I’ve been using Geonodes in the latest stable 3.0 release and have noticed some things that really mess up performance. Here is a list of them:
Renaming any node re-evaluates that node, in the case of booleans, this is really annoying
Doing anything with the colors of the nodes also re-evaluates them. This is not a good thing at all if we have to change colors (or even enable/disable them)
Booleans in general are very very slow!
Adding a frame around nodes also re-evaluates them along with renaming/changing color/toggling shrink of the frame. Frame nodes have nothing to do with the actual connections so why does it re-evaluate the nodes!!
Any node that isn’t connected to anything also causes entire node tree to re calculate, you have to disable visualization of all nodes for smooth performance.
Geonodes doesn’t seem to store data of nodes, instead recalculates them everytime they are to be updated or viewed (values not necessarily changed). There should be an option to store the data of a node so we don’t have to wait ludicrous amounts of time to revisit a node while working on another system (not connected to that node) or viewing a node in the spreadsheet.
I might update this list later with further use, but for now these things seem to really waste alot of time causing nodes to recalculate. This is especially problematic with boolean or volume work.
I hope these issues are resolved.
Can confirm everything CarbonX95 has said and want to add:
Any addon that uses Scattering with GeoNodes like True Terrain or Scatter 5 can only be used on small (up to 50x50m) meshes. As soon as you use real-world dimensions, Blender lags, freezes, is unresponsive, and usually needs to be closed with process cancellation.
Booleans might be sped up a bit if they introduce the old “fast” boolean algorithm. I believe at the moment geonodes are using only the newer and slower “exact” algorithm.
Most of these issues should be fixed soon by this patch: developer.blender.org/D13246. You can test out a build of it here: builder.blender.org/download/patch/D13246/ to see if it fixes your problems (except the boolean ones). If you notice anything broken, or some updates still happening where they shouldn’t, make sure to add a comment on the patch, so that @jacqueslucke can fix that (it’s a huge patch so it’s easy to miss some things).
This is False, I’ve been scattering gigantic forests with no problems
Perhaps you are working with an enormous instance count without realizing it?
However, when changing value sliders geometry node can be felt significantly less reactive compared to the hair system, and i believe the instance count before blender can be felt laggish is a bit lower than usual, i need to do some tests to confirm.
I can confirm that there a lot of un-necessary evaluation happening from time to time, especially when working with objects/collection pointers
Well it´s true from my experience
But yes, using Scatter 5 Biomes on a 600x400x250m mesh usually result in 6 Mio objects, which apparently are too much for Blender to handle. I understand that, but
a) I would love to know if you use real world dimensions on your gigantic forests too? and
b) I have to find the setting in Scatter 5 that limits the amout of objects scattered from the beginnig (I can only find settings for limiting poly count, but that´s not really the same thing)
PS. This is not a slur or complaing about any Add-On - it´s my personal experience that Blender 3.0 Geo Node scattering gives me more grief than it did in 2.93
Blender will start to lag when near 150k instances are displayed in the raster viewport, the new point display however, can show up to 1million+ points with ease
I would love to know if you use real world dimensions on your gigantic forests too?
Yes, always, of course the grass or other smaller elements, which needs a much higher density will not be able to be shown within the viewport, depending on how big your terrain is
If you’d like to talk about plugins, perhaps here is not the best place to do it Contact me via message or in the BA thread
