Nuke supports use of The Foundry plug-ins via its support for the OpenFX standard (several built-in nodes such as Keylight are OpenFX plugins). In 2015, The Foundry released Nuke Non-commercial with some basic limitations. The Foundry released Nuke 4.7 in June 2007, and Nuke 5 was released in early 2008, which replaced the interface with Qt and added Python scripting, and support for a stereoscopic workflow. In 2007, The Foundry, a London-based plug-in development company, took over development and marketing of Nuke from D2. In 2005, Nuke 4.5 introduced a new 3D subsystem developed by Jonathan Egstad. In 2002, Nuke was publicly released by D2 Software. Nuke won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement in 2001. FLTK was subsequently released under the GNU LGPL in 1998. Nuke version 2 introduced a GUI in 1994, built with FLTK – an in-house GUI toolkit developed at Digital Domain. In addition to standard compositing, Nuke was used to render higher-resolution versions of composites from Autodesk Flame. Nuke (the name deriving from 'New compositor') was originally developed by software engineer Phil Beffrey and later Bill Spitzak for in-house use at Digital Domain beginning in 1993.

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