Select noodles for deletion

[andrewkaufman]

@edmondeng would like to select several noodles and delete them all. This would require making noodles selectable in the first place.

[johnhaddon]

Is this genuinely as important as everything else in this milestone? If not I'd like to suggest moving it into the general backlog of tickets - there's already a lot of work in here...

[andrewkaufman]

Well it's certainly one of the least important (hence priority-low), but I think as we push the mod graph further (which @edmondeng is actively doing), it will be a big help. Are you worried about the size of the milestone just in terms of being bogged down / making progress? There isn't a due date on it, so I was just using it as a list of things that CG Sups bring up on our meetings.

[johnhaddon]

My reluctance is 3-fold :

• Milestones with no light at the end of the tunnel are a bit depressing.
• Selection is currently limited to nodes and not plugs, so we don't currently have a good way of representing selected nodules. I haven't thought through the knock-on effects yet, or thought about other ways of representing the same thing.
• I was genuinely surprised that this would be higher priority than the million other things outside the milestone.

I'd be quite interested to see the sort of use cases where this is helpful - are they similar to the "Disconnect" thing you just implemented? Presumably not, because then that would cover it. So I guess there's a frequent need to remove multiple connections where they're a quite specific subset on a node with many inputs?

[danieldresser]

It does seem like something that we would want to think about the implications of - it's connected to the whole question of what should happen if you try to grab the middle of a noodle, which I guess is currently being reserved for creating dots? Would probably make sense to do this at the same time as proper dot support, and other more complex noodle management features.

[edmondeng]

In the scenario below currently you have to pick off each noodle to unplug them (layout* from RenderAttributes)

Should there not be a way to select them and do things to them?
eg. In maya hypershade I can select them , they become yellow and are ready for a delete:

Andrew made an example if a special short cut for extracting a node from a network, (the control-u thing). If we could select noodles perhaps we can do some useful scripting based on that too.

For example:

*The deletion of selected nodes
*re-plugging loads of noodles from one node to another based on seelcting noodles and nodes
*and so on.

Dan's dots comment:
In Nuke you need a control modifier to create a dot. To me it makes sense to have shortcuts be similar to existing apps(in this case nuke).

[johnhaddon]

@arvidurs has an alternative suggestion for a way of deleting connections :

it would be a nice feature to have a cut tool which is toggled while holding a key shortcut.

What it would do, is enable a temporary tool which acts like a knife to cut connections. Click to start then drag over connection an on release they get disconnected.

This has the big advantage that it doesn't require any concept of a selected connection, so would fit into the current scheme of things much more easily.

[arvidurs]

In maya the shortcut is alt+shift if you want to test in the node editor.

[johnhaddon]

Closing, since #5689 provides equivalent functionality, albeit slightly different to the original mechanism proposed.