Check the overview thread for more information about the meeting.
Present
- Dalai Felinto
- Hans Goudey
- Iliya Katueshenock
- Jacques Lucke
- Luis Cherubini
- Mangal K
Since the Last Meeting
- New blog post about the Node Tools, Gizmos and Checkpoints
- Lukas started to implement panels for nodes, starting with the geometry nodes modifier. After building a working prototype, work is now being split to separate pull requests.
- Jacques has started working on internal changes for serial loops.
- Dalai has been working on exploring the designs discussed recently, including making mockups for node panels and changes to node group socket lists.
- Jacques wrote three design proposals, posted on devtalk:
- Hans has been working on getting an initial version of node group operators ready to commit to the main branch.
- New contributor Soeren Schmidt-Clausen finished the new Corners of Edge node.
- Performance changes
- Hans finished some changes that make the delete geometry node over 2-4x faster, or up to 12x faster when there are many vertex groups.
- The
IndexMaskselection refactor continued with a change to improve the performance of inverting selections. - The Sample Nearest Surface node is slightly faster in some cases.
- Leon Schittek improved frame node resizing so that the interactive area doesn’t change size with zooming.
Meeting Topics
- Overview of simulation nodes feedback from feedback thread
- Substeps have been mentioned a lot and might be a good target for 4.0
- There is a performance issue in the timeline that should be fixed
-
#93551: Mesh Normals and Auto Smooth in 4.0
- Luis shares some aspects of his use of custom normals in his daily work
- Because of LODs, it’s important to have watertight, manifold meshes.
- Different meshes end up having different auto smooth angles, which is a pain when joining many meshes.
- Joining will work better with auto smooth as an action, because the sharp edge attributes encode the sharpness (rather than just the angle).
- Transferring normals (as a replacement for the data transfer modifier)
- Setting normals via Geometry Nodes that work in Solid mode requires proper creation of custom normals rather than just generic attributes.
- Because of LODs, it’s important to have watertight, manifold meshes.
- Luis shares some aspects of his use of custom normals in his daily work
- Active attribute status across instancing and joining
- Viewport Shading ‘Attribute’ Option Broken for Instanced Geometry
- Pass on color_attribute metadata through instancing, only for mesh
- render_color_index API is lost after GN modifier
- Solution for now: use the active attribute status from the first instance or mesh input to the join node.
- This won’t give the best behavior in all situations, but it’s predictable and intuitive, so it’s likely a good place to start.
-
Active Camera Node
- Contributor said they may have time in two weeks.
- This is still a target for 4.0, but there is plenty of time to wait still.
- Node group operators menu design
- Current design (using catalogs for menu name and hierarchy) may not scale (though that may be up to the asset creators)
- Pending design
- How to set a node-group as operator?
- A boolean tag on the node tree might work, to say something like “Use this node group as a curve edit mode operator”
- How/if to set which modes to be supported
- For now, only edit mode could be supported, just to be conservative, and to avoid overloading object mode menus
- Eventually object mode should be supported though, to allow replacing operators like “Shade Smooth”
- How to set a node-group as operator?