Scripting for Artists – The Advantages

Archive notice: This article was originally published on October 20, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.

Why Scripting?

The biggest advantage of writing your own scripts is saving time. If you script yourself, you adapt the software to your individual purposes and thus save minutes, hours or even days of tedious clicking. Typical problems, such as the incompatibility of read nodes that occurs when opening other people’s scenes or working in a different location, can be solved with a few lines of scripting and save tedious conversion. Time-consuming actions such as opening and saving in the right place and in the appropriate format are automated. In other words, the workflow is more efficient and faster. So far, so good; for this to work smoothly, you first have to familiarise yourself a little with a scripting language.

Why Python?

The Python scripting language is ubiquitous in the VFX, animation and game industry. This is because it is already integrated into most software packages, such as  Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Cinema 4D and 3ds Max. In the next news item, we will show you how to tame the snake. Further parts of the series will always appear on Fridays—with special chapters for Maya, Nuke and 3ds Max. Stay with us, it is worth it!

You can read more tricks for making your pipeline faster in issue 5 : 2017. You can download Alexander Richter’s workshops from past DP issues free of charge here: DP1505 Animan | DP1601 Droolpool | DP 1602 Animation Pipelines | DP1705 Pipeline4Artists

Update: Our downloads have moved—for technical reasons. You can find this file and all the others, as well as supplementary web content from the magazine, free PDFs, animago images, Video2Brain chapters and much more at:

http://download.digitalproduction.com

Sorry for the inconvenience!