A bit of Love to the NodeGroups UI anyone? (mockups inside)

Hi guys it’s a long time I use nodegroups for shading, and the more I use it the more i feel the need of layout options.
So I came with these ideas of “switches” and subtrees, and this afternoon I eventually took the time to work on a mockup.
At the end I think i managed to shrink everything into a single feature, which is the reverse + button at the bottom of the nodegroup inputs.
The only thing that i couldn’t figure out is what to do when you want to collapse a subtree but there are noodles connected to the pins that are going to be hidden. The nodes already do that: every pin is still visible in the rounded collapsed node. Could be the solution somehow. Or maybe, when something is connected, prevent the collapse function. Don’t know…

Hoping that this can be food for UI dev-team, here are the mockups! And let me know what you think…

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=93679
http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=93681

I love nodes too, and in Blender are awesome! (way more better than maya btw)

your ideas are cool, even I can’t figure out what happen when you toggle on/off che box.

Good idea… Have some advanced shaders with lots of inputs and that would definitelly make things more clean and organized… Also what i am missing is that sometimes when you have input… the slider range is too sensitive or too small (have to input numbers manually). It would be grat to specify some min/max hints for those slider as the shader developer/creator knows best which values make sense

You can already define min/max on nodegroup inputs.


More options for the nodegroup UI would be awesome. I’d love to see boolean toggles and dropdown itemized list selection (for say, metal presets, or a set of material IORs)

I like the mockup a lot, that looks really effective.

Here’s a (dusty) proposal I’ve had for a while.




Being able to connect everything from widgets to text fields into the group node UI will make it possible to literally have plug and play materials (without additional nodes).

@ MmAaXx
when you check the box you set the “on” value. Works as a boolean, so we could use a proper switch instead of ugly 0-1 sliders. At the same time it would be possible to use two values different from 0 and 1

I saw some post in another thread that makes me think: the span idea could be ported to the nodegroup output too. In that case it could become a drop down list. Maybe I’ll make a mockup for that too

To counter this I always plug in the bump map node strength to a new socket before hooking up the actual control. I wish there was some way of defining this sensitivity.

Here we go. Drop down menu in the outputs.

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=93705