About On-screen Controls

Some functions, mainly transformations, have on-screen controls to help you interactively control your images in the Viewer. I have described the general behavior for the most common controls. Other functions that are not listed here will have controls matching one of the models below. The exception is for QuickShape, which is documented under its own function page.

Seeing On-screen Controls

To see on-screen controls, you must have 4 conditions:

We have these restrictions to protect you from modifying the wrong controls so you don't accidently modify a node that you can't see the effect is has.

Therefore, in this example, you would not be able to see the controls for the QuickShape if you were looking at the traffic node.
If this button is not depressed in the Viewer, the only way to see the controls is to connect them with a third node.
In this example, to see Move2D1's controls, you would have to be looking at Move2D1 or Layer1, and have Move2D1's parameters loaded. You would not see the controls if you were looking at Move2D2, RGrad1 or Text1.
Sometimes you want to turn this behavior off, specifically when drawing a roto shape with the QuickShape node. If you take the above example of the traffic and QuickShape nodes that aren't connecetd, you can draw the QuickShape by pushing this button on the Viewer (we don't know what it is called, but we press it whenever we are doing QuickShapes...). When this button is down , you can manipulate on-screen controls even though they aren't linked to the node we are looking at in the Viewer.

On-screen Control buttons

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

Function
Notes
AutoKey is on. Whenever you move an on-screen control, you will be entering a keyframe.
Always display the on-screen control when those parameters are loaded.
Turn off the on-screen control display when actually modifying the image. They return when you release the mouse.
Turn off the on-screen 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 will delete 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 on-screen control.
Motion Path Display Button. This will display both the path and the key positions. You can grab the keys and move them on-screen.
This will display just the key positions.
This will not display the path or the keys in the Viewer.

On-screen Controls and Additional transformations

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

As an example, I pass a RGrad through a CornerPin to place the RGrad in perspective.
I then view the CornerPin, but I am tuning the RGrad. You can see that 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, you will see controls on each copy. For example, here I composite the CornerPin back over the original RGrad:
Now, go back and tune RGrad1 while looking at Over1, and you will see multiple control sets. Moving one will modify the other as well. If you want to break this link, copy the original RGrad and re-link in the new node.
The only functions where this behavior does not occur is with the Stabilize and MatchMove node, where you will see the untransformed on-screen 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.

A good way to quickly scrub through your animation is to set the Update mode to release , and move the time slider - the controls will update, but the image will not until you release the mouse.

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