#Blender evening project: a point cloud galaxy generator in #GeometryNodes. This is around 1.5 million points total, rendered in under a minute.
The key to getting the different colors and opacities was to layer different "galaxies" together, each with a different material applied. @gleb you might enjoy this.
#GeometryNodes has been extended with a few new features recently. First up, the new Bake node allows caching an intermediate geometry on disk. Next steps are to keep material assignments intact and to provide a higher level overview of the bakes in a scene. #b3d#devfund
#GeometryNodes now also has the ability to explicitly set curve normals so that you don't have to rely on the behavior of the Z-Up or Minimum-Twist normal modes anymore if you need specific normals. We want to get something similar for meshes soonish. #b3d#devfund
Lastly, we just added support for panels in the #GeometryNodes modifier allowing for more powerful custom modifiers without overloading the user. We still want to change the built-in panels so that they only show up when necessary, resulting in an even simpler UI. #b3d#devfund
Some more recursion using the repeat node in blender 4.0. I'm not totally happy with my current setup. The recursive tree things actually look pretty jank if you look at them closely, but I like how organic they feel in this context. This is basically the idea I was going for when I started, so I'm calling it a win! #blender#blender3d#geometrynodes
#GeometryNodes has an Index Switch node now. It allows choosing between an arbitrary number of inputs with an index.This was implemented by @hansgoudey. #b3d#devfund
I've done a little #Blender thing again, inspired by one of @Kaierns recent renders. It started out with a random #GeometryNodes shape doodle and turned into something bigger.
A herdsman found this artifact in the Bolivian highlands. It appears to defy gravity, but otherwise it is inert. Spectroscopy analysis did not match any currently known material. However it emits a short modulated radio wave pulse every night that seems to be directed at Ross 248.
This #b3d update, among many goodies, brings the Geometry Node to a new level with smooth integration into the host features. The team definitely has the right vision about the Geo Nodes and this is very exciting!
The next big step I'd like to see is the ability for the #GeometryNodes to interface with a language. An attempt here https://github.com/carson-katri/geometry-script but the point would be insert code parts into a graph instead of generating node graphs.
The trees are point clouds generated with #GeometryNodes, the materials are simple shader nodes, for the HDRI I used the Procedural Starlight addon, and post-processing is all done with compositor nodes.
This might be useful to someone; I was looking into cheap, deterministic but more uniform random number generators (but not perfectly uniform) and noticed that UE already has a "Halton()" function, which implements the Halton Sequence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_sequence.
However it was only used internally for various things, and not really exposed to engine users in a useful way.
@sinbad Nice! also this reminds me of a fun fact: I was asking Blender people how to get a fast hashing function into Blender #GeometryNodes and one told me to use white noise, then I look into it and it turns out to be based on Jenkins hash, so yeah, there are definitely hidden gems in a large codebase :)
Testing out #GodotEngine import pipeline lately, in particular its #b3d blend file import features (Godot imports automatically as glTF on file change).
Some curses of going through glTF format:
one cannot setup instanced meshes unless EXT_mesh_gpu_instancing is supported (which Godot doesn't yet), so if you use #GeometryNodes to generate stuffs, you had to Realize it and lose the perf benefit.
glTF is a last mile format, so you cannot keep 100% your data intact.
One thing I plan to do is to generate a town in Blender via GN then import the resulting scene as mesh instances.
At the moment, there are no easy way to achieve this; I think the 2nd best approach would be to import a set of modular meshes and a mesh acting as a point cloud (since latter isn't available in glTF yet), then use MeshDataTool to read then respawn instances inside Godot?
Feels slow but perhaps doable for a mid-size scene? Any better idea here?