a widget to manipulate result in the compositor
A widget to manipulate items in the compositor, like Natron or after effect, to avoid to enter coordinates. It would be able to rotate, scale, grab, shear...
It would appear when you select an image, or image sequence, mask or every element.the "frame" (output format) would be displayed, so you could grab every item you want and move them in your render frame.
7 Comments
I think better than a widget, would be some context awareness that pressing g, s, or r would automatically insert the according nodes right after the currently selected node and allow you to do the modal change in the compositor view. Something like this (at least the modal compositor, 3d-view like transformation hotkeys) has been implemented in an addon for the VSE.
yes the addon in VSE is really cool, and that is the same idea for the compositor. Having the result of your operation in a tranform node is a good way to keeping "all node" prupose. But in my opinion, a widget is more intuitive than a shortcut, especially for beginners.
I would add the ability to interact with corners for distort node as well. While we are at it, why not include Mask interaction in the same view? It would be nice to have a feedback of alpha subtraction on the image you're placing a mask (or masks) on.
While your proposal makes sense in the abstract, it's still pretty vague. It would be best if you could include a mock-up that shows what your proposed widget would look like, how it would be enabled/disabled, and what exactly it's capable of doing.
Think of it like the free transform in photoshop or after effects, which has now become such an important, basic feature for all animation and compositing tasks in all other packages that it feels silly the compositor doesn't have it.
I've been wanting this for years, especially to edit transforms in the compositor. I believe what he means is a way of using translate/rotate/scale directly on the view in the compositor. A widget could be great, but just using GRS would already be absolutely sufficient for people like me. My idea of implementation could probably even be done in a plugin (which I would happily pay for on the blender market!!) but I don't have the know-how to do it. Most likely someone else here does.
My way of doing it would be: if I have a Transform node present and selected in the compositor, there would be a "direct edit" button which I can select which simply allows me to use GRS to modify the numbers in the box according to where my mouse is in the view and the button I pressed.
To speed up responsiveness it would cache/buffer all the nodes before the transform node in a quickly rendered, smaller res. image which we could set the quality somewhere for "faster, less resolution, slower, more resolution" which it could dump when leaving the mode by pressing enter or spacebar.
This would feel alot more pleasant, user friendly and just natural than moving the numbers and waiting for it to do what we wanted, then tweaking the numbers.
Maybe we can have the same mockup with the backdrop compositor instead of the image editor. but with image editor you can also edit mask...
I suggested the image editor because alot of professionals I talk to don't like to use the backdrop. They like to have their nodes in one area, their image in another. People have different needs and ways of using it, so I suggested that placement according to my own current usage. I kick out an image viewer to another screen for compositing for example. I would happily change my way of working to have this feature.
Actually, a likely more future-proof way to do this would probably be to have it in the movie editor because this may be a better way to use splines (masks) to move objects along them or move objects in compositor according to a track. I'm getting into territory which is unknown to me on the technical implementation (i.e. where it's easier and has more potential uses) so I'd leave that for someone who's more technically minded. This feature is just so badly needed and (for me) is my number 1 usability issue with the compositor. It's like having the 3D viewport without TRS!! I would give up on After Effects if I had this (and if it had motion blur), as it's just about the only thing keeping me in AE.
I actually believe this function is present in ALL compositors except blender. I know at least it's in nuke, AE, Natron and fusion.
To maybe give a few ideas of how this could be implemented, here's how it's implemented in Nuke: youtube.com/watch
Here is how it's implemented in Natron : youtube.com/watch