» VL: Frame Your Patches
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VL: Frame Your Patches

Some things take a while longer...
Planned since vvvv pre-beta1 we're happy to finally bring you:

Frames

Patches tend to do different things all at once and when looking at them it is often not clear at first sight which part of a patch does what. We have comments to add a few words at certain spots but those fail when we'd like to point at a group of nodes that do a certain thing. So the idea is to have a visual element we can place in a patch to frame a group of nodes and mark them with a color and label. This will help us to better structure and document large patches.

Press ALT while making a selction to create a frame and optionally give it a title
When selected, the frame shows a color-box
Move and size the frame

Frames are always in the very back of everything. They don't contain any other elements and they cannot be contained in other regions. They are mere visual elements and don't interfere with the functionality of a patch in any way.

Grab the frame at the color-box to move its content along

To show/hide all frames in a patch at once, press CTRL+ALT+F.
To frame a bunch of selected nodes, press ALT+F.

Screenshots

Besides being structural elements, frames also allow you to take screenshots easily and repeatably. We're using this e.g. to automate generating screenshots for our documentation...

Here is how:

  • Press the Printer button to make a screenshot, then rightclick it to see the captured file in explorer
    • Alternatively press CTRL+2 to take a shot of the selected frame
  • Press CTRL+5 to take screenshots of all frames in a document at once

To create a quick screenshot of an area without even creating a frame, simply press S while making a selection. This will copy the screenshot to the clipboard (so you can simply paste it into the chat or a forum reply) and also place a .png next to the current .vl document.

Recordings

Apart from single screenshots you can also record an animated gif of the area of a frame, here is how:

  • Press the Record button to start a recording, the same button again or ESC to stop it
    • Alternatively toggle CTRL+4 to start/stop recording the selected frame

Note that the resulting .gifs are quite large. This is a known problem that shall be fixed at some point.

Screenspace Frame

One more: In case you want to make a recording that includes panning or zooming in the patch you can create a frame in screenspace:

Press ALT+SHIFT while making a selection to create a frame in screenspace
joreg, Wednesday, Jun 27th 2018 Digg | Tweet | Delicious 11 comments  
veevee 28/06/2018 - 10:44

Hooray! I'm totally in love with it!
(Can we have it in vvvv, too, please? ;) )

dennis 28/06/2018 - 11:00

really really good stuff, ty!

sebl 28/06/2018 - 12:18

i also can totally imagine a collapse feature for the frames. a bit like grouping/subpatching...

u7angel 28/06/2018 - 13:03

@veevee, yes please...vvvv

sunep 28/06/2018 - 13:06

I join veevee and u7angel in the wish for such a feature in vvvv

colorsound 28/06/2018 - 13:09

very nice ¡¡ , +1 for vvvv too.

Noir 28/06/2018 - 15:31

+1 for vvvv too

tonfilm 28/06/2018 - 16:07

@sebl when you think about a crowded patch with a few frames inside and you collapse some of them, it gets much harder to imagine what should happen to the surrounding patch.

timpernagel 03/07/2018 - 09:48

Bravo!

hrovac 25/07/2018 - 08:37

vvvversion pls

baxtan 06/09/2018 - 00:51

Beautiful!

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Shoutbox

~4d ago

~7d ago

joreg: The Winter Season of vvvv workshops is now over but all recordings are still available for purchase: https://thenodeinstitute.org/ws23-vvvv-intermediates/

~14d ago

schlonzo: Love the new drag and drop functionality for links in latest previews!

~22d ago

joreg: Workshop on 29 02: Create Sequencers and Precise Clock Based Tools. Signup here: https://thenodeinstitute.org/courses/ws23-vvvv-08-create-sequencers-and-precise-clock-based-tools-in-vvvv-gamma/

~29d ago

joreg: Workshop on 22 02: Unlocking Shader Artistry: A Journey through ‘The Book of Shaders’ with FUSE. Signup here: https://thenodeinstitute.org/courses/ws23-vvvv-12-book-of-shaders/

~1mth ago

joreg: Talk and Workshop on February 15 & 16 in Frankfurt: https://visualprogramming.net/blog/vvvv-at-node-code-frankfurt/

~1mth ago

woei: @Joanie_AntiVJ: think so, looks doable

~1mth ago

xd_nitro: Anyone remember who increased projector brightness by removing some components that product the color?

~1mth ago

Joanie_AntiVJ: This looks super interesting (vectors over network) would anyone here know how to implement this in beta? https://github.com/madmappersoftware/Ponk