New Nodezator 1.4 - a Public Domain Generalist Python Node Editor

KennedyRichard writes:

Hello, everyone!

I'm Kennedy Richard, 33 this month, from the IndiePython project, just a personal project to promote fun and learning by publishing and maintaining open-source apps, games and content. It's been over a year since I released Nodezator (on the occasion I posted about it here on BlenderNation). It is a generalist multi-purpose Python node editor, totally for free, that I released to the public domain. I'd like to announce the new 1.4 version. You can find it on GitHub and use it as a standalone app as instructed in the README or install it from pypi.org (using the command "pip install --upgrade nodezator").

There's also an online user manual.

It is meant for Python programmers and it allows people to define their own nodes by simply providing functions (that you must save in Python scripts in order for Nodezator to load them). That's it, you provide a function and the app turns it into a node for you.

Here's a 58 seconds video with a simple showcase of its capabilities:

And here's an older 48 minutes video presenting it:

This node editor still has a long way to go, specially since the vast majority of the work is done by a single developer (me). I created it because like anyone that uses Blender nodes, I love them and wanted to use nodes for many other task as well, not only in 3D pipelines.

I myself use it to generate 2d animation positioning data for a game on which I'm working (yet another open-source public domain project of mine that's been on pause for now - see here). and to complement my video editing pipeline by generating images to use in videos.

An interesting new feature is the ability to feed a node into another one (not only the output of a node). That is, since nodes represent functions (or other callables), we can also feed them to other functions (nodes) that accept callables. Nodezator also recently gained the ability to display visuals on the graph, beside the node. One of the next things I want to implement are group nodes, just like in Blender. Oh, and another feature that's interesting and it's been available since its release last year is that it can export its node layout as Python code (other formats like .png and .svg or .html with svg embedded in it are supported as well).

As I said in the post I submitted last year, since it is a generalist node editor, Blender users can make use of Nodezator in any part of their workflow/pipeline which would benefit from a node layout approach with Python. You can also turn functions from third-party modules into nodes as well, which means you can tap into powerful Python libraries like Pillow, matplotlib, pandas, you name it. I actually want to eventually create learning materials on how to integrate Nodezator usage with Blender pipelines, but honestly it is something on which I won't be able to work for a long time until I improve Nodezator and implement other more basic stuff. Even so, slowly but surely, Nodezator is progressing each year and I'm happy it is already useful to a lot of users.

Also bear in mind that I'm no professional Python developer, but have been programming as a hobby for a long time and only in recent years started using it more seriously in a self-taught approach. If you want to see more projects like this flourishing, specially taking into account it is open-source and dedicated to the public domain, please, consider donating to the project (even a tiny amount helps a lot) and sharing it with your friends. Here are some useful links:

Thank you for your attention.

Kennedy Richard S. Guerra
Indie Python developer