Google Bard Experiment¶

Unlike ChatGPT (using davinci-002), Bard actually appears to scan for recent information about MaterialX and returns a reasonable answer for the simple query of what's the latest version.

It does however provide links to the the source material if available which is useful to jump to the original content. For example the reply here was linked to the MaterialX (materialx.org) site.

Basic Knowledge¶

Bard also appears to not be able to extract out basic knowledge of even node graphs. A couple of prompts to ask about nodegraph properties and how to group nodes returned mostly non-factual or "nonsense" replies.

As neither had any source material attribution it is unclear where the information came from.

Note that while the it nice that the online Bard interface provides multiple "drafts", none were remotely close to the correct answer.

Source Code Assistance¶

Like ChatGPT, Bard will also "make up" code using APIs which don't exist. The following is the result of asking Bard to create a MaterialX node of type "image". Even the import statement is incorrect...

In [ ]:
import materialx as mx

def create_image_node():
  # Create a new node of type "image"
  node = mx.nodes.Image()

  # Set the node's label
  node.label = 'Image'

  # Set the node's image
  node.image = mx.File()
  node.image.filename = 'path_to_the_image'

  # Return the node
  return node

# Create the node
node = create_image_node()

# Add the node to the scene
mx.MaterialX.current_scene().nodes.append(node)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ModuleNotFoundError                       Traceback (most recent call last)
Cell In[3], line 1
----> 1 import materialx as mx
      3 def create_image_node():
      4   # Create a new node of type "image"
      5   node = mx.nodes.Image()

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'materialx'

As the C++ API is published online the hope was that C++ code generation would be better. This is not the case as the APIs used are the same "fictional" ones.

#include <materialx/materialx.h>

mx::Node* create_image_node() {
  // Create a new node of type "image"
  mx::Node* node = new mx::nodes::Image();

  // Set the node's label
  node->set_label("Image");

  // Set the node's image
  mx::File* image = new mx::File();
  image->set_filename("path_to_the_image");
  node->set_image(image);

  // Return the node
  return node;
}