve been failing to give much attention to the Wacom workhorse: the Intuos Pro. And perhaps it’s because Wacom hasn’t been making substantial updates to the Intuos since 2017. But this year, that changed.
First things first: The drawing size of the tablet (I’m working with a medium-sized one) is roughly the same as the older version, but we’ve lost the bezels, which means it takes up less real estate on your desk. And you might think, “Well, I used to rest my hand on the bezel when I draw.” But the tablet is so thin that you aren’t going to run into wrist fatigue from having the drawing surface higher than the rest of the desk.
The modifier buttons and express keys have been moved to the top of the tablet, effectively making it ambidextrous without having to go in and switch the orientation. You have a pair of customizable radial buttons with four buttons each (top, left, right, bottom) and a center button in each that can be used to toggle the functionality of the pair of dials that live beside the buttons. The dials have a mechanical “click” to them, which provides nice physical feedback. I’ve seen plenty of uses for the dials, like adjusting brush sizes, scrolling in browser windows or zooming in and out. But since I’m an occasional animator, I like to assign the left dial to frame backward and forward, so I can shuttle and check animation as I’m going. All the buttons and dials are customizable per app (nothing new), but you can also save presets.
The pen is an entirely new design with all kinds of customizability. The grip could be a pencil-like thin version, a cushy straight grip or the traditional flared version. The side buttons can also be changed. If you are a one-button type of person, you can opt for that. Three buttons is the setup I go for. Or maybe you don’t want any buttons on the pen of your stylus at all; you do you. Further, there is a weight inside the pen that can be adjusted for a lighter or heavier weight at the back of the stylus. Or just remove it, if you like a really light feel. Along with the standard and felt nibs, there is a new rubber nib that provides a softer feel than the more traditional style. The pen supports 8,192 levels of pressure, and the tilt sensitivity has been upgraded.
Power and connection comes via a USB-C to USB-3 connector, but there is also an internal battery that powers the tablet and Bluetooth connection for wireless use. The mode can be physically switched with a button along the top edge of the tablet. So, if you wanted to get really fancy, you could be physically tethered to the workstation but swap over to Bluetooth and suddenly be working on your laptop.
All of these changes and advances and it’s still the same price as the 2017 model.
Website: wacom.com/en-us/products/pen-tablets/wacom-intuos-pro
Price: $249.95 (small), $379.95 (medium), $499.95 (large)
KeenTools
When I last reviewed KeenTools back in 2021, it effectively lived in Nuke as a full bundle of tools including FaceBuilder, GeoTracker, FaceTracker, Blender, etc. We also had a version of FaceTracker for After Effects. But since then, the KeenTools team has been busy maintaining and making the established tools better, while developing the tool set for the expanded market of Blender users.
For those unfamiliar with KeenTools, it is a suite of plugins/add-ons primarily for the purpose of trackerless facial capture. If you have done any kind of tracking, facial or otherwise, you know what a pain this can be — but the task has become ubiquitous in visual effects circles, as we are always doing vanity fixes, deaging, putting art and designs on faces or replacing pieces with gore or cyborg pieces. It’s rigorous and time-consuming, and KeenTools makes it immeasurably easier. GeoTracker is also in the suite, which is tailored for tracking more rigid-body stuff, but the face stuff is where the gold lies.
The foundation of the technology is based on the idea that you’re using a face that has the proper topology to begin with. You take that geo, and by using control points, you can adjust the structure of the head to your character, adjusting as you move from different angles of the head — which is easier than it sounds. Once you have the right shape, FaceTracker can go through your shot and track the head — along with changing expressions and lip sync — and if it starts to derail, you can go in and tweak and refine. Since the geo and UVs are the same across all heads, you can quickly add textures, paint out blemishes or even swap faces without as much hassle. Also, because the topology is the same, it means you can blend between the original tracked head and a totally different head. So, if you are all about sculpting in ZBrush and want to track one of your humanoid creations onto an actor — you can wrap the KeenTools head around your creature to inherit the form but retain the KeenTools topo — you can have an animated head! Basically, using the tracking data facial mocap to drive your creature.
It is, and always has been, a powerful tool for both 2D and 3D face-tracking solutions. It’s fast, efficient and totally worth it. If you are a studio, the FaceBuilder/Tracker bundle is $749, but if you are freelancer, it’s $269 (both as an annual subscription). You can use the license in both Nuke and Blender. One face-tracking shot will pay itself off. Which brings me to this: I’ve noticed that because Blender is open source, its user base gets bent out of shape when, God forbid, they have to pay for something (and most especially as a subscription). But if you are doing professional work and saving a couple grand by not paying for your 3D software — maybe you should throw some of those savings to the people and small companies that make your job easier?
Website: keentools.io
Price: Various
Nuke 16’s Multishot
Nuke 16 was released in February with some important and key upgrades in the Roto Tools, in the BlinkScript and in the USD implementation. But this entire review is focused on Multishot — which is a feature that was part of the open beta. It is here in its full glory. I’m giving it most of the airtime here is because there is a lot to talk about.
In a traditional Nuke pipeline, we talk about shots on an artist-by-shot basis: a Nuke script represents the comp for the shot, an artist is assigned a shot, etc. If you are smart, you assign shots in batches — meaning you assign all the similar shots to an artist to keep consistency, and when notes come in, which affect multiple shots, the one artist can maintain continuity across the shots. But this still requires the artist to open each Nuke script, make the change, send to render, close it and then open the next one and do the same. This is time-consuming and has so many points of failure.
This is not the case in animation pipelines, where lighting TDs and compositors make adjustments per sequence so that everything looks the same. While vfx facilities with teams of pipeline TDs have implemented tools to streamline this process, the Foundry team has developed a set of tools that make it so comps can be built — and changed — with the idea that many shots will need to hit the same notes. This is Multishot.
The technology behind Multishot is Graph Scope Variables (GSV), where you set up variables that live in your script and can quickly change the “state” of the script based on your parameter selections. Let’s say you have three shots of a character on green screen — medium, medium close-up and close-up. All of them will have the same background — but the closer the camera gets to the subject, the more out of focus the BG becomes. Instead of three Nuke scripts, you have one that reads all three GS plates and the one BG plate. Then, through GSVs, the shots are a variable that can be switched depending on the shot you are looking at — and then three defocus nodes go through a Variable Switch node — which changes the amount of blur that happens depending on the shot. So, what if there are 18 shots in the sequence with a mix of those original three? You can set up the Variable Switch node to switch to the right depth of focus for all the CUs, all the MedCUs and the medium shots. So if the defocus needs adjusting on the CUs — you only change it once.
That is the simplest example I could come up with, but the potential is quite vast. You can use Variable Group Nodes to encapsulate sections of the script in which you can then override global variables with local variables within the group. Further, those Variable Group Nodes could be LiveGroups — which means that they point to outside Nuke scripts from other departments and inherit their GSVs but still allow you to override them within your own script.
We’re just scratching the surface here. This may be a lot to wrap your head around for those who are strictly artists. At a pipeline TD, you should be able to jump in directly and see the potential. I’m still testing out some of the features, and despite some initial setup time, I am already seeing the time saved in Multishot. I am also saving time by making fewer mistakes opening and closing scripts.
Website: foundry.com/products/nuke-family
Price: Various
Quadspinner’s Gaea 2.1.2.0
Since I missed the release of Quadspinner’s version 2.0 of Gaea last summer, I was pleased to find out they just released 2.1.2.0 in March. Now, I have an opportunity to redeem myself.
To recap, Gaea is a node-based terrain generator with sophisticated algorithms for simulated erosion, surface generation, color and shading and integration with other tools.
The most significant technical upgrade lies under the hood. The engine architecture has been rewritten from the ground up to effectively incorporate GPU acceleration without ignoring the CPU as a backup. The primary speed boosts are during erosion simulation and heavy node scripts.
Erosion 2.0 is faster and more robust, due to the aforementioned architecture upgrades. And Surface Nodes can alter the terrain while preserving the volume so that the silhouette is preserved. Other nodes used for building more detail into the terrain include a new Trees node, Snow 2.0, Snow Dusting, Contours and Cartography (which feel more diagnostic) and Flow Map 2, which calculates rain and water flow that informs the erosion as well as map color and vegetation placement. These tools follow a layered workflow of building the broad shapes, calculating the erosion with ColorErosion and Debris Simulations and then refining with additional color and detail. You can even transpose a calculated surface onto a custom 3D that may have been created in Houdini, Unreal or ZBrush — for example.
The UI has gone through some streamlining so it’s less cluttered — tucking some things away and having a Lazy Menu available with a tilde click — this should be nothing new for Houdini and Nuke users. Users can isolate higher-resolution areas to work on so the entire terrain isn’t being calculated. We can’t forget God mode, where multiple users can be working on different areas of the same terrain at the same time.
Gaea 2 also has interoperability bridges between Unreal and Houdini, with more planned for future builds. And last month, it was announced that Gaea2Unreal is open source.
The price point is unbelievably low and is for a perpetual license as opposed to subscription. There is a “Community Edition” that is available for free evaluation and noncommerical use. But the next tier up — the “Indie” license, for revenue less than $100K, is priced at $99 and allows for up to 8K maps along with Gaea2Unreal. The “Professional” edition (less than $1M) is $199 and allows for 16K terrains, tiled builds, Gaea2Unreal and Gaea2Houdini. Or, if you are making more than $1M, you can splurge for the $299 and be able to do network and online builds.
Gaea 2 is super powerful, intuitive and affordable. Many studios use it in their pipelines on their shows, and the team is actively making it better and better.
Website: quadspinner.com
Price: $99-$299
Software reviews were written after being tested on a Puget Workstation AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7975WX 4.0GHz 32 Core 350W: 128GB DDR5-5600 RAM and NIVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Ge 48GB PCI-E. (pugetsystems.com)
Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose recent credits
include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at [email protected].
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