Writing long formulas with nodes is hard.
Writing one line of math is easy.
Justification
Making mathematical formulas with nodes takes a long time and every time you have to revise something you have to create new nodes, plug them in, check all connections and then see if it was the correct change.
With a written math expression, everything is much more visible in a smaller area, you can make changes much faster.
Implementation Details
There are several ways this could be implemented:
- Like Blender drivers, where you can create a driver for a certain field and create variables in that field which are driven by other parameters.
- Like Houdini expressions/parameters, where you can rightclick any number, copy its parameter and paste it as an expression in another field and then use that to do math with. Quite similar to Blender’s drivers.
- Like Unreal Engine’s math expression node (Math Expression Node | Unreal Engine 4.27 Documentation), where I write a formula and it recreates it with nodes in a subgraph.
This one is probably the easiest(?) to implement as it just creates more nodes and InstaMat already supports making graphs and importing them as a single node in other graphs (how most your nodes are made). - A new node that has inputs for variables and an output for the result and a textfield for the expression (this example is in blender but it could look the same in InstaMat https://www.reddit.com/r/blender/comments/17rlfn3/math_expression_node/).
I hope a change like this can be implemented, of course not tomorrow or the next update. But an update in the future.
It would make procedural modelling so much more fun, as I have to waste less time creating and rearranging nodes and more time making cool generators!
If there are any questions: Please ask!
Thank you for reading!
