Feature request: geometry macros

[manalokos]

Hello,

We've been doing some complex jobs with many cameras and different settings for each camera, even different geometries.
The workflow works great but it leads to having a node tree the size of some 2 or 3 screen sizes, which lead to a very complex tree difficult to navigate on.
This could be easilly improved if there were some kind of groups, like the "material macro". that would incorporate geometries, placements, scatters, and materials and textures onto a single node, with one or more inputs and outputs.
The same would apply to the render target nodes...

I ask the octane team if you have this update in mind in the near future?

Thank you
Best regards
Filipe

[newske]

I would strongly support this! Hopefully it would make such large scenes run a bit faster too (referring to the UI not the render).
Just a general 'cluster' with option in/outs.
Perhaps refer to Grasshoppper3D's clusters (for Rhino).

Would love to see this happen.

[matej]

Yes please, a generalized node container with arbitrary inputs & outputs. Real project can get really messy, as the screencap above shows

[necko77]

+1

[Vanya]

because of this, I like the integration, nor any junk in my head. everything there where it should be. +

[ROUBAL]

+1 ! My current London city scene requires more than 9x the surface of my wide screen only for geometry distribution ! I made all my materials mainly in the Nodes inspector. It becomes very messy and tedious without node groups zoom or autopan !

[friscokid]

+1. This is a must have to work with complex scenes.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Great minds think alike for sure!... I was thinking this about 2 minutes into playing with instances the first time. Perhaps make it look very different than other nodes.. different color etc... I am definitely picturing this as being able to select multiple nodes, right-clicking and choosing Group Node.

I would think that some of the node-heavy apps out there like Nuke (et al) must have this same feature, er, right?.. maybe plagiarize that a little and not re-invent the wheel.

edit: even if they didn't have inputs for the first version - but had one output - this would would still help clean up the instance cluster-f**ks.

[Alesk]

Or something like this : http://code.blender.org/index.php/2012/ ... e-editing/

[manalokos]

Yesssssss!