It slightly off-topic but it has direct impact on what could you do with GN so it’s an important matter.
Even for future/current developments like simulation nodes, this is super important, from water foam to sand simulation to higly complex rigid body destruction system, it’s not strange that a simulation goes up to way more than 300k elements (and not always instances).
That would be another great feature to have in an overlay panel. It would be great for debugging a large tree when you zoom out enough to not see the sockets easily.
While I can understand >200k instances is maybe too large number to keep everything perfectly smooth & realtime, I still believe there could be optimizations incorporated (user-optional or automatic-behind-scenes) which would make such projects at least convenient to work with.
But in the current state you experience very slow viewport and also laggy density painting, you can’t get a merged mesh with all mesh data prevented out of it … while there is no compromise / optimization available to get over such issues - I am sure a lot could be done in this area.
For example if you are just scattering some large amount of instances on a ground (i.e. a game level vegetation), you could enable optimizations like:
Such options would be optional, so user would decide which are worth it for his specific use case - maybe something like a toggle next to the modifier would do the job.
Then I am sure there could be some automatic (behind scenes) optimizations implemented as well, but I am not a Blender developer, so better to not present my noob ideas here 
But even despite my noobness I was able to code an addon for 2.79 which allows us to maintain completely smooth viewport as well as painting the distribution smoothly even with >200k instances (the particles recomputation is slow, but that’s not big deal for this use case), so I believe new Blender & GNodes should offer at least similar experience (hopefully much better as the actual distribution of instances is much faster).
Realize Instances is the biggest improvement in this regard as it makes at least the viewport fast, but it really needs to prevent the mesh data to be usable - after that we can finally substitute 2.79 particles for GNodes for our projects, even though we still hope for some optimizations to be added.
I feel like a pause button should be added to GN. It’d be really useful if you want to tweak several things at once but don’t want to wait for the tree to update with each step.
Hello, guys! I’ve been wondering how can I currently set the point radius of a curve not using legacy attribute nodes? Converting to a mesh and giving is a profile based on another curve is not an option.
Does someone knows how to do it? Cheers!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but currently the new fields nodes dealing with setting attributes (except for setting positions) aren’t there yet. So at the moment with the new “fields” in GN there is not much to achieve than to change point positions.
This will of course change very soon.
Just playing with the Mesh to Points node, I think it is missing a Rotation output of the Rotation field encoded in eulers of the face normal of the original mesh for the instance node
YES! so happy 
is missing a Normal output of the face normal of the original mesh for the instance node
The node is automatically converting the attributes right? so it should be available implicitly
Wait no, I just realized the Normal output does not do what I want, the rotation output does:
I updated the original post.
Well, not the face normal:
We just need to wait for the align rotation to vector node to align these points with the Z normal of their original face.
https://developer.blender.org/T91374
Right, that would make the manual way possible. I just think it makes sense to have it on the Mesh to Points node since the distribute node also has it.
Now that there’s cool text nodes,
here’s a very very useful idea that could be implemented easily (?)
This would greatly increase the accessibility of information for users who know bpy a bit
and also reveal information not currently accessible with geometry node!
God i wish i knew how to code blender
Here’s an example of using any attribute from the mesh on the points output from the mesh to points node (it could be anything, not just the normal).
Generally looking in the spreadsheet to make sure attributes are still available should be a thing of the past, except for the few nodes that aren’t able to transfer attributes like the convex hull node.
This is actually what I meant by manual approach here
We still need the align rotation to vector node for this method to work.
My screenshot of the spreadsheet was in another context. He was talking about whether the node automatically convert the normal attributes or not. In this case it is not so we need to use anonymous attribute manually.
I just think it makes sense for the Mesh to Points to have it since the Distribute Points on Faces also have it.
The manual approach is just too complicated for simple cases like this:
VS this:
What is your statement based on?
So people are fine with the dashed lines for fields functions? I still can’t get over how confusing, noisy and ugly they look. The visual UI quality of the GN node editor just dropped below most of other node based software out there pretty much overnight 
Mainly intuition 
because python can do that extremely easily with the eval() function. So the cpp function would run a one-liner python code and check what’s been returned
I must insist on this part
My knowledge of cpp is very basic. I already saw some cpp code that run a python script for simple tasks where speed is not an issue. But perhaps I’m completely wrong and it is very complicated
Agreed, definitely not pretty, doesn’t feel like 2021.
Also, not GN related, and I hate bashing on things but while we’re on the subject - that new pose slider could use some love (putting it very mildly)
Perhaps maybe an additional option for the users to switch between the ‘dashed lines’ and the ‘normal/connected lines’ for the field functions will do the trick? I honestly think the idea of using ‘dashed lines’ (and yes, using ‘dashed lines’ inside a node editor with large chunks of nodes can easily get messy and sometimes it can get real hideous real quick) is quite cool and not as bad as many people think it is. If the chances are the ‘dashed lines’ noodles are going to be kept forever, I guess that I’m totally fine with it as long as it gets some serious polishings to make sure that it becomes more efficient and usable for projects and production.
