Point Array Node (geometry nodes)
I think we are really missing a Point Array node. It would be a point generator node much like the Point Distribute node which creates points based on a set of parameters and gives each point an id property, except the Point Array node would create set number of points and assign each point an index property, which we could then use to set other attributes via attr math. This would be extremally useful when creating patterns and position a N amount of objects around something ( for boolean operations for example) .
Right now the way I manage to do this is creating a base object with one vertex and using an array modifier with a constant offset of 1 on the x axis before the geometry node modifier, then I use some math to change the position attribute to a index attribute as show on the image. So it is doable, however, it requires some setup and you can't control the number of points from the node editor.
I believe having a node with this functionality would be a great boost to workflows that aim to use Geometry Nodes and it seems a quite simple implementation as we already have a node that does nearly the same thing. An extra feature would be to add a field for the starting value of the index and the value of the offset(edit: read increment) but that would be just the cherry on the cake.
3 Comments
Yes, and also a kind of Mask input, or field where we can define any N to be masked or be a different geo. For exemple if you enter a formula like N%7, every seventh occurence would be masked/changed
* @Darknoodles * That would be nice to have too yes ,although we can do it with a custom node group. But as long as we get the functionality of creating a N amounts of points with and index attribute we already are miles ahead of what we have now ( which is already pretty cool) , I am pretty sure the rest of the functionality we want can be achieved with custom node groups.
We need more array-like structures for geometry nodes including circular arrays