I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the graph editor lately and some recurring annoyances keep scratching away at my brain.
(I’m not sure if this is the right place to do feature requests. Sorry if I’m in the wrong place)
Right now, I have to isolate a selected channel by first selecting the channel(s) I want to focus on, then hitting “v” to isolate it, then moving my mouse over to the graph and hitting the “home” key to frame the curve up. This is a 3-4 step process that I go through every time I select a channel. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you’re doing it all day long those extra clicks really start to add up.
It would be great if there was a (toggle-able) option to make these steps happen automatically every time I select a channel. It would be an incredible time-saver over the course of the day if my channel selection would isolate and frame automatically.
To be specific, menu options for “auto isolate channel selection” and “auto frame on selection” would rock.
Framing a curve doesn’t include handles in the framing, requiring an additional readjustment of the view if I want to work with the handles.
Selecting multiple handles on multiple curves feels a bit buggy. I either can’t ctl-b select the rotation handles at all, or it selects ALL the rotation handles on a particular frame at once, even if I only selected one of them.
Additionally, it would be great if soft select worked on graph curve points. This would be especially useful when working with dense keyframe data like motion capture.
That’s it at the moment, really. Blender’s graph editor is becoming pretty awesome overall. And if these features exist and I’m just doing it wrong, I would love to be corrected!
1: agreed, similar functionality is available in other software, for example After Effects, which can speed up things quite a bit.
And I wish the short cut keys would be more consistent in behaviour in the graph editor: for example, in the 3d view when I hit <numpad></> the object(s) selected are isolated. I would expect that after (<shift>)<ctrl><alt>clicking to select a curve(s), I would be able to isolate them by hitting the <numpad></> key. But no. This is inconsistent behaviour.
2 - well, you can turn off “Only Selected Keyframes Handles”, and turn on “Only Selected Curve Keyframes”. Any select channel will then automatically show all the handles, even if not selected. If I understood your point correct?
3 - don’t know, seems to work for me.
4 - YES!!! I work with mocap, and a proportional edit/brush mode with fall-off would be brilliant!!! +1
2- That’s not what I meant. For me, at least, if I hit the “home” key it will frame up all the curves in the graph editor view, like it’s supposed to. The issue, is that if I have all my handles showing, the “home” action only considers the keyframes themselves, not the associated handles. So if I frame up my curve and then intend to edit the handles on the ends, I have to manually zoom out some more to see those handles.
It’s not a huge issue, but it does get on the nerves a bit if you’ve been working at them all day.
3- Hmm, it works fine for you? Maybe my version is buggy…? I submitted it as a bug, I’m sure we’ll get it straightened out soon.
UPDATE: I submitted the bug in #3 this morning and it was fixed by this afternoon. It’s now in trunk. Thanks Brecht!! You guys are all simply amazing!!
Hi all, this is a shout-out to aligorth. I was wondering if you have had a chance to look at implementing that “auto-isolate channel” function that was presented in the first post of this thread. I know your busy, but I’ve spent another couple of days in the graph editor and all the extra clicking is beginning to drive me mad, so I thought I would ask. It would be a major time saver!
Just as a quick n’ dirty 15 minute test, I scrapped this together: isolate_and_frame.zip. Install and activate it as an add-on.
Usage:
Select the channel
Move your mouse to the Graph Editor
Press Shift+V
It’s not perfect; I wish you didn’t have to move your mouse to the Graph Editor (perhaps a more capable Python hacker could make that happen), but it should reduce the amount of keystrokes and hand-movement you have to use.
I owe you a beer, Jason! That script is awesome and will save me tons of time! In fact, if this feature isn’t coded into the graph editor directly, I would suggest this script get submitted to be included in the release version of blender.
Obviously, this doesn’t go as far as we would like it, but it will definitely do in a pinch!
If I could make a suggestion, it would be to add the instructions for it’s use in the description section of the add-on. Just in case this winds up in contrib and someone tries it with no knowledge of how it’s used.
Thanks Fweeb, I was going to look into this a bit myself today, but I’m not all that skilled in blender python. I did experiment around a bit with bpy.ops.anim.channels_visibility_set() and kept getting a ‘context is incorrect’ error and was thinking the error was because the mouse wasn’t in the graph editor, so I was going to start looking for a way to detect when a channel was activated and when it was, I’d execute the two operators you do. But the more I got to thinking about it, the more I was thinking that would change blender’s default behavior and was pondering if that was a good idea or not. Was thinking if there was any pros or cons to doing that… for example, if blender’s behavior was changed so that when a channel was selected it became the only visible channel would not be any good if you just wanted to highlight the channel to make it more visible to compare it to other channels that are displayed.
The only thing I see wrong with the shift-v hotkey is, if you don’t move the mouse to the graph editor and leave it in the channel list, it toggles all active channels off & on. I don’t think really that’s a big deal cause once all the active curves are hidden (if the mouse is in the channel list) moving the mouse to the graph editor and shift-v again, it corrects itself, which is certainly better than the idea I had of executing the operators on selection of the channels.
I think you should publish it at is to blender’s scripts catalog and create a wiki page on how to use it!!!
I would like to see box select always on for the Graph Editor and the Dopesheet. When you talk about annoying repetition the B-Key is what I end having to press all day. And whats the point? When I move my mouse into those windows I almost always want to draw a box around keys.
Alrighty… the Channel Isolate and Frame add-on is in the wiki. I tweaked it a little bit so it shows up in the Channels menu and it has a tracker for bug-hunting as well.
It turns out that you can’t get custom hotkeys to work in a region (any region: the channels region in the Graph Editor, the Tool Shelf in the 3D View, etc.)… they just don’t work there. Until that’s fixed, though, there is a bit of a work-around. You can use the Spacebar search feature and find “Isolate and Frame”. Then, with your mouse in the Channels region of the Graph Editor, you can do a quick Spacebar > Enter (since Blender happily remembers your last search) and the operator/addon works just fine.
Not my call… I still don’t like the fact that we can’t have a custom hotkey in a region, but perhaps the hackish nature of that could be overlooked ;). I can ask around the bf-python folks and see if it can’t be added to Contrib (been meaning to do that for my Edit Linked Library add-on as well).
Edit linked library…? Do you have a link to it?? I will test that immediately!!
But yeah, inclusion in contrib would be awesome! I can cast my vote for it as well. Who does one contact for such a thing?
Lol, it finally just occured to me why your name seemed so familiar. I have both editions of your blender for dummies books. I have to say thanks, because those books helped me learn blender better and faster than anything else i tried at the time. Great work!
Box select as default can easily be done now in the keymap editor. Just change the hotkey (b) to tweak and mouse. If it conflicts with the mouse select click, change the mouse event of the click from “press” to “click”.
