First, my apologies if there is a better section for this. I couldn’t think of one as this crosses to all aspects of noodling I think.
Second, if this feature ( features) exist then please point me to it and I will consider that I have been enlightened and bother you no more.
Im creating lots of more complicated noodles now , mostly for materials but I think the same issues arise if your creating noodles for compositing.
The ability to annotate a noodle is very very limited at present. You can change the names of group inputs /outputs and so on but there is no real flexible annotation feature.
My request is simple. Create a simple straightforward text node. it would do nothing more than hold a piece of text. It might display text entries from the text editor itself or be able to let you edit the text within it directly when your using it. It need do nothing else. That way I can create small text nodes at points in my noodle were I want to provide instructions, notes , annotations etc.
And that is pretty much it. I was going to suggest that each node had some annotation facility but I realise that that would involve re-engineering all the nodes.
A TextNode would provide a small but very useful addition and surely should be a basic core asset available in the main build.
Such a node/feature would be convenient for sure, and would be pretty much straightforward to add, but the only real issue is the lack of support for multi-line text/description. This could/should be done globally so that (e.g.) tooltips could have multi-line description.
I would settle for text nodes right now as that would be brilliant, but your point is a good one about ideally having an overall design approach to providing better overall scope for annotation.
You can sort of create a text node. Create a Frame around a node, then remove the node from the frame, and you’re left with an empty frame that you can rename. The noodle isn’t connected to it in any way.
It would be nice to have official support for some kind of doc text in node trees.
When I had a group library manager, it used a frame and a bunch of labeled reroutes inside of it to store version information. That was of course used by a script and not very user friendly. As a side note: I always wondered about the lack of word wrap support in the GUI.
Just thinking again.
Obviously a specific text node would be ideal, say with word wrap.
However if there are problems with core GUI in terms of supportingmulti-line text as described above then maybe a small rewrite of the current Frame node would be sufficient. If we had the facility to optionally create more text labels in the Frame node then the method on post #4 above would be workable and each text label would be one line of text.
Does that sound like (hopefully) a very easy solution pending something more substantial?
(I’m saying easy of course as someone who is not doing any coding with Blender so its easy for me to say ! )
+1 I also asked ages ago. It seems that Blender really only wants to have text editing in 1 (2) place(s). Text editor (and 3D view). I gather that it is quite awkward to jam text entry into a node.
Something like this but with nice settings perhaps. Of course this hackish since you can’t really edit the text here but have get it from the copy paste buffer.
Yes a bit hackish but yes even that sort of solution would be a real boon in helping document more complex noodles. All we need is a text field. I dont even expect to able to do any fancy editing in it. Quite happy to do the editing in the text module itself and then copy and paste over. Hackish is better than nothing as far as Im concerned.
^ agree. This is a feature that exists in some other node-based software I am aware of (PD, Max/MSP) and it’s absolutely critical if you want to download a patch and understand WTF you are looking at. Only the basics are needed.
Also, I don’t mean to make this sound like a complaint. I “asked” for this feature by casually mentioning it to a coder friend, and then maybe posting on BA once and never following up in any way. So I didn’t really do my part. But I do agree that this could be an important feature.
I’m thinking that unless it was an essential part of the workflow that is missing, then the core devs. are just not going to bother as long as they have piles of other projects assigned to them.
They might be open to a patch that adds this though, though one should try to do it in a way that would elegantly fit into an existing setup without adding too much clutter.
One thing I noticed was that while typing out a longer sentence into the text input areas, is was a little harder to see what you were doing when you want to go back and edit the text (as you are limited in the amount of text you can see).
The text in the Annotation nodes can be changed via the ‘Text’ property on the panel. The ‘TestNode’ script is the entirety of the code, the ‘run_the_script’ script is what I was using to add a node without having to setup a button to do it.
I have no real experience with python (I do with other languages), other than the hour I spent this afternoon doing this, so I no idea if it was done properly or not.
However, I think that if I have been able to do this, it is proof that an annotation node could be implemented as an addon.
Question: What if you use a textfile as input for the text? Like the osl script node.
Then you can change and format the text in the texteditor window.
Here you go, I made a small addon quickly. The node is added from a new panel on side. Can be linked to a text file inside of blender or store text from clipboard
