My Feedback for Geometry Nodes after a month of Nodevember

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Here is my feedback for the fields version of Geometry nodes. I will avoid common requests such as loops, instancing with variation, etc. which I am sure will get added eventually.

  1. Outputting UVs is complicated and ugly. Eg- you want to ouput the uvs of a curve converted to mesh.

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    https://pasteall.org/media/6/9/6923c36681299c9efd596f8709e627da.blend

    This situation is made worse by the fact that the ouput node cannot be duplicated (T85220). The most obvious solution would be invisible noodles, but there is room for more creative ideas.

  2. When using the index node with any instance transform nodes, it ouputs index of the instance. But if captured it outputs the index of the vertices(?) The position node also displays the same behaviour.

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    I think there should be dedicated “Instance index” and “Instance position” input nodes. And also “Instance scale” and “Instance rotation” nodes (if that makes sense).

  3. The only way I found to instance multiple geometries without using collections was to somehow convert the geomtries to instances and join them. This is time-taking not intuitive whatsoever.

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    I propose that the join geometry node should have an “as instances” checkbox.

I will probably update this list after the 2nd week.

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I think this is an excellent idea.

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Heres week 2:

  1. This maybe a Nodevember specific problem, but primitives such as Quadratic Bezier and Bezier Segment are almost impossible to work with without any visual feedback (for the handles)
  2. Arranging the noodle connections in a multi-input socket requires sniping the wires. Order is especially important for the join strings node. The geometry multi input also sometimes requires arranging the wires. Also muting passes the first wire.
  3. For some reason I expect the set postion nodes to work per-instance. Partly because now we have the translate instances nodes
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Here is the final list:

  1. Not sure whether to report this as a bug, but the alt / alt+shift /ctrl+shift drags in Node-wrangler don’t have the recently implemented view scrolling.
  2. The user is forced to type or use the increment and decrement buttons on the value sliders when the scene gets heavy (as using the slider becomes almost impossible). It would nice to have some sort of control over the buttons; 0.1 seems like a arbitary value which can be too less or too much depending on the situation. I propose holding down shift while clicking changes the value by 0.01 and maybe ctrl changes the value by 1.
  3. A “Fill segments” option for the circle primitive like the cyclinder would be useful.
  4. Also an “offset” mode for the grid primitve like the line primitive.

Thanks to the devs for implementing the geometry to instance node!
The future of Geometry nodes looks very promising. Keep up the great work!

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