New user questions

Hi all,

Are you able to add a dot in the flow like nuke to add multiple paths from a single node?

How do you add tools to favourites?

Does the render manager have a window where you can check progress of what is rendering? I see nodes ticking along in green in the flow but nothing else.

What is the ctrl+space command called in the options? (for quick tool) - I have that shortcut already active in windows, so need to change it in Fusion.

And a more advanced one:

We will need to do an animation where each frame has a different color value on an object. I've had a play and it looks like I can animate the colour corrector, but was just wondering if we can script or tag each frame (either manually, or from a list)? - So we could search for the tag or colour value and it would goto the correct frame?

Thanks for the help.

A pipe router (dot) cannot be created with a hotkey, as far as I know, but you can insert one on an existing wire by alt-clicking.

By "favourites," do you mean the toolbar under the menus? Right-click it, and the Customize Toolbars dialog will appear. Browse to the tool or action you want to add, then drag it from the right-hand panel up into the spot where you want it to go in the toolbar. Toolbars can be undocked by tearing them off and can be redocked to any of the four sides of the Fusion window.

The command is called Choose Tool.

Those are the easy answers. I'll need to think about your more advanced question a little. Off the cuff, I think you'll want an expression that chooses colors from a table based on the time. Could you show a couple of style frames that show how you intend this effect to look? Is it important to choose a specific color on a given frame, or would just cycling through the hue wheel work?

Sure you can add a pipe router to the flow or current selected node with a hotkey. Add this to your "hotkeys.fu"

Code: Select all

OEM_PERIOD = "AddTool{ id = 'PipeRouter' }"

It will use the same shortcut like in Nuke "."

Ah, thank you, Sigurgeir! I hadn't realized it was classified as a Tool.

Thanks Brian (and Sigurgeir) for chipping in.

Got my flows looking tidy now, and ChooseTool is sorted.

This is the favourites I meant, cant seem to add to that menu anywhere.

favs

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For the colour change bit, we usually have a diffuse pass for kitchen cupboards then (as it is a block colour) we can change the base colour and then we overlay spec/reflect/refract etc to build up the final image as usual.

So the colours to change will have to match those provided from the kitchen manufacturer, so we would either animate the colour on each frame, or use some magic and get each frame to read a different colour value to automate things.

We have a very long and complex method for this in After Effects, but it is very slow at processing files. Fusion is so much quicker which is why we have switched.

Also, is it possible to have an underlay within an underlay? It sort of does it but the inner underlay gets hidden behind the outer one until you hover over it.

underlay

underlay.JPG (57.45 KiB) Viewed 1608 times

Thanks again for your help!

You know, I never even noticed that Favorites folder. It looks like it's supposed to find anything that's been put in the Favorites category in the Bins, but it doesn't work in Fu9. It works in 7.7:

Untitled.png (39.54 KiB) Viewed 1601 times

Regarding Underlays, I don't think they were ever designed to nest. If you don't need the selection functionality in the interior one, though, you could substitute a Sticky Note, which will always display behind nodes but above Underlays.


For the color thing, I think what I would do would to be to prepare swatches in an image sequence: Each frame is just a solid of the desired color. Then you could use a raw compositing approach to replace the diffuse with the swatch, multiply by the raw passes, then add them all together as normal.

No need to animate or set up expressions—everything is controlled by the image inputs. How does the manufacturer usually supply the color information? Further automation might be possible depending on that.