Noob python question

Flame Python
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve been playing around with python for the first time these past few days.

The Flame documentation was really helpful with writing my first python API script. It’s just a few resize/col mgmt/diff matte nodes strung together. Very basic! It works fine when I execute it in the Flame Python Console.

But I can’t for the life of me figure out how to get to the next step and have this as a custom batch ui action. Ideally, I would like to right click a clip a in batch and have this script appear in the drop down menu.

I’ve been diving into all the awesome python scripts on Logik and copying and pasting bits but no luck. My python knowledge is zilch!

Just wondering if there are any tutorials about that cover this kind of stuff and help me learn the basics?

Thank you!

2

Take a look at custom_actions_hook.py in /opt/Autodesk/VERSION/python (VERSION being replaced with whatever you’re running) which documents the various hook functions you can use in your own script to add to the various context menus depending on your need (in your case get_batch_custom_ui_actions)

For an example, look in /opt/Autodesk/VERSION/python_utilities/examples at the custom_menu_structure.py script.

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3

As mentioned above, you can find examples in your installation of Flame, there is also documentation which lays out some of details about how to use hooks here: Help

Some of the examples might be too much information for you to get started, especially if you’re new to python too, so in summary;

  1. before you launch flame you’ll want to set an environment variable so flame knows where to look for your python scripts. You could drop them in flame directly, but for my DCC management you want to avoid messing with the base configuration. run export DL_PYTHON_HOOK_PATH=/path/to/your/scripts in a terminal before you launch flame (assuming linux, or do the equivalent for windows/mac) and change the path to wherever you’re going to be developing your scripts.
  2. create a new python file (name is unimportant) in that directory. Inside the python file you will need a function of the format get_<context>_custom_ui_actions where context is the tab/window from which you make the click action. Write up your script as you see fit.

Read the docs to see what else is possible, but the most important thing you need to remember is that this function needs to return a list of dictionaries, where the dictionary keys match a specific format. Some things that aren’t mentioned in the docs;

  • actions > isVisible can be set to True to make the action always visible.
  • you can have multiple actions under one menu option
  • while running the hook, you have access to any python modules that are also available to you at runtime. So if you use the Flame python installation’s pip to install a new package directly into it - that should be available for use within your hooks. Likewise, if you modify PYTHONPATH you will also get access to whatever that pythonpath points to.
  • While you can modify your hook script and run “Refresh Python Hooks” to pick up the changes to your hook (and therefore save you having to restart Flame every time you change something) it does not refresh the any imports to third party modules you may have at the top of your script - the PEP8 recommended place to put all your imports. There are ways around this, and it’s irrelevant once your script is “in production”, but it’s something to be aware of for your dev workflow.
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4

Hey there… here’s a super simple example of how to add a color corrector to batch. Just put this file into /opt/Autodesk/shared/python and refresh the python hooks. After you do that you’ll see a menu added to the right click in batch that will let you add a color corrector node.

get_batch_custom_ui_actions function builds the menu and tells Flame to run the create_node function when the menu option is selected in Flame.

import flame

def create_node(selection):

    flame.batch.create_node('Colour Correct')

def get_batch_custom_ui_actions():

    return [
        {
           'hierarchy': [],
           'actions': [
               {
                    'name': 'Add Color Correct Node',
                    'execute': create_node,
               }
           ]
        }
    ]

add_color_corrector.py (362 Bytes)

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5

Ahh this is great! Exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Thank you all for your detailed responses and even an example script. All things python are slowly becoming clearer. Much appreciated!

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