Perspective guides for Nuke. Trace two edges that are parallel in real life and it finds the vanishing point they share.
dhPerspGuide
First submitted: 17 September 2026
Author: David Hochstadter
Website: https://www.paladinfx.com/dhpersp
Compatible Nuke versions: 13.0 or later
Compatibility: Linux, Mac, Windows
Find the vanishing point in your shot. Drag two lines onto edges that run the same way in real life, two curbs, the top and bottom of a wall, a row of windows, and it shows you where they meet.
What it does
Add more lines and it fits all of them at once, so one sloppy edge cannot pull the answer off. Draw extra lines out through that point and you have perspective guides across the whole frame, for lining up anything you are painting in or placing by hand.
It just draws on top of your plate. Nothing gets moved, nothing gets baked. Leave it in the script and keep working.
Longer lines, better answer
This is the thing that matters most and it is entirely up to you. Stretch every line as far along its edge as it will go. A long line is far more accurate than a short one, and it makes a bigger difference than anything else you can do.
The other thing to watch: both lines have to follow the same real direction. Two edges that only look parallel on screen will give you a confident wrong answer.
You can tell them apart
Say what each guide is marking and it colors itself to match. Red for a direction running away from you, green for one running left to right, blue for uprights. Stack three on a plate and you can see at a glance which is which, in the viewer and in the node graph.
It animates
Key the line points like anything else in Nuke and the guides follow a moving shot.
Installing
Unzip it. Drag the dhPersp folder into your .nuke folder. Add one line to init.py in that same folder, make the file if it is not there:
nuke.pluginAddPath('./dhPersp')
Quit Nuke and start it again. It shows up in the Nodes menu under dhPersp.
Nuke 13 and up, Windows, Mac and Linux. It is saved as a group rather than a live gizmo on purpose, so a render farm can run it without the gizmo installed everywhere. There is a full README in the download.
The solver is separate and not in this download
dhPerspGuide is finished on its own and what you are downloading here is all of it. There is a second node I sell that does the other half of the job: it takes two or three of these guides and works out the camera that took the photo.
Lens, tilt, pan and roll from one still. It draws a grid on the ground through the solve so you can see straight away whether it is right. If the grid lies flat on the road in the plate, the camera is good. Then you press export camera and there is a real Nuke camera in your script, still linked to the guides so it follows while you nudge them.
Tick one box on the way out and it stands the photo up on a card in front of that camera with a ground plane, all in one scene, so you can orbit it and drop your own geometry in.
Animate the guides and the camera animates with them, which is a simple match move without tracking anything.
dhPerspSolve is at paladinfx.com/dhpersp. Nothing in dhPerspGuide is switched off, limited or time restricted without it. What you have downloaded here is the finished tool.
By David Hochstadter. paladinfx.com/dhpersp
Free to use and free to pass on, personally or at a studio, including on a render farm. No warranty. Do not resell it.
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