The powerful Blend and Comp UI are very flexible and easy to use. All images courtesy of Sébastien Jacob.

Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment division recently shipped the second extension for Toxik, 1.1.5, dubbed “The Master Keyer Extension.” They’re also soon going public with plans for the next major release for the application named Toxik 2007 (2.0), which will focus on one of the most requested features: Paint!

If you’ve been keeping track, Toxik has been moving along at an increasing pace lately. For years, it seemed, the project was shrouded in mystery, only a screen shot here and there and a lot of speculation. To some extent, it still is. Sadly, outside the beta/dev circles, you don’t really hear much about it.

That’s why, before diving into any specific details, I thought I would first provide some insight into what Toxik is, and recap how the software has advanced since its 1.0 release last year.

What is Toxik?
So, what is Toxik? By now, associating Toxik with collaboration should be entering the industry’s collective unconscious. However, because of the product’s immense scope, Toxik can mean different things to different people in the world of visual effects.

Built upon an Oracle database, tds, managers, supervisors and others will be very interested in the open door it symbolizes for their pipelines. Traditionally, this was mostly accomplished through in-house development and custom tailoring from the ground up. In Toxik, some simple development can permit bridging the 3D and compositing departments relatively quickly. For instance, it might be set up so that each pass could become a composition inside Toxik and therefore be internally versioned and tracked. Toxik can be viewed as another tool that can be used in the post-house’s inevitable drive for cross-departmental integration. Thus, the possibilities are wide open.

Without a doubt, compositors are the main focus of Toxik. The application has evolved around their specific needs. It’s a hybrid product that promises a tailored experience for the creative artist willing to spend more time being creative, and less time dealing with the tediousness of “house keeping” and communication errors. No more saving, no more browsing the file server and setting render paths. Since the versioning of compositions is the underlying force of Toxik, seamlessly presenting multiple ideas to the client or team becomes less of a technical burden.

The infamous master keyer in action. You can see the Keyer node in the top left quadrant, and the insides of the node below it. The MK’s overlay controls can be seen in the player.

In terms of what you can expect from taking on a Toxik seat as a compositor, here are some examples of what happens once you are fully versed in the collaborative backdrop, and are knee deep in compositing.

Users that are comfortable with a full node-based compositing approach should have no problems whatsoever compositing in Toxik. If you’re familiar with classic Discreet tools, then you’ll have a head start. Basically, Toxik feels like a cross between Shake and Flame.

What will certainly strike compositors will be the performance of a Toxik system. Since the playback is disk-based and not RAM-based, gone are the days of caching previews of your work to RAM. Another very effective aspect of Toxik is its ability to dynamically proxy the images due to its tiling architecture. For example, if you are zoomed into a 2K plate, Toxik will only process the tiles that are visible in the view port. Conversely, if you are zoomed out, it will process a lower proxy level of the image. This happens automatically, and drastically enhances the interactivity of the compositing experience.