2 posts tagged with "nuke scripting"

This post is about creating guides in nuke for vendor-side VFX internal reviews. Full demo here and Git Repo with Script here

Introduction​

The VFX for Spike Lee's film Highest 2 Lowest were done in large part at Baked Studios in New York City. The film had a long list of camera formats used during shooting and each camera had its own crop factor from plate to what was in the edit. This presented us with a challenge to manage aspect ratios with letterboxing along with these overall crop factors programmatically from shot to shot.

Tcl (Pronounced "Tickle") is a scripting language that Nuke modifies to create an expression language specialized for compositing math. Nuke's Tcl expressions can be used to great effect for simple modifications to knob parameters via mathematical expressions with its syntax.

Baked Studios by the time I left, had a robust python based pipeline integrated with ShotGrid toolkit. Largely built by U.K company Nodes & Layers, this pipeline allowed us to pull data from ShotGrid into nuke for slates, burnins, and various Tcl expressions if needed. The details of this workflow are largely proprietary and out of the scope of this blog post, but I encourage people to reach out to both Baked Studios and Nodes & Layers for details and or services.

TLDR: This is about a storage clean-up tool and why your Gen-Z coordinators need to be using Nuke Assist.

Why Nuke Assist Actually Slaps​

Nuke Assist is a limited version of Nuke that comes packaged twice with each NukeX or Studio license. This extra version of the software is extremely useful in a large studio pipeline because it lets you break up work and licenses in a way that is efficient and cost effective. The limitations (no write nodes, limited comp nodes, gizmos etc...) are a feature and not a bug. You can use nuke --assist for paint, roto and tracking work, while breaking out final comp and render work for regular nuke. Similarly, certain coordinator tasks like ingesting, as well as some supervisor tasks like node tree hygiene checks, can also be done using nuke --assist. This article is going to focus on the coordinator's use-case and how Nuke Assist can help act as a connection layer between Autodesk ShotGrid and a filesystem. First, a little history.