Blackmagic Forum

I guess this has been asked 100 times before but as a search didn't yield any answers, here we go.

So I spent most of the weekend messing about in Fusion and the minute pick area for the node handles are driving me nuts, it's just ridiculously small. There must be a way to adjust the pick area size, right? You got the setting for the pipe pick distance in the settings, but not for the handles themselves...

You could also use Fusion's auto-connect in most cases.
Let go the pipe anywhere on the tool and it will be connected automagically.
The order is BG - FG - Mask.
Or you can RMB-drag the pipe onto the tool.
When you let the RMB go, there is a popup-menu listing the available inputs.

My issue is with picking (grabbing), not the piping (attaching), so to speak. I'm so use to Nuke where you have a way bigger area when picking a handle, working in Fusion it drives me half mad that you need to pick exactly at the handle and (for some nodes at least) drop exactly within the pixels that draw the handle/exit port...

Hmmm....seems to work fine for me.
You can also reverse-connnect.
i.e. grab the *input* of tool B and drag it somewhere on top of tool A.
(Not exactly on the seemingly tiny output)
and the tools will connect.

Here's a demo...



And this is exactly the move/pick I've used in Nuke for years and I get the pipe 4/5 times in Nuke, 1/10 times in Fusion. So f***** frustrating.

How hard would it be to just make the pick are bigger? In Nuke you don't only have a couple of pixels out from the actual handle, you can also scale the handles separately from the nodes if you still want it easier to pick (though I never needed to scale them) - and this would speed up workflow sooooo much in Fusion...

http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckle ... ?f=16&t=30

Does this help (a little)?

Pieter Van Houte wrote:http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=30

Does this help (a little)?

Hehe, I didn't post this at your place as I thought it to newbieish a question.

But it seems this is an actual issue with Fusion then, I have the pipe distance set to max in the pref's - 10 - but that only seems to affect the actual lines, not the handles at all.

And as you can see in my clip, this is real issue for me, you can just guess how frustrating it gets having to slow down every time I need to grab a handle compared to what I'm used to... And it's not a dealbreaker, I'm loving Fusion, but it's an annoyance, and a serious one at that.

Imagine you could select both tools and press a hotkey to connect them

Pieter Van Houte wrote:http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckless/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=30

Does this help (a little)?

I think the pipe grab distance has been changed into a global setting in current versions of Fu.

Stefan Ihringer wrote:Imagine you could select both tools and press a hotkey to connect them

Yeah, like in Fusion 3 or 4. CTRL-T FTW!!

Stefan Ihringer wrote:I think the pipe grab distance has been changed into a global setting in current versions of Fu.

I have changed it in preferences/general, it made no difference.

But if this is an issue for more than me, can't we get the dev's on this, I imagine it's not the most complex issue to solve?

At a point I had something called "SmartConnect" which did exactly this.
Alt-C was the Key to use.

It also was able to connect one output to multiple inputs and other gadgets. It had some flaws but for the most part it worked quite well. Not sure if I can dig it out, but I always wanted to reprogram it.

The magic was that I did not have to Activate & Select tools, but it would Predict what you are trying to do by the Input/Output type and where your tools were sitting in relation to each other.

At least for merges it's easy enough to set it up it as in Nuke, just choose two nodes, press "m" and you'll create a merge, and if they are in the wrong order just press shift + "x" to flip them. I'm really surprised stuff like that isn't implemented in Fusion.

But for the pick distance, I checked now and for me, picking, I need to be one pixel in, so the picking area is even less than the handle icon. That's just insane, it's a minute area.

To flip inputs in Fusion it's CTRL-W...

Looking at your video...are you positively sure that your GraphicsDrivers are the latest?
I spotted more than just a few occasions where the connection should have worked flawlessly....:-/
Do you also experience any lag when bringing up context-menus on the flow e.g.?

Johnny Farmfield wrote:At least for merges it's easy enough to set it up it as in Nuke, just choose two nodes, press "m" and you'll create a merge, and if they are in the wrong order just press shift + "x" to flip them. I'm really surprised stuff like that isn't implemented in Fusion.

But for the pick distance, I checked now and for me, picking, I need to be one pixel in, so the picking area is even less than the handle icon. That's just insane, it's a minute area.

Fusion doesn't give you its list of selected tool in the order you selected them. That makes scripting these things like Nuke's "Y" hotkey harder or even impossible. Would be interested in how Blazej found his magic solution and if it's still somewhere to be found

You can easily add your "M" hotkey using a line in your Fusion.hotkeys file. I've also added more hotkeys that duplicate Fusion hotkeys but don't require you to hold ctrl all the time (sometimes I think Fusion was made for people with a spare hand ) It's pretty straightforward based on the default hotkeys file that gets created for you once you've used the hotkey manager script for the first time.

Toulouse LeTrak wrote:To flip inputs in Fusion it's CTRL-W...

Great, tnx.

Toulouse LeTrak wrote:Looking at your video...are you positively sure that your GraphicsDrivers are the latest?
I spotted more than just a few occasions where the connection should have worked flawlessly....:-/
Do you also experience any lag when bringing up context-menus on the flow e.g.?

I tried several different drivers lately as I had OpenCL issues, so yeah, this is the "normal" behavior no matter the driver - and no, no lag or anything like that.

Though note I use a mouse, not a Wacom pad. I tried getting used to that for years but seeing I was never a sketcher before getting into computer graphics, for me it was the reverse.

Stefan Ihringer wrote:You can easily add your "M" hotkey using a line in your Fusion.hotkeys file. I've also added more hotkeys that duplicate Fusion hotkeys but don't require you to hold ctrl all the time (sometimes I think Fusion was made for people with a spare hand ) It's pretty straightforward based on the default hotkeys file that gets created for you once you've used the hotkey manager script for the first time.

I haven't gotten into messing with that yet, how customizable is it? For the popup menu, I'm so used to TAB + start writing as that's the standard for both Nuke and Houdini, so I would love to be able to change that in Fusion, having TAB instead of CTRL + SPACE for the popup. The other thing I would love to be able to change is the 3D view port navigation. Again, I'm so used to ALT + LMB for orbit, ALT + MMB for panning and ALT + scroll for zooming as that is also the same in Nuke and Houdini, I still stumble a lot when navigating the Fusion view port...

Johnny Farmfield wrote: For the popup menu, I'm so used to TAB + start writing as that's the standard for both Nuke and Houdini, so I would love to be able to change that in Fusion, having TAB instead of CTRL + SPACE for the popup. The other thing I would love to be able to change is the 3D view port navigation. Again, I'm so used to ALT + LMB for orbit, ALT + MMB for panning and ALT + scroll for zooming as that is also the same in Nuke and Houdini, I still stumble a lot when navigating the Fusion view port...

The problem with using Tab is that it's needed to, you know, tab through the UI, especially for the viewers. Without it, getting preview controls to work can be a nightmare. So it would seem that we would need access to the viewer hotkeys, which we don't currently. It's not just the 3D navigation, either, I'd like to change the pickwalking hotkeys too. So yeah, it's a general request that could help a lot of different issues.

you can use TAB if you add your hotkey to the Flow section of the hotkeys file.

Stefan Ihringer wrote:you can use TAB if you add your hotkey to the Flow section of the hotkeys file.

Yeah, just means you have to be active there, so Tab in one part of UI, Shift+Space in another, which I think is worse. Better to find a neutral unmodified key for use everywhere.

So what does tab do in Fusion again? It doesn't seem to do anything for me. "Tab through the UI" - what?

And I run the flow w. the tools pain to the left on my right screen and a fullscreen view window on my left screen. I never use ctrl+space other than when in the flow.

Anyhow, I didn't manage to figure out how to set tab for this as it's not in the options for what I can set and I didn't manage to find the hotkeys file either. It's just one of those days, I guess.

check vfxpedia cache on wesuckless. there's some info on hotkey files in its admin chapter.

Stefan Ihringer wrote:check vfxpedia cache on wesuckless. there's some info on hotkey files in its admin chapter.

Ah, awesome, Stefan. I solved it.

But the 3D viewer keys were out of reach, right? No way to remap them to match Nuke/Houdini..?

Johnny Farmfield wrote:At least for merges it's easy enough to set it up it as in Nuke, just choose two nodes, press "m" and you'll create a merge

In Fusion, the easiest way to create a Merge is to grab the Output of one node, then drag and drop over the Output of another node.
The Merge is automatically created and the node, whose Output was dragged and dropped, is assigned as the Foreground.
To me personally, it seems a faster and more intuitive way than in Nuke.

Also, you can paste a node from the clipboard while another node in the Flow is selected.
Fusion will create a Merge and the pasted node will be assigned as the Foreground.

Gregory Chalenko wrote:In Fusion, the easiest way to create a Merge is to grab the Output of one node, then drag and drop over the Output of another node.
The Merge is automatically created and the node, whose Output was dragged and dropped, is assigned as the Foreground.
To me personally, it seems a faster and more intuitive way than in Nuke.

Also, you can paste a node from the clipboard while another node in the Flow is selected.
Fusion will create a Merge and the pasted node will be assigned as the Foreground.

Seeing my problem with picking distance, it's not easy to pick anything and drag onto anything else - but in general, comparing the methods between Nuke and Fusion, it's all personal preference and I really don't care in this case, I think both apps have pretty reasonable ways to create merges - but as I have the problem I have, Nuke comes out on top in this case, for that reason alone.

In regard to Fusion vs. Nuke, I really like both and they each have strengths and weaknesses making them - imo - a pretty good combination. For me Fusion basically replaced After Effects/Element 3D while I will mostly keep to Nuke for compositing CG/live plates and for doing clean plates and reprojection setups - as that's when Nuke shines. And it's not a competition, it's all about getting sh!t done and having fun doing it.

I've got some scripts I made to help with this problem.

There's 4 scripts, and they all do very related but slightly different things. They let you hook up nodes by hotkeys, although there's a bit of a trick to use them.

As has been mentioned, Fusion doesn't let you know which order nodes have been selected, which makes connecting them quite tricky through a script.

So in order to use this scripts, do the following:
1. Set up each script with a hotkey (this will make things much easier)
2. Select the node that will be your output
3. Run the script
4. Select the node that will be the input
5. Run the script again and the nodes will be connected

There are different scripts for when you want to connect nodes as background, foregrounds, or masks.
ConnectOutputToBkg.eyeonscript
ConnectOutputToFg.eyeonscript
ConnectOutputToMask.eyeonscript

The fourth script simply clears out the output selection, so if you selected the wrong node, you can start over.
ClearOutput.eyeonscript

One small clarification as well. When the script is run the first time and you are selected the output node, all scripts do the same thing. So in theory you can run any script to set up the output, and then use the specific one you need to connect it to the correct input.

I've tested this script a bit on Fusion 7, but no guarantees.

Hopefully this helps people out.