How many of you sometimes spend way longer than you should trying to find that OP you know exists, but cannot remember the name? Or even when you remember the name but end up scanning the list for it instead of doing the smart thing and typing in the name?
It’s way easier for me to find things when I have a graphic reference, so I am working on a custom OP Create Dialog with icons:
Icons are setup as 50px X 50px. The script looks in C:\Program Files\Derivative\TouchDesigner088\Samples\Map\OP_icons\CHOP\ for the .png files. Here are a couple samples (most still blank)
B) click a node in your network where you would like to place the new OP
C) hit ctrl 1 to bring up the CHOP dialog, and pick your CHOP
Obviously I still have some work to do. Thought I would share it now though in case this would be helpful to others and they want to share input/opinions…
old versions of Touch had icons as well as text for the op-create dialog menu. The logic CHOP was especially nice (Mr Spock’s ‘live long and prosper’ hand-sign). I guess they disappeared to make a more compact menu. you might even be able to convince Derivative to let you use the original icons if they are not copyright-entangled from Side-Effects and Houdini.
I actually liked the stronger differentiation between source/generator operators and filter/processor ops earlier on too.
@differentiation gens/filters etc: We still have a color coding for these different types and one can increase the contrast of these colors easily.
(I guess you know that it’s just that I didn’t for a long time. I didn’t know what the different brightnesses of the OPs were meant for until I found the colors in the UI comp or whatever.)
Maybe earlier versions than I know of had a bigger differentiation, and that really sounds good. In general the OP create dialog really has room for improvement I think
First and foremost a shortcut for switching between the OP type tabs…
greets
@hrtlacek, yes, I had forgotten. I tried to change them in /ui/colors/operator_CHOPgenerator , for example, but have not seen a change. Maybe that;s the wrong one?
another good tip is to use ctl and shift keys when selecting opcreate menu items in order to put down several things in succession - for example, if you want to make a geo, light,camera, render, phong. I keep forgetting we can do that.
me too, that’s why I’m working on the python patching thing(I find that more intuitive too.)
About changing the colours… hm, just tried it also. It doesn’t make any difference so I thought I should save the file and reopen it, maybe colors are fetched at startup, but when I reopen it my color seems to be gone! hm…
Maybe these colors are created/reset at startup by some script somewhere?
