ICE is coming on Everything nodes. Don´t worry. Will land somewhere at the end of 2020 as solid…
I guess if your video will show how useful (toggle) Sticky keys are, I guess it will pickup the interest around here.
Material manager is a thing of the past. Ever since the introduction of blueprints in U4, every package out there is pursuing realtime shaders. Maybe you´d like to check how that progresses. We have that on Blender through eevee. (new math nodes just landed on 2.81 experimental this monday).
I think Everything Nodes would be the first step to create a similar thing to ICE. I would not say it is ICE.
But on a related subject. part of why the Interactive part of an “Interactive Creative Environment” works is due to Softimage’s GigaCore engine. Blender would choke trying to do some of the stuff ICE could do in real time.
Blender’s ability to handle data has to be fixed before it can accomplish an ICE equivalent.
@Richard_Culver, other than the performance, what shortcomings can you see in Everything Nodes compared to ICE? I haven’t had a chance to look into it properly, and I’m rather curious. I develop a sort-of-competing system called Flakes (remember that? It has been a while ; the thread and the video are really outdated), and I’m kind of trying to assess if it’s still needed or wanted in Blender. The project was a bit stale during my master’s degree, but it’s well back on track now. Funnily enough my ETA is also around late 2020.
My point of contention with node systems has always been, that they tend to be domain specific systems with highly opinionated architectures that serve very particular purposes. Flakes is entirely generic programming language with no such restrictions. How everything works depends entirely on how the modules are built. E.g. we might have several entirely different particle systems with wildly different governing logic structures.
The problem with integrating something like that to Blender is that everything has to go through these really clumsy low performance interfaces. I also really wish they’d address that before building these grand systems on top of the old core.
Paul Smith “pooby” has been a real champion for ICE. And there are still a lot of Softimage users around.
What I could contribute would be more on a very high level. In essence they are trying to achieve the same thing.
Its just that ICE is/was already an advanced tool. And a few tools have been written using it.
Lagoa
Ice Rigging
Ice Modeling
Syflex on ICE.
All of this was available out of the box in Softimage. I still own it by the way. But have not used it in years.
The only thing I have seen that comes close or surpasses ICE is Houdini.
And although you could say the goal is the same in Blender, the level at which ICE was developed was quite far.
So I guess, like you say. The core language has to be there on an equal level with everything. In ICE this was so. All systems were talking the same basic language, Be that rigging, dynamics, particles or meshes.
I don’t know the in depth plans with this in Blender. So I can’t be that great of a help.
Ok, fair enough. Since you said it’s not quite ICE, I figured you might have deeper understanding of what’s coming to Blender. I should say I used ICE quite extensively for some time. Autodesk buying Softimage was actually the original motivation behind the Flakes project, since they clearly didn’t have the best of intentions for it.
I would stay cautiously optimistic about Everything nodes. Obviously we are lagging over a decade behind the commercial packages, but once we’re there, we’re there for good. A lot of people jumped ship to Houdini, but who knows what’s going to happen to it in the long run. I’d rather slowly build a solid (and free) foundation that can’t just be yanked off by some big company on a whim.
If it turns out to be really good, people might build all those things pretty quickly. If it turns out to be crap…well, I’ll just have to figure out some workaround for the performance barrier for Flakes. I could probably just implement an external viewport system that can render everything in real time and sync things to blender as needed. It won’t work for everything, but definitely does for things like particles, mesh animation, modifiers, cloth/hair simulation and such like. I might have to do that anyway when we get to things like 3d-texture painting, since I highly doubt Blender nodes will have that kind of low-level control.
hei @anvilSoup I notice that you are an expert,
I think you should take a look at this thread, those of the particles will be the first piece that will be completed of what will be “everithyng nodes” …
; the thread and the video are really outdated), and I’m kind of trying to assess if it’s still needed or wanted in Blender. The project was a bit stale during my master’s degree, but it’s well back on track now. Funnily enough my ETA is also around late 2020.