I saw Node Tools on Blender Today and had a play around with them myself and I think they have a lot of really great potential, especially if the intent is to work them into active tools as described earlier.
One thought I had though - and this may be somewhat out of scope, my apologies if that’s the case - is I’d like to be able to add new items to the Add > Mesh menu in object mode using nodes. I got the idea when I saw Pablo demonstrating Node Tools by just replacing the current geometry with a sphere. I have, for example, a custom box which is like the cube primitive except that it allows you to set the origin point and different dimensions for x, y, and z:
As you can imagine, I implemented that with a python script addon which works fine but was a bit of a hassle (especially if you’re not used to scripting Blender). To me this seems like exactly the kind of thing that nodes could tackle quite well (at least for many common cases) and I see a lot of overlap between this and the Node Tools feature (the main difference I guess is that you would ignore the geometry input).
Does this sound like something worth investigating? Or is it perhaps too separate from what Node Tools are trying to accomplish?
I assumed that would be the case, but I think it’s really confusing people. Because Tools and Operators are not terms you only hear in Blender, in other softwares too those distinctions exist. Especially for people who mainly use tool-oriented softwares like Adobe ones it is really confusing. Tool, by its purest definition, implies something you use to to operations, hence the confusion.
I remember when workshop happened there was talk about also creating node tools, actual tools that would be exposed in toolbar when modifier is in the scene, such as flow map paint tool, or mesh fracture tool. Having that in mind as well there would definitely come time when GN devs would also need to differenciate between what we have now and what is planned, and if current system keeps name ‘Tool’, you’d have to come up with something new for actual tools, and break naming conventions in Blender even more.
I think you would benefit from knowing that they’re operators. They’re node setups that execute one-time operation on object, instead of modifier with properties you can tweak. Imagine how you have Triangulate modifier (that is regular geonodes), and Triangulate operator in Edit Mode (that is new GN Tools)
Yes, absolutely! We explicitly left out object mode in 4.0 because it made the whole project a bit more risky, and pushed the organization issues even further. But as a next step, exposing tools in object mode makes sense.
Another complicating factor is past designs for procedural primitives. Imagine adding the a primitive cube, getting the redo panel, etc, but it actually adds an object with a geometry nodes modifier that generates the cube. When you go into edit mode you would get the option to apply the first generator modifier. I’m sure both features can exist, I’d just like to keep in mind the procedural primitives goal too.
The idea was that an active tool node group would just be a tool node group with a few more things configured (icon, possibly properties visible in headers), not really a separate concept. But that’s basically what active tools are in Blender anyway-- modal operators with a few extra things configured.
I mean “operator” equally as “coded” or “noded”; as an abstraction between the mouse and the literal architecture producing the result.
Clearly, even the way we’re not even able to agree on how we feel about describing under the hood shows there’s an issue with the word “operator” for this feature.
When I write some code to stick a button in the user interface, I’m creating an operator. In artistic use, I would not tell someone to click on the view ink operator to activate the feature. I would tell them to click the ink button.
There is something odd about Node Tools for sculpt mode.
We can create new geometry. But using a Multires modified mesh is common sculpting practice.
How does creating new geometry from a custom sculpt tool suppose to work with a Multires modifier?
Since the node tools rely on asset library to be reusable, is there finally some way to reuse the node tools between the scenes? I mean they won’t be very useful if the user has to either recreate them for every new scene or manually be appending them to another blend file open in separate blender instance al the time.
That’s not how it works. If you are currently working on a 1.5GB complex blender scene, you are not going to dump that into your asset folder to reuse one tool which has ~2kb in data size.
If you came up with your tool in the middle of a complex scene, you’d have to cut it out of that scene first before adding it to the user asset directory. Which is still a bit convoluted, but I assume that’s the recommended workflow. This, or create tools in a blank scene in the first place and save it there. I guess there could be a one-click solution “save asset in user directory”. Is that what you mean ?
Yes, pretty much. Asset Library has a huge issue with user having to always interrupt their current job and do distracting chores to make asset reusable between files. The decision for Node Tools to use Asset Library as a means of storing and categorizing tools means Node Tools now inherits this huge issue.
That can be done with python. Select assets and send them to the existing .blend file in your User Libraries folder. I think there already are some addons for that. I considered them, but I’m too careful about those things, I’d rather manually do it and make sure
So, how do I include Repeat Zone in tools? I am doing simple Extrude selection with Repeat Zone on 8 iterations. My idea is that I want face to be extruded once, then top face selected again, extruded, and like that for 8 times. Instead, when one extrusion happens, every new face is selected and those are extruded, resulting in this monstrosity
Oh so you can plug something in output and it appears in input? Man I’ve never used Repeat Zone before that’s so cool. I was trying to plug node in itself
