Unreal Blueprints & Houdini nodes in Blender!

[H4nnes]

Hello, I’m excited to share that I’m working on a new addon.
Bringing Unreal’s Blueprints to Blender (a generic node based scripter)

if you want to try the beta leave a reply in the comments

Purpose

Empower artists to easily create a pipeline or workflow.
e.g export pipeline, validation workflow, …

latest progress image:

Support cross dcc pipelines

(long term goal)
The node graph shows your pipeline across apps. ( Blender, maya, max, substance, …)
You double click on a node, and it opens up a sub node-graph. with the steps for just that dcc.

But Blender already has geometry nodes?

The difference with geometry nodes, is that this will work on anything. not just on meshes.
E.g. a node to create a new scene, a node to make a cube, a node to add a material. …

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Check out my other add-ons on my GitHub profile

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(Couldn’t find where to post WIP code and usually I only post after release so posting here for now.
will do a release in a few weeks .)

[ulf3000 (Alexander Mehler)]

ambitious project , looking forward to it

[H4nnes]

combined my first & second posts, so I can keep the top post updated with latest info

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Original first post

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Hello, I’m excited to share that I’m working on a new addon.
Bringing Unreal’s Blueprints to Blender (a generic node based scripter)

Purpose

Empower artists to easily create a pipeline or workflow.
e.g export pipeline, validation workflow, …

The difference with geometry nodes, is that this will work on anything. not just on meshes.
E.g. a node to create a new scene, a node to make a cube, a node to add a material. …

Support cross dcc pipelines

(long term goal)
The node graph shows your pipeline across apps. ( Blender, maya, max, substance, …)
You double click on a node, and it opens up a sub node-graph. with the steps for just that dcc.

First progress sneak peak

references

• Unreal Blueprints
• BiFrost
• Houdini
• Max creation graph
• Blender geometry nodes
• Blender material editor
• Blender compositor

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second post

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• basic execute is working, nodes run their inputs and dependencies
• added option to create nodes from python methods (Dynamic slots from kwargs)
• dark theme, more consistent look
  
  

next:

• create a bunch of test nodes to stress test exec logic and dynamic node generation.
• support groups (graphs within graphs)

[H4nnes]

• added operator nodes.
• support UI update during long commands
• use green yellow red outline for nodes in progress, warning, error.

[Senhor]

This is really ambitious indeed, I legit wish you the best cause this is absolute bananas and game changer for Blender, definitively something to invest a lot into!

[H4nnes]

Got it to run in Blender

[CharlesNG48900 (Charles)]

This really looks cool! Extremely ambitious and I love it!
Just to piggyback on this a bit…but how possible is it to create a Blender engine like the Houdini engine for Unreal in such a way that if I set up a procedural system using geometry nodes, I could transfer the same to Unreal and be able to edit parameters and even edit maybe a curve that controls the scattering and procedural nature?

[H4nnes]

it sounds like you want to

1. create a procedural system in both Blender (geo nodes) & Unreal.
2. have both of these systems read from the same input file (e.g. a json)
3. when you edit a curve or parameter, save to that file. and reload in both systems.

This should be doable with this node based tool, but it will require you to create the procedural system in both Blender and Unreal.

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update 2:

• we now have a working create cube node
  
  

[CharlesNG48900 (Charles)]

yeah, that’s pretty much it…basically, having geometry nodes run and update in real time Unreal the way it would in Blender…so if say, I have a geometry node setup that creates a picket fence from a curve…I could apply the setup to a curve in Unreal and have it do the same exact thing as it would in Blender.

so instead of having to save everytime I update in Blender…I just have geometry nodes working in Unreal without the need to have Blender running…

[H4nnes]

• dynamically create nodes for all mesh operators (think maybe 100-200 nodes)
• need to make some UI for the datanodes so I can test the input properly. create cube seemed to work.

[H4nnes]

• fixed kwarg parsing for operators
• found a bug in blender while working on default kwarg value parsing, reported it
  • added small hack to work around this bug
• added string operators
• since i now have working datatype nodes: a demo creating a cube with nodes
  

[BluePrintRandom]

is this rooted in C++ or py?

[Coverop]

This is a very ambitious project.

But I wonder how the gameplay related logic can be recreated in Blender to Unreal?

[H4nnes]

is this rooted in C++ or py?

• every node is a py class.
• input slots are attributes
• the default output slot is the return value of node’s method (return value of __call__)

[H4nnes]

But I wonder how the gameplay related logic can be recreated in Blender to Unreal?

You want to make gameplay in Blender?
It’s possible with an event loop, but the system was not designed for this.

Instead it’s meant for a single execution of a pipeline or workflow.
if i make it flexible enough you just might be able to.

[aditiapratama (Aditia A. Pratama)]

Hello, it’s very nice project. Would love to become beta tester.

Cheers,
Aditia

[BluePrintRandom]

Upbge logic nodes already do this *

Check the fork upbge. We have a game loop, you can uncheck “undo at exit” and its basically an uber modal operator.

[H4nnes]

Wow Upbge looks cool, a Blender game engine. I’m not familiar with it and will have to check it out Upbge docs.
I noticed that it is a fork of Blender, so this won’t work in vanilla Blender, is that correct? Perhaps that’s where this project could help artists.

[BluePrintRandom]

UPBGE rebases on blender master like every few days, builds are done sporadically,

experimental build is based on blender 4.1x

[brenderbroli]

Incredible @H4nnes are you still working on this?