Friday 11 September 2009

Tip: linked transforms #2 - introducing pre-transforms

Oh joy! I recall my delight on discovering the power of linked transforms as introduced in the 2.08 release. This was a feature that wasn't trumpeted, just quietly slipped in. Well, those sneaky developers have done it again, given us a little Easter Egg quite undocumented in the spartan changelog. 2.09 has much going for it:


  • much more responsive

  • unused variations greyed out

  • only used variables shown

  • transform weight permanently visible in Editor

  • transform opacity



The thumbnails are a nice addition, but an option to default to names would be better. And that Easter Egg? Right-clicking in the Xaos tab now gives 2 linked transform options: before and after. The old linked transform is now 'after', but the 'before' option, always available via a little work but again completely missed by yours truly, opens up yet another vast landscape of possibilities. In conformity with my previous notation, I'll refer to these as 'pre-transforms': all of this linked transform's output is fed to the selected transform, and it receives its input from all except itself.

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