Add keyboard shortcuts to alignment tools

[chun_pubg]

Hi Substance team!

Loving the new Substance Designer 14.1 update!

One feature that I was really excited about was the alignment tools, but I find them a little bit hard to use right now. I am often selecting the bunch of nodes I want to align, hovering over those new icons and see which one I need to pick, click it and then repeat.

It would be much better to have them appear in the Shortcuts panel to assign our own shortcuts to them.

Personally, as someone who is working in Unreal, I am used to the Shift+WASD for the alignment of nodes and think that if it doesn't clash with any of the current keyboard shortcuts, this could be a good default keyboard shortcut for it. But the option to change them should still be there.

I'm sure anyone working in Designer would agree with this!

Thank you!

[chun_pubg]

Additionally, it would be nice if distribute horizontally or vertically would just call the snap to grid function right after.

It is a bit unfortunate as well that the snap to grid shortcut has been removed, I was using it a lot. Please bring it back 😞

[Cyril Dellenbach]

Hi @chun_pubg,

Thank you for the suggestion.

I agree it would make sense to have shortcuts dedicated to the alignment tool.

I'll share the idea with the team !

Best regards,

[Julien3298696659xv]

The sad thing is that there was H and V as default shortcuts for Horizontal and Vertical alignment. And they're gone...

[Marco Vitale]

Hey chun_pubg,

until Adobe fixes the thing with the shortcuts for the alignment tools, here is how you can use a little workaround and assign them yourself, I explain it step by step:

1. Open the Plugin Manager

2. Find the Folder of the node_align_tools in your system. (You can right-click on the node_align_tools and choose "Show in File Browser)

3. Find the file node_alignment_toolbar.py in the folder and open it in a Text-Editor or Code-Editor (it doesn't matter too much, since you just have to add a few lines of code to the file). Make sure you open the Editor as administrator, because it may happen that you can't save the file after editing, when not opened as admin.

To make sure you don't break anything, it maybe a good idea, to copy the original file as a backup somewhere.

4. In the node_alignment_toolbar.py find the line (it should be somewhere at the beginning of the file):

class NodeAlignmentToolBar(QtWidgets.QToolBar)

5. In that class all the actions to perform are defined and you can add one line to the code, to assign a shortcut, every Action has a similar structure, here the example of the 'Align Left' - Action

# 'Align left' button
act = self.addAction(loadSvgIcon("align_horizontal_left", defaultIconSize), "AlignLH")
act.setToolTip(strButtonTooltipAlignLeftH)
act.triggered.connect(partial(self.__onAlignHorizontal, alignmentMode=AlignmentMode.HorizontalLeft))

at the end of the actions definition just add the line act.setShortcut("Ctrl+L") where the string inside the parenthesis is your shortcut. you can replace the shortcut with basically anything you want. For example "L" or "Ctrl+L" or "Shift+L" that is totally up to you. But you have to be careful, somehow Shortcuts in the form "Ctrl+Shift+L" don't work correctly.

This is how the changed action should look like:

# 'Align left' button
act = self.addAction(loadSvgIcon("align_horizontal_left", defaultIconSize), "AlignLH")
act.setToolTip(strButtonTooltipAlignLeftH)
act.triggered.connect(partial(self.__onAlignHorizontal, alignmentMode=AlignmentMode.HorizontalLeft))
act.setShortcut("Ctrl+L")

6. After you made your changes and added your Shortcuts you should save the file and restart Substance 3D Designer, if everything went well you should have your Shortcuts assigned to the Actions you want.

Stay healthy and creative

Marco

[chun_pubg]

Daaaamn, thank you so much! This works wonderfully!