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shadersrjj
01-11-2008, 12:27 PM
Does anyone know of a good tutorial for writing Blender texture nodes? We have a procedural texture library (www.shaders.co.uk to view current ports) and I was toying with a free port over to Blender assuming if it wasn't too time consuming. This means that getting up to speed on writing nodes is imperative so any help would be gratefully received.


RJJ
brkn
01-11-2008, 10:35 PM
Hi, that sounds fantastic!

Currently the state of textures in Blender is a little limited, especially when working with nodes, but hopefully that's due to change too.

Right now in Blender textures are considered somewhat separately from the node system. You add a texture as part of the non-node system, tweak its settings in the texture panels, and then it's possible to (as a user) add a 'texture node' into the shading system, that basically just has the colour/value/normal output. You can't control the parameters from within the node system as node inputs, you have to do all the tweaking in isolation as part of that texture data.

This is 'ok' but because there aren't node inputs it's quite limited and doesn't allow much of the cool shading effects you could imagine, like changing texture parameters based on the angle of surface normal, for example.

There's a patch currently awaiting review that seems like it would change this - the plan is to add the ability to connect up other nodes to the inputs in a texture node, *and* adds an entirely new node system (alongside shading and compositing) for purely creating textures. Here's the patch: https://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=7897&group_id=9&atid=127

Apart from that, there are tutorials here on:
* Adding a node (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/AddingANode)
* Adding a procedural texture (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/AddingAProcedural)

They may be a little out of date in some areas, but should hopefully give enough information to get familiar with how it works.

There's also a texture plugin system (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Blender's_Plugins_System) but it's a bit ancient and I wouldn't recommend going down this path since it's definitely not integrated with the node system, and the UI for texture plugins is pretty horrible. Just letting you know.

If you need any advice, #blendercoders on irc.freenode.net is a good place to ask.

cheers
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