A port of the open-source Polychase 3D motion tracker to Foundry Nuke (NDK / Nuke 17). Polychase tracks camera or object motion in footage by fitting a 3D mesh to the shot, driven by optical-flow analysis, PnP, and user-placed pins. This repository brings that workflow into Nuke as a set of native plugins.
This is a derivative work of the original Polychase Blender add-on by Ahmed Essam (theartful), and like the original it is distributed under the GPL-3.0.
| Folder | Component | What it is |
|---|---|---|
000_POLYCHASE_OG_260626 |
Polychase (core) | The upstream Polychase source — the tracking/solver core that the Nuke plugins build on. |
001_PolychaseTracker_V1.0.0 |
PolychaseTracker | The main Nuke node: fits a 3D mesh to the plate and solves camera/object motion, then exports an animated Camera or TransformGeo. |
002_MOTION2DB_V1.0.0 |
Motion2DB | Builds the Polychase optical-flow database (.db) from a pre-rendered motion-vector EXR sequence. |
003_VisualizeFlowDB_V1.0.0 |
VisualizeFlowDB | Overlays a flow database on the plate in the 2D viewer for inspection — no tracking, pure visualization. |
The three Nuke nodes form one pipeline:
- Motion2DB converts a motion-vector EXR sequence into an optical-flow
database (
.db) — built outside Nuke's render loop, straight from disk. - PolychaseTracker reads that
.db, fits your mesh to the footage with pins, solves the motion, and exports an animated Camera or TransformGeo. - VisualizeFlowDB lets you inspect the same
.dbover the plate to sanity- check the flow before (or after) solving.
Each Nuke node lives in its own numbered folder (001–003). Build
instructions live with each component (see each folder's BUILDING.md /
stepbystep.txt). The Nuke plugins target Nuke 17 and link a prebuilt
Polychase core; the core itself is built from 000_POLYCHASE_OG_260626.
Licensed under GPL-3.0 (see LICENSE / COPYING). This project is a
derivative of the original Polychase by Ahmed Essam (theartful),
https://github.com/theartful/polychase. Third-party components linked or bundled
into the build are listed in THIRD_PARTY_LICENSES.md and NOTICE-binary.txt.
© 2026 Peter Mercell · Developed with assistance from Claude (Anthropic).