Can I create hotkeys/keyboard shortcuts for SGC Panel items?

Question

FIRST: OMG - I LOVE YOUR FLANIMATE POWER TOOLS!!!

Back in 2007 I was doing all kinds of Flash JSFL and Photoshop JSX scripting to automate a ton of stuff... I left Flash behind to puruse software engineering... but here I am 15 years later getting back into animation and WOW! I am so thrilled and impressed at what you've done! I get how buggy the Flash APIs were - I'm just blown away by what you've done, and I can't tell you how grateful I am that you have done all this work. Seriously -- I just found your stuff a few days ago and I am so stoked and in awe!

THE QUESTION: Is there a way to add hotkey shortcuts to the Smart Graphics Control Panels. Say I've got the option of 5 different hands (fist, point, thumbs up, open, wave) on frames 1 through 5... can you provide a way to navigate through those options with the keyboard while that panel has focus? Perhaps I could type the number to set focus to that frame. Or perhaps I could just use the arrow keys or +/- keys to navigate through the options? It would be a nice improvement to my workflow.

Either way, you guys are my heroes... I spent the last 4 months playing around with different animation software and solutions... nothing worked the way I wanted it to. Then I thought I might give Flash/Animate a try again hoping there might be some good plugins. OMFG I had no idea! I haven't slept the last 3 days cuz all I can think about now is learning everything I can about your EDAP tools and getting my hands back into Flash animation!!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!

Answer 1

Hi mate,

 

Thank you so much for the kind words!
It is extremely motivating to hear your positive initial impressions about our work.

 

To the question:
You won't be able to assign shortcuts to SGC thumbnails, but you can use Next/Previous Frame In Symbol commands with shortcuts to quickly go through the content of a Graphic Symbol.
Hopefully, this will give you the desired quick access.
In v.7 there will be improvements to SGC and even more ways of choosing 'first frame'.

 

You've probably already had a look at our rigging and posing system, SMR. There will be a bit of a learning curve there, but everything is logical, and it's been around for a while now, so the UX is quite polished.
We hope that you will enjoy using it!

 

Thanks again for stopping by and sharing your excitement with us!
Good luck with your projects!

Comments

Definitely a learning curve but you've created such excellent learning material - again, one of the things that blows my mind. The key (and you clearly mention it in your documentation) is to not let the excitement overwhelm me and read the articles first... I can see that understanding the importance of registration symbols vs. transformation points, and the gotchas around copy/pasting of rig elements with data on them is critical. Already have a character rigged up and it's sooooo much more fun to work with than what I was doing 15 years ago! It's intoxicating!

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This is awesome!
Well done and congratulations on your first rig!

We love seeing what users do with the tools and very often they surprise us with creative ways of combining the available features that we haven't even thought of. This in turn inspires more dev and polish in various areas.

From the very beginning our goal was to create a well-documented, user friendly, professional and flexible piece of software.
We rarely talk about our processes and goals, but for the tenth anniversary, we published something akin to a mission statement. You can see it here, if that is of interest.

Once again: Have fun and good luck with your projects!