Hasta La Motion!

Happy Sunday 🙂 Thought I’d share a little something for those night-hawks still at the workstation.
I’ve implemented a handy little hack utilizing the fantastic service Dropbox to store and automatically sync all my gizmos and scripts across multiple machines at work and at home. It’s saved me tons of time and now I don’t know how to live without it. I’ve got this working on OSX, but I’d love to see any difference with a PC workflow.

1)
if you haven’t already, download and install dropbox . It’s a file sharing and syncing application that has one very important feature; it adds a new "Dropbox" directory to your home folder that is constantly and automatically put into sync using their servers as long as your logged into your dropbox account, and have an active connection.

2)
modify your init.py to point to anywhere inside your dropbox that you’d wish. I created a folder called "Nuke", in which I put all the usual suspects… Gizmos, Python, TCL… ect.

inity.py example

3)
create a new menu.py (same as the one your used to, but place it inside the newly created "Nuke" folder inside the dropbox. Update this as your master, and move all your plugins here (see screenshot), keeping only the init.py in the hidden .nuke directory.

4)
Done!
Now, whenever you change the menu.py (in the dropbox) it will automatically sync with any nuke station that has dropbox installed, logged in, and a one-line init.py.

I’m a freelancer, and this past week I started at a new studio, I sat down at a brand-new nuke install and had all my gizmos, menus, and scripts up and running in 5 minutes (walked in with nothing but the clothes on my back)… not only that, when I created a new gizmo during the day, it was happily waiting for me, already installed when I got home… on both my machines.

Did i mention that dropbox is free, as in free beer? it also has the added benefits of keeping an additional copy on their servers, and an archiving system that will track changes for up to 2 weeks.

I think there’s limitless potential for something like this in the freelance world. I worked on a project with a couple other freelancers last month, and all I had to do was ‘share’ by nuke dropbox with them and they had instant, and synced scripts throughout the project, even though they were in a different country. At one point we were even using it to render precomps to each other (but that’s a different story 😛 )

enjoy.