If anyone has some cool snippets to share please feel free to leave them in a comment below.

disable “postage stamps” on all nodes

for a in nuke.allNodes():
    try:
        a['postage_stamp'].setValue(0)
    except:
        pass

“unhide” all nodes’ inputs – useful when receiving a sneaky comp/lighting script

for a in nuke.allNodes():
    try:
        a['hide_input'].setValue(0)
    except:
        pass

change the “first” frame of all selected nodes that are “Read” nodes:
(example changes the first frame to 1018)

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
    if a.Class() == 'Read':
        a['first'].setValue(1018)

print a selected nodes’ methods

import struct
node = nuke.selectedNode()
for a in node['lookup'].animations():
    print dir(a)

print inputs (dependencies) of a selected node:

for a in nuke.selectedNode().dependencies():
    print a.name()

print outputs (dependents) of a selected node:

for a in nuke.selectedNode().dependent():
    print a.name()

find all the TimeOffset nodes in a Group called “Group2″, and change the value of each offset based on it’s position in the array of found time offsets

tos = []
for a in nuke.toNode('Group2').nodes():
	if a.Class()=='TimeOffset':
		tos.append(a)
for b in tos:
	b['time_offset'].setValue(tos.index(b))

set the ‘bbox’ for any selected Merge, Keymix & Copy nodes to “B”

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
	classTypes = ['Merge' , 'Keymix', 'Copy', ]
	for n in classTypes:
		if n in a.Class():
			for p in a['bbox'].values():
				if 'B' in p:
					a['bbox'].setValue(a['bbox'].values().index(p))

remove all animation from a selected nodes

for a in nuke.selectedNode().knobs():
	nuke.selectedNode()[a].clearAnimated()

add keyframes – animate a mix

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
	a['mix'].setAnimated()
	a['mix'].setValueAt(1,nuke.frame())
	a['mix'].setValueAt(0,(nuke.frame() - 1))

half the colour value of all the Constant nodes in a script

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if a.Class() == "Constant":
		a['color'].setValue(a['color'].value()[0] / 2 , 0)
		a['color'].setValue(a['color'].value()[1] / 2 , 1)
		a['color'].setValue(a['color'].value()[2] / 2 , 2)

find all the transform nodes in a script, and if their input is a Crop, set the ‘scale’ value to be twice it’s current value (also checks if the scale is a list/array or a float)

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if a.Class() == "Transform":
		if a.input(0).Class() == "Crop":
			x = a['scale'].value()
			if type(x).__name__ == 'list':
				a['scale'].setValue(x[0] * 2 , 0)
				a['scale'].setValue(x[1] * 2 , 1)
			if type(x).__name__ == 'float':
				a['scale'].setValue(x*2)

set all the gain values of all ColorCorrect nodes to be twice their current value

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if a.Class() == "ColorCorrect":
		a['gain'].setValue(a['gain'].value() * 2)

print files with ‘mov’ in filename

for a in nuke.allNodes():
	if 'Read' in a['name'].value():
		if 'mov' in a['file'].value():
			print a['file'].value()

change font size of all “write” nodes in script

for a in nuke.selectedNodes():
	if "Write" in a['name'].value():
		a['note_font_size'].setValue(60)

create 20 constants with incrementing colour values

def makeConstants(amount):
	for i in range(amount):
		a= nuke.nodes.Constant()
		color= float( float(i) / float(amount) )
		a['color'].setValue(color)
makeConstants(20)

2 Comments

• At Thu 27, May 2010, Adam wrote:

  some helpful code:

  http://francoislord.com/blog/tag/python

• At Wed 16, June 2010, Adam wrote:

  Changing the value of a specific node in a group through python?

  http://www.gfxtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?p=91701

Yesterday I decided I have to give up on PyObjC for the moment and step into the world of Objective-C.

I have got to a point in developing SubIt that I can’t seem to get enough out of the PyObjC bridge to be able to get what SubIt needs.

So now I am in the process of rewriting SubIt in Obj-C.

Obj-C seems weird and complicated and I can’t see why it has to be this way when Python/Ruby seem just so much much easier to understand. Oh well, I have taken the plunge.

I spent most of yesterday reading a great and easy to follow PDF called “Become An Xcoder“, available for free download:
http://www.cocoalab.com/?q=becomeanxcoder

I have been looking at a bunch of podcasts/videos/books and to me this PDF was the quickest/easiest way to get a little up to speed.

Support for Non-ASCII characters
Method for cleaning up Overlapping Timecode

Download here

For a little bit more info:
http://adamteale.com/subit/

1 Comments

• At Tue 28, April 2009, warwick wrote:

  looks like new career in software development

Update: I created a dedicated page for SubIt – my attempt at creating a SubTitle file creator application with PyObjC

1 Comments

• At Tue 24, March 2009, Bart Verkoeijen wrote:

  Sounds like a fun application to develop. Let me know if you run into issues! :-)

Thanks to a fair amount of googling and a few days on and off of testing I seem to have a working setup for doing distributed processing using Apple Qmaster – for Shake, Maya and Compressor.

Here is my effort at explaining what I did to get it working – big apologies, it’s poorly written. I’ll revisit this post soon.

some notes on our workflow

(See further down for setting up the ENV variables.)

Centralised $NR_INCLUDE_PATH
I setup an env variable for $NR_INCLUDE_PATH for all Shake machines and the xserve – to look at a sharepoint (the nreal folder) on the xServe and automatically mount it – so all the Shake machines would be using the same macros/plugins and settings. I setup a new user on the xserve “shake” that can only mount the nreal directory.

After some googling around I found a way to automount volumes:

OS X 10.5 (fstab)
/etc/fstab – to automount sharepoint on xServe
LINK: http://blogs.sun.com/lowbit/entry/easy_afp_autmount_on_os

# ————————————————————————————-
# Mount AFP share from xServe via AFP
# ————————————————————————————-
ourserver.local:/nreal /Network/nreal url auto,url==afp://nreal:password@ourserver.local/nreal 0 0
# ————————————————————————————-

how to refresh automount(login as root/su):

sudo automount -cv

OS X 10.4 (netinfo manager)
LINK: http://ask.metafilter.com/54223/Help-me-automount-my-smb-share-in-Apple-OS-X-reward-inside
in terminal.app:

nidump fstab . > /tmp/fstab
echo “ourservernreal /Network/nreal url url==cifs://nreal:password@ourserver/nreal 0 0″ >> /tmp/fstab
sudo niload fstab . < /tmp/fstab
sudo killall -HUP automount

how to refresh automount(login as root/su):

sudo killall -HUP automount

QMASTER
I had tried for some time to get shake scripts to render over our network using Qmaster but it just wouldn’t work. The QMaster logs were where I found all my errors. ‘frame 0021 could not be found’, ‘UNIX error 3 file could not be found’

things to check

What seemed strange was that if I logged into the xServe and executed a script via terminal with shake (to render just on the xserve) the render would complete successfully. Then it clicked that maybe the environment variables I was using in my scripts ($xxx) might not be getting recognised by Qmaster or the way Qmaster launches Shake??

The big tip-off
I googled for the errors I kept seeing and luckily enough this forum post popped up:
http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=204342

“I have pinned this down to at least one reason – that the shake qmaster isn’t picking up the NR_INCLUDE_PATH environment variable. Does anyone know where you need to set this up on a cluster node (I can get the qmasterd to pick it up but that doesn’t solve the problem!) “

If you are trying to use Qmaster, and need to set environment variables, then you need to create a wrapper script that sets the variables and then calls the appropriate version of shake.

For example, (this was from Apple)

NR_INCLUDE_PATH=/Network_Applications/Shake Plugins/nreal/include;export NR_INCLUDE_PATH
NR_ICON_PATH=/Network_Applications/Shake Plugins/nreal/icons;export NR_ICON_PATH

umask 000

/Applications/Shake3.50/shake.app/Contents/MacOS/shake $*
status=$?
if [ $status -ne 0 ]
then
exit $status
fi

Then when using Qmaster, you run the application using this
script (saved for example as /usr/bin/shakeWrapper) which must be
installed on all nodes in the cluster.

Regards
Nell

Cheers Nell!

I took Nell’s script, added a few lines to it and stuck it in /usr/bin/

/usr/bin/shakeWrapper – create a file to launch Shake respecting ENV variables – later alias ‘shake’ to this file

echo
echo “Shake 4 running through a wrapper script – /usr/bin/shakeWrapper”
echo

umask 000

/Applications/Shake/shake.app/Contents/MacOS/shake $*
status=$?
if [ $status -ne 0 ]
then
exit $status
fi

I added the first few lines there so when I later made an alias to this script the Shake user would have some idea what is going on when launching Shake via the terminal.

Setting up the ENV (environment) variables…

/etc/profile – to declare system-wide Environment variables / aliases
(alias shake to use a wrapper to make it launch respecting/recognising the env variables)

# System-wide .profile for sh(1)

if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
[ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi

JOBS_LOCAL=”/Volumes/otherdrive/jobs”;
export JOBS_LOCAL

JOBS_SERVER=”/Volumes/ourserversharepoint/jobs”;
export JOBS_SERVER

NR_INCLUDE_PATH=”$HOME/nreal/include”:”/Network/nreal/include/”;
export NR_INCLUDE_PATH

alias shake=”/usr/bin/shakeWrapper”

*remember to enter into terminal:
source /etc/profile

2 Comments

• At Tue 4, March 2008, Warwick wrote:

  excellent detail. nice job!!

• At Wed 5, March 2008, Will wrote:

  $what_the/ hell/ are_$you talkin bout(?) -x

I just managed to get something kind of cool working.

We have a cool tool in the pipeline, but in the meantime my hacked together python efforts will have to do!

A few months ago I created a python script for building ‘job’ directories – for new jobs that came into the building – a script that runs in a shell.

I then learnt about wxpython and turned the script into a GUI app.

This was cool to run on my machine, but I needed a way for it to be used by other artists / producers.

We got an xServe and some disk storage so I put the script onto the xServe. I was able to log in via VNC and run the script to create the job directories that everyone could access. This gave us all a place to put files in a structured manner and not let things get too messed up (thanks to file permissions).

But the problem was that for me to execute the script, I’d have to VNC or SSH into the server. I didn’t mind doing it, but it was not so useful when I wasn’t around.

So back to this ‘new job’ script….

I just worked out how to setup a producer’s mac to be able to “remotely execute the python ‘new job’ script on our xServe” using SSH and python.

All a producer has to do is type into Terminal:

newjob

and it all starts up. The producer is asked the ‘name of the job’ and ‘the number of shots’ and the script goes ahead and builds all the directories.

How I did it

Getting into the xServe.
I realised that I would not be able to do too much to the file structure of the xServe’s file system if I was to simply mount it on a Desktop – due to permissions etc… and I also didn’t want ‘the user’ to have to mount anything manually. It needed to brainless. SSH seemed the best way.

I found out pretty quickly that there wasn’t an easy way to get out of entering the ‘admin password’ for the xServe to remotely execute the script (you have to enter a password when you ssh into another machine).

I didn’t want to give away our admin password for the xserve. So I read up on SSH and discovered SSH-Key’s.
A cool way to authenticate your machine to the remote machine without having to enter the ‘login password’ for the remote user. Instead you give the SSH connection a ‘passphrase’. Initially you have to login to the remote machine with the remote password, but after that it’s all ‘ about ‘enter your passphrase for key’.

To set up the RSA key for your local machine I followed this easy to read tutorial from IBM.

Basically you need to generate a public key and add that to the list of ‘known computers’ on the remote machine.

To generate the public key (according to the IBM article) run this command in a shell:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

and follow the prompts.

You can choose to not have a passphrase, but that seemed a little too much of a security risk for our setup.
Next I got a bit confused, the command spat out 2 files into a ‘.ssh’ directory in your home folder:

id_dsa
id_dsa.pub

These are the default names and location if u DON’T enter a name for the key.

To get the public key (the .pub file) into the list of known machines on the xServe I mounted the xServe’s Admin’s home folder on the local machine.

I got into the .ssh directory in the home folder of the xserve, and went looking for the file:

.ssh/authorized_keys

but couldn’t see it.

So i created a file called ‘authorized_keys’ using the following command:

touch authorized_keys

Then to add the public key I ran a ‘cat’ command to append the public key file to the ‘authorized_keys’ file on the server.

It worked! I was able to login the the xServe using the passphrase. Shweet!

I found this post on an apple forum also very helpful.

Executing the script

On the remote machine / xServe is where the python script lives – in a folder called ‘scripts’ in the home folder.
To run this script in a shell on the xServe I would type:

python /Path/to/the/script/newjob.py

So I figured from the local machine the command to execute using ssh would be:

ssh admin@ourserver.local python /Path/to/the/script/newjob.py

And that did work.

But that was wayyyyyy too long for or our Producer to have to type up.

So I made bash alias in the bash_profile:

alias newjob ssh admin@ourserver.local python /Path/to/the/script/newjob.py

i tried the alias, and it connected, but it didn’t seem the script was doing anything. But it was. I couldnt see the interactive text prompting me to enter a ‘jobname’ or ‘amount of shots’, but it WAS asking for it.

Why couldn’t I see the text? I was stumped. Why wasn’t the shell showing me the feedback from the xServe?

I read the man pages of SSH and found out a bunch of options you can pass the ssh command. Somehow I came across this:

-t Force pseudo-tty allocation. This can be used to execute arbitrary screen-based programs on a remote machine, which can be very useful, e.g. when implementing menu services. Multiple -t options force tty allocation, even if ssh has no local tty.

As soon as I put that into the command it all worked!

ssh -t admin@ourserver.local python /Path/to/the/script/newjob.py

The last thing I did to make this even easier was to create a ‘.command’ file in the OSX Finder, that can just be double clicked and it will open Terminal.app and run the above command.

2 Comments

• At Sun 25, November 2007, Luke wrote:

  Man, you are one smart cookie.

• At Mon 26, November 2007, Bart Verkoeijen wrote:

  Wow, you should start writing your own "* for Dummies" series! :-)

I have been playing around with a python script using rsync to create an easy way for syncing new material from our server to local machines (it can be a pain in the ass to navigate folders looking for the new stuff) – keeping the folder structure etc… – and most importantly not destroying anything.

I’d never really understood how to use it – thinking it was only for local to remote transfers – but it works on anything. Brilliant!

RSYNC rocks!

The output of the python script is a Shake script that contains as many FileIns as there are images in the sequence – each one slipped one frame more than the previous. Does that make any sense?

Each image is plugged into a Max layer node and then that is plugged into the next Max layer node etc….

So depending on the length of your sequence the Shake script can be enormous!

Python is awesome.

Here is the script:
shake max python script (147)

2 Comments

• At Sat 15, September 2007, Warwick wrote:

  cool.. but can't see the script....

• At Sat 15, September 2007, Adam wrote:

  doh!

  should be there now :)

I have finally made some steps with 1 progamming language. Years ago some good folks at Emerald City Design said I should try get into the programming language Python. I never got very far and just couldn’t grasp the concept. Since then I opened a book on Objective C and had a serious brain fade.

Luckily I got the hang of some basic Shell scripting and started to feel a little better about the whole speaking computer thing.
Then the other day I wanted to recreate some sort of tool I saw at a few post houses I’ve worked at. A “new job” creation tool – so when a new job for VISA card comes in and you need to setup 50 folders for it with all the sub directories etc… you can just punch in VISA and 50 folders and it will be made.

Well I have a very basic version that seems to work fine from a shell.
I have also got a basic version running in a GUI using the Tkinter modules (are they modules? i still have no idea).
I have no user error things setup so if the user types in they’d like BANANA shots instead of 34 then the scripts will probably get all confused.
Also I wanted to test out an if/then statement, so i used it to change the number padding of the shot folder names depending on how many shots you needed – very pointless and not cool – but it works

NewJob_GUI.py – v1
NewJob_script.py – v1

(WordPress user note – if you want to upload files using the ‘inline upload’ when writing posts, certain files aren’t allowed – like “.zip” – so get THIS PLUGIN)

I’m about to try compile the script so it can be run by itself. This is my lead so far:
http://effbot.org/zone/python-compile.htm

Anyway, it’s a start…