Level Set Volume Nodes Feedback and Testing

Oh, right. If the result is a mesh then I don’t see a use for a different name indeed. I may not have thought of all the implications

Hi @HooglyBoogly , It looks promising!! Is any windows build fix planned any soon? Currently I can only see Linux and Mac builds and can’t test it! :sob:

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I don’t even know what Houdini is, so i think i am a good choice for asking how good a naming is, since i am so clueless. You guys often have technical background that spoils your view on things. So if you ask me, yes, “level set” is not very helpful. “Volume surface” is way better, but a bit too long. How about “volume skin”?

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+1 . That makes sense to me! In the tooltip and documentation I would still specify for more technical people that It’s a SDF volume.

I’d vote for consistency with the rest of the industry by calling them SDFs. Signed Distance Fields are pretty common all over the industry, also in shaders, so it might be pretty confusing for people to not make the connection.

I think it would be great if Volumes could have Attributes too, I think there could big overlap there. AFAIK they’re often just used simply as data containers in software like Houdini, storing any sort of value on a voxel. They are efficient and easy to handle. And attributes can offer a lot of control for coloring and controling the volume.

It would be great to get SDF primitives, like we have the geometric primitives that we could combine together to create shapes. Seems like the Sphere is already there!

Having the ability to use Fog as well would be powerful. I find it more flexible to work with mathematically so it’s fit for an environment like the nodes.

Is this implemented in a build already? I’ll try it out for more!

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I do agree that adhering to some standards is good. A layman might not know what a shader is either, but that’s not a compelling reason to call it something else, it’s expected for people new to a certain field or feature to run into new words.
The real difficulty lies in clarifying what it does, where documentation can help, but tooltips, menu organisation and supplied example files even more so!

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I’d also prefer to use standard names here.

Volumes grids are the equivalent of attributes on a mesh already. Attribute editing in geometry nodes still needs to be extended to support volume grids.

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I’ve been working on adding SDF Primitives to the shader nodes here: ⚙ D6464 Shader Nodes: SDF Node (WIP)

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Are 2D SDF possible in OpenVDB?
( Being able to create 3D SDF objects from 2D SDF. Extruding, or Rotate_Extrude)

I look forward for Level Set’s or 3D_SDF’s.

That makes sense as well, as long as features are well documented and easy to discover!

I think the merge node should have options to choose if keep different grids (If it makes sense) and if create a union grid of the two inputs. In that case, the two voxel grids could have different resolution/voxel size, the user should be able to choose to resample based on first or second input’s resolutions, or resample adapting to the one with lower resolution (downsample) or to the one with higher resolution (upsample).

VDB Boolean in Blender?
Yes, please, wrap two, for me and for my best friend!

That’s pretty funny to use!

I think that in a final version there should be a system to avoid freezing blender if the user inputs a very small voxel size or just quickly scrolls the slider (I should be implemented everywhere, and maybe someone already talked about this somewhere else). I don’t really know how that could be achieved from both technical and UX side. A simple solution could be that if blender freezes, just pressing “ESC” should automatically cancel the action and revert like an undo. Of course this implies that a minimal processing power should be reserved to listen tho the ESC key if something goes wrong.

Connecting and disconnecting booleans sometimes crash blender.

I’ll try to play more with this to figure out if some artifacts similar to this:

are simply due to incorrect input settings or they are a bug.

Thanks for the great work @HooglyBoogly !!

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Re T91668* maybe something like this would help (different color/no icon for grid):

I think grids could be analogous to materials in that one must be selected prior to some evaluation, and there may be some named one to choose. Volumes containing level sets would default to an index of 0, both in creation and nodes that sample volumes.

I’m not sure how to handle geometry that has multiple level set grids beyond just not allowing it.

*ninja edit with link