I made this request 5 years ago now, but I thought I might just see if I can get some support on this. I’d like to be able to assign a hotkey to certain nodes I use all the time in batch so that if I have a node selected, then press the appropriate hotkey then that node would be added directly after the selected one. I think it could help speed up the building of batches.
So if I wanted to add a blur, and I’d assigned B as my hotkey for Blur, I could highlight the node before where I want it, hit B then the Blur node would be inserted directly after. What would be really cool is if when it did that, it also connectted the front output into the front input of the blur and the matte output into the matte input of the blur.
As an addition to that, could be cool to be able to do similar for nodes within Action when you are inside an action node within a batch.
I can understand how this may be hard to implement so I’d be happy if it was the simplest version of the request, only working in Batch scematic and only connecting the front input.
To be honest, I find this slower than hovering my cursor of the node library and hitting the first letter of the node. I want to be able to hit a single hotkey then keep working.
I wouldn’t care if you could only assign 10 hotkeys to 10 selected favourites, there are certain nodes that you use over and over again and want to be able to select them as quickly as possible.
I like the idea. The challenge might be to find enough available hot keys. With all my custom hotkeys I think I’m getting close to maxing out.
But maybe if it was a multi-key combo that could work — like shift-alt-B for blur, etc. Or a hardware panel you could assign them to.
I used to set a whole lot of hotkeys with CTL + ALT + FLAME plus a key. The funny thing is, I can’t remember what I had those assigned to now and don’t use that combo at all. Was easy to use though (since the 3x Main keys are all in a row on my keyboard) and never conflicted with anything.
And certain regularly used hotkeys should be set in a way that you can do it with one hand and the hand that isn’t holding the pen. Like for my go to previous & next keyframes I use SPACE + < or >. As they are so close it makes it easy to navigate whilst your pen is ready to go. I also sit my keyboard slightly to the left of my Wacom so there isn’t any kind of contortion going on.
The other thing I use all the time is the User & Project bins in batch as there are certain node setups that you use constantly. I get the feeling that there are a lot of speed tricks like these that are under-utilised.
Thank you for your service. Not putting the tablet behind the keyboard. It’s bad for posture and health, and bad for speed, and a bad look in front of clients when you’re hunched over and it looks like the machine is controlling you, and not the other way around.
Totally disagree. What makes someone fast is not pressing a key in .5 seconds versus going to a menu in 2 seconds. I’ve never set a custom key, and I’ll out produce anyone.
Flame default keys are a mess of 30 years of ad hoc improvisation and are not ergonomic or fast. It’s not ADSK’s fault, it’s just the way things developed, and especially coming from the very first days of any software for this kind of thing.
Many were named not for speed or ergonomics, but just alphabetically. “M” for Move, one of the most used keys in a day — not in a quick and ergonomical position. “Q” makes more sense, or plenty of other options. The list goes on.
Point is, when I put thought into my hotkeys, my speed went up drastically.
I use the project and user bins a lot and I have never understood people who put the keyboard above the tablet, much better to have it off to the left, IMO.
Default hotkeys vs custom hotkeys RENDERDOME challenge.
Two questions so we can establish the victory conditions:
Do degrees in this context equate to percentage points (4 degrees better is 104% as fast), scalar values (5 degrees is 5x as fast), or exponential values?
That’s funny. I don’t hear any of the smoke hot key users complaining about the hot keys. Smoke Hotkeys and the artists that use them are far superior.
That’s because the Smoke hotkey users transitioned over to Flame hotkeys like I did because they were better.
Actually, I changed because I use Resolve a lot and a lot of the hotkeys were similar for playback… especially JKL. Not good keys to accidentally hit when you’re running Smoke hotkeys.
