Viewer Overlays

[OldSkoolVFX]

First: I love what you are doing. This project shows great promise. A suggestion would be to look at other programs asn do what they do well and avoid some of the murkier portions. to that end I find Natron to be easy and hard at the same time. I am using a Nuke book to work my way through it but there are enough differences that things that work in the book don't seem to work in Natron. There needs to be an explained tutorial to the interface and to each node.

Second, my primary question: I have several transforms, crops, etc and their respective overlays clutter up my viewer. How can I have only the overlay for the node I am working on be displayed without the other nodes and without using the 'hide overlays' which is all or nothing? (This is one of those murkier details.)

- Thanks and keep up the great work.

[Alexandre]

Hi, to prevent a node from displaying its overlay, simply close its settings panel.

Regards,

Alex

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[mu.va...@gmail.com]

> Hi, to prevent a node from displaying its overlay, simply close its settings panel.

Alex ...

Thank you for your reply. I figured that out on my own but you have to admit that this is a very inelegant solution. Why have a node settings bin for 10+ panels when you can't leave them open. One should be able to enable or disable whichever overlay one wants to view or not view. Maybe a viewer overlay check box in the node options panel. Please add this to the features wish list.

Thanks

[Alexandre]

Note that you can close the settings panel by hovering the mouse over the panel and pressing Escape.

We will also make the overlay disabled when the panel is minimised.
We could add a global switch for overlays too

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[Old SkoolVFX]

> We will also make the overlay disabled when the panel is minimised.

That's cool.

> We could add a global switch for overlays too

You already have a global switch for overlays when one right clicks in the viewer area. That works fine but as I stated it's all-or-nothing.

What I was getting at is that it would be real useful to have a checkbox in the node controls area of each settings panel so that one could select the overlays needed in each compositing scenario. I.e.: If I needed to see roto and track I could toggle them on and toggle the translates off and still work with the nodes in the bin if needed. I really don't want to have to pay attention to which nodes are in the bin unless I have to. The same with going through the bin minimizing panes. It wastes my time. And they don't stay minimized if I reload the file. However, jumping off from your statement, an option on the bin properties container to automatically minimize unselected nodes would be nice.

To fix all this I am currently using a layout with only the one active node settings panel open. This kind of defeats the purpose of having the ability to have multiple node settings panels open at one time. The node settings bin can let one rapidly move between nodes to tweak settings, but only if more than one is open at once.

So again the two wishes for the wish list are:
1: An option in the related node settings panel to view or not view a specific overlay in the viewer pane.
2: An option on the top of the node properties bin to only show the active node's overlay.
3: An option on the top of the node properties bin to automatically minimize non active panels.

It would also be nice if the layout used and the options state (like #3 above) where saved into the .ntp file like Blender does. It is a wish list after all.

[OldSloolVFX]

Another idea is to have a menu activated from the viewer controls with a menu should allow one to toggle on or off the overlays that are available at that particular time. The advantage would be a single place to look instead of going hunting for the overlays in the bin panels and thus a quick way to toggle them on or off.

[wuensch....@gmail.com]

What about 3 Overlay modes?
ON, ONLY SELECTED NODES, OFF
I also work with Nuke a lot and think this would be a better solution, as it somtimes get confusing when you have opend a lot nodes in the settings panel.

Cheers Michael

[OldSkoolVFX]

Michael ...

That's good but then you have to fiddle around with the node bin. Why not just have a menu in the viewer controls that allows you to toggle the overlays you want at any given time.

[soz...@gmail.com]

Having a toggle to make the overlay on/off may be nice, but that's also something else to check when you have to work on the project of somebody else,
Or when you open an old project of yours and need to check what the hell is going on there...

When you have to dig in the project of somebody else and inspect each node to understand what they are doing, it's better to see visually what is doing what, just by opening somes nodes and quicky inspect or viewing them.
Having to check if the controllers are hidden may be another thing to keep in mind when doing that kind of dirty job.

Also it depends on the type of the project or animation you are working with, but generally , doing one thing at a time , you don't need to interact with a lot of node settings at the same time (at least for me)...
Even if my comps have 100 nodes or more, I have only 3 to 5 nodes settings open maximum to interact with at a time. And I always close all nodes I don"t need anymore when a piece of work is done.

Having the controls hidden when a pannel is reduced seems a good compromise to me, as it hide controls temporaly, thus making no surprise when you open back your project later.

All that sayed , it may depend on your workflow,or type of compositing/animation you're doing. If you animate lot's of layers at the same time, like for instance lots of letters that swarm and form a title, it may become a bit crowded with the overlays I guess...
Why not using a software more oriented to animation then ? , like after effect or blender, when you just have to click on an object to select it and move it ?
Natron or Nuke are IMO more oriented to pure compositing, or maybe procedural animations when moving one object or controler influence many others...
Even if you've got lots of node animated , by the nature of nodals system you generally tweak each layers one at a time, and don"t need that much of parameters open at the same time...

That's my two cents, hope it can help :)