[Bf-committers] Feature Request : all pluggable values in nodes

[Marius Giurgi]

Greetings blender coders,

I would like to suggest that blender (compositor) nodes be made to have all
(or most) of their values  "input pluggable". For instance the
DirectionalBlur's zoom value is not input pluggable and I would like to be
able to make a group node having, let's say, 3 DirectionalBlur nodes and
set some zoom value to all of them externally via an input value of the
group node. This way i could control the input of all 3 DirectionalBlur
nodes simultaneously by one input value of the group node. Of course, many
other nodes have the same limitation given that not all of their values are
exposed to input plugs (e.g. the x/y Blur value would be nice to be
settable via one external input value).

I tried a workaround solution using drivers to have the unexposed values of
the nodes be driven by other node's values but I was unfortunately not able
to do it and I'm not sure if it is even possible given the current version
of blender.

I realize that for some nodes like the mapping node may be hard to provide
a pluggable input interface to all their values, e.g given that xyz values
are displayed as row entries, so perhaps in this case a smarter
implementation is in order if every value in the mapping node is to be
given a pluggable input. However, if providing a pluggable input to all the
values in a node is simply not feasible, at least all the single input
values (e.g. like the DirectionalBlur's zoom value) should/could be made
input pluggable. I believe such an extension would make the nodes a lot
more customizable, easy to work with and open up new possibilities.

regards,
Marius (DolphinDream)