vertical node option
on 16:9 monitors you often split the screen vertically rather than horizontally. With this in mind it would be ice to have an option to have the sockets at the top and bottom of nodes instead of the left and right. This would allow node trees to be built vertically, allowing for available screen space to be more optimally utilised.
6 Comments
Could you make a mockup about how a node tree would look like in this situation?
I agree with @Denis Perchenko here, youre talking about moving the inputs on the top and outputs at the bottom of the node but how the user would know which socket do what since the text would be no longer aligned with them.
Interesting proposal. In practice you could just arrange your nodes verticaly and connections still work but are ugly. But I never really ran into a space problem with nodes. This is how I usually work with them. When I need to see the scene I full screen it. {attachment 2020-08-01_00_29_20-Windowpng}
While I think implementing vertical nodes would be interesting I'm curious on how to appropriately implement the text. Rotating it doesn't seem right nor does truncating it.
* @Denis Perchenko * I don't mean rotate the entire node, just place the input sockets on the top of the node, and the output sockets on the bottom of the node. The node would remain the same way up, so no need to do anything with the text.
* @3d illusions * But how would I know which socket is for which text? On a small node with 4 sockets I can just count but on a node like the principled shader or light path it's hard to tell and a lot of counting.
* @thinsoldier * good point I see what you mean. In that case I think an improvement on the Houdini approach would be best. You connect the nodes to the side, but as soon as you mouse isn't over the node, only one bottom and one top socket is visible, each with potentially multiple wires in or out.
Either that or we could have rhombus shaped nodes, top left of the rhombus is inputs, bottom right of the rhombus for outputs.
Personally I'd prefer a combination of the two, a rhombus shape that only shows one input and one output unless the node is selected or hovered over, in which case it shows all sockets.