Under review

Improved wire flow / routing nodes

11 years ago • updated 9 years ago • 7

Its a little bit confusing to have the cables make huge curves when placed vertically and having a big spece between. I think it would look more organized if the cables make sharper turns and also are able to run vertically straight.

Example wireflow:

futhermore it would be great if there would be a possibilty to pin wires(routing nodes). Cables would run in a straight line between these routing nodes...

Example routing nodes:

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11 years ago

The wire routing is something I will polish and work on every now and then!
It's hard to make a routing system that fits all given occasions, but I do have plans for a more flexible system, which wouldn't share the same issues as the current one.

Routing nodes may be possible, but I think I would prefer to have a system that looks nice without them. Routing nodes seems to me like a way of pushing responsibility of node routing to users, rather than just fixing it myself :)

(Also, please keep it to one request per thread)

Answer

Under review

11 years ago

Sorry, they are somewhat related so i threw it into one thread.

I dont think there will be a way around some kind of manual routing, i am using node networks since a long time and i really know the strenghts and weaknesses of them. I used Worldmachine, Rendertree/ICE(Softimage/XSI), Hypershade(Maya), Mentalmill(Autodesk), UDK, Strumpys...

Worldmachines trees may look very bad but they are by far the best ones when it gets complex, followed by Softimages Rendertree/ICE. Most important feature are of course the compounds(nested nodes) but manual routing really helps a lot too!

9 years ago

I think allowing the user to choose between the splined wires and 90 degree turn wires would be nice. It's a lot easier to organize your nodes around your wires when they aren't curving everywhere.

9 years ago

Joachim, i wanted to ask if there is a chance you could look into this again(and maybe other organizing features). I use shaderforge a lot since the beta phase and the mess the trees quickly become, even when extensively using relay nodes, is the biggest issue for me since ever.

9 years ago

Sure, I can give this an extra look.

Do you have an example of a node tree that is a common case that should look cleaner?

9 years ago

Sure, though this is already with my best effort to make it look clean, without me constantly spending time on layouting, it would be a real mess. So, this only looks halfway decent because i worked hard on the layout and translated big chunks of the tree into codenodes.

I also make another request about hiding relay node cables(here), this would also be a big help as many times(many many times) i need a certain value on the other end of the graph and the visible connection does not help but only clutters. I'll update the other request with more detail, i think i have some nice ideas that could improve the workflow quite a bit.

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