Quick Tip: Reusing Nuke’s default icons.

When adding a new gizmo to a menu inside of Nuke, I like to recycle the existing icons so I can keep everything thematically consistent. However, these icons are buried inside Nuke’s install directory, and I always forget exactly where they live…

If you’re searching for Nuke’s default icons, you can find them here:

Linux: <Your studio’s Nuke install directory>/plugins/icons
Windows: C:\Program Files\Nuke12.1v4\plugins\icons
Mac: /Applications/Nuke12.1v4/Nuke12.1v4.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/icons
(Note: On Mac, you have to right-click the .app file and choose “Show Package Contents”. Only the vanilla Nuke has all the files, whereas other installs such as NukeX, non-commercial, etc. just point to the vanilla directory.)

  Don’t forget: Nuke relies on these icons to function correctly, so if you’re modifying them for your own use, make sure you work with a copy outside of this folder.

However, if you just want to re-use these icons as-is, you’re able to access them programmatically by simply typing the name of the icon file (which is usually the same as the node’s name). For example, we can create a new menu using the FrameHold icon, and add an item to it that uses the Write icon like so:

myMenu = nuke.menu('Nodes').addMenu('myMenu', icon="FrameHold.png")
myMenu.addCommand('Studio Write', 'nuke.createNode("Write")', icon="Write.png")

Depending on the size & shape of the icon you want to create, I’ve found Rectangle, Constant and StickyNote provide a clean “background” to work with. Shuffle and Add will provide you with some nice RGB colour values.