Overview
The nodegraph panel displays the layer graphs and the particle graphs.
Interface
- Main working area: displays the actual nodes & connections
- Visualization mode: Allows to change the color scheme of the graph. Hitting the P key when the nodegraph is focused will cycle through those display modes. Hitting Shift+P will cycle backwards. These default shortcuts can be changed in the editor user settings.
- Toggles between smooth wires (default), and hard wires
- Saves the current viewport as the default for this graph
- Fits the view to the entire graph
- Opens a search dialog in the current graph
- Opens the nodal editor settings
- Displays the hierarchical location in the graph, when diving inside template nodes / subgraphs.
- Graph type indicator: Either “Layergraph” (event graph containing the layers) or “Nodegraph” (particle / data graph, inside a layer).
- Separator between the graph and stats/infos panel. Drag to the left to show the stats/infos panel
Key Bindings (defaults)
| Key | Description |
| LMB | Select nodes, dragging creates a selection rectangle |
| RMB | On a node: contextual menu, On empty space: creation dialog |
| MouseWheel-click | Pan view |
| MouseWheel | Zoom in/out |
| Enter | Open selected node, if possible (template, script, or curve) |
| Alt+Shift | Preview passthrough creation on wire |
| Alt+Shift+LMB | Create passthrough |
| Alt+Left / MousePrev | Jump to previous graph panel |
| Alt+Right / MouseNext | Jump to next graph panel |
| P / Shift+P | Cycle forward/backward through nodegraph display modes |
| Ctrl+F | Search graph |
| Esc | Hide search widget |
| Ctrl+G | Group selected nodes into a new template |
| Ctrl+Shift+G | Annotate selected nodes |
| Ctrl+T | Enable/Disable node (Toggle node) |
| Space | Show node creation dialog |
| Ctrl+Space | Show node insertion dialog if mouse cursor is on a wire |
| … | Convert node to link |
| … | Convert node to property |
| … | Convert node to attribute |
Creating nodes
Nodes can be created via the “node contextual menu”. To display the node contextual menu you can either:
- Right click or hit the Space key in an empty space of the nodegraph
- Drag a link from a node’s input/output pin, drop it in an empty space from the nodegraph
- Hover a link and hit Ctrl+Space, or right click -> Insert node
Node can also be created by drag&dropping them from the effect treeview or the template shelf.
They can also be copy/pasted from one graph or effect to another.
Cutting links
You can cut links by holding the ALT key and left-click + drag the mouse cursor.
Contextual Menus
Nodes
Contextual menu when right-clicking on nodes.
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Wires
Contextual menu when right-clicking on links.
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Pins
Contextual menu when right clicking on pins.
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Background
Contextual menu when right clicking on the nodegraph background will open the node creation dialog:
Search
Using Ctrl+F or the ‘Find’ button in the toolbar, a search dialog will open and allow you to search nodes and their contents
F3 will focus the next match, Shift+F3 will focus the previous match.
Color visualizers
The nodegraph editor provides different color schemes to view the nodes with.
These each color nodes and wires to help visualize a specific set of informations.
You can toggle between the different color schemes by using the dropdown in the nodal editor toolbar, or by using the P and Shift+P keys:
Color scheme: Normal
This is the default mode, which colors nodes based on their type and high-level function.
Color scheme: Exec rate
This mode colors the nodes based on if they are computed at spawn, evolve, or render time.
Blue nodes run at spawn, purple nodes run at evolve, and the orange node runs a render time.
If the color difference between the 3 colors is too hard to see, you can switch to an alternate color scheme by changing the color deficiency option in your user settings:
Color scheme: Performance
In this mode, the editor will color the nodes based on the performance metrics gathered from the simulation running in the 3D viewport.
This allows to quickly spot performance hotspots in an effect, and dig to the root of what’s taking time during the simulation.
Here, the ‘Physics’ and ‘SmallPointAA’ nodes are the ones taking the most time to simulate.
Note: Currently this is only able to show the performance metrics for CPU simulations, we do not instrument the GPU sims yet.
Color scheme: Simulation location
With this scheme, nodes will be colored based on if they’re running on the CPU or GPU.
Blue nodes run on the CPU, and green nodes run on the GPU (in this layer, the spawn nodes are CPU, and evolve+render nodes are GPU)
