My current impression of Graphite as a Blender user

[dozer8383]

I'm a regular Blender user, and my favorite feature of Blender, hands down, is the shader nodes. I can make any kind of texture procedurally and make it look realistic. When I discovered Graphite and saw it had a node editor, I knew I had to try it. After about 30 minutes of playing with it, I feel that in its current state, the node editor is very difficult to use, and that's okay; this is beta software. So here's my primary complaint:
Blender's nodes are very forgiving as far as data types. Plug in a float to a vector3 and it doesn't care. Images are just a stream of vector3s. Just about everything can be translated to everything. Moving to Graphite, it doesn't work that way, and it just feels really difficult as a result. It feels like there's just some kind of trick that I'm missing that would make the system make sense to my brain as Blender's shader nodes did. Thorough documentation on every node will help enormously, but implementing a similar system as Blender would be amazing.
Thank you so much to the developers of Graphite, and I can't wait to see how it grows over the coming years!

[Keavon]

Thanks for coming by to leave feedback! The data model is the current development focus so it's being evolved every day. There's a technical limitation blocking us from doing automatic type conversion but that is also nearing resolution, which will allow us to make the type system much more ergonomic as well. You mentioned raster, just be aware that support for that data type is more experimental than most editor features, but certainly numbers will eventually support conversion to colors and images (and vice versa) once the technical foundation is in place. You will also likely prefer to use the latest development branch at https://dev.graphite.rs for several months of improvements. Thanks!