[Bf-compositor] [enh] labels and reorder inputs to help link nodes

[Sean Kennedy]

I love Francesco's ideas! They would certainly make me more apt to leave nodes collapsed, resulting in a cleaner node view.
At Rhythm & Hues, our in-house software (which you can see here: http://jennepstein.com/beatthisaruna.jpg ) had a great feature that when you were about to connect a noodle to a node, the node would zoom in - or rather, it would scale up while you hovered over it, making it much easier to select an input if you were zoomed out pretty far from the entire node tree. As soon as you connected the node, the little scale up node preview would vanish.
Francesco's mock-up is just as useful, and I would use it every time I was in the compositor.
sean
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 2014 13:52:18 +0100
From: lukas.toenne at gmail.com
To: bf-compositor at blender.org
Subject: Re: [Bf-compositor] [enh] labels and reorder inputs to help link	nodes

I quite like the general idea. Working with collapsed nodes is really limiting atm. Have to think about how such popups can be implemented without too much complexity and chaos on the lower ui code level.

Another idea to make linking easier on expanded (not collapsed) nodes could be to allow more leeway for selecting sockets: Instead of requiring accurate placement on the socket circle we could just detect "user points at node X" and then choose the *closest* socket for connecting (even use the whole height range of the node). This should be fairly easy to implement and not require a whole lot of ui design changes.

I'm not so sure about dragging in the sidebar buttons. Not every socket type has values and it's a bit tricky to associate a generic button with a node socket cleanly. To make this work nicely there should at least be a symbolic representation for every socket (input value button or no), which can be the hook for reconnecting. Even so it could still have corner cases and needs careful consideration. With the features for the main editor mentioned above it may not be necessary to go this far anyway.


On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 1:12 PM, Francesco Paglia <f.paglia.80 at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,link nodes is quite an hard task now, especially if we have too many nodes that requires to zoom out a bit and if we decide to use collapsed node to maintain the tree more clean.



I'd like to propose to add a sort of labeling solution so once we have to plug in a noddle we just drag it on the node (without caring on the right position)  and an easy to read panel can appear with the list of all the available input so we can choose which one we need.



I made just a quick mockup to shot my idea, hope you will find it interesting to discuss since in my opinion this solution can incredibly speed up the workflow without having to zoom in and out every few seconds.



Here the sample:
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-maT-WogxB40/UvN0LVE5eRI/AAAAAAAAIAA/z3E51gAxRFc/w1150-h874-no/LABELING.png



always going on the same path would be very efficient to have in the side panel the complete list of the inputs that can be resorted easily... Imagine this:
I drag a node in an input of a   "RGB curves" node,


I make an error and instead of plugging the noddle to the "image" input I put it in the "black level"it would be a very great addition the ability to simply drag in the "inputs panel" the linked value to the desired input... 



Here a quick visual mockup
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-0uWo0AFcuag/UvN7ri2wb3I/AAAAAAAAIA4/SPlyYSkeuFA/w1292-h594-no/resort_inputs.png




Thanks Francesco  

-- 
Francesco PagliaVfx and Production Supervisor





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