Browsing Third-Pary Elements

smartElements lets you browse online libraries of third party vendors. We collaborate with FX Elements (eventually others in the future as well…) to bring you all their offered elements directly inside Nuke. This lets you browse their whole online content and insert previews of any elements directly into your working files. Please note that these are previews only. They are downscaled and have no alpha channel by purpose. In most cases this will be good enough to judge if an element fits your needs. You can then easily purchase and exchange the preview with the fullres version when needed.

Note that the content of third party elements is streamed live from the web, so an internet connection is required.

How to access third-party elements

In the stacks dropdown at the top left you will find the third-party vendors at the bottom below the dashed line:

_images/stacks_dropdown.png

The stacks dropdown at the top left let you switch to third-party web stacks

_images/dropdown_fxelements.png

Third-party stacks can be found at the bottom

Once you switched to FX Elements, you will see all their offered libraries. Click a library to load all its elements.

_images/fxe_library.png

Browsing FX Element’s ‘Atmosphere’ library

Browsing lists

In order to get quicker results, we use smartElement’s pagination feature and load just a subset of a list as some lists are large. At the top right you see how many elements the current library contains. You can use the left and right arrows buttons to jump between pages.

_images/pagination.png

Use the left and right pagination arrows to jump between pages

Select an element and hold the Alt key to get more information about it.

Click the browse online button to browse to the currently selected library online:

_images/browse_online.png

Browse to the online library

Inserting elements

To bring elements into your working file simply drag them into your node graph. Or select one or multiple elements, and insert them from the right click menu (hotkey: I).

_images/drag_elements_into_dag.png

Drag elements into your node graph

_images/element_right_click_menu.png

Insert and browse online via right click menu

When inserting elements into your node graph, a preview will be downloaded and cached (read on the caching section below for more information), so the next time you insert the element in your working file it will be immediately available.

Node properties

When bringing an element from a third party stack into your node graph, the Read node contains a smartElements tab. In here you can view more information on the element and also browse to the element and its parent library online.

_images/node_properties.png

Get more information on an element browse it online

Settings

In the settings section you can change certain things for third-party elements.

Caching

Please note when loading a list the first time, all its thumbnails and previews will be downloaded and cached to disk. This takes a few seconds. The next time you load the list it will be a lot quicker as it will from now on always read from the cache. In the settings you can configure where to cache to:

_images/settings_cache_root.png

Set the caching root in smartElement’s settings

When working in a team we recommend caching to one central location for all users as this will let all users use a common cache and loading will be much faster for everyone.

Alternatively, you can drive the cache root location by setting the environment variable CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_NON_LOCAL_CACHE_ROOT. For further information on that please also refer to our environment variable section.

If you want to hide all Third-Party stacks, e.g. when you are a studio and all your machines are offline anyways, you can set the environment variable CRAGL_SMARTELEMENTS_HIDE_THIRD_PARTY_STACKS to 'True'.

Video playback

Third-party element previews are cached as mp4 files. Please note that depending on your operating system and your currently installed codecs, videos will play out of hte box or you might need to install additional video codecs.

  • Linux: In our tests, video playback is successful when having gstreamer codec installed

  • Windows: In our tests, video playback is successful when having K-Lite codec installed.

  • MacOS: Video playback should work out of the box, no need to install anything.

In the settings you can also turn ‘Play Videos’ off if you don’t want a preview. By default video playback is turned on.