Animation Nodes

Maybe there is something I´m missing. But in theory connections between Object Mesh Info and Vertex Info and Polygon Info should be allowed.


On the actual version from Github, this isn´t possible.

Hi all,

I’m happy to say some updates for the curve nodes are now available on github! :smiley:
Test blend: curveNodes-20150514.blend (741 KB)

The main update is the addition of an analytic mode for the point projector:


Both an analytic and a sampled projector are included in the test blend, so you can compare them easily. This projection mode is also available in the revolve node when you select the ‘Project Profile’ mode for the revolve:


And finally, I removed the ‘& Morph’ node variations for sweep and birail. The morphed version is now available in the regular version, through an optional End Profile input socket. So, eg, if you don’t connect the end profile socket on the birail node, you get a regular birail; if you do connect it, you get a birail & morph. Same for sweep.


on the vertices issue:
vertices is a list of vertex, vertex is one element,
put a list/get element node in between to select the desired vertex out of the vertices list …

truth is the colors are close in this mesh area greens, so that does not help.
however, this list vs element you’ll find all over the place

To avoid such problems with lists and elements in the future, I implemented another ‘auto-convert-rule’. Now, when you connect a list socket with the corresponding element socket, a Get Element node will be inserted automatically.


Some Updates:

Animation Nodes comes with a new panel now. It can be used to manually decide which sockets are shown and which are hidden. This is mainly useful to create cleaner node tree, because sometimes there are a lot of unused sockets. You will find the panel in the right sidebar of the node editor (after I merged it in a few days I guess, or test it by downloading the particle system branch).
And guess what, this panel also works with all other node tree types in Blender (Compositor, Cycles, …)

Additionally I added all available particle properties. Unfortunally many of them don’t update as you would expect. Some values only update when you play back the animation forward.


I merged the new stuff now:



btw: just if someone interested. We have 124 nodes now.

My god this addon has grown, id love to see some serious motion graphics done with it!

Thanks for the solution.

However I find hard to understand those type of node setups, with loops involved, where connections go from left to right and from right to left. That way of functioning is not really conventional.

On the other hand after seeing your node arrangement I have noted that is divided in two parts. One for data setup and the other to define behaviour. Maybe this could help to someone starting to learn this addon.

the way you should look at loops is like a group,
and reason for me to make that frame green like the loopnode, as if it’s a window with what’s inside of it

(visually it’s still counter intuitive, while from a scripting pov it is an acurate representation )

Y‘all, It seems Jackques was challenging something called Particles. :smiley:

A simple unofficial (or unforgivable) sneak peek:


@Jacques, thanks for the interesting particle nodes, yet another pandora box is opened, sadly… :slight_smile:


I made a short video that shows some of the new stuff that guy and me added lately:

Awesome additions, thank’s guys!

However I find hard to understand those type of node setups, with loops involved, where connections go from left to right and from right to left. That way of functioning is not really conventional.

I’d also like to see a different way to show the loop nodes (hopefully just one node), maybe from the scripting pov makes sense to have it like it is right now, but it’s really weird, and not intuitive at all :stuck_out_tongue:

A quick test, playing around with the particle nodes :slight_smile: I almost can see a particle mesher here hehe.

Good work :slight_smile:

I’m currently working on a native implemention for nodes. Unfortunally I have to rewrite a lot of code by Guy Lateur, but this is going pretty smooth! Having his code as basis is a very big help.


You can check this out in another branch on my github account
It’s still under heavy development, just wanted to share some progress.

Looking good, Jacques! :smiley: Nice to see a spline socket and a projector in there. I’ll take a look at your code as soon as I can. It seems likely I’ll be able to assist you with some rewriting of my curve nodes code.

I’m still in ‘function based mesh generation’ mode, ATM, I’m afraid. :smiley: I’ve been adding those 3D coordinate system transformation nodes – you know, cartesian, spherical, cylindrical and so on. I also made a test blend file to illustrate some of the possibilities: [ATTACH]378982[/ATTACH]. You’ll need the latest code from my github fork in order to run this. I’ve set the number of samples quite low, so as not to create too heavy a file. You might want to increase those here and there while testing.

In a nutshell: the coordinate system you want to use depends on the basic shape/topology of the mesh you want to generate:
. use spherical coordinates if the base shape is a sphere
. use cylindrical (or polar, which seems redundant, now) coordinates if the base shape is a cylinder
. use cartesian coordinates (no transformation node) if the base shape is a plane

Here’s a screenshot from the test blend file (with a decent number of samples). From left to right: spherical, cylindrical and cartesian:


Nice idea. That will make the addon more usable.

BTW. Some strange error throw on OSX with latest Github when trying to ad some node:


Something curious. This error is thrown only on the gooseberry branch. Not in master from buildbot(Hash:000dfc0 - 2015-3-31)

@guy lateur: your results look really good so far :slight_smile:

Yeah give me some time to define where everything goes and then you can help for sure.
btw: do you know how Blender calculates the right and left handles when you set the handle_type to automatic?

@pecador: Sorry I cannot test this because I have no OSX…

Nope, I have no idea, sorry.

Btw, there seems to be something wrong with the attached test blend in the above post, so let me try again: meshGen-IsoSurfaces-20150517-2.blend (1 MB)