[Bf-committers] Proposal for unifying nodes

Brecht Van Lommel brecht at blender.org
Wed Jun 17 14:21:55 CEST 2009


Hi,

Leaving aside the discussion if you should treat a texture similar to a
bitmap, the main feature to me seems to be that in a functional design
you can create "textures", "materials", "modifiers" on the fly. Without
it you would have to create an actual blender texture, material or
modifier node group. Both designs still allow you to build the same node
networks that give the same result, there is just a restriction on what
you can do in a single node tree.

Personally I still prefer that restriction over introducing more types
of inputs and outputs. To me there is nothing wrong with creating an
actual blender material when you want a material. If you want to take
advantage of the types being shader objects for example, you still need
a special input in the node that can use that object instead of just a
color. The equivalent thing would be to give the node a property that
takes a material datablock.

So in my opinion, this is mostly a UI discussion, nothing is
fundamentally lost or gained by doing it one way or the other, just like
you can do the same thing in imperative/OO/functional languages.

On Wed, 2009-06-17 at 07:32 -0400, Yves Poissant wrote:
> Unfortunately, my experience showed me that trying to explain the benefits 
> of functional programming to someone who have never used such languages is 
> truely a lost cause. The fundamental knowledge onto which the concepts can 
> stick are just not there and this fundation can only be built after several 
> months of functional programming experience. All I can suggest to oponents 
> is to try to keep an open mind.

I have worked with functional programming languages, and see the
benefits, but this is not about developers. Implementation is mostly
irrelevant for this discussion in my opinion, both approaches will work
fine at the level. It is about the UI for users, what the effects of
such a functional design will be and if they will actually benefit from
it.

Brecht.




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