This Escher suite had been EOL’d in 2018 and it was my first commercial software product developed for the VFX market. Only a few Nuke plug-ins in the market supported Deep OpenEXR during that period of time. I have included its version 1.2 User Guide below. Escher supported MacOS, Linux and Windows platforms. We had an interview with Nukepedia covering Escher too.
[ Intro ] Escher for Nuke is a suite of image generators, image-based lighting (IBL) and 2.5D creative tools designed for Nuke compositors who are looking for tools to explore the creative possibilities stashed between 2D and 3D. The goal of Escher is to enable creative 3D image making in a different way and at the same time taking full advantage of the organic nature of 2D image processing and manipulation. Escher relies on 2.5D images input, both depth images (or gray-scale images) and 3D normal map images are regarded as 2.5D images to Escher. Depth image is interpreted by Escher as the distance of each pixel from the camera, so it essentially contains information more than just a plain 2D image. Normal map image provides the normal vector direction of each pixel which is good enough for basic shading. Usually, it’s preferred to have both depth and normal vector passes rendered at higher resolution (2x up to 8x) than the beauty pass because of the aliasing consideration, Escher 1.2 has brought new solution to this issue by introducing new Ops that support DEEP data passes directly and this practically eliminates the alias problems of 2.5D rendering.
