Many people who aren’t exactly Blender forum(s) lurkers who learn that Blender has Geometry Nodes that are production ready and useful for instancing will probably sooner or later run into a case where they want to, in some way, modify the instanced geometry after it’s been placed. It doesn’t get much more basic than that. If even something as simple doesn’t work properly, then I hardly see how calling it production ready is appropriate.
I’ve tried to use GN several times on some of the production ready tasks, and I always failed.
More specifically:
I tried to use them to distribute branches on a tree trunk mesh. I failed because I could not drive the width of branch base with the weight map from the tree trunk mesh without destroying UVs on the branches.
I tried to utilize GN’s Attribute Texture node to create simple triplanar displacement modifier. I failed because despite doing my best to use as few nodes as possible, the mesh performance was so poor that it was not worth it compared to legacy modifiers.
Production Ready implies at the very least reliability for the feature set that’s already there, but the reality is far from that yet.
And all it takes to turn this all around is to stop claiming production readiness and just say it’s experimental, which is a lot more appropriate for the current state of things.
It is,
it’s not fair for blender to claim this when directly competing with other software.
it’s also completely misleading with people who are professionals working in the VFX industry.
there’s “ready” in “production-ready”.Meaning that it is a mature technology ready for mass adoption.
Saying that 2.92 geonode is production-ready would be similar to an architect saying that his house is ready for people to settle-in while there’s still massive work/rework being done. It do not make any sense Imo and wouldn’t be fair in the housing market to say such. If the house wouldn’t be given for free this semantic misintepretation would be taken very seriously.
at least that’s my interpretation of things of course
beware this is off topic,
perhaps we shall create dedicated topic for this subject
or perhaps a moderator could split it into another topic @moderators
?
There is a certain difference between something that can be used in production and production-ready terms.
In practice is incredibly hard to create something completely useless or something completely useful.
Industry already is full of solutions that can be used somehow.
Yes, exactly. Many people use experimental features in production. That’s fine. After all, brave folks who use it in production to find bugs and workflow issues is how the feature eventually becomes production ready.
The only difference here is it that not calling it production ready doesn’t imply it can be relied on, which can cause lots of issues to lots of people, and can end up costing time and money. Occasionally even failed jobs.
They expected it to be better than it actually was. That was clearly a mistake and I am sure they are going to be more careful in the future with major new functionality, e.g. by having a few iterations through official releases before calling it production ready.
It is unfortunate, but mistakes happen. The line where something is considered ready is surprisingly difficult to spot. On one side we have the situation we are currently in, on the other side, there are overengineered solutions where it is not unlikely they don’t meet the production requirements.
Hi everyone. I got enough feedback on the proposal itself. And now this is going off topic. Since I have already another iteration for the design, I will close this for now.