Progress feedback

[Danilo Nishimura]

Would be nice to have a feedback about the processing progress.
- Which node is being processed
- What percentage is each node
- What percentage is the overall calculation

How houdini shows which node is processing and its progress:

[Alexis Vaisse]

Hi,

Thank you for your feedback.
We plan to add a progress bar for the erosion simulation nodes.
All the other nodes should be fast, so it should not be necessary to have a progress bar for them.

[Danilo Nishimura]

The problem is that when you select a node further in the graph network, if the software is processing a node far behind (usually simulation nodes), it's impossible to know if I should wait a few more seconds, or go back and tweak the values because it will take forever to complete.

Also:

All the other nodes should be fast, so it should not be necessary to have a progress bar for them

Really depends on the amount of information to process and the user machine. I use a somewhat good machine and sometimes it gets stuck blending color maps using masks.

[Alexis Vaisse]

OK. I see what you mean.

About the color maps: we are currently optimizing the computation on color maps. For instance on 2K x 2K color maps, it should be at least 4x faster.
Computations on color map will become as fast as computation on terrains, so you'll be able to work with very large color maps (we'll remove the 2K limitation) at high speed.

But if you select a node and there is one or several erosion nodes before this node, you don't know when the erosion nodes will be computed, so you're right, we need to find a way to display the information.

[Danilo Nishimura]

One more thing, it also affects the export node. When you click the "Export now!" button but previous nodes are still processing, the Export dialog opens up, the "Compute" and "Write file" progress bars doesn't update, and the only thing you can do is cancel the process.

[Marianne Calva]

Since Version 1.8 in December 2019, we have introduced progress bars for the erosion nodes, for components embedding erosion nodes, and for custom nodes (Python scripts), that is for all the "long calculation" nodes.
We still have to think about a final visual feedback for the entire graph.