RFE: Select POP as indirect reference by default, and/or Attribute Select POP Added

POPs
1

In all operator families, the Select Operator is an indirect reference, even the Select CHOP when filters are active, as far as I’m aware. Ideally, this should be the default behavior of the Select POP, even if the filtering capabilities must be removed or added as a toggle similar to "Copy Topology.

In my opinion, the semantic issue here is the Select POP should select an entire POP operator to make the operator logically appear in a different place or level of Hierarchy in the patch (currently impossible as far as I know, Merge POP is a direct copy), while the current Select POP acts more like a Attribute Select POP.

  • Toggles for Delete Selected Attributes could be added to the Attribute Select POP (similar to Invert toggle on Delete POP), making it clearer that the Delete POP is for deleting Points / Verts / Prims based on conditions such as bounding boxes or attribute values, while Attribute Select POP can be used to Delete Attributes (Potential here for separate, Attribute Delete/Remove POP that is simply the Attribute Select functions called with Invert toggle, just to make long OP chains easier to reason about at a quick glance.)

  • The filtering capabilities that could trigger any sort of Direct reference and/or round trip to CPU could be completely removed from the Select POP, to maintain consistency with the core TouchDesigner user experience.

  • The “Copy Topology Info to CPU” on the new Attribute Select POP remains the same, but now is the global Direct VS Indirect toggle for selecting a subset of attributes AND the deletion of certain attributes (which is more accurately described as a selection of the inverse set of those attributes, which more clearly indicates the consequences of the “Copy Topology…” toggle).

Overall, very impressed with these Point (Shader) Operators :wink: Big cheers to team Derivative.

Edit: Removed Delete POP Removal/Conversion from this RFE. I think there’s a strong argument to add a Select Points POP, perhaps called Match POP or Filter POP, that is much more intuitive that Invert toggles on Delete POP, but this needs more thought and a separate thread, I think.

TD Alpha Build 5.4(b) 2023.32139

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Slightly embarrassing but realized I missed the following:

-----
Reference
-----
Direct
------

When using Select POP, then when a specific attribute is selected, this switches to:

---- 
Direct 
----

I’m guessing this covers most of what I was suggesting? Unless there is a state difference between Reference+Direct and Indirect? Or anything that would propagate downstream once an attribute is modified, etc.

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Hey Jonathan!

Sorry just seeing your post, just confirming that indeed with the default settings the select POP acts similarly to the select SOP and just creates a reference for the whole source POP (indeed what “Reference” means), so is pretty much free

Otherwise even if you’re only selecting a subset of attributes, it only creates references to all the attributes on the source POP, so again no actual copy and super cheap.

This was added for a more CHOP like workflow if you want to “branch out” and work on separate attributes in different POP chains that you can recombine with the Attribute Combine POP when needed.

Otherwise for next alpha we’re reworking a bit the direct/indirect terminology so it’s a bit easier to understand and also rework a few related things.

On behalf of the whole team, thank you, much appreciated!

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