Improve Cycles/EEVEE For Procedural Content Creation

In terms of 4D noise (evolving noise), I don’t think we have discussed which nodes should be able to do this. My vote goes from the Noise node, and the Voronoi node. Both are staples and can be used to produce so many effects. I would kill to have those be 4D!

A seed value for the Random -> Info output would be nice to have.

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Throwing it here… the algorithm that creates ocean movements in the Ocean modifier into a node to be used as shading displacement???

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Wow… good catch!
It’s an awesome idea :slight_smile:

Those will be the first ones to get 4D. :slight_smile:

Not sure what the UI for this should be, perhaps white noise will fix this. I will get back to you this friday.

I will look into it.

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On the topic of randomness provided by the Object Info node, a few things that came to mind in light of recent suggestions here.

Per mesh element randomness as suggested by @JuanGea would indeed be welcome if possible to implement, perhaps provided by the Geometry Info node instead.
Random seed value as suggested by @SimonStorl-Schulke would also be nice, if easy to add, here is a mockup of what it could look like.


Please excuse the crude mockups

Not sure if this is within scope, but one other nice addition to the random output of the Object Info node would be a “From Dupli” option, so randomness would be kept consistent across multiple object inside one instance of a collection.


  • Left is original object
  • Middle is the current Collection Instance behavior (notice undesirable color variations within same group)
  • Right would be the desired outcome when “From Dupli” was ticked (notice consistent color within same collection instance).

I’ve seen your tweets, great work so far, keep it up :slight_smile:

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can you get this shipped by default with Blender ?

This will be included in master if the GSOC reaches good port and core devs review and accept it, but I think that’s the objective from the begining :slight_smile:

I have to say that I am strongly against adding a seed value to the info node. It is confusing because it only affects a single output. I still don’t know what is the best way to fix this, so I will get back to you after I have given it more thought.

I don’t know this works yet, so I will look into it.

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It might make sense to add a Random node, with seed and options to control what to randomize by. If you can randomize by e.g. object and hair curve, then I guess you want to be able to get a random value based on both or either individually, so those could make most sense as checkboxes. Being able to directly specify the range of random values would also be convenient in the same node I guess.

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Good idea. Seems reasonable.

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I second this, this has been missing in the Blender viewport for a long time.

I think Textures Nodes System will be back on development once Evrything Nodes starts to rise within Blender.

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Oh, okay thanks!! I still believe this should come with Blender by default though.

If you do go this route, could you please make the output RGB instead of greyscale? One big limitation of the current object info node random output is that there is just not enough of a range of values to do things like bake an ID map for Substance Painter. One could always convert RGB to BW, but not the other way around.

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Hi, I think this wasn’t mentioned here, but on the textures panel, there are some other kind of noises such as wood or marble, that were left from blender internal and are still accesible to modifiers such as displacement. They can’t be used on cycles/eevee (Not easily at least) so would it be possible to port them to them?

I would also like to point out these maps that can be used on Max, and whose source code is available on Github http://www.ylilammi.com/2013/09/berconmaps/ (I also think some of them try to match some of V-Ray’s procedural maps)

Also 3ds max has some procedural maps that could be useful, either black and white:
Cellular, Dent, Noise, Smoke, Speckle, Stucco and waves.

Or colored ones:
Advanced wood, Marble, Splat, Perlin Marble, Wood and Splat.

Which you can look more in depth here

Yeah, I addmit it, I haven’t used them all but I’m crazy and I want to have every single procedural map available on every other 3D app and render,. I’m just mentioning the ones I know just in case it’s easy to implement some of them, or someone to recreate them with what is already there since some are not just pure noises.

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@xdanic please don’t spread viruses in the forum

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Actually Texture nodes are going to be fazed out. I believe the plan is to replace the functionality with shading nodes. You can see that over here: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Modules

As said above, this kind of stuff in all likelihood will be ported to the shading editor so I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing we want to be asking Omar to do as it is already planned.

The only concern is that those noises in the texture panel have a bunch of different base settings ie: Blender original,Perlin original, Improved Perlin,Voronoi F1 to F4,Vornoi Crackle and Cell noise. I don’t know if we want to keep all these or discard them because they can be achieved relatively easily with other nodes. For instance, cell noise can now be achieved with the new “snap” method on the vector math node.

What I’m trying to say is that while I don’t think Omar should do this, as it is planned, but it may affect design of things currently? I’m not sure. But for instance, if we are adding 4D capability to the standard “noise texture”, would it have to use all those different base noise versions now, or in the future, or just a couple or none etc?. I’m not a developer so I don’t know which direction these things will ultimately take.

Is possible to make realtime pointiness in EEVEE? Or maybe Cavity / Edge decetion node? Would be great to mix textures and shaders in realtime.

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