I’ve been studying vvvv over the past couple of weeks and find I am wasting the majority of time trying to figure out which nodes can interconnect. Eg, a cylinder outputs an x-mesh but which nodes accept x-mesh as input? A node reference indexed by input/output types would really speed up my learning.
PS: Is DirectX knowledge required to get the best from vvvv? I program in OpenGL.
you´re right about the reference. the dx/ex system is still in a transitional phase - this makes it somehow really difficult for novices…
the new ex-system explicitly tries to get as close to directx9 as it makes sense (the e in ex is for explicit). in a broader sense there is not much difference to opengl (as the supporting hardware basically provides the same functionality) but a lot of details vary.
currently a good book on dx9 will help to get the most out of the various renderstate nodes and of course shaders. some good books are online at http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/
Aharrrr, I wondered what all this ex stuff was, thanks for the explanation! I think part of my problem is how I view things at a high level. For instance my first (mental) designs went something like this: I create a cylinder, apply a tranform to it, add a texture node to it (and maybe a transform to the texture as well). Then I will have a fully transformed textured cylinder ready for rendering. The dx seems closer to this view than ex… maybe? I will read-up on the dx9 stuff, thanks for the link
another good way to learn the nodes is to look at the nodelist in category view ! helped me a lot at the beginning …