Apple Shake 4 - Manual (Page 937)

Chapter 31 Expressions and Scripting 937
Viewing Links in the Node View
To help you make sense of what’s happening in the node tree, you can view the links
connecting one node to another. Links are indicated for cloned nodes, as well as for
nodes that use expressions referencing a parameter within another node.
To view the links between nodes in the Node View, do one of the following:
m Right-click in the Node View, then choose Enhanced Node View from the shortcut
menu.
m Press Control-E.
The links appear as lines with arrows pointing to the node that’s being linked to.
Linking to a Parameter at a Different Frame
Ordinarily, links to another parameter produce that parameter’s value at the current
frame. If the parameter is animated and you want to obtain a value at a specific frame,
or at a frame that’s offset from the current time, you can use the following syntax to
view a value at a different frame:
parameterName@@time
In the above syntax, time could be substituted with a specific frame number, or with an
expression that calculates an offset from the time variable that references the current
position of the playhead. For example, the following expression obtains the value from
the yPan parameter of the Move2D1 node at the previous frame:
Move2D1.yPan@@(time-1)
Variables
You can declare your own variables, as shown above. However, each image node also
carries other information about that node, using the width, height, and bytes variables.
When you refer to these, they work exactly the same as above.
For example, the default center of rotation on Move2D is set to:
width/2
This places the center at the midpoint of the current image.