Currently write nodes pulled from the node bin default to “var/tmp”
I was curious if that default is stored somewhere as a preference that could be changed (preferably with tokens!). If so, where is the file I would need to edit?
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You can change it and save it in your user bin. You can add a basic path in media path, then add tokens and slashes in the Pattern. So for example, if I had a drive named Storage that was connected to the flame, and on that drive I had a project folder with the same name as my Flame project, and I had a folder in there called Exports, in the media path I would put /media/Storage/ and in the Pattern I would put < project name>/Exports/ < name>, etc. Save that to your user bin. You can even add < YY>< MM>< DD> and it will make a folder called 221101 (today only of course) and write your file there.
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Yeah, I was sort of hoping that I could do a facility-wide change that would live at the flame install level, rather than a node that we had to circulate and make sure people were using.
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Do people create their own users? You could start with a template that they create their user from and it could include it in the user bin.
Did you take a full time job?
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Yep! I staffed up back in April. And the template idea is not a terrible one, that may be how we end up doing it. But if that value is stored in an xml somewhere that can be edited, rather than being baked into the flame code, I would like to know that.
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I’ve advocated for a shit-load more nodes to have customized defaults. I thought I submitted an improvement request, but I can’t find it, so I guess I didn’t.
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As someone who’s on a job with templates, let me just say they are fucking awesome. I’m always rendering to the right place, always with timecode and correct color space (well, most of the time on the colorspace)
I hear you on the editibility of that /var/temp locale though.
Unmanged workflow FTW.
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Oh sure, I have spent a lot of time reading and re-reading your post on the topic. This is not for that.
This is more for the times you might want to render straight to a pre-renders folder and would like to enforce a certain consistency in where those files end up.
It might turn out that this is not the way to do that, but like I said, if that default path value can be changed somewhere, I’d love to know about it.
Cheers man. I was actually responding to @andy_dill but I hear you.
The way I typically deal with this is by rendering with a render node as opposed to a write and just publishing back out with a set template based on shot number. This comes up a shit-ton with denoise for example but for other pre comp-ish tasks as well. Render local, publish, read node.
Now for the wish-list.
What I would love to see is Flame’s settings/presets for nodes being reworked to be more like Houdini style presets merged with a bookmark manager style scope control with the system-wide addition of custom variables with the same available scopes as the bookmark manager. For example, let’s say that in preferences there was a variables sheet which would have 3 columns, variable, value and scope. Variable being the name of the variable, value being the value it’s assigned and scope being global, project, user. Then we could populate that list something like this:
project location "/mnt/storage/pipeline/22000_carProject" global
shot location "<project location>/shows/thatshow/<shot>" project
drop location "/mnt/storage/drop/<username>" user
assets location "/mnt/storage/assets" global
And then we could start pathing with these tokens in addition to those defined within the software–so one could mix and match between user variables and metadata based ones. Whenever we would save a setting for a node we could also save it with an optional scope. Think about the capability of the bookmark manager merged with a save dialog. So when you save a setting you can decide it’s scope to go beyond the project to being a global or force it to be setting that only is exposed to you as a user. In this way you could create file pathing that remains static beyond the scope of a single project provided you have the variable assignments made per project. If all I have to do is select a preset on a write node to know it will always do what I want to where I want that’s got to be the best possible solve.
On the super rare occasion I need to put a setting someplace specific I’d rather have an export menu.
One can dream can’t they? Oh and can I get relative pathing as well? lol
Edit: Yes, one could do this in python, but it doesn’t mean it should be relegated to python only folks. This is the kinda stuff we need implemented system-wide.
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One option might be to use the Portal Export Menu tool. For any shot I work on, I just build a quick preset for it that shows up in the export menu. You could have one for renders and one for prerenders. but it would be for each shot.
Hey Kirk,
You can do this with python. You can write a simple script that will add a write node, and the path can be tokenized to your project name or project nickname or anything, really. You can have also set default file type, codec, TC, etc. At my last job we sym-linked a sub folder inside of /opt/Autodesk/shared/python that contained all of our facility-wide scripts. That way, everyone was automagically updated.
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Thank you Andy. It sounds like this is probably the most sensible option. I’ve been thinking a lot about sym linking the python folder, we’ll see what kind of alarms go off when I suggest it.
Give my best to Beans!
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Absolutely terrifying
True dat, but sadly I think it just needs to be a resolvable path on both Mac and Linux in the dev’s minds, hence, the lack of helpfullness in real life.