[Bf-committers] Proposal for unifying nodes

[Daniel Salazar - 3Developer.com]

That is fantastic, I'm a big fan of unification in the nodes (ex: maya
hypergraph) I have no comments about your ideas except I agree
completely on everything. I want to just add a link to a node system
with a great *interface* design (watch the video)

http://aviary.com/tools/peacock

It's design with two areas, one for node connections and a separate
one for the actual settings of each node is something we should adopt,
also the nice multiple inputs mixer could be interesting. As I said,
just interface ideas.

cheers

Daniel Salazar

> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:07:53 +0100
> From: Robin Allen <roblovski at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Bf-committers] Proposal for unifying nodes
> To: bf-committers at blender.org
> Message-ID:
>        <152f35140906141107q267bdaf4g91f106ac3487b2bc at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi all, I hope this is the right list.
>
> After hearing Ton say that nodes might see a recode, and knowing that
> users are sometimes frustrated by Blender's strict separation of tree
> types, I thought about ways to change how nodes are evaluated to let
> users use any nodes in any tree. I've put my ideas up at
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Frr/NodeThoughts . I'd be
> willing to take this project on if people feel the design is up to
> scratch, perhaps developing in a branch akin to bmesh.
>
> Main points:
>
> * Expand nodes' data types from (float, vector, color) to include
> functions and other types
> * Define a shader to be a function of a ShaderCallData
> * Define a texture to be a function of a TexCallData
> * Allow the user to specify any nodetree outputting a shader to be
> used as a material tree; any tree outputting a texture to be used as a
> texture tree; etc.
> * Define implicit conversions allowing nodes (e.g. Invert) to be
> defined once to work on colors, and then be automatically converted to
> work on textures and shaders (since both are defined as functions
> returning colors).
> * Results in an extensible node system: instead of defining a new tree
> type, just define a new data type and some nodes that work on it.
> * No more duplication of code with tiny changes (math, image...)
>
> I'd like to hear any comments or criticisms you might have.
>
> -Rob