Hi,
I have a project now that I use a lot of different magma modifiers in. I load, try out, change, remove a lot of them, trying out looks, I have a bunch of presets.
The difficult part is seeing which node does what. I can only see the name of the modifier and the exposed params. It would be great if we could put a little note on the modifier itself, and if loading a preset could automatically rename the modifier.
There are a few approaches here:
*When you add the Magma Modifier, uncheck the Auto Rename checkbox in the Command Panel. When you do this, the modifier will stop auto-renaming as you add channels (normally a Magma with Color and Velocity channels would auto-rename to “Magma_Col_Vel”). With Auto Rename off, you can rename the Magma modifier to whatever you want and the name will persist so you know what it does.
*Inside the Magma Editor, there is a large green field with the title “EDIT Current Flow Notes”. You can enter a description of what the flow is supposed to do, and when you save a preset, that description will be saved with it. When you are loading presets from the Preset Flows Explorer, selecting them on the list will display the notes in the same area, but with red background color (so it is clear it is not editable at that point). If you load the preset, you can edit the notes again on the green background and resave with the edited notes.
The only drawback is that since the Magma Modifier’s UI is written in C++ and the Editor is MAXScript, I have no way of passing those notes to the Command Panel to show up there. I will talk to Darcy to see if he could show that info on the C++ side since the value is stored in the $.modifiers[1].magmaHolder.note parameter that should be easily accessible to the C++ UI code.
*Finally, you could open the Parameter Editor of Max and add a Custom Attribute of type String / UI Control EditText with a height > 17 to enter a multi-line comment.
I guess I could add an option “Expose Notes To UI” that adds this automatically like when exposing nodes from Magma.
Cool, I’ll try these 