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Hi PureRef:

I'm a technical artist here; just found out about PureRef from one of our concept artists, and he really loves it! (It's a great piece of kit, for sure better than Adobe Bridge :) ) One thing I wanted to ask; I'm currently working on pipeline integration with DCCs for the studio (3ds max, Photoshop etc.) with our asset management toolset, and the request came for PureRef to be a part of that.

Does PureRef have any plans for an API or at the very least, command-line options so that I can launch PureRef and open a file with it as well (or even batch export .pur files)? Right now this requires the user to manually open the .pur file from the GUI and perform all the requested actions manually, which is less than ideal for integrating it into a pipeline.

Thanks!

Hi!

Could you elaborate a bit more on what you would need to be able to do? With batch export do you mean extracting the images from the .pur?

If you just want to launch PureRef with a specific set of files you can just pass the file paths as command line arguments, that should work for both images and scenes, but not images and scenes at the same time.

Hi PureRef:

Sorry for the delayed response, forgot to subscribe to the topic :X

Ideally, this would be my wishlist:

- to be able to launch PureRef with files located at specific positions
- to be able to batch export several .pur files to media sequences (JPGs/PNGs etc.)
- to be able to merge .pur files together (with positions of images also being able to be passed via cmdline args)
- Python interpreter and API (so that I could create custom commands in PureRef to work with our asset management system, ftrack)

That last one is obviously a huge undertaking, obviously, but I think would have the most benefit for PureRef to be used in a DCC-centric pipeline (and would probably take a lot of work out of your hands as TDs extend it with their own tools). But the first three are essentially the bare minimum of what I would like to have in order to at least wrangle it into our workflow here.

In any case, don't take this the wrong way; I think PureRef is a fantastic tool as it is. It's just that this would possibly make it a ton easier to work with for TDs. :)

Thank you for elaborating! We don't have any of these features planed right now but we will keep it in mind. The first three are, as you say, probably not that hard to add so this might be a first step.

+ 1 for sonictk's suggestions ! This tool is great but could be used by a much wider group of researchers and developers too!

In addition I would like a command line option to specify the location of the PureRef.ini

Regards, Paul

That could indeed be useful and would enable support for multiple PureRef instances at the same time with different settings. We will look into it!

In the new version of PureRef 1.8.0 you can at least specify the location of a secondary settings file by providing PureRef with a command line option, -s C:\\path\\to\\settings.ini. As for the other requests they are still on our roadmap.

Hey just wanted to add that I really like this application and chime in as another person who wants more command line support, particularly:

"launch PureRef with files located at specific locations"

Thank you either way this is a great application.

Would also love to see more command line support. I am looking at integrating PureRef into a 3D assets pipeline and it would be super useful to at least be able to export an image file from .pur files on the command line. It would also be great if there was a way of adding custom menu items to allow external script to be run from inside the application. Is there a list of current command line options for reference anywhere? It is a fantastic tool though, keep up the cracking work!

When you say "export an image file from .pur files" do you mean you want to export one specific (named?) image or all images or one image for the entire scene?

Thanks for the fast reply!

So, it would be useful to be able to run something like the following on the command line:

PureRef /path/to/pureref/scene.pur --export /path/to/image/export.png

enabling you to take a scene file and export an image of the entire scene without having to open the application again. Essentially, being able to execute the Save > Export > Scene option that is available in the UI without opening the UI.

Wonderful tool, PureRef team!

Just adding another vote for command line support, such as:

- "Launch PureRef with files located at specific locations" (suggested by zimmyFinger above)
- Add an image to specific .pur and refresh display (auto-arranged)
- Same as above, but without UI

Some of these will be available in the next version of PureRef so keep an eye out for that!

Hi, thanks so much for the marvellous software.

I'm also a Technical Artist, and I would like to add another vote for the command line support, such as:

- "Launch PureRef with files located at specific locations" (suggested by zimmyFinger above)
- Add an image to specific .pur and refresh display (auto-arranged)

Cheers,
Mushogenshin.

A pretty barebones version of this is now available in 1.10+ it unfortunately still shows the window while the commands are executed so we hope we can revisit this in the future but maybe it can be helpful anyway? Please let us know if it is :)

For some reason the help command -C doesn't work in windows CMD, but it seems to work fine in for example Git Bash, we're not quite sure why yet.

I've got a chance to get into the commands! Though they are relativellimited at the moment, they are still very helpful. Thanks so much for exposing them to us <3