05-20-2025, 09:21 AM
So Tyflow is awesome, but it can feel very complicated, especially for beginners. With a bit of experience you learn that it is not a complicated as you thought. This is the power of the tool in my view.
I assume, like most people, if I need to get something done in Tyflow I search for a tutorial that is close enough to what I am trying to achieve and adapt the results to my purposes. This works well, but can be a little frustrating, especially as you are learning as you go.
I would like to propose a feature that I am calling "TySummary". It would work like this:
You work on a flow and get it working just the way you want, fantastic. Render. Feel good. You come back to the flow two months later and have not the first idea what you did and how it works.
The solution, press the big red TySummary button. This acts as a filter on all of the values, spinners, check boxes, selectors in all of your flows, nodes and the tyflow object's rollouts. The filter hides all values, leaving only values that have been changed from their default. This means you can look through all your nodes at see at a glance what it is doing.
For example a PhysX Shape node has around 60 values that you can change in one way or another. However, typically I only change one or two values. All the other values are no doubt useful when their time comes, but when you are just trying to understand what the node is doing they are just distracting and confusing.
I have built, what are for me, some quite complex flows to get the job done. They look complex, but I expect if I could apply a 'TySummary' to them they would feel a good deal less complex. This would also make sharing them with others much more useful. I propose it would make learning TyFlow much, much easier.
Now, I wouldn't be suprised to learn the the limitations of the max interface, make this hard or impossible. An alternative would be in some what to highlight in colour, bold, italics etc, vaules that have been changed from default.
Bonus feature. When the TySummary filter is turned on, each value that remains has a little text box below it called 'Why?' Here the user can type in wtf they think it's doing.
Thank you for your consideration.
P.S.
I started to try and write a maxscript for this and gave up after about 46 seconds.
I assume, like most people, if I need to get something done in Tyflow I search for a tutorial that is close enough to what I am trying to achieve and adapt the results to my purposes. This works well, but can be a little frustrating, especially as you are learning as you go.
I would like to propose a feature that I am calling "TySummary". It would work like this:
You work on a flow and get it working just the way you want, fantastic. Render. Feel good. You come back to the flow two months later and have not the first idea what you did and how it works.
The solution, press the big red TySummary button. This acts as a filter on all of the values, spinners, check boxes, selectors in all of your flows, nodes and the tyflow object's rollouts. The filter hides all values, leaving only values that have been changed from their default. This means you can look through all your nodes at see at a glance what it is doing.
For example a PhysX Shape node has around 60 values that you can change in one way or another. However, typically I only change one or two values. All the other values are no doubt useful when their time comes, but when you are just trying to understand what the node is doing they are just distracting and confusing.
I have built, what are for me, some quite complex flows to get the job done. They look complex, but I expect if I could apply a 'TySummary' to them they would feel a good deal less complex. This would also make sharing them with others much more useful. I propose it would make learning TyFlow much, much easier.
Now, I wouldn't be suprised to learn the the limitations of the max interface, make this hard or impossible. An alternative would be in some what to highlight in colour, bold, italics etc, vaules that have been changed from default.
Bonus feature. When the TySummary filter is turned on, each value that remains has a little text box below it called 'Why?' Here the user can type in wtf they think it's doing.
Thank you for your consideration.
P.S.
I started to try and write a maxscript for this and gave up after about 46 seconds.
)