f7f18cd0c7
So far, only node group were able to have menu input sockets. Built-in nodes did not support them. Currently, all menus of built-in nodes are stored on the node instead of on the sockets. This limits their flexibility because it's not possible to expose these inputs. This patch adds initial support for having menu inputs in built-in nodes. For testing purposes, it also changes a couple built-in nodes to use an input socket instead of a node property: Points to Volume, Transform Geometry, Triangulate, Volume to Mesh and Match String. ### Compatibility Forward and backward compatibility is maintained where possible (it's not possible when the menu input is linked in 5.0). The overall compatibility approach is the same as what was done for the compositor with two differences: there are no wrapper RNA properties (not necessary for 5.0, those were removed for the compositor already too), no need to version animation (animation on the menu properties was already disabled). This also makes menu sockets not animatable in general which is kind of brittle (e.g. doesn't properly update when the menu definition changes). To animate a menu it's better to animate an integer and to drive an index switch with it. ### Which nodes to update? Many existing menu properties can become sockets, but it's currently not the intention to convert all of them. In some cases, converting them might restrict future improvements too much. This mainly affects Math nodes. Other existing nodes should be updated but are a bit more tricky to update for different reasons: * We don't support dynamic output visibility yet. This is something I'll need to look into at some point. * They are shared with shader/compositor nodes, which may be more limited in what can become a socket. * There may be performance implications unless extra special cases are implemented, especially for multi-function nodes. * Some nodes use socket renaming instead of dynamic socket visibility which isn't something we support more generally yet. ### Implementation The core implementation is fairly straight forward. The heavy lifting is done by the existing socket visibility inferencing. There is a new simple API that allows individual nodes to implement custom input-usage-rules based on other inputs in a decentralized way. In most cases, the nodes to update just have a single menu, so there is a new node-declaration utility that links a socket to a specific value of the menu input. This internally handles the usage inferencing as well as making the socket available when using link-drag-search. In the modified nodes, I also had to explicitly set the "main input" now which is used when inserting the node in a link. The automatic behavior doesn't work currently when the first input is a menu. This is something we'll have to solve more generally at some point but is out of scope for this patch. Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/140705
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