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  • Published 2 Mar 2025

native geom node to place a collection of objects along a path

This is an essential block for generating procedural worlds/objects, it should support:

  • objects of different sizes
  • configurable gap between objects
    • no gap
    • same gap for all objects
    • random gaps (to break uniformity)
  • closed loops, where every object would be slightly scaled so it closes the loop
  • align objects to path, with and without deformation

Use cases:

  • creating townhouses where different houses share a wall
  • placing vegetation
  • creating stacks of boxes/stones/books

I tried implementing this myself and it was super hard, and given this is such an essential feature this should work in the scripting and the geometry nodes

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 0 Downvote 2
rendercat-1
2 Mar 2025

3 Comments

3dfigaro

Doesn’t seem like an essential feature to me. If every small request like this got its own node, we’d end up with a bloated system full of super specific tools. It’s better to stick to a more general approach. You can probably achieve this with existing Geometry Nodes, and learning them will give you more flexibility in solving similar problems.

rendercat-1 Author

"Doesn’t seem like an essential feature to me."

What is your experience writing procedural shaders? Could you share your repo so we can asses your competence in this matter?

Note: I started in the demoscene writing my own realtime renderers in C and ASM. I have written physics engines and game engines including all the shaders. I found very painful to write such a node and gave up. If you can write such a geometry node send me your resume.

Lauloque

Hi, welcome to RCS. As explained on the homepage :

This is the place to make your proposals. Share your idea with the community. Discuss it. Revise it. Flesh it out to the point that it's a well thought-out, actionable proposal that a Blender developer can work with.

Proposals and their comments stand on their own merits, getting defensive and running a credentials contest and Ad hominem arguments will not help here. So let's keep the discussion constructive and focused on the feature request itself.

Regarding the request, AFAIK Blender's design philosophy for Geometry Nodes is to provide mostly flexible low-level building blocks rather than highly specific nodes for every possible use case, with the expectation that the community can make their own modifiers and node groups: which are easily reusable and sharable.

With that in mind:

  1. Communities like blenderartists.org can definitely help figure out how to get a setup that does what you need. Maybe someone already did such a setup.
  2. If current nodes genuinely lack the capability to achieve the desired result, a well-detailed proposal identifying the missing building block would have better chances to be what a developer passing by would call "actionable".
  3. If you want to keep the request as-is despite the existing solutions, sure enough, but be aware that: with its design being out of the current scope, it is less likely to make it through.