The Iterator – Idea for an enhancement to Nuke

So I’m sure we have all had a spot in a script where we need to re do the same task over and over in one chain to get the desired effect.

So I was thinking, and I came up with a way (which would have to be built into nuke) to streamline this scenario.

Attached is an image of a mockup of how it would look in the interface.

Basically, you have two operators. IterationsIn, and IterationsOut.

An image goes into the first input of InterationsIn, and then from there you hook up whatever nodes you want to repeat the set amount of times.

After the nodes, you have IterationsOut, which would refeed it’s resulting image into IterationsIn, until the set amount of repeats has been reached, at which point it spits out a real output.

This obviously goes against Nuke’s top to bottom approach. Since the Out goes up into the In. But I dont think this would cause any infinite loops or anything like that, and programatically it would be the same as pasting clones of the original nodes the set amount of times. They’d simply have to add one exception to the rule that’s there to prevent loops. Since this would have a set number of times to run, it would never create an infinite loop.

I think the hardest thing programatically on this would be getting two different outputs on the bottom Out node. Or in theory it could be the same thing, and not report being done processing to nuke until the set iterations is reached.

Anyways, this is probably an extremely confusing post, but it’d basically be a for loop in nuke. And it should be possible I think. Though I’m sure a bit would have to change behind the scenes to make ti possible. I know it’d be impossible with the current limits put in place on how connections can be made to prevent infinite loops.

If anyone is interested, the project that got this idea going, was the second image I attached. It was nothing but a radial, and the same 3 nodes repeated over and over, about 200 times. (a blur, edge detect, and an alpha to RGB shuffle). Oh, and the color gradient came in Photoshop, but that’s it. I’ve been doing some Chaos Theory themed art recently 😉

Attached Thumbnails

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