About Onscreen Controls

Some functions, mainly transformations, have onscreen controls to help you interactively control your images in the Viewer. These controls appear whenever the node's parameters are loaded.

Onscreen Control buttons

Whenever you have a function with onscreen controls, a second shelf of buttons appears in that Viewer, and disappears when you load a different node's parameters. The common onscreen buttons are as follows:

Function
Notes
AutoKey is on. Whenever you move an onscreen control, you enter a keyframe.
When activated, onscreen controls are always displayed.
Turn off the onscreen control display when actually modifying the image. They return when you release the mouse.
Turn off the onscreen controls.
Delete Key at the current frame. This is used because controls for functions like Move2D enter keys on xPan, yPan, xScale, yScale, and angle simultaneously. Therefore, Delete Key deletes from all of these parameters.
X/Y Lock Button. This indicates that you can move a control in both X and Y directions.
This indicates that you can move a control in only the X direction.
This indicates that you can move a control in only the Y direction.
Press this to change the color of the onscreen control.
Motion Path Display Button. Displays both the path and the key positions. You can grab the keys and move them onscreen.
Displays just the key positions.
Does not display the path or the keys in the Viewer.



Onscreen Controls and Additional transformations

If you have two different transformations on a tree, and you are looking downstream, all controls are be transformed along with the image. This is really swank, by the way.

As an example, pass a RGrad through a CornerPin to place the RGrad in perspective.

 

View the CornerPin, but load the RGrad parameters. The RGRad controls, instead of being perfectly round, also inherit the perspective shift of the CornerPin. You can therefore always edit in context of your composite.

 

If you create a tree where several versions of the same node are visualized, controls are displayed for each copy. For example, here the the CornerPin is composited back over the original RGrad:

 

Tuning RGrad1 while looking at Over1 displays multiple control sets. Moving one modifies the other as well. If you want to break this link, copy the original RGrad and connect in the new node.

 

The only function where this behavior does not occur is with the MatchMove node, where you see the untransformed onscreen controls for nodes above them.


The Controls:

The most commonly used tranform is Move2D, which combines the controls of Rotate, Pan, and Scale. For special controls over the rotation center of Move2D, check out the Rotate controls.

Because the controls are visualized outside of the frame, they are a good way of finding an image after it has been passed through an extreme transformation. Just zoom out the viewer until you see the transform box.

To quickly scrub through your animation, set the Update mode to release , and move the time slider – the controls update, but the image does not until you release the mouse.

Move2D CornerPin
Crop...  
Pan Rotate
RGrad...  
Scale Text