Copy & Paste Nodes Outside Blender
This would make node system sharing much easier and save Space and resources.
MaxMsp has implemented this approach and makes node ideas accessible and faster to experiment with.
Formats could be XML, JSON, or Binary.
Developers: What do you think?
8 Comments
XML, JSON and Binaries are container formats (doesn't describe what is inside, just how to structure it), which actual format are you proposing, that is able to do this? Which other applications do support this? How to deal with nodes that aren't supported by other applications? For Blender an Open Standard would be best, otherwise we cannot guarantee how long it will work.
USD/MaterialX is something working on this, but after many years of development they haven't found a working solution yet due to the many different things that needs to be aligned.
I rather see a prototype of this as this could be scripted
Take a look into MaxMSP's implementation. There are two formats: XML-like and Binary. If you copypaste a graph and there is a node that is not available on the users system, it is flagged red and a terminal massage is displayed about whats missing. this allows the user to install missing libs or similar.
Everything else is:
<NodeName> <node_position> <inputs/ouputs connections> <(or if not connected) inputs/ouputs values>
how complicated is this to script?
The title of this task uses the term Outside Blender. Which other application uses your proposed format and what is the use case? The usecase your describing is inside the same application and doesn't require to have a specific format.
if not many applications support it, it cannot be considered a standard and won't survive the wheel of time or be useful by many users. In that case a python add-on would be better than having native support inside blender. Hence create a prototype and validate the value of the requested feature and format.
Blender already supports the concept of missing nodes. Blender doesn't have the concept of libs in this sense. I think you mean add-ons.
I don't think the idea is to use the pasted nodes outside of Blender, merely to share them as text on an arbitrary platform, from which someone else could then copy and paste them back into Blender.
exactly!
Yes! I've been thinking about making an add-on + website for this purpose for a long time now, since before even geometry nodes. Easily sharing simple nodetrees by copy-pasting.
It would already help if we could copy & paste between two instances of Blender.
BTW because there was a question which other node based application can copy & paste to e.g. a text editor outside: Nuke, Fusion and Houdini can do this. You get plain, human readable text. It helps A LOT.
You can use custom formats, but blender itself won't do that. If assets and blender files to this.