Mux node

Flame Flame Questions
1

Does anyone else find it odd that theres a mismatch between amount and selection? Surely the numbers should correlate.

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2

I remember asking that when I was first trying to learn Flame (well, Smoke) and was told, ‘Engineers start counting at zero’. So I guess the person who designed one box was an engineer and the other wasn’t.

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3

No the math works. 1 port is port zero. Zero ports would be useless lol.

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4

It only bothers me when I have more than just a few inputs. It can get confusing when you start wrangling double digits. I would rather see them correlate.

5

The issue for me has been the incongruity between the MUX numbering, and pretty much all other numbering in Flame. It makes expressions quite awkward for complex operations. Normally in Flame, “1” equals “1”.

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6

Yeah, i don’t like it either. It’s confusing.

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7

*I did flag this when MUX was introduced, and the response was that it basically doesn’t matter.

8

totally agree Paul

9

For all developers, the 21th century, began in 2000.

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10

Please add your upvotes to the request, which is actually 10 years old.

Fl-00529

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11

@Peter also has a great workaround on the feature request page:
As a workaround, add one more input than needed, and then add the 1st source into mux input 1 and ignore the 0 input.
Then the numbers line up and it keeps things easier to follow

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12

At this point they’re going to say it would break old setups to make this change so they won’t be doing it.

13

Well, opening an archive of a project that used the ACES1.1 workflow in 2026 with OCIO/ACES2.0 breaks everything. So there’s that.

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14

Using mux nodes a lot and it never was bothering somehow. It’s like counting the first frame, some software uses 0 and other uses 1.

15

Flame is full of odd choices, I don’t think this would make the top 10.

And y’all survived for 10 years with it all accounts.

In politics you’d consider this a slow news day.

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16

That is a brilliant idea!

17

It’s something that has bugged me for years, TBH.

18

I’m just happy this thread isn’t about ML.

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19

While we’re talking about the mux and ML I do wish we could get an update to it so that it behaved like the get and set nodes in Comfy and do away with the semi-hidden lines. For those that don’t use Comfy you give the set a name and then in order to to fetch its output you add a get node and select the name of the set node. In this way you can massively decouple your node positions from flow without losing all readability. Bonus points if the colors could match on both nodes automatically.

Unpopular opinion perhaps but it would be dope.

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20

Almost a “teleport” node. Yeah. That would be a lovely way of moving a lot of channels around in a setup.

1 Like