@lukasstockner97 I hope you can consider my suggestion for the design of collapsible panels for the nodes.
Please ignore the naming and placement of parameters. I am not following the development too closely, so I might have put some things somewhat randomly. Which shouldn’t affect the general design idea.
- Let’s not make any color separation for the panels. It’s not needed. The icon left to the title of the panel already indicating the visual group.
- And add 4px padding or spacer at the end of the group to visually separate panel blocks.
- Let’s have the default state for the collapsible panels, so some panels can be set to collapsed when the new node is added. Saving on space for the parameters which are not used often.
- We already have circle and diamond shapes. Let’s introduce “funnel” socket for special use case with collapsible panels to indicate that other socket types are available behind this socket.
I am using the last on the right socket design, but in my tests simpler shape that is next to the diamond shape works as well.
The socket would only appear when the panel is collapsed:
- When you connect a node to the socket in a collapsible panel the menu will appear with the choice where exactly you want to connect it to.
The same would happen if you’d like to get the noodle from the collapsible panel socket. You would click on the socket and then choose the channel from the menu.
The channels have icons indicating which parameters have connected noodles and which don’t.
I also hope the new nodes UI design element will be available as a standard feature, so other render engines could benefit from this to create better and more compact nodes.