User:Dsmatthews/Node List Groups

From K-3D

User Defined Grouping of Nodes within K-3D Scenes.

If a new object type is added to K-3D called Group and a new property, to every other object, called Membership, the Node List can become a tree view because a Group can be a member of another Group.

As well as making large scenes easier to work with in the Node List, it would extend selection functions because a Group and it's members could be selected in a single GUI action. Other possibilities are Cut/Copy/Paste, Save/Export Group and Merge to Group (which would retain existing groups from the files as members of the assigned parent Group).

When importing geometry, e.g. from .obj files, each object could be assigned to an auto-generated Group name and would be given membership to an assigned parent Group, rather than the current situation where everything is in one object that is hard to edit.

Every Group is a member of a master Group called SceneGroups, this is to allow all groups, which are objects in themselves, to be viewed or folded away as required. There is a default Group called Scene.

Group Object

 Name: text
 Membership: connection to other Group (defaults to SceneGroups)
 Notes: text
 User Properties: user selected
 ...

All Nodes
 Membership: connection to Group (defaults to Scene)
 ...

User defined groups have an added advantage in that their user defined properties can be referenced by their membership so that the groups as a whole acts like a parametric object. i.e. the Group Node acts as a control panel for it's member's tweakable properties.