Maya + pyqt + mel

I recently discovered a way to use my melscripting knowledge, and do some experiment with pyqt designer. I know I promised a gui programming with python and designer and that will come soon too. Until that: it is possible to create a gui in designer, and do the core scripting in mel. It creates an .ui file, and in maya 2011 you can load it with the loadUI command. If you name the layouts, buttons etc. properly in designer, you can freely modify them from mel, create, attach, parent or trigger action with them. Here you can find a good tutorial for start, and here is a table, showing gui element types in designer and the corresponding type in mel. I discovered some strange things about the layout handling, and I don't know if it's a bug or not. But if you don't want to learn python quickly, but want to quickly slap a gui, it's worth a try.

New nuke gizmo - rotator

Do you need to rotate a wheel in nuke? Do you have the translation for it but it needs to rotate accordingly? Here's the solution: rotator gizmo! Premiere here, now. Put the gizmo in your menu.py. Assume you have a wheel plate in the starting position, matted with alpha. Put down the gizmo from menu, connect after the wheel. Holding down ctrl, move the center sign to the center of the wheel (the translate knob should remain 0). Then drag the dot named "outside" to anywhere on the wheel circumference. You can test the rotation now by dragging the center sign without pressing control (changing the translate knob). Currently it does proper rotation only from this starting point, but in any direction. Then put the translation animation in the translate knob and you are done. Turn on motionblur if you need.
Comments, feedbacks are welcome!
I will put this on nukepedia/creativecrash, as the others, but after a little while. So if you want to get the new gizmos/scripts I make as soon as possible, come back, here you can find them!

Nuke 6.2, maya, scenemanagers

So now after finshing a project, using Nuke 6.1 for a long time (months), now we can try 6.2 version of nuke. It has really exciting new features, finally they built python 2.6! (You can think that okay that's not the feature I'd mentioned in the first place! :) It's good, because python 2.6 has official win64 build, and maya2011 is also using 2.6, so the so called scenemanager gui I'm started to develop for nuke, with alteration of course, but without conceptual changes, can be used later on for maya (or houdini). Actually I already coded a scenemanager for maya, but it was scripted in mel. We are using it for opening, saving, referencing scenes, assets, according to our inhouse name convention. Now I'm developing a similar gui for nuke, but this time with pyqt, now python 2.6, and it will be fetching all data from our project database. This will be later adapted for maya (if we had time).
If there's interest, maybe I can share screenshots, concepts, or code snippets/tips as I'm going with the development of the nuke scenemanager. Please comment if you would be interested in that! Thanks,
Gabor

Nuke commandline render and python

Happy new year nukers, and non-nukers! First post this year, hopefully many more will follow it.
For the beginning, a little about commandline rendering with nuke, using pythonscript (got the idea from a mailing list post of mine). I mean with nuke you can't only execute a nuke file, but a pythonscript too. Like this:
nuke6.1.exe -x -F 1-30 myscript.py
One can think, that this is useful for creating nodes on the fly, like a read node, a write node, and execute that for converting sequences to another format. That is an option, but you also can open existing scripts and modify them. For this you can use the scriptOpen command. For example, if you have a nuke script called test_v001,nk, make a file called test.py, and write in it:

nuke.scriptOpen("e:\\Projects\\test_v001.nk")
(Replace the path with the path to your nuke file) After this in the .py file you can do modifications on your nukefile. Knob changes etc. And that's it. You can execute with the above mentioned cmdline command:
nuke6.1.exe -x -F 1-30 test.py

There is another option to do that. Slight change, but important, and you can do much more with it than rendering. You can not only execute, but literally open nuke files in command line (terminal) mode, hold it in memory, do changes (blindly) to that. For example I use that for my archiving script, open many nukefiles one by one, collect the used readnodes, and put those in a list etc. So I'm not executing the nukefile, just open it. But if I want I can render it too. I put a line more in the previous test.py file, so it will look like this:

nuke.scriptOpen("e:\\Projects\\test_v001.nk")
#do some modification on knobs if you need
nuke.execute('Write1', 1, 30, 1)

Here I called an execute command at the end of my pythonscript (I must know the name of my writenode)
I will use this script in my commandline command, that is almost the same as before:
nuke6.1.exe -t -F 1-30 test.py

But notice the -t flag! That means the test.py is not executed as a render, but treated as normal a pythonscript, just like if I put that in script editor in nuke. It will render the nukefile anyway, because the execute command in the test.py But as I said the great thing is to have an option to execute python scripts in terminal mode with the nuke interpreter.

PyQT for nuke - 64bit

Hi, here is a post about compiling pyqt 4 for python 2.5 - 64bit, that is required for current version of nuke (6.1). The next version, 6.2 will come with  python 2.6, but until then if you want to use pyqt with 64bit nuke, you have to compile from source, or download from this place as I did. Thanks to Ozgur!

Nuke-RV integration!

Whoaa, the sneak peek video was out yesterday, and the tools are now downloadable (for free of course)! The developers of RV are really great guys, thank you!
Now you can preview readnodes directly in rv, render to rv, set up checkpoints of your work, create multiple version quickly to review with the sup etc. Check the video here.
Now I really need a second monitor for work :)

New commercial!

Our latest finished work at Digitalapes, the Vilmos commercial is on air now, so you can check it out here.
There is a makingof video too. Hope you like it.