Welcome to Introduction to Pipeline Development for Nuke Artists!

This is a course that’s been in development since I started taking on client side work in 2020, and aims to help better serve the Nuke freelancing community.

This 14-part course will guide you through the process of creating a pipeline, with lots of code to sink your teeth in to and practical examples to experiment with. The course is designed to work with all operating systems, so whether you are on Mac, Windows, or Linux, I’ve got you covered. The best part is it’s also fully compatible with all flavours of Nuke, so it doesn’t matter if you’re running NukeX, Indie or Non-Commercial. In the final lesson of this course, you’ll be able to find download links for the fully packaged up pipeline, so there’s no need to worry about getting lost along the way.

Who’s this course for?

This course is designed for Nuke artists that are freelancing outside of a studio environment, or are planning to in the future. However, that doesn’t limit it exclusively to this audience. We’re going to deep dive in to the mechanics of pipeline creation in Nuke, which makes it a beneficial course for technical artists that are not freelancing, but are looking to expand their pipeline development skillset.

What will we be creating? 

In this course you will be creating a robust Nuke pipeline that will allow you to work in a professional environment and handle large sequences and turnovers with the benefits of an automated pipeline. You will begin by setting show and shot environments, and then proceed to launching Nuke. From there, all of your write nodes will be correctly setup and you will have access to all of the media relevant to the shot in a custom Nuke panel. You will have show based defaults that can customize the entire UI, set read and writes node to the correct colorspace, change the project resolution to a delivery spec and much more. We will cover the importance of setting global naming conventions for your business and use that information to build a file ingestion tool to make sure your media is always named correctly.

Prerequisites

What I expect from you is that you are familiar with using a command line interface, have a basic understanding of Python and how Nuke utilizes it, but more importantly have good problem solving skills as you may spend some time de-bugging your code! I’ve tried to make this a ‘one size fits all’ guide, but you may be required to slightly customize certain parts of the code to make it work on your system.