Making connections between properties to reuse and establish relationships between sizes, colors angle etc is a very powerful feature. It can allow you to set up complex designs and patterns and then change the entire design by adjusting just the base parameters the rest rely on. However, an issue with this I ran into in Patternodes is that once your web of connections and relationships becomes complex enough to be really powerful, it’s also hard to keep track of what to change and where to control the design.
This was something I had in mind and wanted to ensure I had a better solution for in Paragraphic, and from the very start I’ve had a place in the UI for custom parameters you can add for this purpose. I’ve now renamed this panel Inputs but it might be renamed again (EDIT: later renamed to just Parameters or Document parameters), and implemented the basic functionality for it. The idea is that you can use this Inputs panel as a sort of control panel for your design. In it you can add any number of parameters of different types, like values, colors, sizes etc, that you can then connect to control parameters on your layers and layer nodes.
For example you could use it to specify repetition counts, colors, angles, texts or even fonts and images or that you might want to use in multiple layers or vary to try tweaking you design. And these will then always be easily available regardless of selection.
Another use-case for these custom inputs is if you want to set up a sort of automated design that you want to make multiple iterations of with slight variations, like different colors, different sizes or such. Then you just need to set up the layers and connect them once, and then you (or someone else) can just change these input parameters and quickly be able to make a new variation of the design to export.
Additional improvements
UI/UX
- Implemented undo/redo support for adding/removing layer nodes.
- Implemented undo/redo support for adding and removing connections.
- Duplicating layers now also duplicates all connections to the layers.
- Angle parameters like rotations and angle ranges now get a little ° degree marker to show they’re angles in degrees.
Generation / nodes
- Implemented basic Apply function layer node, allowing you to easily apply gradual transformations on elements in a group based on their index or position.