GafferUI : Improve visibility of which Nodes are affected by Viewport Tools

[themissingcow]

Background

As a User adjusting my scene using Viewer tools, I often find myself inadvertently changing plugs on the wrong Node in my graph. This usually happens when I am working in a Sequence based workflow and I have Shot specific branches as the Node I have focused in the NodeEditor is not contributing to the Node I'm Viewing. This is often due to Context-based Switches.

The Viewer already has an informational widget that displays which node is being targeted by the Tool, but I don't always make the mental connection as to which node this is in the graph (it may be called Transform12 .vs. the intended Transform13.

What would I like

As a User, I'd like to see some indication in the GraphEditor which node(s) are being affected by active tools in any Viewport.

[themissingcow]

@johnhaddon Another idea here would be that we could also decorate the PlugValueWidget for any open NodeEditors that are applicable to the target. How feasible might this be?

[johnhaddon]

I think we'd probably implement this sort of thing as follows :

• The Viewport tools assign some non-persistent thisThingIsCurrentlyBeingEdited metadata.
• The GraphEditor/PlugValueWidget picks up on that metadata and displays it in some appropriate form.

A super lo-fi version of this could just be the TransformTools making annotation metadata, in which case the second part (displaying it) is already done.