How do you keep your graphs clean? Any tips?

Help! How do I...
#1

Hi,

especially for texturing I tend to have a big bowl of “noodle soup” following the erosion node mostly because terrain, flowmap, selectors etc are being used for all kinds of different textures and wires are quickly crossing and making graphs very messy and hard to read (and understand if coming back to the project after some time)

wm_noodlesoup
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I mostly try to stretch it out a little bit more with checkpoints but still it gets kinda messy. Do you guys know this problem and do you have some best practices to keep it clean? I’d love to have a portal node :smiley:

#2

As long as I’m decided on a final resolution, I can divide my project into multiple tmd graphs (stages). The method I demonstrated in THIS tutorial project, works for splitting across multiple projects as well.

This way I can finalize a terrain, before I can move on to texturing. I’ve found that texturing requires a lot more test builds, and takes up a lot of memory in case of file textures or materials loaded from disk. Easier to manage when your terrain and masks are all organized neatly into one single node that’s baked (so it builds in seconds). If you want to adjust masks, easier to do it in an isolated terrain project as well. Been working this way since Library I/O was introduced for the first time. Helps organize your mess, when you spend months iterating on a single piece of land.

#3

Well that is indeed a quite conventional method. You could try to use groups as well, or, if you have repeated processes, create custom macros! Groups have the benefit they incoming and outgoing wires, which help with organisation.

And lastly, I suggest using the original wire scheme, together with waypoints, that can result in really clean node setups!

#4

Original wire scheme is good, Orthogonal-Only mode also makes for pretty clean graphs in my experience.