From the course: Nuke Essential Training

Build node trees

- [Instructor] Nuke has a great many node operations to speed up the creation and editing of Nuke scripts. Here we'll take a look at just the most common one that you'll use most often. I'm using this script here from the exercise files. I'm going to increase the Node Graph area so we got more room to play. Now the navigation commands for the Node Graph are identical to the viewer, so if we want to pan in the Node Graph, that's alt + LMB, click and drag. If we want to zoom, alt + MMB, click and drag, left and right, or use the thumb wheel. If the Node Graph is big enough to go out of frame, then this navigation map shows up. And you can use this to navigate your way around your Node Graph. I'm going to re-home the Node Graph with the same command as the viewer, F. There's three different ways to add a node. I'm going to click over here and then come up to the tool tabs and let's say for example, from the filter tools I want a blur node. It'll go where I clicked. The second way is a right-click menu. So if I click on the right mouse button I'll get this pop-up, and it has a duplicate of all the same folders as we have over here in our tool tab. So I can go to the Filter folder and ask for a blur node. The third way is a tab search, with the cursor in the Node Graph, hit the tab key. And now you start typing the letters of the node you want. So I want a blur node, so I'll type B, and it down selects to all the B nodes. And then I'll type L and now I've got all the BL nodes. When I see the one I want, I just click on it. If I want to insert a node, I select the node I want to hook it to, like this transform node, and then go add my node. And Nuke will hook it in for me. Here's how to connect and disconnect the data pipes. In Nuke speak, these little arrows are data pipes. I can grab the arrow off the bottom and it'll disconnect. I can reconnect by pushing it up here. I can also disconnect it from up there and reconnect by pulling it down that way. I'll zoom out a little bit here. Sometimes you want to add a node and have it branched instead of inline. So I'm going to select the transform node to tell it where I want to hook it in. Come up to the Filters tab, and do a shift click on the blur node. And it's the shift that causes it to connect branched. If you'd like to detach a node, select the node, shift + cmd/ctrl + X and it pops right out. To insert a node just slide it in 'til the data pipes light up and then let go. If you want to select nodes, you can just click on them to select or you can draw a rectangle around a whole block of them. Or using the shift key, you can click on one, shift click on a second, shift click on a third. And now all three of those nodes are selected. If you want to delete a node, select the node, or nodes, and just hit the delete key. To rename a node, push in a little bit here, I'm going to select this blur node. The rename keyboard short cut is the N key. N for name. And we'll give it my name. I'll zoom out a little bit to show you the copy and paste. First, select the nodes you want to copy and then it's the standard copy and paste commands. Cmd / ctl + C to copy. Now, this is important. You have to click on your destination before you paste. Cmd / ctl + V to paste. If you don't click to tell it where you want to drop them off, it's going to paste 'em right on top of your original nodes and make a bit of a mess. If you'd like to disable a node, select the node and type D. I've disabled the composite on the merge node, so I'm no longer compositing the jet over the background. If I hit the D key a second time, the node is enabled. So disable, enable, and you'll notice the little X that we get across it to say this node is disabled. I'll select it and re-enable it. Nuke has an interesting thing called a dot. It's used to route the pipes for a neater fit. If I hold down the Command or Control key, you see these little yellow spots light up. If you click on one of those, it'll bring in a dot. And now you can use that to route your data pipes to make a nice clean flow graph. Nuke also adds little marks and icons to the nodes called node indicators, to clue you in to what's going on inside. We'll take a look up here. Push in a little bit. So this read node, has this red, green, blue and white. This is the four channels that this node is actually affecting. The grade node is only affecting the red, green, and blue. You'll notice that the white is short. So that tells you it's not operating on the Alpha channel. The Transform node, of course, is operating on all four channels. Another node indicator is this little A right here. This tells you that there's animation, keyframe animation inside this node. Over here is another one, this little gray X. I'm going to double-click on the grade node to open it up to show you that that's telling you that the mix slider is being used. In other words there's a mix back between the output of the node and the input image. So if I take the mix and I slide it to one, meaning don't do any mix back, you'll notice the little mark goes away. There are many more keyboard shortcuts that you should learn over time as you become more familiar with Nuke. Be sure to check out my keyboard shortcuts pdf file located in the exercise files folder shown here.

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