Nuke - Managing Your Files On Multiple Computers

Often times I find myself moving Nuke scripts back and forth between my computer at home and the labs in school. If you work on multiple computers with your Nuke scripts, you've more than likely experienced broken Read Nodes.



But fear not young padawan! There are ways to avoid spending 15 minutes redirecting Nuke to all your files. I've come across a couple of scripts to fix your Read Nodes, but by far the most jaw-droppingly easy one comes from The Foundry itself. If you haven't checked it out yet, the Nuke Master Class last January was extremely beneficial and I highly recommend everyone to check out their videos and source files.

In their Python videos, they quickly demonstrate fixPaths.py, which attempts to automatically fix the paths of all the missing files in your Nuke script. Here's a little excerpt from the second Python video showing the FixPaths script in action:



Again, please please please, I urge you to go visit the Nuke Master Class and view the entire video in higher res. It will be worth your while, I promise.

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This second method I learned from a good friend of mine, Devank, who put together a PDF based on another tutorial from The Foundry. You can download his original PDF here.

The rundown of his interpretation goes a little bit like this:

1. Create a NoOp node and set its name to Path.




2. Right-click on the NoOp node in the Properties panel and select Manage User Knobs. Add a Filename knob and rename it to Project_Path.
   



3. Enter or browse to the path of your project directory.
   



4. Now all you have to do is copy and paste this little code into all your Read nodes before the filename to insure it links to the Project directory.
   
   

   [value Path.Project_Path]

   
   
   
   


5. Now whenever you switch computers, all you need to do is change the Project path in the NoOp node and your Read nodes should fix themselves.