animatrix_
There are some UX ideas I showcased here recently (the last 3rd of the presentation)

It might help inspire some ideas though it's barely the tip of the iceberg in the whole UX design I use.

That's an incredible amount of customization you have done animatrix!. Some great ideas you have developed as well.

You were saying in the video that you can not work with default Houdini anymore. For me the idea of this type of QOL improvements we are commenting here is about making default Houdini productivity closer to the one you get with your 3 year deeply customized version.

I'm probably missing a few but this are things I saw in your video and I think they fit the QOL improvements idea:

• Viewport as network editor background. With a temporary key to switch to control viewport. Zero head travel.
  
• Smaller, flatter and simpler play bar. As an extra version for the compact UI setting.
  
• Easy customization of which flags are being display in the nodes.
  
• Floating menu type to access any shelf so they don't need to be visible all the time.
  
• Context sensitive hotkeys. In my opinion this would need to be done slowly to make sure the hotkeys that change form the current ones are truly improvements.
  
• Colored circles around display, render, output nodes that show at the same size regardless of zoom.
  
• Bring back bezier style wires.
  
• Dual keys that lets you execute any action using 2 keys, 1 to bring up a custom menu and 1 to invoke an item from the menu, or mouse.
  

EDIT: I have added a few ideas I missed and Animatrix mentioned below.

Multiple outputs for wrangle and vop networks.

The same way there is 4 different inputs we can select in many vex functions there could be 4 different outputs that functions could write to.

Multiple geometry streams in sops for loops.

Right now for loops can only accumulate or iterate through a single geometry stream but it would be nice if we could create parallel outputs to work with different elements that need to iterate with same rules.

For every new output in the loop a new input would be created as well that accumulates whatever geo is feed to the corresponding output number.

andreuparri

animatrix_
There are some UX ideas I showcased here recently (the last 3rd of the presentation)

It might help inspire some ideas though it's barely the tip of the iceberg in the whole UX design I use.

That's an incredible amount of customization you have done animatrix!. Some great ideas you have developed as well.

You were saying in the video that you can not work with default Houdini anymore. For me the idea of this type of QOL improvements we are commenting here is about making default Houdini productivity closer to the one you get with your 3 year deeply customized version.

I'm probably missing a few but this are things I saw in your video and I think they fit the QOL improvements idea:

• Viewport as network editor background. With a temporary key to switch to control viewport. Zero head travel.
  
• Smaller, flatter and simpler play bar.
  
• Easy customization of which flags are being display in the nodes.
  
• Floating menu type to access any shelf so they don't need to be visible all the time.
  
• Context sensitive hotkeys. In my opinion this would need to be done slowly to make sure the hotkeys that change form the current ones are truly improvements.
  

Yes basically. There were a ton of other features I didn't show but those would be nice to have. Some others I wanted to implement are for example colored circles around display, render, output nodes that show at the same size regardless of zoom (more or less) and accompanying text so you can immediately see these nodes in a complex network in a zoomed out state. I find the default flags are not easy to spot immediately, even the selected node is hard to find sometimes.

I also prefer bezier style wires in the network editor despite a lot of requests from even ILM and other studios that was in the RFE ref, have yet to come back. Unfortunately I don't think there is a way for users to remedy this themselves using Qt.

There were some other thing shown in the video like dual keys that lets you execute any action using 2 keys, 1 to bring up a custom menu and 1 to invoke an item from the menu, or mouse.

andreuparri
Multiple outputs for wrangle and vop networks.

The same way there is 4 different inputs we can select in many vex functions there could be 4 different outputs that functions could write to.

That's a popular request also. Since we have geoself() function to imply this future ability, hopefully we will see the ability to write to different outputs using VEX in the future.

Ability to include vex functions from other wrangles specified with a relative path.

Add a dropdown list of available attributes to fill the attribute name when bind and bind export in vops.

Oh I forgot this one: Ability to set layout preferences to mplay. I do that about 20 times a day.

Soothsayer
A few simple, random, and silly things I do a lot of every day:


- Dealing with large strings in the Geometry Spreadsheet. Asset names can be very long and parsing/checking them is tedious and common. Have them right-aligned, abbreviated, or something along those lines. Same with expressions in parms.

Same with the status bar, so that you know on what node the network is stuck on cooking.

animatrix_
There are some UX ideas I showcased here recently (the last 3rd of the presentation)

It might help inspire some ideas though it's barely the tip of the iceberg in the whole UX design I use.

This is so cool.

BrianHanke

animatrix_
There are some UX ideas I showcased here recently (the last 3rd of the presentation)

It might help inspire some ideas though it's barely the tip of the iceberg in the whole UX design I use.

This is so cool.

Thanks a lot! Feel free to submit RFEs to SESI with reference to the video The more RFEs of the same thing, the higher chance SESI might implement it (in theory).

Just a reminder to log any suggestions you might have. Forum posts and discussions are nice and all, but if you actually want it to be logged, tracked, and assigned to someone, have a look at the READ ME FIRST message at the top of every forum and log your suggestion (aka RFE).
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/25347/ [www.sidefx.com]

Oh man, I never even thought of submitting RFEs for UI/UX stuff. Get ready guys. :P

I've already put in an RFE for this, but in Solaris, prim pattern boxes need to be a filterable, sortable list view, with user-friendly add/modify/delete options, rather than a monolithic text box that is nearly impossible to work with.

Here's a bugbear of mine - the Network Editor grid is functionally useless, because of Houdini's penchant for pushing things off it willy-nilly.

If a grid is visible, and Houdini is expected to move nodes around (when inserting nodes, laying out nodes, etc.), it needs to respect the defined grid spacing values, rather than some arbitrary numbers it currently uses to space nodes.

Furthermore, I should never have to open a scene and find the entire network randomly shifted off the grid by a tiny amount.




I think - in the interim - that this could be retroactively addressed with a simple "Snap nodes to nearest grid point" command, rather than reworking the logic of node spacing.

Cameras, both at Object level and in Solaris, absolutely need a focus target parameter. Solaris, being a specialist lookdev environment, is particularly egregious in this omission.

I don't recall where I've seen this (Presto?) but I would like to see a Scene View Flipbook. The idea is to have a per-frame viewport cache so that you can replay already fully cooked frames in real time in the viewport, regardless of how heavy the scene is. Basically frames that don't change get put into a frame buffer and just played back. There's a visual indication on the playbar telling you which frames are cached and which frames have changed. The whole thing can of course be toggled on and off.

Soothsayer
I don't recall where I've seen this (Presto?) but I would like to see a Scene View Flipbook. The idea is to have a per-frame viewport cache so that you can replay already fully cooked frames in real time in the viewport, regardless of how heavy the scene is. Basically frames that don't change get put into a frame buffer and just played back. There's a visual indication on the playbar telling you which frames are cached and which frames have changed. The whole thing can of course be toggled on and off.

If by "heavy" you mean computationally heavy, then there is a Cache SOP that already does this. If by "heavy" you mean geometry-heavy, then you're limited by your GPU.

eikonoklastes

Soothsayer
I don't recall where I've seen this (Presto?) but I would like to see a Scene View Flipbook. The idea is to have a per-frame viewport cache so that you can replay already fully cooked frames in real time in the viewport, regardless of how heavy the scene is. Basically frames that don't change get put into a frame buffer and just played back. There's a visual indication on the playbar telling you which frames are cached and which frames have changed. The whole thing can of course be toggled on and off.

If by "heavy" you mean computationally heavy, then there is a Cache SOP that already does this. If by "heavy" you mean geometry-heavy, then you're limited by your GPU.

The cache sop does it for all data piped in and it still needs to be translated into the 3d viewport. When the data is very large you need a lot of ram and realtime playback isn't possible. What I propose is a a framebuffer cache so that you only have to cache the 2d image in the viewport. It's useful for animating when you're only concerned with tweaking certain frames.

Soothsayer
The cache sop does it for all data piped in and it still needs to be translated into the 3d viewport. When the data is very large you need a lot of ram and realtime playback isn't possible. What I propose is a a framebuffer cache so that you only have to cache the 2d image in the viewport. It's useful for animating when you're only concerned with tweaking certain frames.

Ah, I misunderstood. That would be a nice feature, yes.

Soothsayer
Oh I forgot this one: Ability to set layout preferences to mplay. I do that about 20 times a day.

I see your mplay preference and raise you one File Open dialog.

Two things that annoy me every single day: after opening a fresh Houdini, I want to open a file. I am greeted with a tiny, tiny, tiny File Open dialog box. So I resize it to a proper size. Houdini remembers that size until the next time I launch it.

When working with texture files it's even worse. For some reason when opening a texture, for a shader or in COPs, it always wants to display thumbnails in the file select dialog. That would be nice in theory, but generating the thumbnails is slow as molasses. And when switching it to not show thumbnails, it forgets that setting even within the same session. So annoying!