Geometry Nodes

Can’t you guys just use layout.prop_search() ? (I must assume it’s a bit more complicated than that, otherwise it would’ve been used already)

Hah, right, it’s not that simple unfortunately. Basically it’s not possible to know the available attributes statically without evaluating the node tree. For many simple cases you could consider doing some pass before-hand to figure out which attributes are available, but imagine that your input is the output of another nodes modifier on another object.

The idea is to cache the available attributes at each node with an attribute string input so the drop-down can contain the attributes that were available on the last execution of the tree. So it’s not too complicated, but it will take some time.

Would it make sense to have it output the attribute as data and for input attribute to detect if it is a string or actual data? I am just shooting here in the dark, I have not looked at the actual code…

Oh, there’s a boolean attribute now ! Nice. Obviously handy for scattering, but also basics for specifying components to operate on with modeling nodes to come ?

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I thought that calculations of nodes evaluation are always being cached. Otherwise it will take extra time to reevaluate a tree if changing of a parameter only effects part of downstream nodes.

Hi! I don’t know if I’m posting in the right place.
Geometry Nodes is incredibly fast, Great Job!
I’m trying to achieve un effect: filling an object with cubes et control their scale with an influencer.
It’s easily doable with Animation nodes, but it can’t handle a huge number of instance ( 1000000 objects ) it become laggy and crushes blender.
With geometry nodes it’s more difficult to achive, I did it by generating particles inside the object in a grid, the particles where a simple vertex wich I converted then joined. I applied geometrynodes modifier to this new object.
I instanced the points wich I controled the scale with an object and the weightproximity modifier.

It would so much easier to have a node "distribute point " inside the volume of an object ( randomly or with grid ) Or to read points from the particle system of the object.

We need a more easy way to link any property like scale rotation …to an other object distance and scale, .and a way to control the gradient attribute with another object because for now it’s linked to the origin of the object.

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Is not there a Viewer/Reader node planned ?

If there is, I suppose that people would like a lot of customization to hide/reveal only useful info and possibly expose desired outputs.
So, that would be a complicated one with a lot of work.
Did you want to skip it, for first milestone, because of that ? Or did you thought to another way to expose info about nodetree output?

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Can I just put a +1 for a Geometry Spreadsheet ? We need to see the values generated on what attributes on what points. Thats essential for wrangling large number of points and attrs.

Yeah. Thank you very much.

If I remember correctly, the old Point Cloud object had some attributes on its properties tab. Maybe we can have something similar, a new tab on the properties tab of the object, similar to Vertex Groups, Colors, UV Maps, then Attributes. Just giving ideas, I think that the attributes workflow is very powerful! :smiley:

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A distribute on volume is a must indeed, but right now you can kind of simulate this with arrays and object offset. There are some YT videos about it.

There was a basic attribute spreadsheet prototype done by Brecht before geonodes really even started, so I am sure that it is planned. Hopefully it will arrive in the 2.93 cycle, as you really are flying blind without one. Also 2.93 is a LTS so it makes sense to have something this fundamental to geonodes included.

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Yes I saw it, it’s very clever technique but it doesn’t do exactly what I want.
I want to fill an object witch can be any thing, in my case the susan head, with cubes in a grid distribution.
If I do his technique arraying a plane and intersecting it with the head, it adds a lot of vertices witch are not organised in a grid.
That’s why I used the particles technique; it allows to fill the volume of the object with particles with grid distribution.

I’m trying my first real world Geometry Nodes application. :smiley: Let’s see how far I can go using the current available nodes. The vegetation right now is created using assets, but the scattering and the terrain deformation are GN. Already did some testing, and probably is possible to create the rest, but let’s see.

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Suggestion:

what about a way of randomly pick an attribute? Lets say, a mesh has several vertex groups, it would be nice to pick one of them with a seed value. This way, one can have an unique mesh and iterate along several variations of this unique mesh. With the join mesh addon, only one mesh can create lots of replicas, each one with random attributes to create variation.

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I think it’s already possible using attribute mix node. Vertex groups which should be randomly picked up should be putted into A and B inputs of the ndoe. Factor should be random number equal to 0 or 1. Changing seed of the random number will switch the vertex groups randomly.

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This looks like a trick, I will try with some 4 or 5 attribute mix nodes to see how well it can work.

I really think a LOD system is absolutely a must.

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For the records I updated the post description with the finished sample file for flower distribution (based on texture).

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For everyone asking for LoD I would be curious first to see what you can come up with by bringing in the camera object via the Object Info node and a basic Vector Math (distance) node.

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@anon10078140 hi, you should be able to explain how you see LoDs implemented without referring to non-open source solutions. I had to remove the videos links from your post. Feel free to edit it to remove my remark there.