Tips and Techniques/Quick Tips

From VFXPedia

Jump to: navigation, search

This is a list of useful little tips you might not know about Fusion - invaluable for the beginner, and worth a read for even the most advanced user.

These tips are shown randomly in Fusion's Console view, when opening or creating a comp. You can get more at any time by typing "tip" into the console.

We encourage you to add your favourite tip to this list. Remember when you discovered that little trick that made your life so much easier? Now if only someone had mentioned it to you sooner! :-) Also, feel free to add to or rephrase existing tips to make them clearer. We will periodically collect the contents of this page and compile them into the latest build of Fusion, so your tip could make it onto the desktops of thousands of compositors around the world!

Contents

UI

  • You can drag the Pick button from any colour control set to an image view to pick colors. Try it, and you'll see a little square following the cursor. Ctrl+drag to change the size of the square. The color controls will be set to the average of all the pixels within the square, as you drag. The color inspector subview also uses this rectangle size, but the values shown in Fusion's statusbar are always the actual pixel values.
  • To zoom a 2D or 3D view, any of the following works:
    • Press the + or - keys on the numeric keypad
    • Press Ctrl & use the mousewheel
    • Hold down the middle mouse button & click the left or right button
    • Hold down the left & middle mouse buttons then drag side to side
  • The [ and ] keys move you forward and backwards through a sequence. ALT + [ and ALT + ] move you to the next/prev keyframe of the currently active tool, or of the whole comp if no tool is selected. If the spline view is active, it will move you to the prev/next keyframe of the current spline. On most non-American keyboards the square brackets [] are not directly accessible. You can use the two keys left from the backspace (ß and ´ on a German keyboard e.g.) instead.
  • The most common reason for a big red X in the viewport is that you are trying to view the Z channel of an image that doesn't have one.
  • Pressing Ctrl+1 will reset the size and positioning of the display view, and the flow view.
  • The Chat view (talk bubble icon) is a handy way to share comments with other users of the comp.
  • When viewing Z values in the viewport, by default Fusion will scale the depth values so that z = 0 is black and z = -1000 is white. Depending on the scale of your scene, this may make all the z values in your viewport appear solid white or solid black. You can change these default values in Preferences -> View -> Displayed Depth Range. To have Fusion automatically map depth values so that black is the depth of the nearest pixel and white is the furthest, you can turn on view normalization.
  • Normally the active view has a yellow border. If the Some/None/All button is set to None, this becomes a red border and tools will no longer render interactively. Hitting the Scroll Lock key toggles None mode on and off.
  • "Image LUTs" are applied only to images, and can be selected from the display view's "LUT" popup list. The "Buffer LUT" is a LUT applied to all display view types, in addition to any image LUTs, and is found in the display view's Global Options context submenu.
  • Any macro with an image output may be used as a view LUT, by placing its .setting file in the LUTs: path. You can even use the saved .setting file of one or more tools.
  • Enabling the display view's "Snap" button is a handy way to ensure that your layers or paths are positioned on whole-pixel offsets, avoiding sub-pixel blur.
  • You can now add macros, saved settings and scripts to your Tool bars. Choose Customize Tool Bars from the View menu to add them.
  • If you move away or delete the file Fusion:Plugins/eyeon/ContextMenu.plugin and restart Fusion, standard Windows-style context menus will be used instead. Some users may find these to be preferable since they are higher contrast and/or easier to navigate using a mouse cursor. They may also appear faster on some systems.
  • If you prefer to use the standard Windows file requester instead of the built-in one, paste in console without the outer quotes "fusion:SetPrefs{["Global.FileReq.CustomDialogs"]= false}". To revert to the built-in dialogs, paste the same with "true" in place of "false". --p.marinov 14:36, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • By using the Window -> New Window menu option, you can create another window for the same comp. This can be useful, for example, to view the flow view and the spline view at the same time.
  • When using the A/B splitwipe view, a common gotcha is that the A and B views each have their own group of settings. For example, you may have SmoothResize or View Normalization on in view A, but not in B. The view toolbar shows the settings for whichever of A or B is active (left click on a side to activate).
  • You can change which subview shows up by default in a view by right clicking in the view and saving your current settings as default.
  • When using the A/B splitwipe you can use Ctrl+Alt+LeftClick to bring the A/B box to the cursor's position.
  • Use the Up Arrow & Down Arrow keys in the Console View to bring up a history of previous commands - even if you've just loaded the comp.
  • The Global Start Time, Render Start Time, Render End Time, Global End Time, and Current Time fields allow you to enter arithmetic which gets evaluated to make an entry, just like the other numerical entry fields. HOWEVER, multiplication is not allowed. So while you can do 65+1805 or 452-123 or 2244/24, you can’t do 2*2. A workaround is to divide by the reciprocal. So instead of 10*20, try 10/(1/20). This will return 200, as expected. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Ctrl+F brings up the Find dialog, but that disappears as soon as you hit “Find Next” or “Find Previous”. If you want to keep finding, just hit F3 to cycle though all the tools that match the search criteria. You can do this at any time, so by tagging your tools with a special substring, you can cycle through a set of tools very easily, even if they are in different parts of your comp. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • The viewers have a normalize button as well as a color channel button. If you are viewing RGB images and press the normalize button, you will normalize the RGB according to the luminance. Changing the channel view will show you the channel of that result. However, if you view the individual channels, then turn on normalize, you will re-normalize to the values of that channel only. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Ctrl-mousewheel will make the fonts used in text entry boxes larger. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Typing an equal sign (=) in a numeric entry field will turn whatever is typed after the equal sign into a simple expression. By inserting the equal sign in front of the existing value, you can easily make a persistent expression based on the current value. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Dragging a .setting file from explorer on the Fusion title bar will open your setting as if it were a comp. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Ctrl-dragging a range slider handle will move the other end by the same amount, but negative. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Having too many scripts and script menu is too long? You can organize the actual script files in sub folders, which will appear as submenu's in Fusion's script menu. --p.marinov 03:23, 10 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Placing a "--" in a simple expression will ignore the characters to the right. As in "3.14159 -- pi to 5 decimals" --Chad 13:17, 3 December 2009 (EST)
  • To avoid visible banding when displaying a low-contrasty gradient, make sure the image is 32 bit float, then RMB on the Display View, select General Options > Dither. --Gringo 07:59, 27 December 2009 (EST)
  • You can right click on the display view toolbars to change the size of the icons. Making your icons smaller allows one to squeeze a double row of icons into a single row which is helpful on lower resolution monitors.
  • Pressing Ctrl-Space pops up the Add Tool dialog. Using this dialog you can quickly add any tool in Fusion in a few keystrokes. Example 1: to add a Loader you'd press Ctrl-Space, L, D, Enter. Example 2: to add a Renderer3D you'd press Ctrl-Space, R, E, N, Enter.

Tools & Rendering

  • Fusion automatically chooses the smallest data type that will store the mask information without loss of information. e.g. hard edged masks are stored as int8 since they are rendered at <= 256 shades of grey. This can be overridden with the Custom button in the mask's Image tab.
  • You can lock tools to prevent you from accidentally changing them. Ever destroyed a crop region accidentally? Or move a camera that you were looking through?
  • In addition to color, Fusion images can also have 'hidden' auxiliary channels like depth, coverage, normals, and texture coordinates. These extra channels are used by the Deep Pixel tools.
  • One way to see which extra channels are present in the output of a tool is to view the tool and turn on the Color Inspector subview.
  • One way to see the contents of an image's auxiliary channel is to use a ChannelBoolean to move the channels into color. Keep in mind that the auxiliary channels are usually float and they may not show up correctly.
  • When you hover your cursor over a tool on the flow it will display the color depth the tool was most recently rendered at. If the tool has not rendered yet it will display 32 bit float.
  • Holding down Shift when dropping a numbered image file in the Bins will add a clip trimmed to that frame only.
  • Holding down Shift when dropping a numbered image file on the flow will add a Loader trimmed to that frame only.
  • Right-clicking on a Loader's Trim In/Out control will let you change the auto-detected length of a clip.
  • Creating instances of Loaders is a very bad idea because the image data gets loaded twice and messes up the clip list.
  • Paint's Clone tool has a handy "Snap Offset" checkbox which forces Clone to automatically uses the nearest whole-pixel offset.
  • You can set one input in a macro to “EffectMask” and it will appear as a regular effect mask input and masks will automatically be connected to it. --Chad 11:46, 7 August 2009 (EDT)
  • One way to optimize large compositions that are slow is to reduce the amount of memory you are using. Reduce the size of images, reduce the number of particles you are using. There's no advantage to using a 1080p texture on particles or 3D geometry that are never bigger than 20 pixels - use a Resize tool to downsize it before feeding it into particles.
  • If you load the same footage in two separate Loaders, the image data will be duplicated in memory. It is best to have only one Loader and to branch the output.
  • Use a Bmp to convert greyscale images from RGBA to A. This reduces memory usage by 75% and can sometimes improve rendering speed. Mono images can also be used as 3D textures, where they save video memory as well. --Chad
  • All the output image parameters such as color depth, resolution, pixel aspect, fields and metadata are always taken from the Background (yellow) image inputs of all the tools except Dissolve. The "lowest layer" of a composition, i.e. the image over which everything is merged defines them for the final output. --Gringo 12:11, 4 December 2009 (EST)
  • To submit a composition to just one render node on the farm, append #1 to the network group name, e.g. all#1.
  • When designing a network rendering architecture you should keep in mind the best way to optimise it for Fusion is to split up the frame range into contiguous chunks among render slaves rather sending frames one at a time. Rendering the first frame is always the slowest. Subsequent frames often render faster by multiples since Fusion will reuse cached in memory results from the previous frame. This is especially noticable with particles, where if you send frames one at a time Fusion needs to pre-roll the particle state from scratch each frame.

3D

  • If the GL renderer is really slow to render check your bit depth. Certain graphics cards do not support int16 or float32 rendering and a software emulation fallback will be used.
  • The functionality of OpenGL rendering depends on the hardware. To provide a maximum range of compatibility there are some environment variables that can force Fusion to use specific Cg-profiles. If you have some trouble rendering a scene using OpenGL or displaying it in the viewport, try to set the environment variables GGL_LATEST_FRAGMENT_PROFILE = arbfp1 and/or CGGL_LATEST_VERTEX_PROFILE = arbvp1
  • The OpenGL renderer in Fusion 6.0 can now produce higher quality images than the software renderer though the use of supersampling. The downside is that the GL renderer requires a recent graphics card and the results of renders are graphics card dependant.
  • If your 3D views slow down with lots of semi-transparent geometry try setting sorting to "unsorted".
  • There are now 3 ways to do camera projection in Fusion: (1) UV projection with UVMap3D, (2) texture projection with Camera3D and Catcher3D, (3) light projection with Camera3D. These are described in the wiki.
  • A TextureTransform3D tool can be placed at the bottom of a material tool tree enabling one to simultaneously modify all the textures feeding into the tree.
  • The Override3D tool can be used to access some of the missing 3D options in Text3D and particles such as "unseen by camera", "affected by lighting", "object/material ids", or "receives shadows".
  • The most common reasons an imported camera fails to match up are metric/imperial unit conversions and not setting the correct pixel aspect, film back, and frame range in Fusion. For a list of common gotchas you can read the Matchmoving page on the wiki: http://vfxpedia.com/index.php?title=FAQ/3D_matchmoving.
  • You can drag and drop a camera or light from the toolbar directly onto the display view to add and connect it to the currently viewed tool in a single step, and it will be positioned and angled to match your current point of view. Additionally, cameras will be selected to view through.
  • It's usually best to use Fusion with default settings in your video card's control panel. Enabling driver options like antialiasing can take you off the well-tested driver path, which can increase instability and crashes.

Shortcuts

  • Right-clicking on a Tool bar is a quick way to bring up the Customize Tool Bars dialog.
  • Right-clicking on the render status indicator in the bottom right of Fusion's window will bring up a menu for controlling network-render settings.
  • Double-clicking on the render status indicator in the bottom right of Fusion's window will bring up the Render Status dialog.
  • Right-clicking on the memory indicator at the bottom right of Fusion's window will bring up the Cache control menu.
  • Double-clicking on the memory indicator at the bottom right of Fusion's window will bring up the global Preferences.
  • Shift-clicking on the memory indicator at the bottom right of Fusion's window will bring up the Debug cache control menu. --Chad 11:27, 12 August 2009 (EDT)
  • Right-clicking on the speaker icon at the bottom middle of Fusion's window will bring up the Audio track control menu.
  • Right-clicking on the Rewind or Fast Forward icons at the bottom middle of Fusion's window will let you select the frame step size. The current time will change by the frame step size when clicking those buttons, or when pressing the [ or ] keys.
  • Right-clicking on the Disk Cache icon in a tool's control window will bring up a menu of disk cache settings.
  • Right-clicking on the Width, Height or Pixel Aspect controls of many tools will bring up a menu of standard frame formats.
  • You can click tools on the toolbar to automatically add & connect them after the active tool, or drag them to the flow to place them manually.
  • You can drag and drop tools from the toolbar directly onto the display view, and they will be automatically added and connected to the currently viewed tool.
  • It's possible to email tools to other people. You can select a group of tools in the flow view, Ctrl-C to copy them, and then Ctrl-V to paste their Lua code into your email or any other text editor. Conversely if you copy tools from your email you can paste them back into Fusions flow view.

Random

  • Type "tip" in the Console to display another tip.
  • Pressing F1 while hovering the mouse cursor over a tool will bring up the help page for that tool.
  • Type "8ball" in the Console followed by a question to get Fusion's considered opinion.
  • Stressed? Ctrl+Shift+H can help you relax.
  • Bored? Ctrl+Shift+B does something other compositors don't.
  • Who wrote this brilliant software? Ctrl+Shift+/ will answer.
  • eyeon hosts an user-editable online wiki at http://www.vfxpedia.com. Choose VFXpedia from the Help menu's Online Support submenu.
  • Got a tip? Add it to the wiki at http://www.vfxpedia.com/index.php?title=Tips_and_Techniques/Quick_Tips and look for your tip built into a future release of Fusion!
Retrieved from "http://96.0.243.189/index.php?title=Tips_and_Techniques/Quick_Tips"