Note section for Geometry Node Frames
Geometry Nodes allow you to add a Frame around Nodes and title the frame. I would like to add some quick notes to go with the Frame. Some times the title is not enough space for notes about the frame contents. Thinking an icon on the corner of the Frame to indicate there is a note attached. Click on the icon to display the note. Doesn't need to be there all the time - click off of it to close it. I like being have to describe what the Node sequence does, or suggest a node property to change to produce a different output of the nodes.
I do use the Notes feature, but that can become hidden in the project and you need to know to look for it.
4 Comments
It's actually possible using the Text property of the Frame node:
But the usage of it is a bit clunky:
But then, you might still don't see anything because a Frame node auto shrinks around its nodes by default, and thus the text is hidden behind the nodes . Which adds the following steps:
For the first part, surely it wouldn't hurt the UX if we could double-click the middle of a Frame node to be able to write text, without having to worry about all the fuss I mentioned above. But it probably requires quite some work under the hood.
But for the second, I'm not sure what would be a good way to go. Because when not using text, it's definitely quite useful to have the frame shrinking enabled most of the time. So disabling it by default might not be the best.
And auto-disabling it when adding some text would be unexpected behavior (user asks X, Blender does X and Y ; that's not good) and would still require adapting the nodes' layout.
Maybe the shrinking algorithm could have some rules to take the text + nodes into account?
Maybe a better solution could be to have a dedicated node for notes and let the Frame node do only that: framing node?
Related: Frames' label is also hard to read due to the auto shrinking's tiny margin
Overall, I just don't see the user benefit of "link frame node to a text data block", instead of just having an input area where one can type the text for the selected node.
I'm not saying the "link to text" has no use cases, but the former is what I think the average user is looking for when they want to add a note to the grid.
Don't take my word for it, because I can only speculate from the little I know.
AFAIK the only text-like property in Blender is
bpy.types.StringProperty, which is limited to a single line of text with a character limit, meaning it can't handle long passages or line breaks.So when someone made the Frame node and wanted a multi-line text input, they found none available. Creating one from scratch was likely out of scope for different reasons, so they went to the next best option: a text data-block input using the text editor.
I suspect this wasn't thought of as the best solution, but rather because it was the only workable option at the time, hoping that it would be properly improved later on.
ALSO I completely forgot that you can use Reroute nodes and add a custom label to them:
It's still limited to a single line string with a 63 characters limit. But you can add many of them, place them in whatever "layout" you want.
It's not exactly what is asked in the proposal, but still another way to add notes.