2021-01-25 Geometry Nodes Feedback by Andy Goralczyk

Meeting to gather another round of feedback from the animation studio pipeline perspective.
Participants: Andy Goralczyk, Dalai Felinto, Simon Thommes

Overall Impressions

  • The priority now should be to polish/sort out any instancing related issue.
  • It is already more powerful in terms of rotation.
  • Andy is figuring out how to do things (e.g., rotate point, align so that is aligned with an axis).

Issues

Instancing Collections:

  • Miss option to have object count (e.g., T84608).
    • Current workarounds may suffice, but for future cases will be a problem.
    • Simon proposed a new workaround where the collection to be instanced has duplicated of its objects based on the required count.

Attributes

  • What is the name for builtin attributes?
  • Hard to find which attributes to add.
  • How to keep track of the attribute values.

Alignment:

  • Interpolation of normals when (implemented, still need check if Andy is happy).
  • World space without reference object.
  • (Dalai explained to Andy why this is not in the current design, but some sort of “self” node may help with that).

Texture Sampling:

  • No way of going into the texture (the plan is to mimic the displacement modifier behavior).
  • Generated mapping coordinates would be helpful.

Next Targets

  • Tree leaves can still be in the agenda.
  • Object info node needs “make real”.
  • Bark modeling will be done by shaders.
  • Procedural modeling should focus on advanced array modifiers and hard surfacers needs.

Dynamic Particles

“What is the tornado scene of the Sprites movie?” A reference to “Cosmos Laundromat”, the scene where we spend all our VFX budget and where a lot of pain is expected from.

The closest to this would be the drowning shot. That said there are other scenes that are could use particles in a way or another:

  • Note: Most of the stuff they need can be done with Blender.
  • Animation with flowmap
  • Melting is already possible.
  • Campfire can use mantaflow unless the project goes to a more stylized look, which is yet to be defined.
8 Likes

So this means that we will not have nodal modeling tools for now, but do you have a time frame for that?

1 Like

Correct me if I’m wrong, but right now the asset manager will only allow marking as assets datablocks which are within the same Blender file? Will the functionality for adding assets to other repositories (such as other blender files) of assets be added some point?

Otherwise it’s quite a time consuming process for each asset to go find the repository, open it up, append the asset, mark it as an asset, save the repository, then go back to my original project, etc.

4 Likes

This is mainly Andy’s opinion on the topic. No decision has been made in that regard yet.

Hi, the asset browser project has no direct relation with the geometry-nodes. It has its own communication channels.

1 Like