The idea of going the nodal, segregated route and integrating towards ubernodes later is becoming very interesting to me. The reasoning for me is this: no one wants another paint application, especially if it starts out as simple as something like MS Paint. Pshaw, that sucks. Except what if it wasnt an application, but a node? A lego block? Now we can connect what we are painting there to a whole world of image filters, adding bevel/emboss/drop shadows and things like that to what you are painting and see the results in realtime. We can even wrap our favorite combo of image filters and effects into a compound which we made to instantly generate a style and look for a widget, e.g., and suddenly the combo of this simplistic painting node with all these filters starts to form a competent application for web/UI design. Hook up these filters/effects to time nodes for animation and suddenly we got something reasonably competent for certain types of motion graphics. And were not done yet. Im tackling 3D nodes that let us do things like texture paint in them, and that can output both a scene and an image. The image can be used to composite what you see in those viewports in realtime with all these image filters along with what we paint in 2D. I already have a lot of image filter nodes. I just thought itd be ages before they had much use beyond limited areas under the hood. If I expose the node space to users sooner, every single thing Ive made so far in the project, even things as small as a single image filter, become useful lego building blocks right away. We dont have to wait for that dreamy uber integrated app that does modeling, animation, rendering, compositing, etc. all in one ubernode (in my system all apps are nodes). This connects the entire world of my development. Im seeing a trend lately with Java/WebGL JS applets showing off all kinds of cool demos of image filters and 3D effects. These are quick little things: the code often fits on a single page. Yet theyre not useful beyond eye candy since we cant use that in a software like AFX/PS as a filter or in a 3D software as a feature. With my node system, they could instantly be nodes and we could use them with anything with no extra development cost. Suddenly things that could be coded up in a day arent just eye candy demos, suddenly theyre powerful image filters we can use for 3D realtime compositing, 2D effects we apply over what we are painting in a paint node, video compositing, or even motion graphics animations we are creating from scratch. Suddenly everything combines just by being a node that inputs/outputs data. The downside is that, from a workflow/environment perspective, this is more of a segregation route (many simple nodes) than an integration route (an ubernode). It would likely push the latter further away, but the power of being able to use everything I created so far as lego blocks and combine it all together creatively becomes possible today.
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 11:19:49 +0000
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