A place to Collect Geometry Nodes Groups?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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Hello everyone,

This is mainly an open discussion to get ideas,
By design Geometry nodes relies a lot on nodegroups,
personally I ended up making a bunch of custom tools and I used a few made by other artists.

Some artists are provinding some really useful ones, but for now there isn’t a place to regroup them, some are on gumroad, some other on github/gitlab, some are on this very forum…

I don’t know if some of you knows NukePedia ?
Among other things it’s a great place to find nodegroups for Nuke , the nodal compositing software : https://www.nukepedia.com/gizmo-downloads

Something a bit similar as been done for Natron, hosted on github :

Each plugin got some quick documentation also, which is an important feature IMO. : https://github.com/NatronGitHub/natron-plugins/tree/master/Filter/kaleidoscope

First, assuming this is a good idea, what would be the best way to make that append ?
we can use blendswap for instance, which seem a good fit for that, or github/ gitlab… other ideas ?

I think a lot of people might find that useful, but if you think it’s pointless I’d be happy to get your opinion.

The way I see it, is that it would roughly follow open-source way of working :
It shouldn’t be a place to sell stuff or do self promotion and all group would be kind of standardized.
But having some way to access users and their contribution could be cool .

The maintenance of the repository should be simple and probably community driven.
Having an individual creating a website for instance isn’t a good idea I think.

The way blendswap works on the overall is great : https://www.blendswap.com/blend/31012
One important point tho is licencing, on blend swap users tend to licence their work as CC-BY which can become an issue if say I want to use one nodegroup professionally.
But this also asks questions about redistribution, It would be super interesting to get your POV on what sound useful, fair for people doing these groups…
Since groups can range from very simple tools like a new bloc used to construct something to almost a plugin that do all the work , this can be complex to find a one fit for all solution.

I don’t have particular plans for that but I though this could be an important point to start discussing !

Thank you for reading and I look forward to your ideas / thoughts !

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This is terrific idea and would push geometry / shading / compositing nodes workflow no another level for many users. Lot of new Blender users get intimidated thinking they’ll have to make everything from the scratch since they don’t see anything available like in other softwares.

Best way to start this would be to be able to export/import Node Groups from .blend files in some extention, so sharing entire blend files and uncomfortability of appending from them and making sense of somebody elses UI isn’t a problem.

I believe that is doable by addons, since I have ones that export/import Timeline Markers, Frame Ranges, Render Settings, I believe everything is exportable by converting it to python script. Currently I know some addons that do that, so what needs to exist is an universal file extention that you can import in Blender and it loads in Node Group via python script. I believe its doable, but outside of my capabilities.

In the future, this should be pushed in Blender development agenda as well

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Hi !

You’re right, that’s a good point.

We’re working on a similar project and would love your input. (see you on Discord)

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I like this idea very much!

I know the BF is planning to create something like this with the Extensions Platform but in the meantime I’d be perfectly happy using blendswap for it, seems like a good fit and it’s already used by many people so there’s no need to create yet another website for it.

Alternatively, a new category/tag here on BA could also be useful…? Something like #GNTools maybe?
I think BA could also work because people would be able to create it’s own thread for a tool, and share screenshots, videos, external links, updates, etc on the same thread. And for users it’s really simple to just follow/search a specific tag.

Agree 100%, maybe now that Blender has an asset browser they realize we need to share assets (node groups, brushes, etc) as its own file, without sharing the whole .blend file. It gets really annoying to setup a simple file just to share a node group…

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This is a really amazing idea @sozap ! :smiley:

And BlenderSwap is IMHO the best ( as the simplest ) wy to go.

More than simply sharing nodegroups this thing will be the best teaching-point for GN.
I believe lots of people ( including me :stuck_out_tongue: ) are greedy of taking a peek at groups on ‘how to do this or that’. And beeing able to look at examples is extremely pedagogic !

I bookmark this topic and hope there will be lots of neat stuff :smiley:

Thanks a lot !

And happy blending !

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Hey !!

Thanks a lot for the positive feedback !

Cool ! The extension platform look like the ideal place for something like that !
At least it seems really close to what I had in mind, and I completely missed the news :smiley:

So maybe yeah it’s just about finding a short term solution in the meantime, and it’s probably not worth creating something new at all !

I forget to mention but this tread is already an attempt to centralize information and links :

Maybe that’s just what we need as a quick workaround ?

@nickberckley you made interesting points ! I didn’t thought about other kind of nodes, and that’s a good idea. And the way we simplify import/export too ! I had a good talk with @AntoineBagattini who envision something a bit similar. To me easy access is more like icing on the cake, and the most important is to find a hosting solution first, and convince people that are already sharing stuff to put it there.
But that can be seen the other way around : making things super simple first so it’s attractive.
It’s a chicken and egg problem :smiley:

But it looks like once again the Extension platform is going to address most of these problems !

@pitibonom ! Good point too ! I didn’t think about the educational value, but of course !

Thanks a lot and let’s keep discussing and see where that will lead us, is anyone against blendswap ?
Other ideas ?

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Great idea! And unless the Extensions Platform release is right around the corner (I don’t think so), it’s good thinking to at least get this started. Having collected a lot of nodegroups it in one place might make it easier to add to the new platform too.

And if this is just an interim solution primarily for collection and easy access, not sexy presentation, I’d much prefer GitHub or similar, for several reasons: Everything is in one place (no search required to see all available nodegroups), updates are easily made and pulled, anyone can download without having an account, the interface is no-frills and fast. Blendswap often loads slowly, requires search-fu, has no easy upgrade method, must have login to download, and twice a year it ends up being blocked by modern browsers for a couple of weeks because they never seem to remember to update their security certificates on time.

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Thanks, you made very good points !
Indeed a temp solution could be useful, I’ve got mixed feelings since it could take a lot of energy to build something that will eventually get in the way of the extension plateform.

But in the end it really depends on the community, if a few node wizard find the idea useful enough then let’s do it and see how it goes ! At least from there it should be easier to build something !

Let’s keep brainstorming then !

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