[Bf-committers] Proposed Noise Modifier

[metalliandy]

Campbell,

I can understand why you don't want to bloat Blender by adding a bunch 
of redundant or unnecessary modifiers, but I really don't think that 
situation is true in this case.

I just want to be clear that I have only ever use the 
displacement/texture workflow out of necessity because no other solution 
exists in Blender and wouldn't use it again if the dedicated modifier 
was available.
The problem is that the displacement modifier is extremely slow to 
update results to the point where it is probably the slowest modifier in 
Blender that I personally use. I would rather sculpt the noise in ZBrush 
much of the time because tweaking values is such an ordeal. :P

In any case a displacement modifier isn't a good place to have a 
dedicated noise function, which should be reserved for actual 
displacement from height maps etc. This is what people expect from 
displacement to start with and using it to generate something as simple 
as random noise is a super hacky and inefficient workflow which we 
should really be trying to move away from as Blender continues to mature 
into an application that is taken seriously in production. People won't 
be looking in the displacement modifier for a noise function because its 
not the logical place for it to be.

Rather than adding new features (and more code) to the already slow 
displacement modifier, wouldn't it be much more efficient and more 
obvious to the user to have a dedicated noise modifier for the purposes 
of generating noise on a mesh? Ofc, the displacement modifier can always 
be rewritten to make it faster at a later date in order to increase its 
performance too.

It's much more preferable to have 5 dedicated modifiers that are 
specifically designed for one job each (and do them well) than 1 
modifier that does 5 jobs poorly.

Cheers,

-Andy

On 16/02/2014 00:55, Campbell Barton wrote:
> If displace is slow and setting up textures is a hassle, maybe its
> better if we have a way to select between different displacement
> methods [Constant | Noise | Texture].
>
> Prefer not to add new modifiers just because existing ones could be
> implemented better.
>
> Also, best link to the patch, otherwise everyone needs to search for it:
> https://developer.blender.org/D320
>
> Added initial review.
>
> On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Paulo José Amaro <pauloup at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Patrick, this is one of the most wanted features I ever seen. Also It's
>> amazing to see how well you did the UI for this modifier.
>>
>> My suggestion is to include another noise options from F-Curve's Noise
>> Modifier, like "phase", "scale" and "depth". I'm not sure if they are
>> applicable to a mesh modifier, but I hope they are just the same options
>> applied to space domain, not time.
>>
>> Also it would be interesting to provide a seed interpolation option. This
>> could be done using the average between top and floor functions of the seed
>> value. Lets say seed "1.6" is 40% seed "1" and 60% seed "2". So it would be
>> possible to animate smoothly from a seed to another.
>>
>> Thank you for doing this! I hope I can test this patch... it will be my
>> first attempt with patches
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>
>