Katana Scripting - Creating/Pasting Nodes in a Floating Layer

Katana scripting is commonplace for surfacing/lighting artists in the post-production industry, who just want to create tools which are easy to use and intuitive for themselves and their peers.

When creating a node in Foundry’s 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, however, 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()

At the moment, this method isn’t shown in the Katana scripting documentation, so I hope this helps you create some nice user-friendly workflows within your Katana scripting!