Apple Shake 4 - Manual (Page 1019)

Appendix A The Shake Command-Line Manual 1019
Getting Help
How do you know what Blur is expecting? Aside from using the product non-stop for
five years, you can also type:
shake -help blur
to return what arguments that function takes. Blur has six arguments:
-blur [xPixels] [yPixels] [spread] [xFilter] [yFilter] [channels]
Often, you don’t need to specify every argument. Shake gives you an error message if it
expects more arguments than you have supplied. For additional information, refer to
the relative function pages. For example, the Blur function can be found on page 864 in
Chapter 28, “
Filters .”
You also do not have to know the entire function name. For example, your request for
help on the Blur node probably produced information about seven different functions,
so try:
shake -help mul
and you see that Shake simply looks for the string “mul.”
To quickly launch these docs:
shake -doc
Argument Flow
Looking at the arguments in the Blur function, it expects an image as its first input,
which is labeled In:
image Blur(
image In,
float xPixels,
float yPixels,
int spread,
const char * xFilter,
const char * yFilter,
const char * channels
);
However, the command line differs from the interface in that it always assumes the first
image argument is coming from the previous argument in a linear flow, so omit the
first image argument. Therefore, in Blur, the first argument on the command line is the
xPixels parameter.
Shake assumes the previous image is fed into the function that follows. However, if you
have multiple input images, only the last image has the effect applied.
In this example, only sign_mask.iff is blurred:
shake truck.iff bg.iff sign_mask.iff -blur 50