This May be something strange to request, but I’ll try to request it anyway.
Basically I’m trying to Create a new alternative for people to create good motion graphics in Blender, a new lightweight particle system using nodes. (More infos: https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/cBbbbc/).
I already Created the nodes and the execute mechanism, and I am creating the physics algorithms.
This idea is like nothing ever done before, so it may be a little hard to code, but, I’m basically talking about a new compositor node.
Why a compositor Node?
I tought that given the fact that “Halo” material isn’t ‘physically right’, so isn’t possible (or it isn’t a good idea to implement it) in a path-tracing engine like Cycles, it may not be suitable for a material node, and also, it would not need any object to be displayed, it would be better as a compositing node.
How would it work?
It would have only one option, a stringProperty, containing the path to the file cache. The file cache, generated by the code I’ve already written would have a structure like this:
Frame X:
particle: {location, color, size, etc]
particle: {location, color, size, etc}
The node would have a button To Render The particles and will will have a red background if the rendered frame is different from the current_frame (so if the render is outdated). And will output a color Socket.
The Node would render a particle at the given location, with the given color and size on an alpha background.
This is the basic idea.
Maybe The node Would also contain the slider that were present in old Blender (2.79) Halo Material settngs (so Hardness, Alpha and Add), but it’s a secondary Thing.
I’m willing to code the node by myself not to make developers loose time, but I have really little experience of c++ and I also am completely missing the way to render points as circle in a 3d space.
So, hope you’ll like the idea, and maybe take it into consideration.