User Manual

Switching Thumbnails between Images and Icons
Whenever you enable node thumbnails, you have the choice of having these thumbnails either
display an image of the state of the image at that node, or you can instead choose to display
the icon for that particular node. The setting for this affects all nodes at once.
To display icons instead of thumbnails:
Right-click anywhere in the background of the Node Editor and deselect Show
Thumbnailsin the contextual menu.
Sometimes Nodes Only Show Icons
As you add more and more nodes to a composition, you’ll notice that some nodes
never display an image in their thumbnail. In these cases, the default icon for that node
is displayed instead of an image.
Most nodes in the Particle and 3D categories fall into this group. The exceptions are the
pRender node and the Render 3D node. These two nodes are capable of displaying a
rendered thumbnail if you have the menu options set for Thumbnails to bedisplayed.
In other cases, whether nodes display images in their thumbnail is more situational.
Some Transform nodes are able to concatenate their results with one another,
passing the actual processing downstream to another node later in the node tree. In
this case, upstream Transform nodes don’t actually process the image, so they don’t
produce a thumbnail.
In other situations where the Loader is not reading in a clip or the clip is trimmed in the
Keyframes Editor to be out of range, it can cause the node not to process the image, so
it will not produce a rendered Thumbnail image. Also, nodes that have been set to Pass
Through mode are disabled and do not display a rendered Thumbnail image.
Finding Nodes
Modern visual effects require detailed work that often results in compositions with hundreds of
nodes. For such large node trees, finding things visually would have you panning around the
Node Editor for a long, long time. Happily, you can quickly locate nodes in the Node Editor
using the Find dialog.
The Find dialog lets you quickly locate nodes
wherever they are in the Node Editor.
Performing Simple Searches
To do simple searches using node names is easy.
Chapter – 56 Working in the Node Editor 1102