Cycles/Eevee texture nodes for modifiers, painting and more #54656

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Brecht Van Lommel · 2018-04-16T13:17:31+02:00

Brecht Van Lommel commented

2018-04-16 13:17:31 +02:00

With Blender Internal being removed, we have an opportunity to support the same set of textures for Cycles, Eevee, modifiers, particles, painting, compositing, etc. So we plan to port the relevant Cycles / Eevee shader nodes to Blender C code, and make those the new texture nodes that can be used throughout Blender. Blender Internal textures can be removed then, and we can extend the Cycles / Eevee shader nodes to add any important missing features from them.

Some nodes like color ramps, RGB curves, and similar utilities are already there.
Texture nodes like image, noise, voronoi need to be ported.
Geometry, attribute and similar nodes as well. These are the most complicated since they access the mesh geometry.
Some nodes like BSDF, Mix Shader, Bevel, .. would not be supported.

Further we need a good UI for this in the texture properties.

With Blender Internal being removed, we have an opportunity to support the same set of textures for Cycles, Eevee, modifiers, particles, painting, compositing, etc. So we plan to port the relevant Cycles / Eevee shader nodes to Blender C code, and make those the new texture nodes that can be used throughout Blender. Blender Internal textures can be removed then, and we can extend the Cycles / Eevee shader nodes to add any important missing features from them. * Some nodes like color ramps, RGB curves, and similar utilities are already there. * Texture nodes like image, noise, voronoi need to be ported. * Geometry, attribute and similar nodes as well. These are the most complicated since they access the mesh geometry. * Some nodes like BSDF, Mix Shader, Bevel, .. would not be supported. Further we need a good UI for this in the texture properties.

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Brecht Van Lommel commented

2018-04-16 13:17:31 +02:00

Added subscriber: @brecht

blender-admin commented

2018-04-16 13:17:31 +02:00

#68895 was marked as duplicate of this issue

michael knubben commented

2018-04-20 11:36:35 +02:00

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Miguel Pozo commented

2018-04-28 19:25:34 +02:00

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Miguel Pozo commented

2018-04-28 19:25:34 +02:00

May I suggest adding a bake texture function to the baking API instead of duplicating every node in C?
This function would evaluate a single mesh in isolation and would take a texture node tree instead of a material one (texture node trees would be just like regular material node trees without shader nodes).
This would likely be faster to evaluate since it could run in the GPU and would allow better integration with third party render engines.

I already suggested this in the devtalk forums , but I'm not sure if it was discarded as a bad idea or just went unnoticed.

May I suggest adding a bake texture function to the baking API instead of duplicating every node in C? This function would evaluate a single mesh in isolation and would take a texture node tree instead of a material one (texture node trees would be just like regular material node trees without shader nodes). This would likely be faster to evaluate since it could run in the GPU and would allow better integration with third party render engines. I already suggested this [in the devtalk forums ](https://devtalk.blender.org/t/displacement-from-material-modifier/107/9?u=pragma37), but I'm not sure if it was discarded as a bad idea or just went unnoticed.

Brecht Van Lommel commented

2018-04-28 19:48:13 +02:00

Performance is not going to be good that way, we don't want to copy meshes to Cycles or another renderer when we already have them in Blender just to do some texture evaluations in the middle of a modifier stack. Using the GPU would also be problematic, mostly because of the latency of transferring data between CPU and GPU, and because it's difficult to create big enough batches of data to work on even if latency was low.

Miguel Pozo commented

2018-04-28 21:22:54 +02:00

At least on that particular example, running the modifier on the GPU(gtx 950) is much faster than on the CPU(i7 4790k). And that's on a case where the ratio between evaluated pixels and vertices is just 1. For painting and compositing, shouldn't the payoff be much better ? It wouldn't even be necessary to send the whole mesh to the renderer.

Just to make it clear, I know you are infinitely more qualified than me to know what's the correct way to go. Sorry if I look disrespectful, it's absolutely not my intention.

At least on that particular example, running the modifier on the GPU(gtx 950) is much faster than on the CPU(i7 4790k). And that's on a case where the ratio between evaluated pixels and vertices is just 1. For painting and compositing, shouldn't the payoff be much better ? It wouldn't even be necessary to send the whole mesh to the renderer. Just to make it clear, I know you are infinitely more qualified than me to know what's the correct way to go. Sorry if I look disrespectful, it's absolutely not my intention.

Brecht Van Lommel commented

2018-04-28 21:39:08 +02:00

There is definitely a point where it gets faster on the CPU, when the shader is sufficiently complicated and the number of vertices is high enough. There's a latency vs throughput trade-off.

If you have for example a scene with hundreds of objects that need few texture evaluations, the latency adds up and things could slow down a lot. Existing code is usually structured assuming that you can get one texture evaluation at a time. Rewriting that to batch together a bunch of texture evaluations would be quite some work and make the code more complicated.

There is definitely a point where it gets faster on the CPU, when the shader is sufficiently complicated and the number of vertices is high enough. There's a latency vs throughput trade-off. If you have for example a scene with hundreds of objects that need few texture evaluations, the latency adds up and things could slow down a lot. Existing code is usually structured assuming that you can get one texture evaluation at a time. Rewriting that to batch together a bunch of texture evaluations would be quite some work and make the code more complicated.

Luciano Muñoz Sessarego commented

2018-06-04 17:54:16 +02:00

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mantissa commented

2018-06-13 12:20:08 +02:00

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2018-12-20 14:19:39 +01:00

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2019-05-09 20:21:09 +02:00

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Brecht Van Lommel commented

2019-08-22 12:28:08 +02:00

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2019-12-18 09:31:09 +01:00

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2020-03-01 22:43:04 +01:00

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2020-04-01 06:09:20 +02:00

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2020-04-28 15:13:02 +02:00

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baoyu commented

2021-02-03 18:21:12 +01:00

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baoyu commented

2021-02-03 18:21:12 +01:00

Any update on this? Reuse the procedural texture nodes across the entire blender could be much intuitive cause they can easily be visualized. Implementation of luxcore render's texture node editor is a good reference. User can create a pointer in luxcore texture node editor, and use them in shader node editor the way like how node group's been used.

Andres Stephens commented

2021-02-12 19:49:15 +01:00

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Andres Stephens commented

2021-02-12 19:49:15 +01:00

Just tried to use these editors, and found they are almost a redundant and non-working editor - no thumbnails, no use when "use nodes" is on, and no properties accessible elsewhere in the UI. The editor is currently legacy with no integration into any practical use - and was mainly there for Blender Internal.

Is there a way to make these editors relevant for Cycles and Eevee?

And also, is there a way to be able to access the node trees of these textures throughout the general UI? (Modifiers, Geometry Nodes, materials, etc)?

Just tried to use these editors, and found they are almost a redundant and non-working editor - no thumbnails, no use when "use nodes" is on, and no properties accessible elsewhere in the UI. The editor is currently legacy with no integration into any practical use - and was mainly there for Blender Internal. Is there a way to make these editors relevant for Cycles and Eevee? And also, is there a way to be able to access the node trees of these textures throughout the general UI? (Modifiers, Geometry Nodes, materials, etc)?

Andy Cuccaro commented

2021-03-07 23:34:28 +01:00

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2021-03-08 23:55:52 +01:00

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2021-03-09 15:12:08 +01:00

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Erindale commented

2021-03-09 16:48:33 +01:00

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Erindale commented

2021-03-09 16:48:33 +01:00

Fingers crossed for Blender 3.0!

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2021-03-17 19:55:33 +01:00

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2021-03-22 17:00:57 +01:00

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2021-03-22 22:25:46 +01:00

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2021-04-15 19:20:52 +02:00

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Ramil Roosileht commented

2021-05-03 22:26:40 +02:00

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Ramil Roosileht commented

2021-05-03 22:26:40 +02:00

It's been 3 years since this task was created - surely most of the community is eager to see some action!
Is there any pre-production that can be done with our hands to help push this forward?
UI designs, sketches, workflow examples, anything you need to start the discussion on what the new system will and won't be at least?

It's been 3 years since this task was created - surely most of the community is eager to see some action! Is there any pre-production that can be done with our hands to help push this forward? UI designs, sketches, workflow examples, anything you need to start the discussion on what the new system will and won't be at least?

Julien Kaspar commented

2021-06-18 10:41:22 +02:00

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Markus Graf commented

2021-08-17 02:41:07 +02:00

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Markus Graf commented

2021-08-17 02:41:07 +02:00

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Diogo Valadares Reis dos Santos commented

2021-09-19 01:45:38 +02:00

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hamed commented

2021-09-19 15:28:44 +02:00

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hamed commented

2021-09-19 15:28:44 +02:00

Hi , is it possible to just take whats cycles rendering it and converting it to geo ? not baking any map just taking the geo data after displacement from cycels and turn it to real object .