Drinking my morning coffee and thought I might start a thread - something I have been thinking about recently: I thought it might be interesting to mention some of the small things that I learned over the past few months that I did not know and may have never learned if it were not for this group. And, maybe others can add some of this type of stuff to this thread so we can all add to our arsenal of Autodesk amazingness. Obviously there are tons of HUGE things that we have and probably are still learning, but here is a short list of some of the smaller things. Here are a few to get started.
A “gmask tracer” node can have multiple outputs!
Using the drag and/or smear brush in paint to take red lines out of eyeballs! (Andy’s Beauty video.)
The freaking object obliterator - LOVE IT! OMG! Using it with different types of blur can make serious magic - try directional blur and offset for example. HUGE.
The RunwayML Green screen tool. When it works, it seriously rocks.
One I came across on my own - adding and elbow to a node that you wish you had added earlier because now it is feeding twenty other nodes and you need to slip a node in between it and the rest, simply drag an elbow out from the “output” and bam, there is an elbow between the node and all the nodes it feeds - massive for me.
What simple things did you learn or perhaps would like to share?
Connected conform workflows with Jeff Kyle have been a great help. Too many others to count, but I use the CC workflow to save me from endless social versioning.
This is a great little find. I was having to do the hotkey combo and add a mux after the clip, then add an elbow before the mux, then delete the mux. This is very helpful. Thanks.
Alright here’s one I felt dumb when I realized but it’s so satisfying to use, and it’s probably like “duh” for everyone here- but I didn’t really realize the point of the matte input in paint, until I realized I could plug my plate into paint, and then I could plug in my key or roto into the matte input, and just paint my flyaways, blowing blades of grass, motion blurred edge, etc and then that would all carry through the matte output of the paint. No need to disconnect the paint and use the matte as the main input, just done all very neatly in the pipeline.
Talking of geeking: I just discovered if you render a segment on the timeline then with linking you only need to render it once! That’s today I found that out. I’d always used 10bit timelines with BLGs atop. But put everything into the segment, render and bam: all versions rendered. Time saver.
It was a while ago now, but the little blue dot, top right of all icons takes you to the animation curves for that node. Really useful when you have a mega batch.
