I think we should just have have an “output” node, one that is always at the end of a tree graph. You would give the output node a name, aka particle type like “exploded”, then all the nodes that came before it would be attributed to that particle type.
I’m going to post a particle graph from Houdini here, but before people skin me alive for posting other software, please note it’s purely for reference, and in no way am I saying “this is how it should be”. I’m hoping we can learn from this and come up with something that works for blender (hopefully something better).For now just look at the bottom of the graph.
(TonR: removed image, not allowed to share copyrighted material from other apps here)
The thing I mainly want to point out is the last node being “output”. Everything leads up to it, always. I think we could rename it something like “Particle Output”, and you could have more than one for each graph. So if you had multiple trees, let’s say one for exploded, one for trail, one for path, all you would have to do is look for the particle output nodes for each tree and you would know that everything that precedes it is part of that particle type. It definitely feels good to have something like that at the end, it confirms the end of a tree so well. This way, you also don’t need a “particle type” node in the middle, and perhaps forces could technically go anywhere? Perhaps that would make things like:
easier.