Ripple Technical Overview
The idea behind Ripple is that we can run X operation on N number of nuke scripts without needing to manually update each shot. Ripple has grown to be capable of a lot more than that.
Here’s how that’s achieved.
Here’s an example above: our client wants us to change our ‘end-of-script‘ setup on every shot.
Ripple deals with small nuke scriptlets - it can create, publish, or ‘rip‘ nuke scriptlets. Ripple within nuke can resolve against a *project* or a *shot*. In this example, we’re focusing on resolving against a project.
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CREATE : create a new token for other artists or scripts to access.
PUBLISH : update an existing token for other artists or scripts to access.
RIP : clone from an existing setup. (note: if your goal is to resolve a read node’s path to the current shot, ‘rip‘ can also do that - if ‘type‘ is set to ‘file‘)
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CREATE: When a token is created, it is added to a designated directory as an .nk script. That .nk script contains the nodes contained in the ripple backdrop node.
PUBLISH : If we want to change an existing token, like in our above example, we’d publish our update. All this does is overwrite the existing .nk script in our project directory.
RIP : ‘rip‘ simply copies the most recent token into your ripple backdrop.
Note - if your ripple node is set to type: file, your filepath will be resolved to the current shot context. This applies to any node with a file read function: Read, ReadGeo, DeepRead, Camera, Write, WriteGeo, DeepWrite.
for example:
Z:/job/9mobile/work/03_Workflow/Shots/seq010-sh0020/plate/v03/sh0020_bg01_v03/sh0020_bg01_v03.%04d.exr
becomes:
Z:/job/9mobile/work/03_Workflow/Shots/seq010-sh0030/plate/v03/sh0030_bg01_v03/sh0030_bg01_v03.%04d.exr
This is useful when copying setups across shots.
NXT
Using NXT we can sequentially run python scripts which can automatically update these ripple setups.