Jacques still stands by what he wrote in the PR comments that the option should be more explicit, to avoid relying on a series of heuristics.
Maybe the UX would be better if the socket was just attached to the panel? It’s not clear that booleans are the only type we would expose though, and that would be quite annoying to implement.
This should be implemented in the node editor too.
Moving import nodes out of experimental
There are a few todos, but overall it should be good.
Take object names into account in the OBJ node.
Use full format names (based on Blender conventions) (e.g., Wavefront OBJ, Stanford PLY)
Use file extension filtering when selecting file.
Log the path and display it in the internal dependencies panel.
Stretch goal: drag and drop to create import nodes
@dfelinto I’m looking into the renaming of the import nodes you brought up during the meeting. I wonder what names you had in mind exactly. It feels tricky to be consistent with the import menu while also being consistent across nodes. That’s mainly because the naming conventions in the menu are all over the place (and the ordering also does not make sense?).
Personally, I don’t see much value in adding Wavefront and Stanford to the node labels. I’ve only ever heard people calling these file formats by their file extension and not by the organization that introduced them. Do you have other reasons besides attempting consistency for adding this to the node names?
I don’t know the larger discussion, but from the outside, I found it a bit strange that Blender has “Wavefront” and “Stanford” in these menu names. I’d vote for actually removing these words from the menu items.
It would make sense to me that the nomenclature followed common usage, but common usage is irregular : I’ve only ever heard people say OBJ or USD, but also Alembic and not ABC (probably because alembic is a noun in the first place). FBX on the other hand means “Filmbox” but no one said that, ever. It’s also weird that SVG would appear irregular with itself (first SVG, then “Scalable Vector Graphics”).
If choice is made to have a regular nomenclature (name first, extensions second), I would suggest writing the extension in all caps because this is what most artists are familiar with and you want it to be attention-grabbing.
To prevent clutter in the node list, would it be possible to have a single import node rather than one for every type of file format? The node’s UI in the N panel could be populated appropriately based on the file type of the selected file.
I’ve heard people refer to the format as Wavefront in common discussion, but that was also 25 years ago. I doubt anyone who wasn’t hanging out at SIGGRAPH in the 90’s even knows what Wavefront was…
So - agreed on that (and Stanford.)
Just as menus don’t need to say Export Image as Joint Photographic Experts Group JPG, or Aldus TIF.
Ahh, Alias Wavefront, running on a Silicon Graphics (SGI) computer, even had brief (and I mean brief) thoughts of buying one of their ‘cheaper’ little desktop machines at one time.
Good old Aldus PageMaker, that was fun in the early days, especially on Windows…
Man, I’m aging myself here. Anyway, back to the more recent scheduled programs and something that the ‘kids’ may be more accustom too.
Do you have other reasons besides attempting consistency for adding this to the node names?
Not really. For the records, we also use the “full name” in the Collection exporter:
For me it it less about going for short or long names, but about being consistent across Blender. Regardless of the direction we go.
You can also have the “full-name” in the menu, and have the Nodes use the short name in the Label. And postpone a decision to do a massive rename for 5.0.
Blender is even inconsitent now by calling SVG as Grease Pencil, and Scalable Vector Graphics. Either you know what an SVG is or not
By the way, this is how Meshlab does, it is even more obnoxious than Blender:
100%. I think the imagen @dfelinto shows that the most easily located at first glance are the ones that have the extension all in caps at the beggining (FBX, PTX, STL…). Those are really easy to spot.
