Draws a mask by hand with a pen tool, the way you'd roto a shape in Nuke, and keeps it editable forever, because what gets saved is the control points rather than pixels. Click Draw mask shapes and the editor opens over the graph.
Two curve types, mixable in the same mask. Bezier puts the point on the curve with pen handles, which is what you want tracing an exact outline. B-spline is the same NURBS curve as the 😺NKD Sigmas Curve editor, drawn the same way, with points joined by a dashed control polygon so you can see which one steers what. It stays smooth with far fewer points and no handles to wrangle, and it can never overshoot however close together you put them.
- Click to drop points. Shapes are open while you're drawing them: click the first point again, or double-click empty space, to close. Until then it's a stroke, not a region.
- Click on a finished curve to insert a point between the two it falls between, then drag it into place. On a B-spline the new point lands on the control polygon rather than under the cursor, which is the position that leaves the rest of the shape where it was.
- Double-click a point for a hard corner, double-click again to make it smooth. On a Bezier both handles retract; on a B-spline it repeats the control point, which is the only way to get a true corner.
- Subtract shapes cut holes in the shapes before them, each with its own feather, so a soft cut-out is one shape rather than a second node.
- Ctrl-drag a point to pull a feather clone out of it, exactly as in Fusion. The clone is a real point you place by hand: drag it to say where the edge has faded to nothing, drag it again later to move it, shift-click it to take it away and the edge goes back to hard.
- Clear feather removes every clone at once and puts all the edges back to hard, or just the box-selected ones if there's a selection.
- The shape-wide Feather slider is continuous, down to hundredths of a pixel.
Hold
Shiftwhile dragging for fine control; it reads out the radius in px.
A clone isn't a width pushed straight out. You can skew it along the edge, make the softness wider at one end than the other, or pull it inside the shape to feather inward. That's how you blend a shadow side away while the lit edge next to it stays razor sharp, which a single shape-wide feather can't do.
Between clones the softness runs on the same spline as the shape, so it eases in and out along the curve with no crease at the control points, and it falls off on a smoothstep rather than a straight ramp, whose corners read as edges.
- Shift-drag empty space to box-select points, then move them as a pack,
delete them together, or Ctrl-drag one to move every selected clone by the same
offset. Same gesture as the 😺NKD Color Warp grid.
Escdrops the selection. Hhides the curves, leaving the backdrop with nothing drawn over it, which is the only way to judge an edge with a control point sitting on it. Editing still works while they're hidden.Vcycles between the image with everything outside the mask dimmed, the mask on its own, and the untouched image.
The editor composites the real matte as you drag, subtract shapes actually cutting, feather actually soft. It also survives a resolution change: coordinates are relative, and the editor warns you if the aspect ratio no longer matches what you drew on.
They're two ways at the same job, and better together than apart. This node's
MASK output plugs straight into Mask Painter's mask input.
Reach for Vector Mask when the mask is a shape: an outline you want exact, and still editable next week.
Reach for Mask Painter when you're combining masks and
want to keep editing. Send it a vector mask, a segmenter's output, 😺NKD Mask
Ops, and its mask_input_mode composites them with Add, Subtract or
Intersect while you carry on painting on the result by hand. Chain several and
each stage stays editable.