Blackmagic Forum

Hi!

How do you align elements in Fusion 9?

I mean aligning tops, bottoms, right edges, left edges, centers of elements.

Thanks in advance!

If what you mean is something similar to the align palettes in After Effects, Illustrator, or Photoshop, there is no equivalent function in Fusion.

I miss the AE rulers and guides sometimes.

You can align centers by right clicking on the center, going down to the bottom of the popup menu and choosing "Nodename:Center->Publish. Then any other node with a center attribute can be connected to it by right clicking on its Center attribute in the Toolbar and choosing "Connect to". This can be used for other node attributes as well.

OK, thanks!

One of the downsides of a node based system?

Generally speaking, yes. And also a resolution-independent one. It might be possible to script something, but there would be a lot of assumptions to be made, and it would probably not work in enough cases to be worth distributing (and thus supporting).

I think I understand the resolution independence issue.

THat's something that I really miss, I never know if the element is correctly aligned to the page. IT should be possible for the current resolution to do it.

Bryan Ray wrote:Generally speaking, yes. And also a resolution-independent one. It might be possible to script something, but there would be a lot of assumptions to be made, and it would probably not work in enough cases to be worth distributing (and thus supporting).

Erm, Illustrator for one is resolution independent and has no issues with aligning and smart guides.
Having recently switched from the After effects I find a host of features sorely missing, especially those useful to motion graphics.

I do hope that the devs will someday bring those features to Fusion as I find the concept of Resolve really powerful if not yet properly balanced.

That's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Illustrator and Fusion operate on entirely different principles. By and large, Illustrator is "resolution independent" because it just doesn't care about pixels. Fusion is resolution independent not because resolution doesn't matter, but because it internally converts distances to normalized screen coordinates. But and the end of the day, it's still all pixels.

Alignment tools aren't a technical impossibility, but the procedural nature of Fusion image makes it difficult to come up with an easy-to-use and generalized solution. A nice first step might be a guides system for the viewport. That could be independent of the node structure, and therefore easy to snap things to—centers, pivots, and DoD edges.

I'm sure there are a lot of ways Fusion could be nicer for mograph. That's not a field I do much with, though, so I hesitate to offer many thoughts on the topic.

I would imagine snapping to do just that, snap to guides etc when transforming something in viewer. Because it is nothing more than constraining the movement to some kind of discrete ”steps” for lack of better word, and doesn’t need any change in how nodes themselves behave, it could be solved purely as a mouse interaction behavior. Snapping when changing knob values would be a bit more involved probably.

Whether positions are calculated in normalized coords or pixel coords makes no difference imho, because it is very easy to get one from another.

The thing is - probably - that for snapping to work you need some kind of awareness of where objects are. You can't align objects if to Fusion the input is pixels.

Adding pivot points to every element would be a good first step forward. Currently some elements have it, like the transform but not polygons and rectangles.
One could use those pivots for aligning.

Fusion is resolution independent not because resolution doesn't matter, but because it internally converts distances to normalized screen coordinates.

I don't see why resolution matters at all here, just put each element in a vector container, which is what Fusion seems to be doing already.

DoD provides the foundation for this awareness. By default the pivot can be center of DoD, and it could be user modifiable. DoD can also be calculated based on pixel values pretty efficiently, to provide edge snapping when original DoD is expanded beyond what user naturally expects elements area to be.