After a tech preview at FMX 2025, a closed beta over the winter, and a hands-on tease at NAB 2026, ZEISS has officially launched CinCraft LensCore: a GPU-accelerated, ray-traced Nuke plugin that simulates the optical behavior of real cinema lenses inside 2D compositing. The plugin will be available worldwide through the CinCraft webshop starting June 1, 2026, with multiple license tiers but, notably, no public pricing yet from ZEISS.
The road here has been deliberate. ZEISS first showed the technology under the working title Virtual Lens Technology at FMX 2025, opened a closed beta in late 2025 that ran through February, then walked us through CinCraft LensCore at NAB 2026 (video embedded below) ahead of the commercial launch now confirmed at FMX 2026. For working compositors and VFX supervisors, that progression matters less than what ZEISS is now actually shipping into Nuke pipelines.
A ray-traced lens engine, not a defocus filter
At the core of CinCraft LensCore is a GPU-accelerated, ray-traced rendering engine built specifically for The Foundry Nuke. ZEISS’ framing is that this is not a filter-based bokeh or defocus tool but a physical simulation: every pixel and every frame is computed through a virtual lens whose behavior is parameterized by real optical values. The tool is driven by focus, T-stop, focal length, and focus distance, and it keeps lens behavior physically coherent as those parameters change.
What that means in practice is that traits like vignetting, geometric distortion, focus falloff, and the shape of out-of-focus highlights are derived from a lens model rather than approximated with stylization sliders. Compositors working in 2D get an effect set that has historically required either heavy 3D setups or careful manual matching against on-set plates.
A virtual shelf of cinema lenses
CinCraft LensCore ships with a digital lens shelf that includes profiles of real ZEISS cinema lenses and supports user-created custom presets. The pitch from ZEISS is that one click applies a complete digital lens look to a shot, reproducing the bokeh, defocus, distortion, vignetting, and other optical effects characteristic of a specific physical lens. Artists can compare looks in seconds and apply the same profile across a sequence to maintain consistency.
According to Egor Nikitin, Head of Digital Cinematography at ZEISS, the goal is to give compositing the same vocabulary as on-set lens choices, “from the way light falls off at the edges of the frame to the nuance of out-of-focus highlights.” The premise is straightforward: if a DP knows which lens was used (or wants to match one for a CG element), the post artist should be able to load that profile and start from a physically grounded base rather than a generic blur.
ZEISS CinCraft LensCore – CG renders. Image credit: ZEISS
ZEISS CinCraft LensCore – CG renders. Image credit: ZEISSBuilding lenses that do not exist
Beyond replicating real glass, LensCore also lets artists generate entirely new lens designs that still behave with the physics of authentic optics. Starting from a ZEISS or custom lens profile, every key lens characteristic can be manually adjusted. ZEISS argues that the result remains grounded in believable optical performance even as the look is pushed for a project, because the underlying engine still respects how light and glass interact.
That is a meaningful editorial claim and one we will need to test with hands-on time. It is also where this product diverges from typical Nuke defocus and bokeh tools, which let you fake almost anything but rarely hold up under scrutiny on close-up shots or heavy depth transitions.
The inpaint feature and other workflow details
One concrete addition worth flagging is a built-in inpaint feature that intelligently fills occluded areas behind defocused objects. In a defocus pipeline, when something blurs heavily, the area behind it can become visible at the edges, and that region would normally need to be reconstructed manually or via 3D. ZEISS’ inpaint is positioned as a way to handle that automatically, reducing the need for complex 3D setups and speeding up compositing.
Joern Grosshans, Product Manager Digital Cinematography at ZEISS and a former VFX supervisor, frames the broader argument bluntly: matching a specific lens look in post eats time even when the on-set documentation is good. LensCore tries to compress that work into picking a lens off a virtual shelf, the same way a DP pulls one from a rental house.
ZEISS CinCraft LensCore selection and customization options. Image credit: ZEISSHow it fits into the CinCraft ecosystem
CinCraft LensCore is the post-production complement to the rest of the CinCraft toolkit, which includes CinCraft Scenario for real-time camera tracking and CinCraft Mapper for frame-accurate distortion and shading data. The whole ecosystem is built on ZEISS’ eXtended Data (XD) layer, which the company introduced in 2017 to push lens metadata from set to post.
This is also a strategic move that fits the broader industry direction: optics manufacturers pushing further down the pipeline into software, particularly the handoff between capture and finishing. It is no longer enough to make great glass, the argument goes, if the look is going to be replicated, extended, or replaced in a CG-heavy finishing room.
Pricing and availability
ZEISS CinCraft LensCore will be available worldwide through the CinCraft webshop starting June 1, 2026, with multiple license tiers. Specific pricing has not been published in the launch materials, which is something we will revisit once the webshop goes live. ZEISS is running live demos at FMX 2026 in Stuttgart at booth 2.1 in the FMX Marketplace. More information is available on the official LensCore page.
Will a physically based virtual lens engine actually save Nuke teams meaningful time, or is this another tool that demos beautifully and breaks in production? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!