Can we get more/better access to color ramps, float and RGB curves and the like?
I came across an issue in an old project that could have been solved if I could have had access to the individual positions, values and colors of a color ramp. It would be useful to be able to adjust these values procedurally. The same goes for float and RGB curve nodes.
Also, it would be nice to have a way to place color ramps and float/RGB curves as externally editable named attributes, where the fully editable node itself would be exposed in the geometry node modifier as a named attribute. There is no difference between these nodes and a (float/material/integer/etc.) value. They ARE values.
4 Comments
This post is a bit confusing, I don't see how it relates to Named Attributes. And no, Ramps and Curves are NOT values, they are very different from Float, Material, Integers etc...
They are actually small functions that alter values, but they are not values themselves.
The good thing is "Functions" have been added to Geometry Nodes a while ago and they are called Closures.
Ramps and Curves are actually much closer to Closures than anything else, and that's why Jacques Lucke is thinking about having "defaults" for Closures inputs in Node Groups, which could be set by the user to be a Color Ramp, Float Curve etc... This exposes those functions outside of the node group to be used by the node group user.
This feature is in development : projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/141264
I assume that what the original poster is requesting is that we could have procedural control over the control points in Color Ramp and Float.
So we could, for example, procedurally change the color ramp from above to below:
Not sure, but maybe wiht Attributes he means that values for control points could be exposed as Named Attributes.
So, the top one would have positions 0 and 1 and colors #000000 #FFFFFF
And bottom one positions for 0.3 and 1 and colors #830015FF and #FFFFFF
But I don't know how that could work or be useful. Which mesh would store the attributes?
If this is what the post is about, this is already possible, a simple Color Ramp function with 2 color stops can be made easily in geometry nodes as a custom node group. The issue it color ramps can have as many stops as the user wants, and it is not possible to dynamically add inputs in node groups for as many stops you need.
The Closure "default" feature is a much better alternative. If someone wants to have full control over color ramps on node groups, then it is much better to directly expose a full color ramp function on the node group
I've had need of this myself. This would be a pretty big chunk of work given how prevalent these are throughout various modules.
If color ramps, curves etc. were named IDs, they could be treated as a first class asset like everything else and be linked, appended and passed through as arguments in geometry nodes etc.