When did Blender first get a node system? I’ve seen screenshots from 2.4x where it existed.
What I’m looking for is the original specification/design documentation for the node system. I’m working toward an understanding of how node systems are built and I’d like to get a better understanding of how it was done in Blender.
If you haven’t already seen them, you might find some of the documents on everything nodes and particle nodes at the bottom of this page interesting. I think they’re mainly written by Jacques Lucke.
I know I’m thankful for all the documentation he’s been writing about the new system.
Edit: I forgot to link the page: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Source
That wasn’t a node system, it was the Oops schematic (took a lot of digging to find!): https://archive.blender.org/wiki/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Data_System/The_Outliner/
Ah-ha! No wonder I was having trouble. Thanks for providing the proper name, Joseph.
In light of that, I have a new question: Where can I find the OOPS Schematic design docs? Googling isn’t helping.
Thanks for the link, Hoogly. I did find those. They seem to be about how to expand the node system, though.
Honestly, there’s probably no way to find that without contacting some of the original developers of the feature (which was probably just Ton).
But remember, the node isn’t the UI or the noodles. It’s a bit of data in some code. All OOPS did was visualize the data (it looks suspiciously like Maya’s hypergraph) that was already in the Blend file. So in that case, the node structure was the Blend file structure. There are plenty of design documents about this.
3D apps are built around dependency graphs, which are themselves Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG).
I happen to be a user from that time… the OOPS is the current “Outliner”. It was just a graphical way to see your objects hierarchy.