The Foundry of London, which recently won an Academy Award for development of the Furnace suite of plug-ins, announced at its 10-year anniversary party last Friday, March 9, that it has acquired D2 Software's flagship NUKE compositing software.

The Foundry also makes Keylight (another Academy Award winner) and Tinder plug-ins, and is the creator and major supporter of the OFX plug-in standard, plug-ins that are currently supported within NUKE.


The following statement can be found on The Foundry website:

"We are pleased to announce that The Foundry will be taking on the marketing, development, sales and support of NUKE. The number of staff in our engineering department is already expanding to ensure we have teams dedicated to both plug-in development and the development of NUKE. As part of this expansion we are delighted to welcome Bill Spitzak, the primary author of NUKE, and Matt Plec, formerly of Sony Pictures Imageworks as key members of the NUKE development team. We are thrilled to be adding such a fantastic product to our range of high-end technology solutions and NUKE will be the third Academy Award-winning product to be managed and developed under The Foundry brand..."
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About D2
D2 is a subsidiary of Digital Domain, which was acquired last year by South Florida-based Wyndcrest Holdings Llc., a group led by director Michael Bay and investor John Textor. Carl Stork, a long-time senior Microsoft exec and principal of Wyndcrest Holdings, was elected ceo and a member of the board of directors of Digital Domain. The vfx studio subsequently recruited Mark Miller, Cliff Plumer and Kim Libreri from Industrial Light & Magic, with Miller becoming president, Plumer assuming the role of cto and Libreri becoming vp, advanced strategy.

About The Foundry
The Foundry is a software developer specialising in plug-in visual effects for the film and video markets. The company was set up in 1996 by Bruno Nicoletti after writing custom effects for flame operators at Rushes Postproduction in London. Simon Robinson joined soon afterwards to form the partnership. The Foundry were the first sparks’ developer for Discreet Systems Products and now have their Tinder, Furnace, Keylight and Anvil plug-ins on the leading compositing platforms for customers throughout the world. In January 2004 The Foundry launched OpenFX, an open plug-in solution that is setting the new standard for industry plug-in development and support.

For more info on The Furnace, go to www.thefoundry.co.uk