A node-based modifier system sounds like a cool and useful idea!
More or less 3 years ago someone made a proposal to have an unified node system in Blender.
The proposal was rejected by the main developers so I don’t think we’ll see this kind of things soon in Blender.
It’s a pity because nodes are the only way to allow people to extend blender without having to code.
Currently there is a huge wall between users and coders(the fact that it doesn’t exist a plugin system makes the thing even worse).
The proposal was rejected, but probably not the idea of a unified node system. I’m sure if someone comes up with a really good proposal it would be accepted.
Also three years ago was forever ago. 
A unified node system would be really great. Imagine the possibilities of animating with a node system…
Personally I would really like to use Blender for realtime animations (think of VVVV or TouchDesigner). But I don’t really get then hang of the game engine…
A small mock up of what I’d like to have:
so, low frequencies on au.mp audio file, drive the x scale of a cube? nice.
That’s what I mean when I say “Driver nodes”.
Would be really awesome to have.
It would probably look a bit more like this (I forgot to put a field for loading an audio file, but you get the point):
It’s cool to read frequency, would be also cool to modify the audio frequency via an evelope. After all Blender is supposed to animate everything. Volume and Pitch aren’t the only effects you can apply to sound to make it more authentic. For example when a gamer closes a door not only does the sound volume reduce but it looses all the high frequencies as well.
Wish that kind of detail would be exposed to these nodes.
imagine having driver nodes also.
something that I have always been fascinated with is using nodes to display logic bricks. to start, it could literally just be a change in the way the bricks are displayed, but they are still attached in the same way. once that is in place, than that opens up possibilities for further advancement, such as allowing for multiple controllers for a single function.
couldn’t the entire logic bricks be replaced with a node workflow. make it a overall spanning ‘interactive’ workflow.
That was a GSoC project last year but it didn’t pass. To be fair, it was one of the most complex projects.
yeah, the main issue with that is it wouldn’t be backwards compatible. My proposition is to only change the way it’s displayed, and then recreating a node based workflow can come later.
Do you have a URL to the project proposal? Maybe the idea can be developed a bit further…
node base workflow want~~~
Modifier Nodes, Particle Nodes, PyNodes drool
This gets mentioned a lot by people but what are the advantages of using nodes over a plan modifier stack. Is this something from Softimage or Houdini?
@tyrant monkey
It will make it possible to use “modefier nodes” to affect more than one object and to duplicate. More flexible.
watch the video on the last post of previous page.
Would be nice though to have deeper node system available for objects, drivers, modefiers, transforms, modeling operations etc. Much like ICE or Houdini yes. #dreaming