Something I run into quite often while building a project is the lack of a way to insert or remove nodes without disconnecting and then reconnecting them again.
In Fusion you would hold shift and drag the node onto or away from a connection to insert or remove the node with far more ease than disconnect/drag into place/connect both ends. It also works on branched connections, so I could add a node in between one and many child nodes with a single action.
I understand that in Notch it might be more complicated because for lots of nodes there would be more options for what parameters should be connected, but perhaps for these nodes this could be handled by popping up the uncollapsed view of the concerned nodes and make a selection there.
Sometimes graphs get so big and connections go all over the place, it can be a hassle figuring out what goes where, then disconnecting that, navigating to the other side of the graph, add your new node and connect it upstream, pull out a connection, find that other downstream node again etc.
There are improvements to the node graph coming in a future update. I will mention one trick though, which is to right click and select “Replace Node”.
Can I jump in on this and request/suggest that there are ways to automatically order and arrange nodes in the graph, such as automically align vertically, condense into the smallest space without overlapping, expand etc… maybe this is already in place?
Manipulating nodes in Notch is downright incomplete or I am missing something. Do I have to type in the search bar everytime? Why no Tab + Node command? Right click add? Doesn’t TD do this already? The lines go all over the place and overlap. No curvy lines? Can’t tell anything when connections are seamlessly overlapping each other. Really need to copy the way nodes work in Houdini (auto insert etc…) or at least have some keyboard commands. Other than that Notch is amazing and I can’t wait for my dongle to come!!!
Praying there is already a nice way to add insert disconnect nodes that I am missing but every guru I see types it in. Best thing I did was create a CTRL + R shortcut.
Good news! An in nodegraph node search window is on the way, and we’re looking closely at how we can maintain readability in complex scenes with various additions to the UI.
