Free Nuke for fun

Greetings to all my new friends at GCHQ and at Fort Meade who had their filters tripped by the post title - sorry for taking your time folks, it's just a way to create a title for this post. But hey, stay and enjoy anyway!

A few weeks ago I posted on the need for free quality visual creative software if we want to produce the next generation of people who'll enrich our visual world. Well this week comes the announcement from The Foundry of a free version of NUKE for people who just want to mess around at home and have fun, and who want to learn the software. This is exactly what we need to see from more companies, and all credit to The Foundry for doing it. It's going to give anybody who wants to the chance to muck around with it with no expense. Everybody wins with deals like this. Of course there are limitations to try and reduce the chance of it being misused by people who really ought to be paying for it, which again is good for everybody because companies need their commercial revenue stream.

If I have one tiny wee gripe about the conditions it's this one, though I can see why they've done it

"The commercial NUKE range cannot load files created with NUKE Non-commercial. The Non-commercial NUKE range can, however, load scripts and gizmos created with the commercial version"

Clearly this is to stop companies getting people to do work at home with the free version which they then import into the commercial one, and I can honesty see why they went with this, but it also means that if kids have access to NUKE at school under an educational licence they can't then download the free one to use at home and move files into and out of school...which rather goes against my view that we need to have kids doing as much stuff both at home and at school as possible: but again I can see why they did this. Perhaps a future upgrade might allow the product sold to schools under the educational licence to open files from free NUKE?

But, all round this is totally to be applauded, well done The Foundry and let's hope we see lots of other commercial creative software companies following their lead

The Future of Design Requires Free thinking and 'Free' Software

Or at least, very cheap software.

The creators of the visual world of tomorrow are in schools now. If we want an amazing visual world tomorrow then we've got to nurture them today, we've got to build their confidence and let them practice. We've also got to show all the kids that this is for them; I don't mean that they should all do it, or even want to do it, but we've got to show them that if they want to then they can.

The problem is that the digital tools for this are expensive. In some cases very expensive. I'm not going to name names here but some software, while still sold much more cheaply into schools than it is into industry is still very expensive in the constrained budgets for education. If we want top flight and excited visual creatives in the future we've got to give them time to play with the tools now (the lack of time to play in the crowded modern curriculum with the multitude of targets and grading is another issue). I'll will name-names and praise Autodesk for biting the bullet and giving schools and their students free access to their stuff saying "The challenges of today will be solved by the designers of tomorrow. That's why Autodesk gives students, educators and educational institutions free* access to professional design software, creativity apps and real-world projects. Autodesk Education helps to inspire and prepare the next generation to imagine, design and create a better world." - okay so the folks at Autodesk have twigged it, you want designers tomorrow you've got to let them play with the toys today.

Sure, there are brilliant free tools out there like GIMP and Blender, but you come up against the issue that most people have only heard the name of one piece of graphics software and will use it generically, like we do 'hoover' for a vacuum cleaner, and believe that you have to use that. And frankly much as I love GIMP if you want to let kids play with the pro tools for graphics and web design now there is one game in town...but that's an expensive game to play for a school. Then there are all the programs used by VFX companies which lots of kids in schools would love to use - now under the Autodesk package they could have Maya or 3Ds  but there are others which would be great to let kids use, even just to play on in extra-curricular clubs, but which are expensive. The core business of these companies is selling into the graphics industry, wouldn't it be an investment in our visual future, and also their future businesses, to either let schools and their students have free use of it, or price it at a peppercorn level?

In ten years I want to be blogging on Visupulse about exciting stuff being produced - I reckon that will be so much more exciting if all the kids in all the schools could play with all the toys