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  • Published 24 Nov 2020

Node Editor UI improvements

Since we are getting Geometry Nodes i would like to suggest some Node Editor UI changes .

Suggestions :

  1. The first one might be a small one because no one ever notices it i guess, and it's not that big of a deal, but getting it fixed might give some satisfaction to the eyes. So when the Node Editor's curve is set to 10 levels, the curves of the wires tend to break when they are too closed to the connection point as seen in this image. So smoothing it out with proper roundess/subdivision might have a good impact when viewing and interacting with the nodes. Click Here to see the image
  2. Make the wire colors as same as the connection point color. Like, If the connection points are green, the wire should be green.
  3. Have different colorful icons for each node. The icons should be visible above the node and the users should be able to see the icons from a zoom out view. The icons can also resemble the color theme of the node it self.
  4. Making the customized Node Label appear above the node. Like this in the picture. Click Here
  5. The node wires should be interactive. Meaning, you would be able to select the wire and remove it from any node without actually touching the node points.
  6. When clicking and dragging out a node point the node wire should be active even when we leave the mouse button. So that when we press shift+a to bring up the Add Node Menu we can easily search and connect our desired node with the active node in ONE CLICK .
  7. There should be an arrow on the wires by default when two connecting nodes are far away or stretched from each other. So that we can see easily find where this wire is connected in a huge node tree. I know in the current version you can do it. But it's not automatic.
  8. Since Blender is going to be fully procedural it is best to have a clean node tree . And in order to have that, Nodes in the node editor shouldn't have any Properties . They will only have connection dots. The properties of the selected node should appear on the Properties panel and not in the node editor it self. This way the node editor will stay simple and clean, and the properties panel of the nodes will have a huge room for feature improvements.
  9. Also there should be more helpful and easily accessible icons on the header of node editor. At present it looks very empty. There are room for more functions. Such as Switch icon for making the grid on or off , Adjusting the node curve icon , Making an on/off icon for the "add node menu" to stick on the left side of the node editor so that each time we want to add a node we don't have press shift+a. Trust me, it will save a lot of time.

We really have a lot of space for improvements. If you find these features can speed up your workflow and make the UI much more clean and beautiful, then feel free to leave an upvote. I am open for more suggestions or changes regarding this post.

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Development Status: Open

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eon
24 Nov 2020

2 Comments

troylego

I also don't understand why node wires aren't the same color as the type of information they are linking. I.e. a In the shader nodes a wire carrying RGB should be yellow.

IIIFGIII

Too much in one & too much text at all :)Then most of described things not like suggestion SUGGESTION!!! but small papercuts.

Better to go with this to devtalks We would like to collect a list of UI papercuts in this thread for reference. What is a Paper cut? A small, isolated problem that makes using Blender annoying...