Geometry Nodes

[HooglyBoogly]

@Hadriscus

1. to start off, a UI thing : the auto-connect feature when you drop down a node onto an existing connection really needs to be optional. Although it is handy sometimes, it becomes a hindrance when fiddling around in dense node trees.

We’ve talked about that before a few times. A couple related tasks:

• T94917: Alt modifier key to disable node auto-connection
• T91840: Don’t create invalid links when inserting a node on a link

@Hadriscus

2. … Any chance we could have this work -maybe through a copy on points node that would make hard copies instead of instances ?

Yes, we’ve done some design explorations on that topic here: Loops in Geometry Nodes [Proposal]

@Hadriscus

3. I didn’t find an angle function in the vector math node, it could be useful. It is pretty simple to build but would probably be faster as a builtin function. I use it to measure the angle each curve point makes with its neighbouring vertices

More patches!

• D12550: Geometry Nodes: Add Curve Curvature Node
• D13550: Nodes: Expand Math and Vector Math functions

@Hadriscus

It doesn’t work as well as a curvature attribute would, because it’s resolution-dependent, but it’s better than nothing.

Unfortunately there are a few definitions of discrete curvature and they all have their limitations, so there’s no one silver bullet here.

@Hadriscus

4. I’d like to be able to work in “branch space”, ie work with coordinates that are aligned to the tree branches, and I don’t know how to do that. I thought maybe matrix nodes would help, but maybe there’s a way right now ? Basically space conversions.

I’d be wary of going to far in this direction too quickly, but the next step in that direction is this task to make rotations more intuitive/useful: T92967: Add rotation data type

@Hadriscus

5. providing an actual “distance” float property may be useful as well ? it could use geodesic distance, as an alternative to topological distance.

Geodesic distances would be great! There’s no task for that at the moment. Maybe a geodesic distance node could have a selection input, and outputs for the nearest selected index and the distance to it.

@Hadriscus

6. does the team consider adding presets to the modifier interface ? I would love to make presets for different types of trees.

This is really more tied to the asset project. Node groups can be assets in the future, and there will likely end up being a preset system for assets. Which is great I think, since it makes sense to solve that problem in a generic way.

@Hadriscus

7. any plans to change the string nodes to accept string fields ? so that we can pass them geometry info to display around the object.

The string nodes do currently support fields, they’re just made to look like they don’t, because there aren’t yet any areas that can use string fields. String attributes will eventually be supported, but currently we only have a very inefficient way of storing them (hard-coded at 256 bytes per element), and we want to have a better way first.

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If you sense a trend in my answers, yes, there are so many plans, and so many opportunities, but a limited supply of developers!