I'm tired... but... Haven't you though in a node system for layers??? like blender, nuke,...

Well, if you want have a real special feature this is a really original form to make images.

I'd thought of that a few times, but when I thought about it more, I think it would probably be overkill. Most painters aren't as technical as most 3D artists, and the layer system is very familiar to them from all other painting apps (from Photoshop, Corel Painter, Mypaint, Gimp, you name it), while node systems are usually only known by 3D and video users. Besides, the features that *are* there to do rudimentary versions of what nodes would (group, clone and filter layers) seem to get hardly any use as far as I can see. That said I'm making a video tutorial on using them right now.

Kubuntiac wrote:I'd thought of that a few times, but when I thought about it more, I think it would probably be overkill. Most painters aren't as technical as most 3D artists, and the layer system is very familiar to them from all other painting apps (from Photoshop, Corel Painter, Mypaint, Gimp, you name it), while node systems are usually only known by 3D and video users. Besides, the features that *are* there to do rudimentary versions of what nodes would (group, clone and filter layers) seem to get hardly any use as far as I can see. That said I'm making a video tutorial on using them right now.

The dev can do a tipical layer system and if somebody wnat use a node system. A classic layers system is a node, and other node, and other,...

Everything's possible, but it seems to me that you'd be creating two different code bases to be maintained with a lot of duplicate functionality, for users unfamiliar with this type of system. As I noted above, the existing features that start to provide some similar functionality at the moment... well, other than me, I've yet to see anyone use them, so at the very least I think we can say they're not popular.

Now personally, I'd find it cool and would definitely play around with it... but whether it would be one of the best uses of dev resources, I'm not so sure.

We discussed it before, and the idea is always interesting, but trying to implement it might well kill Krita. It's way more work than anyone would imagine. And then, I don't think painters actually care that much. If you need to do forty paintings in a week, messing with nodes isn't going to play a big role in your workflow. Gimp is going there with Gegl -- and for the purpose of Gimp it'll probably turn out very well.

From the UI design it looks that Gimp will still use layers even though it uses a node based system internally. Unlike 3D artists, painters are mostly used to layers.

While a node based system would be interesting, I currently don't see a use case for Krita that would justify the amout of work that would have to put into it.

The developers are probably right. But if it was not too much of an effort it would be nice to give the alternative of working with nodes as they provide a structure which resemble the way our mind think of a process.

The beauty of nodes is to run parallel pipelines alongside the main compositing effort.

Cycles implementation in blender provides a nice example of back and forth node-layer workflow, the node structure is mirrored in a kind of a layered representation, with all of it's limits.