vfxTdUtils - Visual-Effects Technical-Director Utilities

Beyond the other repositories provided by me, James Rowell, this git-repository provides further utilities for VFX "Technical Directors"

Some backstory.

In the early days, VFX-artists were often given the title of "Technical Director", whether lighting, compositing, rigging characters, creating particle-simulations, render-wrangling, etc., or most likely all of the above.

The reason we called ourselves TDs was that we did much of our work via scripts, in tcsh or bash or with makefiles, or using custom scripts that drove the plethora of home-brewed tools at the studio. We lived on the command-line, making extensive use of the Unix environment. We capitalized on the Unix philosopy in our approach to building our shots and "pipelines".

Even with our powerful GUI-based tools today I still find it helpful (in my work as a VFX-Supervisor and artist) to work in the command-line with old-school TD-utilties and practices. This is doubly so working at smaller studios that can't afford pricey and comprehensive "Pipeline" tools like Autodesk's "Flow Production Tracking" software.

I hope independent VFX-artists, likely also working without the help of monolithic pipeline tools, will find my thoughts and utilties to be helpful as building-blocks for their own pipelines, joining the ranks of us O.G. Technical-Directors.

Summary of the utilities in vfxTdUtils.

runsed - an unbelievably useful wrapper-utility for sed that been in heavy use for 30+ years to batch run sed-scripts on files. Quite robust! Easy to back out changes!

"I think I hold the record for the most number of file-checkout, changes and commits on the AutoCAD code base when I was working on R13. I renamed almost ALL the API calls (to have nice and consistent naming convention across the WHOLE API which I designed to make reading code flow like reading prose) and similarly for many internal function calls in the newly designed C++ libraries and modules. In large part that work I did was possible simply because I wrote and used runsed." ~~ James Rowell

rm-spaces - a utility to remove spaces from filenames while maintaining filename readability.

time-stamp - prints out a string suitable for a time-stamp as YYMMDD-hhmmss say to embed in a file-name. Several options to customize the output as typically needed when embedding the time-stamp in a file-name or directory-name.

tabs2spaces/spaces2tabs - wrappers for the commands expand and unexpand respectively. The FILES are changed in place, and like runsed the changes can be easily reviewed and backed out if desired.

mod-tstamp - adds or subtracts hours from a file's time-stamp which used to be useful when copying files across timezones. Possibly less useful these days due to decent system-level timezone support.

Installation.

Download the latest tarball from the dist directory. Unzip it. cd into the unzip'ed directory. Run "$ make install", if as root then it will install into /usr/local/bin, otherwise in $HOME/bin.

The most essential VFX-TD-Utils are in jrowellfx's other repos.

Please install the following tools as well, they are essential when TD'ing shots from the command line. I dare say, without lsseq it would be extremely tough to TD shots from the command-line without support from modern Pipeline tools like Autodesk's "Flow Production Tracking" software.

• lsseq - An extremely powerful, feature-rich and robust tool akin to /bin/ls for listing image-sequences in a nice way. Build other pipeline utilities on top of this one.
• renumseq - Command line utility to renumber and/or rename image-sequences. An valuable companion to lsseq.
• expandseq/condenseseq - utilities for expanding and condensing integer-sequences using a simple frame-range-syntax widely used within the VFX-industry.

Other essential TD tools don't need to be installed, just mastered. Namely:

• grep, fgrep
• find
• sort
• cat
• use of back-quotes to echo command output onto the command line,
  for example: touch myfile.`time-stamp --short` might create the file: myfile.250207
• regular-expressions (as used by sed).
• At least be a little familiar with bash shell scripting.
• vi
• git
• Use of file redirection like "<" and ">" and pipes "|".

More detailed descriptions of the utilities in vfxTdUtils.

About runsed

runsed is an unbelievably useful script that been in heavy use for 30+ years to batch run sed-scripts on files. Quite robust! Easy to back out changes!

runsed is a wrapper for the command "sed -f sed.script [FILE]...".

runsed runs a script-file called sed.script (that must exist in the current directory) with sed on each FILE listed on the command line.

runsed changes the files in place, that is, it replaces the existing FILE with a stream-edited copy of itself.

A backup copy of each original FILE is created called ".FILE.runsed" in the directory that FILE resides.

Two special files are also created in the current directory to allow you to review all the changes made as well as undo the changes if the results weren't what you expected. Namely, the files ".runsed.diff.runsed" and ".runsed.undo.runsed" which are executable.

When you are eventually satisfied simply remove all files called ".*.runsed" with the command:

    rm .*.runsed

If you changed files in subdirectories, this is a better way to get rid of all the crufty leftovers, plus it handles files with spaces in their names properly:

    find . -name '.*.runsed' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

Ultimately it's up to you to clean up the crufty leftover files.

Usage: runsed [-h | --help | --version] [FILE]...

optional arguments:

 -h, --help      show the help and exit
 --version       print out the version number and exit

About rm-spaces

$ ./rm-spaces -h

usage: rm-spaces [-h | --help] [OPTIONS]

rm-spaces is a util to help remove spaces from filenames. rm-spaces operates on files
in the current working directory (and/or below).

Options:
 -h, --help           display this help and exit
 -r, --recursive      remove spaces from filenames from the current working
                        directory and down into subdirectories (not default)
 -d, --directories    only remove spaces from directory names
 -f, --regular-files  only remove spaces from regular files (and links)
 -x, --execute        make the changes on the fly
 -q, --remove-quotes  also strip '`?"[](){} characters.
 -c, --camel-case     converts words to camel case when possible (not default).
 --dates              replaces spaces before or after dates (eg 2023-03-27) with
                        underscores. (default)
 --noDates            don't try to match dates in filenames as in --dates.
 --version            print out the version number and exit

rm-spaces takes spaces out of filenames while maintaining filename readability.
It removes trailing and leading spaces, removes spaces after or before dots (.),
pluses (+) etc.

rm-spaces then replaces all spaces with underscores (_) unless --camel-case is
specified, in which case words are converted to 'camel case" unless readability
would suffer.

rm-spaces creates the following executable files in the current working directory:

 - .rename.files.rm-spaces
     Run this to rename regular files (must run before directories below).
     (not necessary with -x option).
 - .undo.files.rm-spaces
     Run this to undo the above changes
 - .failed.files.rm-spaces
     List of renames that would have failed due to name conflict
     (hand edit to taste then run it).

 - .rename.dirs.rm-spaces
     Run this to rename directories (must run after changing names on regular files
     with the .rename.files.rm-spaces script).  (not necessary with -x option).
 - .undo.dirs.rm-spaces
     Run this to undo the above changes
 - .failed.dirs.rm-spaces
     List of renames that would have failed due to name conflict
     (hand edit to taste then run it).