2023-07-25 Nodes & Physics Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Check the overview thread for more information about the meeting.

Present

  • Lukas Tönne
  • Jacques Lucke
  • Hans Goudey
  • Iljya Katueshenock
  • Dalai Felinto

Since the Last Meeting

  • Lukas continued work on node panels
  • The Repeat Zone was merged.
  • Node group operators were made an experimental feature until a few more of the features are added.
  • Some performance improvements to the blur node and “no cache” simulation

Meeting Topics

  • Checking in on 4.0 targets
    • Thomas asked the module about a possible extension to the 4.0 timeline, mostly to make the planned breaking changes possible.
    • #105321: Replace legacy instancing panel for 4.0
      • This would be nice to tackle but isn’t essential since it mainly just makes it simpler to improve performance.
    • #109135: New data structures for node group interface declaration
      • It is an important breaking change, needs to keep being prioritized, though it doesn’t necessarily need more time yet.
    • Rotation Socket
      • The design is somewhat stalled, needs buy in from Simon Thommes. This can be discussed next Tuesday.
    • Hans felt rushed for some of these changes, which may become hard/impossible to finish in the next two years after 4.0. The unresolved design questions are important to address.
    • Postponing 4.0 can help other projects, but it is also fine to stick to the current scope and use the extra time for 4.1 targets (or postponed 4.0 targets).

Pull Requests

  • #105023: Geometry Nodes: Separate converting operation nodes in submenus
    • It’s not always clear what is a conversion node and what isn’t (e.g. Volume Cube).
    • Node group assets don’t have a way to specify separators in menus. It might be nice to avoid more divergence in ability between builtin nodes and assets.
    • While it makes some sense, the benefit isn’t large enough to justify the change.
  • #109405: Geometry Nodes: Easing Node
    • Seems reasonable, but needs buy-in from stake-holders.
    • There is general agreement that it would be nicer to implement this as node group assets, but that may not be possible for quite a while (since enum sockets are not supported and aren’t in short/medium term plans). So this is not necessarily blocking, and can be converted then.
    • It will be presented next Tuesday at 15:00 CEST (everyone is welcome).
  • #110240: Add Invert option to Rotate Euler node
    • With rotation sockets wrapping up soon, this should be a separate “Invert Rotation” node.
  • #110251: Add Transform Order to the Transform Geometry node
    • There was agreement that for such specific control we should use separate nodes. The Transform Geometry node is meant to expose a high level control. With matrix nodes in the future, there will be more straightforward ways to build transformations with a specific order.
  • Mapping nodes for features from image texture node in shader editor
    • The image texture node in the shader editor has extra mapping features that aren’t available in geometry nodes yet.
    • The team agreed that the image texture node in geometry nodes should just have the responsibility of sampling images. Geometry-aware coordinate mapping should be dealt with by other nodes.
    • Shipping these as node groups should work well.
  • #109846: Geometry Nodes: Add Quaternion data type to Random Value node
    • The “Quaternion” option in the dropdown should be called “Rotation” though.
    • A slider for “how much to rotate at most” may make the functionality more useful
    • It’s not clear that the random value node handle this at all, since it’s relatively different from the more basic “random value” types. There are likely multiple ways to generate a random rotation, and we didn’t add colors to the node for that reason.
    • A node group that does the same thing would be helpful to see. This would be an easy thing to ship as an “Essentials” asset. Adding assets one at a time is okay in cases like this, especially when we would add it as a builtin node otherwise.
  • #106065: Active Camera Node
    • Andre has rounded up the depsgraph part and will soon finish the marker part then remove the WIP tag

Help Wanted

If you are interested on working on that contact the team (or send a pull request).

  • Search in Compositor
    • Link drag search in the compositor doesn’t support all the features from the other node editors.
      • e.g., if you type “Add” you don’t get the Math → Add node like in the other editors.
    • The order of results also seems “unweighted”, yielding less important results on top.
      • e.g., the normalized Value is the first entry when dragging an Image (the sockets are not even compatible (!)), while the Image Texture could be the first one.
        image

Extraordinary Meeting Pre-SIGGRAPH

1 August, 2023 15:00 CEST

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