Call for development: Material and geometry nodes comments text box

Dear Blender Developers,
I am into coding in python for a bout a year, and learned the importance of clean code writing and reading code. A major common sense in clean coding is “add comments, explain your code”.

The same should apply to node layouts. Even with a clean layout, sometimes is hard to understand what my node groups do, what i was thinking when i was creating it. Manual annotation through the annotation pen is problematic since it is hard to use with mouse and it is not specific for a single material.
My idea is to extend the node editors of blender with a comments text box that you can be added to the layout to write explanations. Maybe these text boxes could be connected to nodes and enlarged to fit screen when a connected node is selected and a hot key pressed (this would be useful to revise a complex layout while zoomed out).
It would be nice to see such feature in an upcoming Blender release.

1 Like

You can make feature suggestions here:

You can already do this by selecting nodes, framing them, and adding a label to the frame, although it can be a bit clunky

Generally I agree and would also use that feature, but as @joseph mentioned RCS is the place for making feature requests.
Displaying those notes could belong in Overlays.

Good luck.

Comment node ⁠— Right-Click Select (blender.community)

By the way, there is a text data block input in the N-panel of the frame node. Not too useful, but good to know

4 Likes

I do this for all the issues the original post mention.
I have not have a problem after picking up 3 years old nodes.