Fergus Dieu
- Sep 2, 2022
- 2 min read

Nuke Command Line Rendering

Updated: Sep 9, 2022

Rendering via command line is a handy way to render Nuke scripts in the background or remotely in the absence of a render farm/manager such as Deadline. This method also allows you to leverage your gpu(s) for rendering which is not currently supported when rendering with Frame Server.

Here's a few tips, examples and references to get started along with some bonus flags to debug the Frame Server as well.

* This guide was performed in Windows and there are slight differences for the system environment variables if you are using MacOS/Linux shell documented in the Nuke user guide.

Open a command line/terminal shell prompt and change directory to Nuke.exe path

cd C:\Program Files\Nuke13.2v3\

I recommend adding the Nuke.exe path to your system environment variables to avoid having to type/cd into that path each time.

Alternatively, you can set a doskey to point to Nuke and then you can launch Nuke from any directory:

doskey nuke="C:\Program Files\Nuke13.2v2\Nuke13.2.exe"

If you want to doskey NukeX, enter:

doskey NukeX="C:\Program Files\Nuke13.2v2\Nuke13.2.exe" --nukex

If you want to doskey Nuke Studio, enter:

doskey nukes="C:\Program Files\Nuke13.2v2\Nuke13.2.exe" --studio

Nuke Command Line render flags:

# Launch Nuke Studio

--studio

# Launch NukeX

--nukex

# Launch in safe mode

--safe

# Enable Interactive License

-i

# Enable GPU Rendering

-gpu

# Display version info

--version

# Verbose mode low/med/high: (0/1/2)

-V 1

# Pause viewers

--pause

# Measure Performance

-P

# Open script(s) at proxy resolution

-p

# Measure your nodes performance metrics and write them to an XML file at render

time. See Using Script Profiling for more information.

-Pf <filename>

# Set render range frame '1-100'

-F 1-100

# Open Nuke script at full resolution

-f

# Continue on errors

--cont

# Background mode

-b

# Anamorphic format

-a

# Open script without Postage stamp nodes

-n

# Nuke priority specifiy: (low/medium/high)

--priority p

# Quite mode

-q

# Limit the cache memory usage, where size equals a number in bytes. You can specify a

different unit by appending k (kilobytes), M (megabytes), or G (gigabytes) after size.

-c size (k, M, or G)

Examples:

Run NukeX in interactive mode (-i) and render 'Write_EXR' node with frame range '1-240' with gpu acceleration and verbose level 2

Nuke13.2.exe --nukex -i -F 1-240 -gpu -V 2 -X Write_EXR --pause S:\PROJECTS\path_to_my_nuke_script_v01.nk

You can also have multiple terminal/shell instances running without the overhead of the Nuke gui saving you precious memory and VRAM.

Using a StickyNote or Backdrop node you can grab the Nuke script path easily and append it to a command line render with this TCL snippet:

Nuke13.2.exe --nukex -i -F 1-240 -gpu -V 2 -X Write_EXR --pause [join [lrange [split [file dirname [knob root.name]] "/"] 0 end-1] "/"]/[lindex [split [value root.name] /] end]

Frame Server debugging commands (useful for troubleshooting Frame Server issues):

# Frame Server Debug Log

--frameserver-loglevel DEBUG

# Manually launch Frame Server with 3 workers and 6 threads each, 48gb max memory

python.exe pythonextensions\site-packages\foundry\frameserver\nuke\runframeserver.py --numworkers=3 --nukeworkerthreads=6 --nukeworkermemory=48192 --workerconnecturl tcp://hostip:5560 --nukepath=Nuke13.2.exe --useInteractiveLicense