Another procedural experiment. This complex scene took a whopping 2 triangles.
Might make this part of a larger scene.
This is great! Your procedural experiments are very interesting, and frankly I have no idea what you’re talking about half the time (but that’s okay!).
I really like this latest test too, it’s beautiful in its simplicity. It reminds me of going to the pool as a small boy, and walking through the inside shower area/lockers to the entrance/exit. There was no door, just an opening in the wall, and the difference in brightness between the daylight outside and the darkness inside was exactly like this. You could tell what was an “old” wet footprint and what was a more recent one.
I think I better start posting some stuff again.
Old procedural continent test, the clouds and terrain color are cheats with 16384 x 8192 textures:
Random procedural cloud experiment. GPU of course. The CPU is still faster for simple volume shaders, but at a certain point procedural texturing of the volume become faster on GPU regardless:
Been very busy past few months, finally started working on some tools for custom normals workflow. Anyway, did a fast test on a pipe with bevels:
Nice to finally have decent lighting on things without adding 10x the polycount. Aside from finally being able to put time in to finish my seamless tools addon, I have some normals editing tools under construction. Trying to decide right now on feature set for smoothing boundaries: edges marked sharp, uv seams, selection boundary, face and angle weights, vertex color weights, edge crease, etc. Ironically these normals tools are used in edit mode, but for some reason the normals can only be actually set in object mode… WTF. So all the tools I have so far switch to object mode and back to edit mode when used. In edit mode the normals visibility can get a bit crowded. It would be great if they added an option to only show normals of the current selection.
Decided to give PhotoScan a try. Did 30 photos around a rock pile without much thought. Obviously for asset creation I would best be doing this on an overcast day to avoid harsh shadows. Anyway test result came out nice:
Ironically cycles preview is a lot less laggy than most of the other draw modes in the viewport. Also took a good 196 seconds to import the fbx.
That photo scan… unbelievable…
Another PhotoScan test. I’ve been using an old Pentax K20D. Still trying to figure out my texturing workflows but here are a couple render with and without sunlight:
Also enjoy a random space rock because reasons:
Quick test of a hacky bake cache node addon for cycles. It appears as though the python interface for baking is just as painful and pathetic as the standard baking workflow. Emphasis on the work part of “workflow”. Way back I remember something about the possibility of cycles getting a bake node of sorts. Guess that has not gone anywhere yet and baking is still convoluted and confusing as hell. This is an experiment to create an addon for a simple bake node of sorts. It is intended to cache expensive parts of a node tree to a UV mapped texture. My interest of course being procedural textures which can become quite slow and also the small SVM stack size which can fill up fast.
It’s a combo of a unique node group and control node with bake settings. The frame caption displays the bake time. The eye visibility button toggles the mute of the node group which allows the cache to be turned off.
CPU 3.9GHz hexa-core /w hyperthreading and GPU 2x GTX 680s.
CPU: 4:53
GPU: 0:44
Cached CPU: 1:31
Cached GPU: 0:18
Have to do further experiments on this at some point.
Super fast project I did for my cousin last year. RC truck is real everything else in Blender:
Also a funky volumetric test on random project:
EDIT: Seems BA duplicates large image attachments at the bottom of the post, despite them being embedded in the post’s text. That’s unfortunate. Also editing a post comes up with errors that a message is too short despite the obvious fact it is not too short (this text is an example).
Attachments
So I think I am going to finally start organizing all my nodes into a node pack of some kind. Maybe to sell (with documentation, examples, etc). Either way I gotta do it for myself at least. To quote Mr. Torgue: I AM F***N’ DISORGANIZED AS SHT.
I did a rework of a 7-segment display to make it easier to use:
There is no built-in rounding for decimal count, it just cuts off, but meh. It works for both cycles and GLSL preview.
Also added a scope for playing around with values, testing node groups, etc:
Also works in both Cycles render and GLSL preview. Could be added to some nice props down the road. I should maybe make a 3D holographic version as well. =D
Nice to see more nodes from you again. 
Keep it up! 
So I started importing and revising my patterns from way back… I have multiple versions of a number of them, but I have to inspect them for possible improvements.
Just playing around:
Also need to come up with a consistent order, type and naming of outputs for all patterns. At least one of each tile pattern type I want to output tile space and tile location. sometimes extras.
Finally started building up a collection of procedural 1D/2D/3D patterns and textures. :yes:
To aid progress on my gigantic node pack, I have been working on some tools and panel replacements in the node editor.
One of my biggest problems with node groups is the lack of organizing and the ability to browse. Search menu is fine but otherwise an endless scrolling menu of groups is a pain.
So the solution is real dynamic nested menus:
The menu and all sub-menus are the same menu class. Just a single registered menu is need to function, although you need two registered menus if the menu is bound to a hotkey to avoid showing the hotkey in the sub-menu listing.
In this case the sub-menus conform to directories indicated by the forward slash in the node group name. Groups in the menu will eventually have an icon to indicate state, Loaded (Local), Linked, Not Loaded, etc.
The node properties panel has been redone:
Node flags, options, and sockets, visibility of which can be toggled on or off depending on need.
When showing sockets in the properties panel they can be clicked to toggle visibility, if they are not connected or disabled:
Changed the group interface editing panel. Now instead of the group interface always being visible, simply select a group input/output node to edit or add sockets:
The type for a new socket can also be selected, which can affect how the value of a disconnected socket is presented to the user:
You’ve done some amazing very realistic stuff here. I’m interested in Photoscan - is it a part of Blender or some other software?