user friendly node based modeling, animation and simulation solution, with focus on UI/UX
interactive operators with automatic node sensing and activation
performant operators, accelereated with GPU/CUDA cores
declarative style operators and nodes
uncluttered nodes interface
node parametrization and data binding
reusable digital assets
fewer connection as possible
pass-through state
automatic conversion to and from mesh/object/curve/collection/etc when required
generic operators based on standard ops, modifiers and bmesh already working
live node previews
custom python operators
independent/autonomous operators from blender internal(affect blenders internal affairs as little as possible)
Long term goals:
integration with everything nodes if possible
complete workflows for game development
batched processing and optimizations
multi user support
unity/unreal exchange
animation/simulation integration
and many moreā¦
Very long term:
relase as stand-alone app with other packages integration
What works so far:
Operations and node previews
Live edits
Interactive primitive
Live primitive node
This project is in early state of prototyping. When it will be ready for prime time, I will release it on blender market and gumroad. Any C&C are welcome.
Since itās overlapping a lot the the future everything nodes features is difficult to know how much time until it be deprecated. But itās probably the best prof of concept to ānode modifiersā as a modelling workflow.
@vitorbalbio Yes, itās true that some of these ideas ar overlapping with āeverything nodesā. But, we donāt know when everything nodes will be released. Think about it, they started talking about this stuff 5 years agoā¦ Only recently everything nodes was moved from backlog to ālong termā. I donāt even know what that means. There is no ETA for this project. It could be 6 months, or it could be 2 years from nowā¦ until you will have a first early BETA to toy with. Besides this, they are refactoring a lot of blender core right now. I donāt know exactly what is the purpose of that refactoring?!? C++?, better perf?, I donāt know. Anyway this refactoring alone will introduce an enormous number of bugs to be fixed. Donāt expect to much stability in the next two three versions.
Also, there is the GPU accelerated problem to address. How? Is it going to work out of the box, another 2 years?. We donāt knowā¦
My approach here is taking in consideration, from the start, the UI/UX/perf problem. In the end, this is what truly matters for the end user.
Also, worth mentioning is the fact that I intend to release an early BETA, hopefully, two months from now
I donāt know much about sorcar, but from the looks of it, it was designed to work with standard operators and modifiers. This approach has some limitations. You are totally bound to what blender does internally. Other than that, it looks like a very good solution. And it is also a lot more mature than my approach. What I am trying to do here is beyond blender scope. From the start I want to introduce GPU accelerated operators which are also context agnostic(you can run them from anywhere - not bound to blender internal state). Beside this, I want this solution to be extremely easy to use and interact with from the viewport. This is something I really missed in Houdiniā¦
Good answer, in this case this is a very good approach.
Indeed, Blender has a good set of fundamental modifiers, however the toolbox is quite limited, not to mention that half of them need to be reworked so they can become 10 times more productive and user friendly.
What is Iām really missing right now in animation nodes, sverchok, etc is the ability to work with rigs via nodes creating some complex structures. I want to see the whole rig with all its connections (modifiers, constraints, drivers, children, parenting) as nodes as the whole picture instead of messing with bone layers, selecting each bone to edit constraints, etc. Do you have some plans about that maybe?
There are already addons like Sorcar, Sverchok, Animation nodes etc. They are good but they have performance issues and itās diffcult to work with those in combination with each other.
Did you try to contact blender foundation developpers if they are interested in this?
Have you read function nodes and everything nodes documents by Jacques Luke?
I feel like, if all the developers are united and stick together, they can bring a really good unified node system for the community. Some one has to lead the development.
(This is just a suggestion, I am not even a developer)
Thanks, I am aware of everything nodes and the docs made public already. My approach here is different than what they are trying to do. I am doing a top-down implementation instead of bottom-up. I am trying to focus here on high level functionaly first and then I will take care of low level optimizations and performace.
Thereās a long debate here https://devtalk.blender.org/t/blenders-architecture-concerning-everything-nodes/9888 about this subject if you are interested in more technical details
From what it seems you can utilize both destructive and non-destructive techniques. Is this something that Houdini does as well?
I have some idea for a workflow as well, that I do often, though I still trying to perfect it.
Creating a shape as extruded plane.
Using solidify operator to make it 3D.
Using smooth operator reduce hard corners (Laplacian or Corrective).
[x] Editing geometry ontop of the existing result
Only step [4] is the most difficult, in simple cases I would use a cage mesh operator (or lattice) though, but for finer control it does not work well. I have a test model I created that way that uses about 10 lattice modifiers stacked ontop of the other, however is really bothersome to setup. The correct solution as of now is to bake the operators of the mesh at step [3] and then proceed to [4].
