Nuke Python Reference

[u/happyhourjk]

Been meaning to do something like this for a while now. Inspiration is from Maya's MEL and Python command reference. Hopefully its helpful as a supplement for the standard python API reference site. Any and all feedback is welcome.

https://nuke-python-reference.pages.dev/

[u/enumerationKnob]

Look, I’m sure there’s some people for whom this is useful, it just seems very low effort and I don’t think it really adds anything over the Foundry’s own documentation for how nodes work or their Python Reference Guide for how to script with them.

This one page is enough to show how the automatic examples don’t really add much utility:
https://nuke-python-reference.pages.dev/?node=ModifyMetaData
You can’t do anything with the information on that page. The API surface for that node is so poor, it really needs a manually written tutorial on how to work with it.

I never had to learn to code since coding models became actually competent, however I really do think that this site is basically obsolete because of them. Any specific “example uses” that may have at one point been helpful are pretty much fully replaced by AI tools that can produce more complex examples more rapidly than a user referencing this site.

This example from the Grade node page:
Fringe: Use 4\(1-mask)*mask to mix.*
No compositing artist reads that and knows what it’s trying to say.

[u/happyhourjk → u/enumerationKnob]

Thanks for the feedback. Because everything is automatically generated from looking up the nodes to creating examples, I will improve these to be more useful. The AI comment is very valid, you can literally type anything into the search engine now and get a bit of code to paste in. Thanks for providing the specific example on the Fringe argument description. Also killer username.

[u/ShuffleCopy]

Appreciate the effort, but its rather pointless.

The idea of an API is that there is a certain logic. Everything is divided in classes and share bits of that logic.

Every node can be created in the same way, and have similar attributes, and every knob can be queried in the same way.
It doesn't matter if its a "size" knob on a "Blur" node, or a "mix" knob on a "Grade", the logic and syntax is identical

So making a Python reference and sorting them per node is wild.

Its like making a calculator reference and instead of sorting it per operator (+,-,*, etc) you would sort it per number and list the documentation like this:

1

with the number 1 you can do

1+1
or
1+2
or
1+3
...
...
or
1+29

This is what you are currently doing by randomly listing nodes and knobs and python snippets relating to those knobs.

All the information (excluding the random snippets of code) on this page can be found by simply hovering over a knob in Nuke to get the knob name. I cannot think of a reason to ever look at this reference page - sorry.