Today I learned…

Flame Tips and Tricks
268

I haven’t been around in the old days, so I can’t compare to how it may have worked at some point.

But on 2025.2.2 I see this behavior:

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Action with two outputs, both of which have a comp and matte output.

If I hit F4, it switches between first and second output, and with the 1 and 2 key it switches between comp and matte view of the active output. It also remembers which output is set which way. If I last viewed to comp on the first output but the matte on the 2nd output, F4 toggles between the comp of the first and the matte on the second.

Presumably if you had other output channels enabled on the output, like motion vectors, etc. it 1 and 2 would iterate through them as well.

So this all makes sense and is consistent. It works well if you have indeed actions (or gMask Tracer) with multiple outputs.

But it’s very annoying and inconsistent with how many other nodes work. If the action only has a single output with a matte (which is likely 80% of them). There it would be fantastic if F4 would in fact toggle between the comp and the matte.

There’s a world, where the behavior of Action/gMask Tracer would be like any other node if there’s a single output. F4 would toggle to the matte as in any other node. But once you have multiple outputs, then you go to the behavior above. However, this could be confusing to just as many folks.

What would have been better, if this was reversed. If F4 indeed would toggle between comp, matte (and any other channels), and 1 and 2 would step up and down the additional outputs. Then we wouldn’t have lost continuity with other nodes, yet still have this ability select multiple outputs. This is why UI design is complicated and very important. Consistency in behavior is the only way to make complex apps usable.

But switching this behavior at this time is also very disruptive to people’s muscle memory. It would have to be a preference somewhere that’s enabled selectively to avoid mayhem.

Let me know what you think and I’ll write up a feature request you can all vote up if you feel like it.

1 Like
269

There was a logic to both: the introduction of multiple outputs in Action and the addition of 8 more context views.

2 Likes
270

oh sorry, Tim do you mean Action timeline while in the timeline view? In which case the answer is no. I thought you meant using the Action on the timeline and being inside the editor.

271

There were always 10 context views, which were mapped to 1, 2, 3, etc. It was strangely changed to other hot keys, which we have to manually remap.

272

There was only 2 context views up until Flame 2016 Extension 1.
You can read about in the whats new.
https://help.autodesk.com/view/FLAME_P/2016/ENU/?guid=GUID-5DD34B96-FEE5-4E8F-8AE1-42671A7E7B3F

1 Like
273

Yes. The hotkeys were changed from 1 and 2 to space-1 and space-2, for no apparent benefit.

1 Like
274

They were changed because we changed the amount of Context views from 2 to 10 and there were already other shortcuts assigned to keystrokes 3 to 0.

The choice was to either change two shortcuts, 1 and 2, or other shortcuts assigned to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0. So, no matter what, shortcuts needed to be modified to implement what was one of the most frequent request we had back then and no matter what somebody was to be upset by the change.

Again, it never happens that we start planning a release and decide that one of the feature will be to change buttons or shortcuts for no reason or logic. You may disagree with the decision, but it is never a random choice.

8 Likes
275

Preach.

1 Like
276

Totally useless knowledge: If you replace a rendered segment on the timeline with the exact same source (why would you want to do that?) it remains rendered.