Node-Network Editing: Some Suggestions

First, let me say 'Hi all!' and 'Filter Forge rocks!'

After several days of playing around with the software (and getting my first texture generator approved, YAY!), I must say I am very impressed. The beta is already very stable, intuitive and uniquely powerful, and you guys already have me addicted! Ok now. Enough praise already, quickly off to my suggestions, so I can create more filters...

Coming from a compositing background, I practically do node-network editing every day (Digital Fusion / Shake / Nuke anyone?). What immediately struck me as annyoing was an apparently unnecessary complication when editing node-networks in the filter editor:

a) Unless I am missing something, it seems you cannot simply drag & drop a component onto an existing connection and have it automatically make default input/output connections with its neighboring nodes up- and downstream.

b) Similarly, you can't simply 'lift' a component from its connection to its neighbors without destroying the 'stream'. After killing a component, the flow of data shouldn't be broken, but it is. The connection has to be manually restored.

Digital Fusion, for example, has a more comfortable workflow, which can serve as a good model. You can simply hold SHIFT, lift a node from its current connection and drop it elsewhere into the stream, all in a one-click-drag operation. Sweet! Compositors always love to work smarter rather than harder. You also have hotkeys for switching foreground/background inputs, which would be nice for blend components.

Well, I certainly hope to see some more workflow comfort in the future of FF. Other than that, I am blown away.

Just my two lazy-ass cents.

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Glad to hear this -- especially from an everyday user of Digital Fusion, Shake & Nuke Smile

Actually, its mostly Digital Fusion these days, but the workflow carries over. The apps I named actually have these workflow issues pretty well worked out, that's why I was referencing them.

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Already planned -- just didn't make it into this beta. The only possible problem with this is that we may need to to reposition the "upstream" components and their subtree to make room for the component you're adding. Hopefully this can be solved.

With the 'Move Subtree' feature enabled, we already have this kind of behaviour implemented, methinks. It would just be a thing of shifting the subtree to the right automatically then.

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Great idea, but if a component has more than one connection, all of them will be broken except the connection to the default input. Anyway , I'm adding this to our plan.

Hehe, but it still saves us from having to manually redo that one connecton.

While I am at it, I am also missing a way of temporarily disabling components without having to break their connections, i.e. a pass-through mode where the component doesn't get processed and just passes along the image data.