Sorry about being a whiner but the node bins improvement…
Some Matchbox shaders included with Flame like A2Beauty and MasterGrade are now available from the All Nodes and Custom bins.
is throwing my muscle memory waaay off with many nodes added. Is there a pref to exclude matchbox shaders from the All bin like the previous version? Like
If there are more like me I’ll put in a feature request…
Same! Especially trying to grab a cc node.
Or better still, the ability to add to custom bins, not just user or project
however, it makes a lot more sense to me that nodes like MasterGrade are in the “all nodes bin”.
I’ve always found it kind of weird that it was in Matchbox bin. Not sure if, besides the ones already mentioned , master grade or a2beauty there are many other new additions now.
Or read the documentation: custom bins can be made, you can custom sort your bin and put your favs at the front of some of the bins, you can hide nodes you don’t care about….
I do remember some of the discussion on this from the beta cycles. I get the muscle memory thing, that’s real. At the same time it was always weird that A2Beauty and MasterGrade where in the Matchbox bin, but not in the All Nodes bin. After all those are primary ADSK nodes, not 3rd party contributions.
So having (at least some) Matchbox nodes in AllNodes has some logic to it. When I first learned Flame, it took me a while to find A2Beauty.
There is an argument for preferences to maintain legacy behaviors to prevent muscle lapses. At the same time it does junk up the preferences, especially if there’s no path for transitioning a few releases later. That muscle memory might last another 20 years.
Backwards compatible preferences are critical if old projects need to be opened, and if they can’t be auto-converted. But for user interface / human experience parts, it’s a mixed bag.
Not denying that it’s annoying at first, especially if you didn’t ask for it.
Thanks @allklier for pointing out the obvious. Solution is to RTFM.
I actually rarely use the node bin in the first place, unless I’m doing a new workflow.
I find the F12 keyboard command more intuitive and faster. There, you do have a search bar with auto-complete, and even better, you can mark various nodes as favorites with one click, which then show up at the top of the list automatically. This is way faster than digging in the sock drawer at the bottom. You can leave your cursor where it is, which is also likely where you want the node added.
Since the initial node position when adding the node is the current cursor position.
In this sample, I had the ‘comp’ node favorited before, and it is top of the list now.
And as you can search the whole node name, it’s better than the first letter match of the node bins.
Lastly, you can add tags to nodes and then search on tags. So if you regularly use 5 nodes with different names in particle setups, create a particle tag, attach it to those nodes. Then when you hit F12, search ‘particle’ and this node list will appear for you to pick from.
That’s the equivalent of a custom bin, except a node can have multiple tags, not sure a node can be in multiple bins? Haven’t checked.
This has been there for at least 10 years. The problem was that only nodes from the All Nodes bins could be put in a Custom bin. Now Matchbox shaders can be added too.
Yes it can
Thanks Fred, good to know.
I always thought we should just have a sort on the node bin with the ability to manually move them around anywhere we want , I dont want a custom bin thats starts from scratch and I cant be bothered to add them , I just want a manual sort in the main bin menu
I’ve had a situation where I’m looking for a node starting with say..M and when I press the keyboard and all the M’s highlight, there are so many that they go off to the right. How do we scroll the highlighted list without unhighlighting
yea the node bin imho needs a modernization where it stays centered , maybe every other node falls off when pressing M , nodes can be rearranged . Clearly them adding more nodes has opened up the discussion at least within the user base which I think is a nice step forward.
I’d upvote that.
This may sound like a leading question, but once you have navigate to the start of nodes starting with M, it is important if other nodes are no longer greyed-out once you scroll in the list?
I mean, isn’t the feature itself more about navigating to the start of M than disabling the other nodes?
I think its a multiple fix they need to be centered and all shown , the other nodes imho should just be gone making the manually sort more of a thing and that would cluster the M nodes together.
