Improve Instancing
Hi everyone, while creating the model, I noticed that Instances lack sufficient functionality.
Currently, correct placement of Instances is only possible on vertices; placement on faces isn't supported. By "correct placement," I mean consistent orientation of elements along the Z-axis.
Instancing by Vertices with "Align to Vertex Normal":
Instancing by Faces:
But what I missed most is a Fill mode that would give each Instance the shape of the face it's placed on.
Additionally, it would be great to add:
Sliders: For Rotate, Scale, and Offset for each axis (XYZ), as well as a slider for the global Scale of the Instance. These sliders would make adding Instances much more intuitive. Without them, you constantly have to be in edit mode to adjust the position of Instances, which is less convenient than using sliders.
We shouldn't forget a button to convert Instances to Mesh.
The next step would be creating sliders for random Rotate, Scale, and Offset for each axis, as well as for random placement. These are more specialized functions, so their implementation could be deferred.
Some might say that Geometry Nodes can be used for such purposes, and I agree. However, as someone not well-versed in that area, I spent an entire day just trying to correctly orient each Instance and still couldn't implement the Fill mode. Geometry Nodes are a fantastic tool, but they require significant time and effort to learn.
If anyone needs the Geometry Nodes I'm using:
3 Comments
As you said some parts of that functionality can be achieve using GN, and maybe blender should provide some built in assets for the most common uses (like the hair nodes), or at least as a starting point. That old instancing method will probably be fased out and should be, as it lacks functionality and does not interact with others parts of Blender as we move more and more in to node base modeling. But there is one addon that can do some scaling to fit the faces. Tissue Addon - extensions.blender.org/add-ons/tissue/
Yes, I know about this addon, but it has only one function - Fill, and it even performs that poorly because it rotates the original object randomly. It would be great for creating chainmail, but not for this type of armor.
Hi, I very much agree with this kind of proposal. GN should offer high level nodes for many operations to be comparable in accessibility to the old tools. All nodal editors that I used have both low level and high level nodes.