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Control points disappear
Sorry if this is a dumb newbie question…
As soon as I draw a mask or shape, the control points disappear and I cannot figure out how to bring them back for editing.
I’ve highlighted the mask/shape layer, and the tools is the inspector (scale, shear, etc) work fine, but no points.
Any ideas? I’ve searched the manual but found no reference to this particular issue.
Thanks
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2 Replies
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Heya,
There are so many things that you can do to an object that they are separated into different modes. The default is the Transform mode, where you can drag stuff around. The others allow for things like adjusting Anchor Point, Four Corner, Crop, etc. The last mode on any object will be specific to that object type. For example, a Light Rays filter has a centerpoint control, a Gradient generator has endpoint controls, and shapes/masks have points.
The reason why your shape points disappear is because selecting a non-shape object will switch the control mode back to Transform, thus hiding the points. To get your points back, select the shape, right-click on it in the Canvas (or Ctrl-click), then choose ‘Edit Points’ from the first grouping in the contextual menu. You can also repeatedly press the Tab-key to cycle through the different modes. An even better shortcut: double-clicking on shape objects (in the Canvas) will jump you straight to the points-editing mode.
Sorry for the long explanation, but I thought it might make things a little less mysterious. It’s much easier to explain in person 🙂
Good luck!
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Thank you, specialcase, for your quick and very clear response.
What you describe is the behavior I expected. As an experiment, I opened another copy of Motion on another machine and it all worked perfectly, control points visible, etc. SO…
I trashed my Motion prefs, and now it works perfectly on my machine too. Go figure…
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