katirpWorking in larger Katana scripts I always find it a bit cumbersome to switch between Nodes that I’d like to view and/or launch a Render from. I recently started getting my hands dirty with PySide/PyQt and I wanted to put it to use. My goal was to build a simple dynamic UI that would allow the user to quickly switch the view flag of a selection of Nodes in Katana and trigger a render.

If you have a lot of different passes in your Katana script it can become a bit draining to constantly switch your view flag. The separate Viewer Node in Nuke for example makes it easy to quickly switch between outputs by pressing 1,2,3,…9 as it can accept multiple inputs. In Katana you have to navigate through your script to the desired node to change the view-flag or launch a render.

Being overly lazy I hacked together this simple UI which lets’s you quickly change the view flag and launch live [L] and preview [P] renders. It’s not very aesthetic but it get’s the job done:

katirpbase

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To add the buttons to the UI you can set it to get nodes by Type, Name or based on your current selection in the Nodegraph. It should be worth noting that the text input is CaseSensitve. If you don’t have the add option checked it will replace your current set of buttons.

Katana Interactive RenderPanel from Julius Ihle on Vimeo.

 

There are a lot of things there that’d be nice to have… A simple option to delete button groups, save bookmarks, etc… Maybe… Some day… :)

 

If you’re feeling adventurous you can give it a try HERE.
To use it put the .pyc file in a sub-directory called Tabs that’s part of your $KATANA_RESOURCES.

 

 

 
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