Add UI elements for 'ramp' plugs

[bentoogood]

This will be of use for shader nodes initially, then may be picked up in other areas of the application.

[johnhaddon]

Since I've been chugging away on this bigger ticket for a while without showing anything, I thought I'd give a quick progress update, and check I'm on the right track. I've got the mapping of pairs of array shader parameters to spline plugs working, and fixed various problems in the spline plugs that cropped up along the way. And I've got a basic UI set up now, although I've still got various problems to iron out and functionality to add. The picture below should give you an idea...

The small ramps you see in the node editor are non-editable and are just intended to give a quick preview of what's there. Clicking on them opens the editing dialogue, where there's a bigger ramp and controls for editing. You can move the knots around by dragging the circles in the slider below. Clicking a knot selects it, and connects it to the fields below, where you can edit values with finer control, open a colour picker, make expressions and connections etc using the usual plug popup menus. Is that roughly what people expected?

One thing I was thinking was that for nodes which don't have many plugs other than the ramp (like a ramp shader for instance), we're not making much use of the space in the node editor. Perhaps if I gave the ramp editor a vertical mode, we could have the option of embedding it directly in the node editor when it made sense to do so, and only go with the minimal horizontal arrangement in the screenshot when the ramp is just one plug of many. Does that make sense?

[bentoogood]

The small ramps you see in the node editor are non-editable and are just intended to give a quick preview of what's there. Clicking on them opens the editing dialogue, where there's a bigger ramp and controls for editing. You can move the knots around by dragging the circles in the slider below. Clicking a knot selects it, and connects it to the fields below, where you can edit values with finer control, open a colour picker, make expressions and connections etc using the usual plug popup menus. Is that roughly what people expected?

Is as expected.

One thing I was thinking was that for nodes which don't have many plugs other than the ramp (like a ramp shader for instance), we're not making much use of the space in the node editor. Perhaps if I gave the ramp editor a vertical mode, we could have the option of embedding it directly in the node editor when it made sense to do so, and only go with the minimal horizontal arrangement in the screenshot when the ramp is just one plug of many. Does that make sense?

Doesn't seem super necessary, but if it's trivial we could do. I think if it took more than 2.5 hrs I might be tempted to not bother.
Would it look like this?

[danieldresser]

I don't really like the idea of having some ramps vertical - particularly if the same ramp might need to be drawn horizontally if it got promoted onto a box that was more crowded. If the name of the plug was drawn above the parameter instead of to the left, it seems like there could be enough room to draw the ramp horizontally inside the node editor?

[johnhaddon]

Yes it would look like your picture Ben - it wouldn't be compulsory though and if something got promoted to a crowded box then the user could choose which orientation to give it. We could draw an editable ramp in the node editor horizontally, but i assumed sometimes people will want more precision than that would provide, and popping up a bigger but identical floating one seems kindof weird. I'll just stick with what I've done for now...