I love Houdini, but I hate this feature so much and I cant seem to find any options to disable it...

Anytime I drag a node between other connected nodes, or shift-enter to add a new one from the tab menu, it moves the rest of the nodes down the line to try to fit that new node... EXCEPT it misses half of the graph, because it doesnt move secondary connections and other exceptions and just makes a mess of the graph, especially a large one.

Whats extra annoying is that I try to avoid this by giving a little extra room between nodes before adding the new one and it still ends up being just close enough to one of them to still trigger this move.



A distance/tolerance option would be awesome, or even just disabling it completely.

in Network Editor Tools Menu uncheck Make Room For New Nodes (last option, Ctrl+9)

Ohhh ya, so much better! Thank you!!!

I was looking around preferences, didnt even notice those options in Tools.

Does that save with the file or your other preferences, so it's off by default?

it saves in networkeditor.pref as networkeditor.doautomovenodes := 0;

Perfect, thanks again!

As long as you have enough space in between to begin with, the nodes will not shift when you insert a new one.

Just keep in mind that node shapes with non-default heights (i.e. node shapes that are taller than the default rectangle), require more space to not trigger a shift.

I find this quirk annoying, so while I still use custom-shaped nodes, I set all the out-of-the-box taller-shaped nodes (like the Null SOP) to use ones that are the same height as the default rectangle.

No shift, with default-height nodes:
https://gfycat.com/IncredibleFlakyCoelacanth [gfycat.com]

Shift, with taller nodes:
https://gfycat.com/AgileAlarmingAffenpinscher [gfycat.com]