I have been waiting for this. Really cool.
Here are my thoughts:
For both, Curve thickness and Solidifying/Extruding, “Even thickness” should be the default behavior.
Never did I ever, in the many years of using Blender, did I not turn it on when using the solidify modifier, or wanted it not to work when using 2D curves.
I can’t think of a single reason to ever turn it off (Anyone has any examples?).
If there aren’t any reasons to ever turn it off, then is there a point in having a checkbox at all?
If there are reasons to turn it off, I think it would make sense if the checkbox worked in reverse and be called something like “Profile on joints”.
Btw, I really hope the extrusion node gets even thickness functionality as well.
Thank you for this. Hope it gets into the trunk soon.
Thanks for your feedback FreeMind. There are a few reasons to keep it as a optional. If you look at the limitations, my “Even Thickness” approach prevents the existing curve normal tilt smoothing occuring (specially appreciable on cyclic curves) and could create some extreme twists for cyclic curve extrusion. Also, the original method behaves differently on low angle segments, preventing huge stretch of geometry in some cases. All in all the default behavior should probably be kept as is for backward compatibility reasons.
Of course, even thickness can create some bad results that you do not want… But at that point, you fix your curve instead of doing something else that you do not want (Un-even curve thickness).
Sometimes having even thickness may not matter, and it’s quicker to fix a problem by turning it off for problematic joints, rather than fixing the curve shape. Perhaps the checkbox can be there for such (I guess) rare occasions.
Considering backwards compatibility: I don’t think it being default would impact backwards compatibility. It could be “ON” by default when you add the node, but “OFF” when you load an old file with that node already placed.
This is kind of like how “Light tree” was implemented. It’s “ON” by default on new files, but “OFF” when opening an older file, just so it would render the same.
What stumps me on Geo Nodes is some of these things should be built into the object. It looks like the Blender foundation is leaning on geometry nodes to fix the basic functionality of Blender.
As nodes are being added, shouldn’t the objects get fixed as well to match the nodes? Does anyone know what the developer’s strategy is here?
It seems my problem is actually caused by the fillet curve node, but here it is anyway:
Long ago I watched a C4D tutorial where the artist make some letters with curved lines and also with straight lines and automatically smoothed the corners. Then they added thickness to those lines, applied a glow material, duplicated them and made them thicker and applied a glass material. It was flawless neon signage in seconds, including having rounded caps on the end of the curves if they were needed.
This Geometry node setup fixes what Blender default curve can’t do at the moment. So adding a checkbox to the default object to do what the geometry node setup is doing, would be a fix.
Another example is curves have a random twist issue that needs to be fixed. So again instead of fiding the problem, a geometry node was introduced to tackle this issue.
Hope that helps shed some more light on the issue. Bug reports have been filed for these issues.
@AdamEarle, the inner workings of Curves are being completely revamped. This effort was initiated for curves in Geo Nodes (new hair particles etc.) and will later be rolled out throughout Blender, at which point the regular Curve objects will also benefit from the features like Even Thickness, Fillet etc., outside Geo Nodes. In the meantime, that would be double the work for dev and maintenance so please bear with us, this is anything but a workaround!
Also, the approach I took may not be final both from a usability and implementation perspective but with your feedback and the one from others I hope we can come to a good compromise!
A bit off topic.
Geometry nodes will eventually fully replace the legacy hair/particle systems. I think, same should happen for curve geometry from the object data tab and updating them is a waste of time.
Generating geometry from the base curve is a modifier thing, not an object data thing, so it should’ve always been a modifier.
Now that it can be done with geometry nodes, and even better than ever before, I think this legacy feature can be removed already.
It would break backward compatibility, sure, but I think such legacy feature cleanups every once in a while are good for blender in the long run.
P.S. “Path Animation” should be a constraint… Blender has some weird inconsistencies sometimes…
Not knowing when, makes users behave like a “while loop” constantly checking for fixes. You can only imagine the frustration that will cause.
Loose timelines can still be set to let users know what’s going on. This should help reduce frustration from myself and other community members with the same interest.
General announcements saying, this when we would like to have this done by, here are our milestones and this is where we are expecting to bump into issues. The road doesn’t have to be unknown and walked alone.
I can only imagine that the greater community may even want to chime in and help more. Juuuuuust a little more care and love.
There’s none at this point. I guess I have to migrate the feature to the new development platform Gitea in order to request a new build… bear with me! Which platform are you on?
