Foundry Is Designing Nuke for Both Human Compositors and AI Agents

Christy Anzelmo says AI has reversed the way visual effects artists work. Instead of building an image step by step and refining as they go, compositors now start from the result they want and trace back to the data or the prompt that produces it. As Chief Product Officer at Foundry, the 30-year-old company behind Nuke, Anzelmo is designing that software for a second kind of user, the AI agent that can drive the same tools an artist does.

In this episode of Inside the AI Studio, we talked with Christy Anzelmo about how AI flips VFX work, how Foundry is rebuilding its tools for agents, and where Nuke and the company's node-based orchestration platform are headed.

• AI reverses how VFX artists work. Anzelmo says compositors used to lay out an image and refine it in stages; AI-driven work starts from the intended result and traces back to the data or prompt that gets there.
• Foundry is folding its orchestration platform into Nuke. The Griptape platform gives compositors an expanded generative-AI toolkit inside Nuke, plus a way to wire models and pipeline steps together across applications.
• Control is the gap gen AI still leaves. Anzelmo says better tools still don't cover everything artists want to steer by hand; pairing generative AI with a 3D camera is how they claw control back.
• Every new feature now targets two operators. Anzelmo says product design has to account for both a human and an agent driving the same tool.

AI flips the compositor's workflow so artists define the result first

Traditional compositing is additive and hands-on. Generative work asks the artist to specify an outcome first, then figure out what will steer a model toward it. Anzelmo lays out the reversal directly:

Instead of thinking about traditional compositing, you lay out, here's your image, here's the basic processes you expect, and then you refine as you go. With AI, you need to think about the result. What's the vision that I want? And then what's the information I need to give to guide the model to make it?

That trips up artists trained only on traditional VFX, she says, though most get past it. The gap that remains, in a word, is "control." Even with better tools, she adds, "nobody wants to prompt everything."

One way artists claw control back, Anzelmo says, is by pairing generative AI with 3D. Moving between a tool like Nuke and a model, an artist can build a camera and map a shot in 3D space to steer the output, without rigging everything for full animation, which returns fine control over the result.

Foundry has chased that control problem for years. Its Copycat toolset, released in 2021, lets an artist train a bespoke model on the footage in a single shot, using overfitting to build what amounts to a custom plugin. The approach ran in production on Dune 2, where the team trained a model on the first film's data to apply the Fremen blue eyes automatically. It pays off most, Anzelmo says, "if you have a task that's repetitive, you can automate it."

Griptape gives shows a model-agnostic layer to build and swap AI workflows

Griptape is the newest piece of a broad lineup. Foundry already spans production, from the FLUX storyboarding tool and Nuke Stage for in-camera VFX to Nuke, Katana and Mari for compositing, lighting and lookdev.

Griptape, which joined Foundry, is a node-based orchestration platform Anzelmo describes as transparent, scalable and extensible. It runs on Python and ships open source under Apache 2. It can build image-generation workflows accessible to artists, and it can glue a pipeline together, driving close to anything Python can. Work can run locally, talk to the cloud, or combine both.

Anzelmo says that flexibility puts model selection in the hands of each production:

It's really up to the show. Our customers can choose what models they want to use, when they want to use them, who has access to what, and manage all of that so they can choose the tools they want to use for the job.

Foundry's customers decide which models run and who can access them, a control layer that matters as major studios cut costs with AI. New integrations are quick, she says: "with a coding agent, it's minutes to get a new model in."

As Griptape folds into Foundry, compositors will reach that toolkit from inside Nuke and use it to orchestrate work that crosses applications, like lighting and comp coming together.

Every new feature now has to serve a human operator and an agent

Anzelmo's product background shapes how she frames the next build cycle. She says "anytime you're thinking about a product or a new feature, now you need to think about the human operator and the agentic operator of that," and the design question is how much to enable each.

Inside Griptape, her team is "vibe coding nodes" and building custom widgets and interfaces. Anzelmo expects that to push toward software people shape for themselves:

I totally believe we're getting to this era of personalized software. We can all develop apps and things. I'm sure everyone has some kind of dashboard they built with an agent for managing something in their life.

Nuke and Griptape are heading toward a two-way pipeline

Anzelmo describes the integration as bidirectional. Nuke will call models running through Griptape, and Griptape will trigger Nuke processes in return, something she notes is already partly possible through Nuke's Python API and the way Foundry manages render processes. "It's already possible, really," she says of running those processes across the two.

For VFX teams, the practical payoff is a pipeline that swaps models fast and lets artists, and their agents, drive the same tools from wherever they work.

The full conversation with Anzelmo is in this episode of Inside the AI Studio, shot at AI on the Lot; the rest of the series lives on the show page.