The MatteBuddy is a custom matte selection tool, which I built around Python for Guru Studio. At the time of its creation their primary rendering engine (Redshift) didn't support Cryptomatte and they needed an alternative.
About
The MatteBuddy nodes let you quickly merge a collection of Mattes together to create a new matte set based on name, class, sample region or character. It has a robust UI to help artists work quickly and efficiently.
1) Add mattes by character name
2) Add mattes by class, I.E. Character, Props, Sets, etc.
3) Add mattes by sampling the screen
4) Add mattes by running a general search
Adding Character based mattes
Adding mattes based on class
Adding mattes based on sampling the screen
Adding mattes based on a search parameter
How it works
At Guru the matte sets are called HPMs, which stand for Hash Per Matte, these work similarly to Cryptomatte and store a hash value for each matte set. When Nuke loads these in, the hash is converted to user readable copy and that's what the tool runs a search on. The matte set names are formatted as indicated below with a rigid structure that is based around asset classes and HPM names.
Using this information I was able to write a few different python modules, which parsed the data based on the users request and build a collection of mattes out of it.
Development Mode
Since the tool can get pretty complicated to troubleshoot, I built in a development mode that allows anyone to modify and test a separate set of development scripts before pushing changes to the floor. It also prints cleaner logs to the script editor.
