[Christmas wish] alternative wire display modes to avoid spaghetti!

Dear David and the Grasshopper team (maybe David is the team, anyway, I digress...),

Can I suggest that Grasshopper provides alternative way of displayiing wire connections?

My personal experience with Sidefx's Houdini software, which has a very powerful procedure modeling work space similar to Grasshopper except that its workflow is vertically oriented, is very pleasant, and one of the reason is that its node network organization is tidy and clean, thanks to its multiple way of displaying the wires between nodes that don't get to cook out entangled "spaghetti" easily (see images below).

Or can we at least do sth to control the bezier wire which takes just too many space to make a turn ...

Wish the team can consider this suggestion!

Or, shush me if this is already been taken care of in some way ...

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 4, 2015 at 9:29am

It hasn't been taken care of yet. I don't understand from the images you posted how the spaghettification is countered in this software. Is it that it only draws a single wire between two components, even if there's more than one there?

Permalink Reply by Grasshope on August 4, 2015 at 10:04am

Dear David,

Thanks for your prompt reply!

My point is shown in the 2 images below.

The wire in the first one takes too much of the canvas space to "make a turn" when the components it connects are far away from each other, and this will worsen the spaghetti appearance of the canvas when you have a lot of distant components to connect.

Whereas in the second image, the wires take less canvas space and they are nicely aligned like the first image of Houdini shown above (I know my clumsy drawing betrays me, but trust me, this is the 5th one I draw and it is difficult using a mouse...)

Notice that the Houdini wire can smartly "bend" itself based on the positions of the two nodes:

Thanks for your attention!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 4, 2015 at 11:30am

It's sort of pointless to see a wire if you can't see either of the end-points. I'm definitely planning to hide wires that go off screen in both directions. Even if one end is visible but the other is far, far away then there is almost no purpose to showing a wire, with the sole exception of showing that there is a connection of some kind. This however can be shown in a much less visually loud way.

To be sure, I am acutely aware of the spaghetti problem and I am planning several ways to reduce it, but none of those ways so far include having special per-wire geometry. It's all about not showing wires when not needed, showing them in a subdued fashion if they are not particularly important, and about providing tools which allow people to use fewer wires in the first place.

The horizontal bulging of vertical wires is indeed somewhat visually jarring, I can probably fine-tune the bezier vectors in these cases to make it look better.

Permalink Reply by 3dcon on August 4, 2015 at 11:16am