Meaning that the user does not need to worry about the math or code to create something nice. It does not mean that there shouldn’t be any math/coding nodes. It would be cool to have for example a node to fracture object or a node that simulates branches or something
Have you tried the fracture branch? I have no experience with c4d voronoi fracture but from images it looks very similar to the blenders fracture branch. The underlying math is also based on voronoi cels and it appears to have similar use cases.
If you look at everything the developers, in particular Jaques, have written about the Everything Nodes project you can see they are thinking about it very deeply indeed. It’s obviously a multi-year project and won’t be complete for several years but when it’s complete Blender will make C4D look like a Fisher-Price tool in comparison.
Blender will never be as deep as Houdini but it doesn’t need to be, think more of a modern day XSI. Yes the low level nodal workflow of Everything Nodes will be more involved and slower than using C4D’s high level tools but I expect the vast community of highly skilled Blender users will create Group Nodes and addons that sit on top of Everything Nodes and create higher level tools for those who don’t need to delve deep just like many of the Nodevember geniuses do with shader node groups.
Obviously the Asset Manager will be a key component in sharing nodal setups and reading the design specs for this features again gives me huge confidence we’re heading in the right direction.
Everything Nodes isn’t just a replacement for Animation Nodes it’ll include workflows that Sverchok and Sorcar have opened. I would certainly expect that Everything Nodes would enable a user to code their own voronoi fracture from nodes like in Sverchok. But It will make sense for Blender to have a good mix of high level tools and low level noding for everyone so I’d expect the Voronoi fracture tool to return in due course.
The future looks very exciting.
People keep saying this but why shouldn’t it be?
Houdini has a very big head start and was built around nodes from the ground up . It will be very difficult for blender to catch up anytime soon…
Still you never know it’s still possible . blender have brushes for sculpting that even ZBrush doesn’t have
Do you ever foresee Blender or Maya or Max or C4D ever having the depth of Houdini?
In Houdini you can code your own 3d raytracer using OpenCL. Do you ever see Blender users needing that depth? You could actually code Houdini in Houdini if you so desired. Many of Houdini’s own tools are effectively Group Nodes written in VEX. Delve into the Simulation nodes and it’s all VEX under the surface.
Houdini is more of a 3D development environment with a nodal UI that does animation, it’s the swiss army knife of 3D Applications but the vast majority of the 3D user base much of its profound depth remains unnecessary.
I do see Blender becoming he natural replacement for XSI, a deep and powerful application with a good mix of high level tools and a powerful low level node based toolset. It doesn’t need to try to be Houdini.
Is there any chance this will make it into the master 2.8x branch any time soon?
I don’t think it will. The developer is working on his FlipFluid addon and I believe the Blender Foundation does not want it in Blender the way it is coded at the moment.
But I just finished a job with it. I used the 2.79 fracture build for doing the simulations and cached them to MDD. In case of varying vertex count you’d of course use Alembic instead. Then I brought it to 2.81 and did all the other stuff ( particles, shaders, animations, rendering) there.
The scene contained around 60 simulations with about 7000 pieces of coal each falling into an oven, so all in all around 400 000 pieces of coal. The result was satisfactory.
The workflow is obviously not perfect but even if it did work in 2.8x you would want to cache the fracture sims and reimport them.
If a rigid body sim that can simulate large amounts of objects could be directly implemented into everything nodes so that other sims can influence it, that would be fantastic.
No idea if it will ever have this depth, but the development fund is in its infancy and allready at nearly 100k €. In 10 years it might be at half a million per month. Who knows what a team of 60 or 70 full time developers can do.
Do Blender users need this depth? Well, probably not, if they did they’d be using Houdini. But if you give Blender these functions then people who need it will come to Blender.
Is it likely? Perhaps not but I don’t think it is reasonable to categorically dismiss it as absurd, either.
I didn’t dismiss it as absurd, you’re putting words into my mouth. I think it’s highly unlikely that Blender will ever compete with Houdini. Houdini is a tool designed for a tiny elite TD user base and Blender is a tool aimed at the mass market. Different courses for different horses.
Then we’re probably not that far appart. It doesn’t seem all that likely to me either but with the way the resources are growing you never know.
I tried the fracture branch a while back, probably 2.79. I have to admit I haven’t tried newer releases since then. Unless I’m missing some new feature, I think the voronoi fracture in C4D is still the best solutions around for motion graphics jobs.
Watch this (around min 7 - but actually the whole video is quite something)
# Siggraph 2016 Rewind - Derya Ozturk: New MoGraph Features in R18
Hi,
the developer of the flip fluid addon and engine doesnt have anything to do with the development of the fracture modifier branch. Just to mention. But you are right with the current situation of acceptance into master.
Furthermore, the FM is more targeted to fracturing for rigidbody simulations and doesnt integrate too well into motion graphics (imho), since the shards are packed geometry (all in one mesh) and not a set of individually animateable objects. But you can convert the shards to individual objects too.
Ah, ok. But the marketing and tutorial Dennis from FlipFluid is the same Dennis as the one from Fracture, right?
That is right. Dennis is active for FlipFluid and Fracture Modifier (tutorials) too
Yes, I hope there will be more discussion about the "condition gate’ going from right to left.
(Previousl portion has been removed because of both misconceptions and sounded way too panicky).
Edit 3:
So question, will “edit mode” actually be going away? Because I would be more comfortable if I was able to still model destructively for level design purposes.
Edit mode is here to stay. Manual destructive modeling is still absolutely necessary. The EN project is designed to add some procedural tools to complement the existing modeling tools.