Visual Dependancy Graph View
On larger projects that have many assets, linked files, dupliverts, instances, linked materials, etc; it would be very helpful to see a visual layout that looks like a node tree, that display how all dependancies are established between all aspects of the file, scenes, objects, collections, parents. etc. It would be even better, If I could drag a noodle from one item to change where a dependency should go. After doing "Link Materials", among other options in the Link Menu, it can become unruly to see if there are items that are not linked properly as desired.
I haven't had a chance to really mach-up anything, but the general way Nodes work in blender are great, and would be ideal for this too. I would be willing to invest some time in maybe establishing some further details if there is substantial support for this idea.
I see this feature being accessed the same way you would change a UI window from say a 3D Viewport, to a Shader Editor, Timeline, Properties, Outliner, etc.
[EDIT] Part of my desire for this is when working with a team, I need to be able to check other people's work, and make sure the dependencies are the way they are intended to work. Also this feature could allow a team member to understand how a scene is constructed under the hood.
3 Comments
This can be awesome but it's a design challenge to make that useful. Funny thing is that blender had that in the earlier versions, it was called the oops window and it looked really nice on simple scenes : blenderartists.org/uploads/default/original/4X/5/9/d/59d7ea4ee87b61863179715e5d70ca9810beb0b4.png
However, on bigger scenes where it's the most needed it turns out that it was very difficult to navigate and extract the info we'd like : blenderartists.org/uploads/default/original/3X/6/f/6fa1a3ecc3627d5db6be1093b4a4dfcfc7977093.jpg
blenderartists.org/uploads/default/original/3X/8/e/8eb5e9cd0c5414a6039e9b21835d6e5070369bf7.jpg
Ideally the graph would be dynamic allowing to show only say dependencies of selected items ?
On top of that , on projects with a lot of dependencies you also have external files linked from or to other files, and it's great to keep track of that too.
That makes me wonder if blender is the best interface for that , and maybe an external software can scan a project and build a database of all the relations, and let you explore that in a fancy way , some software are really dedicated to navigate giant database and they might make things much simpler !
Yes, I can agree that larger projects could become unruly, but it would make sense to have filters, similar to how the outliner works. And if I had an item selected I should be able to easily see what is dependent on that item. For instance, If I have a material called "Matte White", I want to see all the items in the scene or project that are using that material. Beyond that, I would like to know what versions exist with duplicate names such as "Matte White.001", .002 and so on, so I can tell those items to redirect to the original material. This should be possible with instanced mesh, collections, and many more possibilities in the mapped dependency graph. (Anything that is used by multiple users.)
Ton R. speaks about it ladt year in the conference.....its on the talking points for the evertging node system....