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Something that I have found when using graphical programming (by connecting nodes) (My experience with this is with Houdini for VFX) is that some developers do

Something that I have found when using graphical programming (by connecting nodes) (My experience with this is with Houdini for VFX) is that some developers do take to it and are comfortable either wayq (hence able to share setups with less-technical peers) but others will immediately swap to the (usually available) write-code context, and it's very hard to fault them for it. It's an interesting thing to expect developers to be able to cope with! Maybe even more of an ask than learning a new language?

KineticLensman 6y ago
> using graphical programming (by connecting nodes) I use Octane Render [0] whose materials editor is based on graphically connecting nodes which might be materials (diffuse, specular, etc), image files, mappings, colours, procedurals, emitters and many more. Compared with conventional languages the Octane shader language lacks any sort of conditional or iterative constructs, which obviously simplifies the 'programming' required. I'm happy with graphical node editing for this shader use case. However, I sometimes really miss the ability to do a global textual search and replace across multiple materials, e.g. to change the file name of a normal map that is used in a node in multiple materials. I suspect that there would be similar frustrations when maintaining and updating a complex system configuration using a 'no-code' node-based mechanism. [0] https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/
- otoy 6y ago
  Have you played around with octane script nodes for the use cases above? They should allow you to do almost anything in the node graph through Lua (or native code via ffi) - Jules
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    Thanks for this great reply, and sorry for lack of response! I should have been more precise - I was actually referring to the Octane plug-in for Daz Studio, where I don't think script nodes are available.
kanobo 6y ago
I really enjoy nodes for tasks that require immediate visual or audio feedback - making shaders in Blender, designing waveforms in Max, etc. But there are tasks that I find dead simple when done with code, such as translating a math formula into an algorithm or parsing data, that become non-trivial to figure out in those same systems.

KineticLensman 6y ago

> using graphical programming (by connecting nodes) I use Octane Render [0] whose materials editor is based on graphically connecting nodes which might be materials (diffuse, specular, etc), image files, mappings, colours, procedurals, emitters and many more. Compared with conventional languages the Octane shader language lacks any sort of conditional or iterative constructs, which obviously simplifies the 'programming' required. I'm happy with graphical node editing for this shader use case. However, I sometimes really miss the ability to do a global textual search and replace across multiple materials, e.g. to change the file name of a normal map that is used in a node in multiple materials. I suspect that there would be similar frustrations when maintaining and updating a complex system configuration using a 'no-code' node-based mechanism. [0] https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/ https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/

otoy 6y ago
Have you played around with octane script nodes for the use cases above? They should allow you to do almost anything in the node graph through Lua (or native code via ffi) - Jules
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  Thanks for this great reply, and sorry for lack of response! I should have been more precise - I was actually referring to the Octane plug-in for Daz Studio, where I don't think script nodes are available.

kanobo 6y ago

I really enjoy nodes for tasks that require immediate visual or audio feedback - making shaders in Blender, designing waveforms in Max, etc. But there are tasks that I find dead simple when done with code, such as translating a math formula into an algorithm or parsing data, that become non-trivial to figure out in those same systems.