fast travel between any node tree in Blender
My proposal is to be able to instantly fast travel to user chosen node trees, (shader, compositor, geometry nodes) quickly. Sort of like how Shift + F3 shortcut already switches between Shader Editor/Geometry Node Editor/Compositor currently in Blender.
Right clicking on any pin icon within a node tree would give you the newly added option to save a "new fast travel area". This does not impact current pinned node tree behavior and is an additional feature.
Here is a mockup of three fast travel areas saved.
And then when dropdown arrow clicked.
Once you have a few fast travel areas saved... in say a gold shader material on a monkey object, geometry nodes setup on a cube, compositor glare nodegroup, then you can switch between them by clicking the small drop-down arrow. When switching between fast travel areas the associated object you were working on at the time will also be selected. The number of fast travel areas saved shows up next to the pin icon to keep track of them.
This would speed up some node workflows and also not take up extra icon space. I geuss a new icon could be created for fast travel between nodetrees if it over-complicates the current pin UI.
7 Comments
Good idea and design proposal is also very solid
The amount of developer and ui designer effort necessary to do this vs the workarounds you can come up with in the existing UI and workspaces makes me want to downvote.
To have a shortcut to your 2 favorite 3d objects, you can link them into a collection named favorites while keeping them in whatever other collection you had them in. You can make a workspace with multiple material editors and multiple geometry node editors and pin each editor to a different favorite thing.
Yes, I agree that is a good option with the workspaces. I guess I like this idea as it kind of "clean" no clutter of extra workspaces, it also feels less effort/mouseclicks for the user to setup. No need to rename workspaces and setup editors/pin them that could take 30 seconds this could take 5 seconds. How much developer effort is an interesting one, obviously this is not in my top 50 things i would want blender to have, it's just a minor timesaver.
It's minor enough and not universal enough that it would be best done as an add-on. I see no reason why an experienced add-on developer would have trouble creating this. If they did it would be because of shortcomings in the add-on API which is something we could all support being fixed/improved.
I recently had a dream-come-true addon built for me: blendermarket.com/products/materialpicker That developer could probably build this for you.
AoE vibes right there.
AoE is that a gaming thing? not sure what you mean...
It is. Where you can spam a specific key to make your camera cycle through specific buildings locations. Or user made locations.