Flowchart Editor
Blender is becoming more and more interesting for pre-production. For example, grease pencil for storyboards.
I would be happy about a flow chart or mindmap tool within blender. Also puzzle dependency charts for adventure games would be possible.
Actually everything is given with the note editor. The only thing missing is a text node.
I have drawn something how it could look like. There is a text node in which you simply have a text field. The nodes have an input/output on both sides. To work fast a new node is created every time a connection is drawn from there.
There used to be a similar plugin but the nodes could not be connected: blendernation.com/2015/09/08/add-on-text-notes-in-node-editor/ and there was once a short discussion on Blenderartist about such a tool: blenderartists.org/t/is-it-possibile-to-create-a-node-that-contains-just-text-to-create-mind-maps/1102589/6
I am probably not alone with the interest. Further suggestions are welcome but I think it would be nice if it remains a simple tool. It would be great if someone could implement this.
UPDATE:
Thanks to SpectralVectors we now have a custom node editor for text and image flowcharts. Link to the plugin: github.com/SpectralVectors/MindMapper
5 Comments
I think this is a great idea- and relatively easy to do as well for an intermediate blender developer who's looking for something interesting to tackle. Creating node editors with GHOST is super easy, and the flow chart could use a standard markup language like UML and store it in the existing texts datablock. Easy to edit, easy to export/import, etc. Seems like a slam dunk to me, have an upvote!
Side note- As a minimum viable solution I think text flow charts are fine, but as a more useful and fleshed out solution I would personally like to see image support, basic rich text support via markdown, and maybe even UML standard node shapes.
The long term possibilities for a flow chart editor built into blender are endless- you could have deep linking support, where clicking on a link would take you to a camera and frame and then display an annotation. You could pull data out of your scene and populate nodes that rely on that data.
As a collaboration and planning tool it's a pretty compelling value proposition
* @testure * Wow these are really great ideas. I did not imagine that it could be so extensive. Then a separate editor is definitely needed.
Currently it is possible to create text with the frame, but you cannot connect them. This would be a very clean and simple way of tackling this problem. If this becomes it's own editor, boolean math and switches would be nice. I would recommend being able to create any number of outputs and naming them, so it is easier to split off and understand what is happening. Another thing could be an image node, so you could use it to better portray your idea.
I think this idea is very promising, as you should move all the things that you normally do in another software to one software. If this never becomes a feature in blender, it would make a great addon.
* @zorro.weaver * i would not want to make a flow chart in the shader editor anyway. a new editor type would 100% need to be created.
* @testure * Yes, thanks for getting that out of the way. Doing it in the shader editor would be very messy.