duber's blog

As with my previous post, I’m preparing a few handy tools for 3ds Max artists using Mari and Nuke. This bit is the fun part with Nuke: live communication between 3ds Max and Nuke.

Stay tuned!

Finally! This was one of the reasons why I bought a copy of Mari! The bridge between Nuke and Mari makes these two an uber-powerful combo!

Here are some information about this update and Frank’s video demonstrating the power of this tool.

Btw: this is something I also want to extend to the 3ds Max world. Stay tuned…

To celebrate a new, fresh year ahead, I sat down and wrote a script that I’ve wanted to write for some time. A simple to use, yet powerful set of tools that’d help out anyone working in 3ds Max and Nuke to get the 3ds Max Cameras and locators (be it geometry, point helpers or anything between) to Nuke, flawlessly and with as little effort as possible.

So I condensed two essential functions into a single-click button in your toolbar. Watch the vieo above for a thorough description with examples.

The functionality could be described as Save To File and Copy To Clipboard methods. The first one will take all the selected objects and will generate a .chan file for each of them which can then be imported back in Nuke’s Axis or Camera nodes. The second one is pretty cool and rather powerful. I wrote a set of functions that take the selected objecs and generate a full Nuke script in the memory, which is then stored in the clipboard. A simple Ctrl+V in Nuke’s node editor will then paste in the generated Nuke script with all the Cameras and Axis nodes as they were in 3ds Max’s scene. Very cool, fast and useful for more complex comping in Nuke.

Anyways, the tools are licensed under the Creative Commons License, so, feel free to enhance and share the scripts as you like, as long as you give me credits for it.

DOWNLOAD, install by drag and dropping onto you 3ds Max scene. Don’t forget to copy the import_chan_file.tcl to your Nuke plugins directory.

Enjoy!

EDIT: If you’re having trouble installing the script using the .mzp installer, just open the NukeOps.mzp file with WinRAR or WinZIP (or directly in TotalCommander for example), extract the files and copy them to the appropriate folders of you 3ds Max installation (in my case it’s the C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\ folder):

• duber_NukeOps.mcr to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\ui\usermacros
• NukeOps.ms to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\Scripts\Startup
• all the .BMP files to C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\ui\usericons

RSMB is a fantastic plugin that I use very often to speed up my renderings, however, there is one little glitch that almost made me go crazy! Hopefully I’ll be able to save you some time by explaining this issue and offering a fix in the video above.

Finally! I made the commitment to build my pipeline on the very popular and successful high-end compositing package, Nuke from The Foundry.

I took advantage of their incredible deal (still valid until the end of November) and bought NukeX, Furnace and some render licenses for my studio.

Now it’s the hard-core pipeline integration time! Stay tuned!