GSoC 2025 - Week 2

This was a slow week with respect to actual coding - only basic prototyping and validations to support some of the approaches discussed.

All the discussion details are captured here:

• GSoC 2025: Styles support for MDA Universes (#879)
• Basic universe management APIs and GUI (#877) PR
• GSoC 2025: High level structure to start with (#870)

Here are a few things I learnt this week:

• As part of earlier prototyping, I learnt that Blender crashes if there are any structural changes to the Geometry Node tree during the render process. This fact plays a key role in the design choices we make. This dictates that any logic involving Geometry Nodes be embedded into the Geometry Node tree as opposed to modifying it (add/delete nodes/links) on the fly
• A Geometry Node Node Group is a great way to encapsulate a node tree structure - each of the nodes within it can be uniquely referenced by the node name in the code and not have to worry about the unique names that Blender creates in the case of individual node instances
• Node Group instances can be decoupled from one another by simply making a copy of the node tree - this is also equivalent to making a data block as single-user in Blender. This allows changes to each of the node groups to be independent of others

Next week, I would hope to make progress on the outstanding issues described in the discussions above.