Use texture nodes as inputs in Cycles
The idea is quite ambitious. Is to upgrade Blender Cycles node system capabilities to Substance Designer's. If you don't know what it is, watch on YouTube. It already has a lot of procedural texture making abilities, but here is my proposal:
- Make the Texture node tree work with Cycles. It'll give the opportunity to use generated textures as a node in shader.
- Add all the image processing algorithms from Compositor nodes to Texture generator nodes. It will give us so needed blur, edge detection, bevel and all the other fancy filters, that Substance Designer has. And add more.
- Add more pattern and noise ready-to-use generators.
That said, all that will be implemented outside of the shader code. As I understand the principles of Substance Designer, it generates a bitmap out of its nodetree, and then we just render an image. We generate an image of the given resolution and link it via a node into shader.
For that to implement we will need pre-caching or something, for the live update in Cycles.
Here's three procedural examples made in Blender, but it's quite hard to achive. And some patterns are impossible to achive at the moment. For example, random square tiles or tiles with blurry edges. I know the trick for blurring textures, but it's unusable for bump mapping, or displacement.
I'm also attaching a Substance Designer screenshot, so you can take a look at a small part of its patterns.
I'm suggesting to take a closer look at Substance's nodes and how they are implemented for those, who will take this task to implement.
I know that my proposal incorporates some of the proposals here, but i think it has the most global scale.
4 Comments
I've suggested something along these lines in other proposals (see my comment here, for instance rightclickselect.com/p/general/Sgbbbc/cycles-blur-node ) but please change your title and wording to something different. The current one won't fly well with a lot of people, especially developers who have no experience with certain commercial applications.
The core functionality would be to repurpose and extend the compositor to output to Blender images which can be used in shaders directly without going through rendering and files.
Another reasonably simple extension would be the ability to evaluate Cycles shaders in the compositor - similar to baking but with the ability to feed image nodes as inputs to properties like normal, position, etc.
I think this would be a really low-hanging fruit that would provide a tremendous benefit to artists for a modest effort.
I guess you are right. I voted for yours
This is a big proposal and it's simply not sufficient to say "make it like X other software." You can't expect other users or developers to have the same experience with other software that you do.
For something this big, it's best to break your proposal into multiple smaller ones, if possible. And in each of those smaller proposals, you should expand on how the feature would work in Blender and include mock-up images of what you envision the feature to look like (and the kind of workflow you'd expect) in Blender.
I guessed this site works this way as well. That i can make a big topic, like a roadmap, you know. I'm describing the whole idea. Now we can split the idea into smaller chunks. I brought Substane Designer just as a reference to show you how the final product functions. I think is that idea was quite clear. The main thing to do is to enable using Texture nodes in Cycles. The third button in the Node Editor window with the checker. Now it's enabled, for some reason, but unusable with Cycles.