# Nuke - Custom tools Over the years our students have made a lot of nice additions to our Nuke. Here's a showcase of some of these tools. #### Snippets - By Gilles Vink The snippets tool, which can be found in the top menu bar, makes it easy to store a part of your node graph so other Nuke users can load it into their comp. Just select the nodes you want to save, press "Create snippet" and give it a name. It will show up for other users under your own name. [![Nuke15.0_i6wj2XooFX.png](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/scaled-1680-/nuke15-0-i6wj2xoofx.png)](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/nuke15-0-i6wj2xoofx.png) #### Node Mailer - By Mervin van Brakel Node Mailer allows you to "mail" node setups to other students that have Nuke open at school. They will receive a pop-up notification that allows them to import the selected nodes you've sent. [![Nuke15.0_ahxmS8bf5l.png](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2025-01/scaled-1680-/nuke15-0-ahxms8bf5l.png)](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2025-01/nuke15-0-ahxms8bf5l.png) #### LightGroupMixer - By Mervin van Brakel The LightGroupMixer gizmo goes through the layers of your CG render and collects light groups for you to grade. This only works if your light group layer names have the prefix `LG_`, which is done automatically in our ShotGrid pipeline. [![output.gif](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/output.gif)](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/output.gif) #### Extract Camera from CG render - By Max de Groot Found in the Edit menu, this script uses the metadata stored in CG .EXRs to extract an animated camera. You can run it when you have a read node selected. [![Nuke15.0_osisoeFpqn.png](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/scaled-1680-/nuke15-0-osisoefpqn.png)](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/nuke15-0-osisoefpqn.png) #### Breakout .PSD to 3d cards - By Mervin van Brakel This tool was made specifically for concept artists who want to use Nuke to bring some 3d perspective to their 2d Photoshop layers. You can run it from the Edit menu when you have a read node selected which points to a Photoshop file. It will take your Photoshop layers and lay them out into the Nuke 3d scene. [![Nuke15.0_Sbo4fcyPsA.png](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/scaled-1680-/nuke15-0-sbo4fcypsa.png)](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/nuke15-0-sbo4fcypsa.png) #### PySide\_Compat by Robbert Scholten In 2026 we switched our supported Nuke versions from Nuke 15 to Nuke 16 & 17. One of the most impactful changes between those versions was Foundry's switch from PySide2 to PySide6. PySide is a UI library used in a lot of Nuke plugins that are part of our pipeline. The switch from PySide2 to PySide6 came with some big changes; modules were renamed and restructured, some classes moved between modules, and a number of methods were renamed or removed entirely Porting all our scripts to PySide6 by hand would have been lots of work, and would have left older Nuke versions broken. Inspired by shims like Qt.py we came up with a different solution: **pyside\_compat.py** The result is that all our existing scripts stay almost entirely untouched. The only change needed is the import statement at the top of each file. Instead of importing PySide2 (or PySide6) directly, scripts now import from pyside\_compat. When pyside\_compat is imported, it figures out which PySide is available in the user's Nuke version by trying to import PySide2 first, and falling back to PySide6: On older Nuke versions (Nuke 15 and earlier), PySide2 works, so pyside\_compat simply sends back the real PySide2 modules. Everything behaves exactly as it always did. On newer Nuke versions (Nuke 16+), PySide2 isn't available, so it imports PySide6 instead, and applies some patches on top. These patches re-add the renamed/moved/removed APIs so that our PySide2-style code keeps working. Pyside\_compat acts as a dictionary: our scripts are still written in PySide2, but compat makes sure PySide6 can read/understand them. This way we can keep all our scripts unmodified across every Nuke version we support, instead of maintaining two PySide2 and PySide6 branches. **When adding new tools to our pipeline, please try to change any PySide import lines to pyside\_compat. Especially for older PySide2 scripts, this makes sure everything will work across all our supported Nuke versions.** ``` EXAMPLE: # Before from PySide2 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets from PySide2.QtCore import Qt # After from pyside_compat import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets, Qt ``` #### #### Additional custom tools Tools under the BreakTools, MagicTools and MaximumFX tabs were also all made by students! [![Nuke15.0_RrhZuLHVde.png](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/scaled-1680-/nuke15-0-rrhzulhvde.png)](https://docs.vfxim.nl/uploads/images/gallery/2024-10/nuke15-0-rrhzulhvde.png)