Foundry Releases SmartRoto for Nuke
Spline-based AI powered plugin accelerates time-consuming rotoscoping, helping visual effects artists work up to 4x faster
Creative software developer Foundry today announced the availability of SmartRoto, a new AI-powered plugin upgrade for Nuke, NukeX, Nuke Studio, and Nuke Indie compositing toolsets. Available as an add-on purchase, SmartRoto helps automate repetitive and time-consuming rotoscoping across frames and sequences, reducing bottlenecks for studios and freeing artists to focus on more complex creative work.
Whether for a 500-frame episodic tracking sequence or a 20-frame commercial garbage matte, SmartRoto acts as a specialized roto assistant to intelligently move and deform splines across shots to follow the subject, based on initial input frames. Artists working on roto in Nuke can now work up to 4x faster compared with manual rotoscoping alone. Unlike with automated matting solutions, artists using SmartRoto can fine-tune detail by adjusting splines, retaining complete creative control to the finest pixel without starting over.
“SmartRoto provides what artists have been asking for—speeding up the tedious parts of the job while maintaining control,” said Adam Cherbetji, Director of Product at Foundry. SmartRoto integrates into the spline-based workflow, leveraging the artist’s core understanding of shape and motion and retaining the ability to refine the results. This enables creative precision, reduces manual work, and directly addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks in the VFX pipeline.
After four years of building and training a proprietary machine learning model, Foundry recently recruited a team of roto artists and experts for final beta testing. Benjamin Bratt, compositor and author of Rotoscoping: Techniques and Tools for the Aspiring Artist, said: “I’m shocked at how good SmartRoto is. It uses principles of rotoscoping and incorporates an intuitive, easily adaptable key frame approach that meshes with manual roto practices. It’s easy to fix autogenerated keys, without needing to start from scratch.”
Key SmartRoto features include:
— Increased time for creative quality: SmartRoto is proven to work roto up to 4x faster (compared to manual Nuke workflows). Less time spent on repetitive roto frees up artists to focus on creative aspects of the job and keep up with the increasing shot volume and complexity of modern productions.
— Seamless pipeline integration: SmartRoto operates as part of Nuke’s existing Roto node, with a spline-based interface that fits seamlessly into existing artist workflows, with minimal pipeline change or training required.
— Artistic control: The AI-powered tool applies the initial shapes to a sequence after receiving just a few frames of manual roto. Artists maintain control with options for refining generated shapes and locking in splines to prevent them from being overwritten, without any risk they’ll be presented with a result that requires them to start over.
— Commercially safe: The model underpinning SmartRoto is exclusively trained on licensed data for full commercial use. Everything runs locally and none of your data is transmitted.
SIGGRAPH 2026 attendees can view a demo of SmartRoto and Nuke 17 in the Foundry’s booth 519 on Tuesday, July 21 at 12:00 p.m., in the Los Angeles Convention Center.
To try SmartRoto, Foundry is offering an extended free trial for a limited time; sign up by 11:59pm PST August 16 to receive unrestricted access for 90 days. To buy, studios and artists with an active Nuke license can purchase SmartRoto today with a promotional price of $499 per licence*, available for a limited-time only, and $599 thereafter.
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