Allow ganging of child plugs on compound plugs (e.g. colours)

[bentoogood]

In graffer I find my self processing a lot of float patterns/images that are actually colours.

When using the processing nodes (grade, etc) I have to set the r,g, and b plugs of any control to the same value manually, otherwise the greyscale pattern gets 'tinted'.

The more I've been doing this kind of work, the more annoying that seems.
Another option is to place a shuffle node down and remap to r,r,r - but I'd rather avoid node bloat.

Thoughts?

[johnhaddon]

Sounds very reasonable. The easiest approach is to stick in a right-click "Gang" menu option (or a little button) which just connects the r into the g and b plugs so they're still visible in the ui but they're non-editable and driven by the first one. Another approach would be to have a little button that just hides the g and b plugs and then have the field for r set all three values at once - that's a bit trickier, particularly as some other event (scripting or use of a non-ganged editor) could break the values apart behind the back of the ganged editor. So I would prefer the former one in that it's more explicit about what is happening and less prone to problems down the line...it's also very quick to implement if you wanted to add it to the milestone.

[bentoogood]

First sounds fine (for now at least)
Was my first thought as a user, but I couldn't drag one child plug to another child plug to make a connection.
Is that expected?

[johnhaddon]

I'll do the first one then - probably tomorrow as I'm fighting spline plugs at the mo'. It'd be doable to initiate a drag from a child plug (rather than just the label as you can now) if we can somehow resolve the conflicting requirements for all the drags that might start in one, which currently are :

• Scrubbing fast
• Scrubbing slow
• Drag selecting text
• Dragging the plug for a connection
• Dragging the plug value

And of course do all that without resorting to middle mouse button which doesn't exist on the Mac.

[bentoogood]

http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-3-Button-Optical-Wheel-Mouse/dp/B000H51GA6 ?

[andrewkaufman]

Is "Gang" an official term that I'm not familiar with? If not, can we pick a term that sounds logical in all major flavors of English? Connect/Drive Siblings?

[bentoogood]

I believe 'gang' comes from audio mixing panels.
Is used in a number of comp/imaging apps.....

[johnhaddon]

I presume you means flavours of English? :) Gang was a term that made sense to me, and I prefer it to talk of siblings which I suspect isn't that intuitive without some knowledge of the plug hierarchy. I'm happy to go with the consensus though if there is one...

[andrewkaufman]

Sounds like Ben had some real ganging experience, so we can stick with that. I did initially write flavours just for you, but I couldn't stand the squiggly red lines indicating my egregious mistake.