Toolkit Home Page

A brief overview of the changes and new features:

• tk-core: Core now supports the notion of changing contexts on the fly. The first use of this feature is in Nuke Studio, as the workflow there allows for Nuke scripts at the task level to be embedded into a project-level edit. As a user dives into and out of these Nuke node graphs, Toolkit keeps track of and switches to the correct context.
• tk-nuke: The tk-nuke engine has been heavily extended and refactored to take advantage of Nuke Studio's workflow possibilities and to make use of the upgraded tk-core to manage context changes.
• Pretty much every app: Just about all of them have had changes made to them to support Nuke Studio's context changing behavior. Most of these alterations are minor, but critically important to the performance of on-the-fly context changes.
• YAML caching: Before the holidays, we made another tk-core release that included a new tank command: tank cache_yaml. This command crawls through the config structure and builds a pickled cache of all yaml data it finds. This pre-populated cache is used to load up the in-memory cache that tk-core keeps up to date while Toolkit is running. This is a GREAT way to speed up Toolkit in general, and will make a visible difference to some aspects of the performance of context changes in Nuke Studio. This cache does not have to be 100% up to date at all times, as tk-core's in-memory caching mechanism will detect a mismatch and reload yaml data from disk when necessary.

Hi Everyone! 

We've released a new multi app panel called the Shotgun Python Console. The app is designed to be used in DCCs that have access to a python interpreter but have little or no support for interacting with it. Here's a look at the console running in the Shotgun Engine for Photoshop and being used to load and manipulate an image via Python:

The console is based on the open source PyQtTerm project developed by Michael Kessler. For more screenshots and a complete look at the features of the Shotgun Python Console, please check out the docs. 

As always, please check it out and send any feedback to support@shotgunsoftware.com. Enjoy!

-Josh T.

Hi everyone!

After many months of hard work we are excited to announce that the new version of our completely redesigned workfile manager is released. You can read everything you need to know about it here. We would like to give a big shout out to our beta testers, whose invaluable feedback helped us make this app even better. 

You can download the application from the app store today and it is now the default in most of our configs.

Don't hesitate to let us know what you think in the comments section or at support@shotgunsoftware.com.

Hi everyone! 

Last year, we put together a series of posts on the main Shotgun blog entitled Two Guys and a Toolkit. The primary purpose of those posts was to talk about our experiences getting up to speed with Toolkit as we built a very simple end-to-end pipeline. If you haven't had a chance to read the series, we'd love for you to check it out and send us your thoughts.

As promised at the end of the blog series, we've put together a brand new tutorial that provides a set of step-by-step instructions for building a simple, end-to-end pipeline using Toolkit.

Toolkit Pipeline Tutorial

The tutorial is intended for anyone who is interested in learning the basics of how Toolkit works. It covers how to push Assets through each pipeline step from modeling all the way through to compositing. Included are a few examples of how to customize Toolkit to meet your studio's specific pipeline needs as well as an introduction to each of the primary out-of-the-box Toolkit apps and their respective roles in a production workflow. 

As always, have a look and send any feedback to support@shotgunsoftware.com. Enjoy!

- Jeff & Josh

Thanks to everybody who made it to our webinar.  We loved showing you what we're working on and had a lot of fun answering the great questions you were asking (especially about the Publisher... thanks everybody for the feedback).  It can be hard to make it to things like this, so for anybody who couldn't make it (or REALLY wants to watch it again) here is the full recording.  To try and make it easy for you to find what you are looking for we've also included what is where in the video.

Enjoy!

0:01:46 The actual start
0:03:09 The recent past
0:05:06 Shotgun Panel demo
0:13:13 Going on now
0:18:47 Workfiles v2
0:23:26 In just a bit
0:27:30 And a little further out
0:30:59 Ease of use designs
0:45:59 Standalone Publisher designs
1:02:31 Q&A

The actual start - Start here to bypass any inane introductory chit-chat
The recent past - Going through the work we've recently finished including websockets, the Shotgun Panel, and Houdini polish
Shotgun Panel demo - If you haven't seen the Shotgun Panel here's your chance
Going on now - The things we are currently working on including Nuke Studio support, My Tasks, and Workfiles v2
Workfiles v2 - An demo of our updated file manager
In just a bit - The things that are just around the corner, including cloud based configs and the long awaited Photoshop update
And a little further out - And longer term plans, including our plans to make Toolkit easier to use and our Standalone Publisher
Ease of use designs - See what we're thinking in terms of how to get started with Toolkit
Standalone Publisher designs - See what we're thinking for a big update to our publisher
Q&A - You ask.  We answer.

It was a lot of fun and we can't wait to do it again.
Let us know if there are topics you'd like us to dive into next time.