In the process of trying to streamline things a bit more in my day-to-day workflow I have recently been working on a hand-full of small helper tools. One of them is a small set of scripts that handle the conversion of a selection of files to Arnold & RenderMan’s native .tx/.tex files from the filebrowser… because people like the GUI, right? :)
Unfortunately for anyone out there on Windows or OS X they won’t be of much use I’m afraid. If you are on Linux and using Gnome or KDE as your Desktop environment (others may work, too) this might come in handy. The file conversion is being handled on a selection of files through the standard right-click context menu:
Upon clicking you will be presented with a little pop-up menu that allows you to enter additional options for the conversion if needed. Anything that’s noted in the -help docs of the respective commands should work in the dialog boxes. Upon specifying your options there’s time to grab another cup of coffee… The progress bar will let you know when it’s done :)
By default it is assumed that the bin folders of Arnold and RPS are part of your $PATH environment variable, but if you need to change it the code should be fairly easy to read (although it looks a bit messy because it’s 1 line :) ) and can be modified to suit your needs. The dialogs are using KDialog and zenity (for KDE and Gnome respectively), but those should come by default depending on what desktop you are using.
To use them on KDE put the attached .desktop files in ~/.kde/share/kde4/services/ or /usr/share/kde4/services/ (for all users).
For Gnome you need to install nautilus-actions and import the attached .schemas files. Once that’s done just restart nautilus/dolphin or log out and log back in again.
Tested on my laptop with CentOS 7 (KDE 4.10.5) and my trusty old CentOS 5 testbox (Gnome 2.16.0). Unfortunately I don’t have my main workstation around to test it on CentOS 6, but it should work there as well.
//Edit: Now also tested & confirmed working on CentOS 6.
Arnold .tx Converter for KDE
Arnold .tx Converter for Gnome
PRMan .tex Converter for KDE
PRMan .tex Converter for Gnome
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