Geometry Nodes development process

Dalai, Jacques and Hans talk about Geometry Nodes development process. How it started and pivoted, and how the experiences of geometry nodes helped the hair project and to define the priority for other satellite projects in Blender.
Blender Conference 2022
2022-10-27 14:00 at the attic.

[@dasisntablet9069]

There have been a lot of amazing improvements to blender recently, but for me, the one that really surprised me was the power and accessability of geometry nodes. As a technical person and software developer i thought i kind of knew where it was going in the beginning (which would have already been very useful), but it has become so much more than i could have imagined to be possible with a reasonable UI. It really worked out well. Thanks blender developers!

[@GaryParris]

Excellent, congrats Blender Devs, we appreciate you all!

[@opti12]

Really impressed with the management of the projects, along with the expertise this is a team creating digital wonders at the speed of light!

[@TripTilt]

yay, I made it into a bcon talk without even being there. I made that chili generator in geonodes shown @ 31:36 I'm very excited for all things to come to blender and geonodes \o/ and there are so many more talks coming... have fun on the bcon :)

[@DanielPartzsch]

I can't express how happy and grateful I am for geometry nodes. Big props to the developers and contributors for this wonderful piece of software.

[@fakecubed]

There were some early stumbles, but it's been amazing seeing geometry nodes develop and what we have now is nothing short of revolutionary. The way I use Blender now, compared to when I first got into it, has radically changed. I always go straight to geometry nodes. And each subsequent release has only gotten better, unlocking new functionality I hadn't thought I'd ever want but became suddenly very necessary. It's my main workflow now, and even those times it takes me a little longer to do something compared to modeling in edit mode, just the fact that I can iterate on a procedural model over and over again non-destructively means I'm making better art. Really, that's what it's all about. The more creative decisions I can make, and get instant feedback on, the better. My time is much better spent doing something I can adjust later than on something I'd need to start completely over to change. There's some stuff I know is coming down the pipe that I am very excited about with nodes, and I hope we'll get to see that soon. So, keep up the amazing work. Thanks to all the developers at Blender Foundation who have worked on geometry nodes, all the Blender Studio artists using it and providing that feedback to devs to make it better, and everyone who has contributed code and design ideas to it from the community.

[@Kram1032]

~ 44:00 brush nodes? YESS!! All the nodes. Nodes for Everything. Everything-Nodes, please! Brush Nodes will be useful for every single area that uses a brush right now: Sculpting, Texture Painting, and Grease Pencil at the very least. Probably more things. And if you can share stuff between geometry nodes, material nodes, sculpt nodes, and, eventually particle and physics nodes, that will be *huge*

[@sonario6489]

Brush Nodes would honestly be my first ever time doing anything with sculpt mode.

[@3d-illusions]

Thanks for the presentation, was really good 👍 The biggest thing I think is missing, is the rest of Blender being able to use the attributes instead of still only accepting vertex groups, when this is addressed we'll be firmly in Houdini territory. Data visualisation in the viewport would be nice too, in particular being able to display the attribute ID together with attribute values as floats/vectors above the domains (verts, faces, edges). And of course object/mesh domain attributes for storage of single values. An other important thing would be attribute capture from the viewport, so the user could paint attribute values directly in the viewport rather than only being able to populate values with nodes. Something like a capture attribute from viewport node with a capture button so that it only updates manually rather than every frame. This would allow technical people to make tools for artistic people, exposing the capture attribute buttons to the modifier's front end. Maybe clicking it could open up weight paint mode, and when finished painting the user could click 'accept paint' to overwrite the previous values for that attribute. Mesh state capture too would be great for capturing manual geometry edits. Lastly, I think instead of building nodes that perform specific tasks, the team should concentrate on building sufficiently low level nodes for the end users to be able to build those specific task nodes instead. This would results in users no longer being constrained to the bounds of the a small number of bundles nodes, and an explosion in community built high level nodes. Next time a dev thinks, I'm going to code a new node to fulfil this need, I think they should only allow themselves to build the task node from existing nodes, this will show them which nodes are missing. Turning nodes into more of a node based programming languge that can communicate with Blender via a bespoke geo nodes API . P.S a script node that can communicate directly with the API would be awesome too (for those who'd prefer to type several lines of code instead of laying down a hundred nodes)

[@sebbosebbo9794]

I think the dev team have big dreams and doing great work....thx thx thx... they need more dev. power & money. hope the G.Nodes can help in the future to push hand manual non destructive modeling and bring ups new workflows... thx for sharing ...happy blending..

[@jeffg4686]

Can't wait for Particle Nodes - sounds like gonna be part of geonodes now - the team kicked ass on geonodes. Very intuitive. I would'nt have learned Houdini because it seemed complicated but geonodes is very approachable.

[@ThinkingPenguin]

We love you Jacques Lucke.

[@grafgrantula6100]

Great talk! I think this could be a recurring type of format that they call "War stories" in game development :)

[@qedqubit]

23:30 i'm soo happy with 'fields' , because the previous nodes with all the variable names was not for me... so i'm glad you changed indo something more noodley 😀 ! Blender's speed of innovation exceeds SpaceX and Tesla's 😀!

[@InfoAI239]

عمل رائع الجيومترى نود لكن عندى فكرة افضل ان نحول الفيزياء الى رسم يقوم المستخدم بالرسم فتتحول الرسمة الى حركات مثلا اضن ان الذكاء الاصطناعي يمكنه القيام بذلك من الجزائر وشكرا لجميع مطورى برنامج بلندر

[@filipemecenas]

🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@awesomedata8973]

What about a "Blender Engine" (akin to Houdini Engine in UE5 and Unity)? -- Is something like this coming ever? -- I'd love to use Blender assets directly in my Unity project, for example.

[@pipeliner8969]

they had one but disconinued it. Something similar is planned in the future when everything is realtime but it's not an actual engine like Godot and O3DE. The concept is called "The Interactive Mode". For Game Engines it's crucial that Blender works well with game engine. And I think it already does in some parts

[@kaustubhbagri7780]

Physics nodes ?

[@pipeliner8969]

yes

[@JasonCunliffe]

30:00 Curve Nodes >>>🍁🌹🥚🎯

[@awesomedata8973]

Imagine making "blobs" of curves in VR and generating a hairstyle in something akin to Google's Tiltbrush.

[@LawrenceAaronLuther]

28:20 shows how little I know about Blender under the hood. I thought everything was Python