By Kenn Hedin Kalvik in Nuke — Feb 29, 2024

Automating Tedious Tasks Using Python In Nuke

🔒 How to both automate and massively speed up repetitive tasks using Python’s for-loop in Nuke…

🔒 How to both automate and massively speed up repetitive tasks using Python’s for-loop in Nuke…

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Several Companions have reached out to me, wanting to better understand Python and to learn how to write some actually useful, practical Python scripts for Nuke at a beginner level.

A good way to start is to dive into how we can use Python to both automate and speed up the daily tasks that we don't really want to do, so that we can focus more on the fun and creative aspects of compositing!

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I’ve found that when tackling a large and complex subject such as Python, it's more enjoyable when you’re actually building something useful. Instead of studying all of the nuts and bolts, and then only using 10-20% of that knowledge to actually make something, let’s focus on the end goal which is building several different practical tools (see list below). We’ll break that goal down into smaller objectives, and then learn the relevant things we need to know in order to accomplish those objectives along the way. And finally, we'll flesh out that knowledge with different scenarios and approaches, reinforcing the principles for making your own Python tools.

Automate The Boring Tasks

At some point while compositing, you’ll no doubt have encountered tedious and mundane tasks which purely require repetitive, manual input.

Tasks which are not at all creative in themselves – only frustrating and time consuming.

For example:

Changing the same setting over and over in many nodes.
Creating a large number of the same nodes with different values applied to each of them.
Shuffling out and labelling all of the render passes in your CG render and removing the superfluous layers/channels from each stream.

It can be very annoying to have to manually create hundreds of nodes, open up their properties, and individually change the parameters over and over.

But the good news is that this is completely avoidable.

In this large guide, we’ll walk through how to write three very useful and adaptable Python scripts – easy, medium, and a little bit more complex – plus variations of them. These scripts will take advantage of the for-loop in order to automate the repetitive tasks described above.

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You don't need any prior Python knowledge to follow along with this guide.