hi everyone,
i wanted to bring up something about the fuse help patches.
first: i really like fuse and i think there is a lot of amazing stuff in the examples. so this is not meant as complaining about the work that already exists. but from my perspective as someone who is trying to really understand fuse, many of the help patches are quite hard to learn from.
very often the patches show what is possible, but not really why it is done this way. for me the difficult part is not only understanding a single node, but understanding the whole concept behind the patch.
especially with gpu related stuff this becomes difficult very fast. terms like compute stage, render stage, buffers, append buffers, sphere impostors, instancing, materials, static mesh, dynamic data etc. are used or implied, but often not really explained inside the patch. so if you already know the concepts, the patch is useful. but if you are trying to learn the concepts from the patch, it can be quite confusing.
what i often miss is a bit more of the “teaching layer”:
what is the main idea of this patch?
what part of the patch runs on the cpu and what part runs on the gpu?
what data is created where?
how does the data move from compute to rendering?
why is this specific approach used here?
when would i use this patch/technique in a real project?
and also: when should i not use it?
for example i had two patches where the result in the renderer looked quite similar, but conceptually they were doing very different things. one was more like a static approach, but with changing data in the shader. another one used a compute stage and then rendered sphere impostors. visually this can look very close, but the meaning of the approach is completely different. and exactly this difference is super important to understand.
i think this is where some of the help patches could be improved a lot. not by making them more complex, but by adding more comments, frames and explanations directly in the patch. not only “this node does x”, but also “this is the concept”, “this is why we use this method”, “this is a typical use case”, “this is a common pitfall”.
i experimented a bit with chatgpt for this. i gave it some .vl help patches and asked it to analyse the structure and add explanatory comments directly into the patch xml. then i asked it to move the nodes around a bit so that the comment boxes do not overlap with the patch. of course the result still needs manual review, and sometimes the explanations need correction. but as a first draft it worked surprisingly well.
during this process i also worked out a prompt for automatically commenting fuse/vl help patches. the idea is not that chatgpt magically creates a finished perfect help patch. it is more like a first pass: analyse the patch, identify the important concepts, add comments and frames, explain the data flow and the gpu/rendering concepts. after that the patch still needs to be opened again in vvvv and visually cleaned up. nodes and comments often have to be repositioned, frames adjusted, maybe some explanations rewritten or corrected. but it gives a pretty useful starting point.
i will also post the prompt here, in case others want to try it or improve it.
the nice thing is that chatgpt can generate a kind of learner-oriented explanation layer quite quickly. then someone who actually understands fuse deeply could review and correct it. this might be much faster than writing all explanations completely from scratch.
i can share one or two examples if this is interesting. they are not perfect, but they show the idea: same help patch, same technical content, but with more explanation about stages, data flow and why things are done in this specific way.
my suggestion would be to maybe improve some of the fuse help patches step by step like this. especially the gpu / compute / rendering related ones. i think this would make fuse much easier to learn for people who are not already familiar with these concepts.
for me the main issue is not that the examples are bad. the technical examples are often really good. but sometimes they feel more like “look, this is possible” and less like “this is how you can understand and use this concept yourself”.
maybe others feel the same?
in the attachement you find a few auto commented fuse help patches and the prompt i used for these.
HowToRenderSphereImposters_commented_v2.vl (53.7 KB)
HowToDrawsSphereImposters_commented_v2.vl (153.7 KB)
HowTo ComputeTexture2D_commented.vl (49.0 KB)
Prompt.zip (1.8 KB)