First note; this is a WIP project, some commits might change things that
make formerly saved situations not to work identically... like now!
------ New Material integration ------
Until now, the Node system worked on top of the 'current' Material, just
like how the Material Layers worked. That's quite confusing in practice,
especially to see what Material is a Node, or what is the "base material"
Best solution is to completely separate the two. This has been implemented
as follows now;
- The confusing "Input" node has been removed.
- When choosing a Material in Blender, you can define this Material to be
either 'normal' (default) or be the root of a Node tree.
- If a Material is a Node tree, you have to add Nodes in the tree to see
something happen. An empty Node tree doesn't do anything (black).
- If a Material is a Node Tree, the 'data browse' menus show it with an
'N' mark before the name. The 'data block' buttons display it with the
suffix 'NT' (instead of 'MA').
- In a Node Tree, any Material can be inserted, including itself. Only in
that case the Material is being used itself for shading.
UI changes:
Added a new Panel "Links", which shows:
- where the Material is linked to (Object, Mesh, etc)
- if the Material is a NodeTree or not
- the actual active Material in the Tree
The "Node" Panel itself now only shows buttons from the other nodes, when
they are active.
Further the Material Nodes themselves allow browsing and renaming or adding
new Materials now too.
Second half of today's work was cleaning up selection when the Nodes
overlap... it was possible to drag links from invisible sockets, or click
headers for invisible nodes, etc. This because the mouse input code was
not checking for visibility yet.
Works now even for buttons. :)
********* Node editor work:
- To enable Nodes for Materials, you have to set the "Use Nodes"
button, in the new Material buttons "Nodes" Panel or in header
of the Node editor. Doing this will disable Material-Layers.
- Nodes now execute materials ("shaders"), but still only using the
previewrender code.
- Nodes have (optional) previews for rendered images.
- Node headers allow to hide buttons and/or preview image
- Nodes can be dragged larger/smaller (right-bottom corner)
- Nodes can be hidden (minimized) with hotkey H
- CTRL+click on an Input Socket gives a popup with default values.
- Changing Material/Texture or Mix node will adjust Node title.
- Click-drag outside of a Node changes cursor to "Knife' and allows to
draw a rect where to cut Links.
- Added new node types RGBtoBW, Texture, In/Output, ColorRamp
- Material Nodes have options to ouput diffuse or specular, or to use
a negative normal. The input socket 'Normal' will force the material
to use that normal, otherwise it uses the normal from the Material
that has the node tree.
- When drawing a link between two not-matching sockets, Blender inserts
a converting node (now only for value/rgb combos)
- When drawing a link to an input socket that's already in use, the
old link will either disappear or flip to another unused socket.
- A click on a Material Node will activate it, and show all its settings
in the Material Buttons. Active Material Nodes draw the material icon
in red.
- A click on any node will show its options in the Node Panel in the
Material buttons.
- Multiple Output Nodes can be used, to sample contents of a tree, but
only one Output is the real one, which is indicated in a different
color and red material icon.
- Added ThemeColors for node types
- ALT+C will convert existing Material-Layers to Node... this currently
only adds the material/mix nodes and connects them. Dunno if this is
worth a lot of coding work to make perfect?
- Press C to call another "Solve order", which will show all possible
cyclic conflicts (if there are).
- Technical: nodes now use "Type" structs which define the
structure of nodes and in/output sockets. The Type structs store all
fixed info, callbacks, and allow to reconstruct saved Nodes to match
what is required by Blender.
- Defining (new) nodes now is as simple as filling in a fixed
Type struct, plus code some callbacks. A doc will be made!
- Node preview images are by default float
********* Icon drawing:
- Cleanup of how old icons were implemented in new system, making
them 16x16 too, correctly centered *and* scaled.
- Made drawing Icons use float coordinates
- Moved BIF_calcpreview_image() into interface_icons.c, renamed it
icon_from_image(). Removed a lot of unneeded Imbuf magic here! :)
- Skipped scaling and imbuf copying when icons are OK size
********* Preview render:
- Huge cleanup of code....
- renaming BIF_xxx calls that only were used internally
- BIF_previewrender() now accepts an argument for rendering method,
so it supports icons, buttonwindow previewrender and node editor
- Only a single BIF_preview_changed() call now exists, supporting all
signals as needed for buttos and node editor
********* More stuff:
- glutil.c, glaDrawPixelsSafe() and glaDrawPixelsTex() now accept format
argument for GL_FLOAT rects
- Made the ColorBand become a built-in button for interface.c
Was a load of cleanup work in buttons_shading.c...
- removed a load of unneeded glBlendFunc() calls
- Fixed bug in calculating text length for buttons (ancient!)
- Adding execution code for Node trees. Was a bit a puzzle, since I want
it to be multithreading by design. This now is solved by defining a
stack per tree for all data that's being written into. This stack, which
resides now in the NodeTree itself, then can be allocated per thread.
- For testing pleasure, I've added a 'mix node' and a 'show node', so
you can already see it do something. :)
- reshuffled structure, to put things nice together, and have easier node
adding. Current state is still WIP though, structure might change.
For the record; new file node_shaders.c will contain all shader node
definitions, apart from the drawing callbacks.
Next: I'm going to check on Andrea's work on icons now, since this is very
much needed for true shader/composit work.
Now back to release work...
- delete/duplicate with connection links
- type awareness for sockets
- make connections checks for max amount of possible connections
- added dependency sorting of node list
- cyclic connections are drawn red now, press Ckey to see the other bad
cycles.
- added UI toolkit support in nodes (try shift+a)
So, almost ready for execution code. :)
- Sunday merger with bf-blender
- Foundations for new Node editor in Blender, generic framework that can
be used for Material/Texture, Compositing, Logic or maybe even Sequencer.
Note: this doesn't do anything yet, nor save! Is just to get this nice
in CVS now. :)
