Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Manipulating Nodes in Genetica

Genetica 3.6 introduces changes that will be more intuitive to new users and lead to faster workflow, but will be a change for long-time users of Genetica.  This article will get you up to speed on the changes you need to know about.

Old-timers will recognize the popup menu shown in the following illustration.  In this example the user has just dragged a Gaussian Blur node over the Colorize node, and the popup menu appears to ask users what type of operation they intended.  Did they want to completely replace the branch?  Did they want to insert the new node below the old one?  Or perhaps they wanted to replace the node while keeping its inputs intact?


While familiar, these popups confuse new users and also slow workflow.  With Genetica 3.6, dropping one node on top of another one will always do a "Replace, Keep Inputs" operation, while other operations happen depending on where the node is dropped.  Other changes include the ability to create nodes by typing, and a new way to work with groups and inputs.  See the video for further details.



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