Creating/Pasting Nodes in a Floating Layer in Katana

When creating a node in Katana through the Tab menu (or pasting a node), the node enters a “floating” state which allows the user to place the node wherever they like.

When creating a node (or pasting a node) programatically in Katana, the node is placed directly into the scene graph.

You can replicate the “floating” functionality programmatically by getting the Node Graph’s Tab object and using the prepareFloatingLayerWithPasteBounds and enableFloatingLayer functions.

# This first line pastes a node based on an xmlTree.
# This could also simply be a new node made with NodegraphAPI.CreateNode()
newNode = KatanaFile.Paste(xmlTree, NodegraphAPI.GetRootNode())[0]

nodeGraphTab = UI4.App.Tabs.FindTopTab('Node Graph')
nodeGraphTab.prepareFloatingLayerWithPasteBounds([newNode])
nodeGraphTab.enableFloatingLayer()