2024-09-17 Nodes & Physics Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Check the overview thread for more information about the meeting.

Present

  • Hans Goudey
  • Jacques Lucke
  • Simon Thommes
  • Falk David
  • Iliya Katueshenock
  • Lukas Tönne

Since the Last Meeting

  • Line separators in nodes (commit)
  • More accurate node timings (commit)
  • Speedup joining many geometries (commit)
  • Simplified visualization of internal lazy-function graphs for debugging purposes (extension)
  • Refactor to simplify handling of (anonymous) attributes internally (commit 1, commit 2)

Meeting Topics

  • Integer Math
    • Our reasoning to avoid this before was that we wanted to split the math node. It’s clear at this point that we won’t be able to do that for a while still, and adding one more math node doesn’t make this fundamentally harder.
    • Some of the operations might need renaming, etc. but we agreed it makes sense to move forward with this.
  • Merging Grease Pencil layers
    • For consistency with applying a modifier, this is necessary.
    • Applying a modifier needs to merge layers → different behavior than the join geometry.
    • Allow evaluated Grease Pencil geometry to have multiple layers with the same name. Falk will start by doing this.
    • Rather than adding an option, add a new node that merges layers, called “Merge Layers”.
    • For now this would support merging by name. It should also support merging by group ID (internally we would just convert the name to an ID).
    • Later on this could be converted to a node group if/when it becomes possible to build it.
  • For Each Geometry Element zone
    • Add a geometry output by default.
    • Geometry Element output.
      • There was a lot of discussion about the trade-offs of adding access to single element geometries in the foreach zone.
      • In the end the decision was to add the geometry socket, even though not everyone is super happy with that.
      • Also investigate visualizing the node timings differently if we can detect that there is a lot of overhead.
  • Index in Repeat Zone
    • Call the socket “Iteration”
  • Expose Default Link Socket
    • Not clear that this is the right solution
      • It seems wrong that for some node groups the default socket to link can be somewhere at the bottom.
    • May be better to improve the logic of the insertion to take the link type into account.
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