are GN limited to operate only on the Geometry which has them as a modifier?
Is there a possibility to give them various outputs sort of? (as a reverse situation to how we can put almost anything as an input)
A practical example:
GN1 creates a group of instances that float on top of a water surface. Some of these instances (but not all) should deform the water surface. At the moment, I bring the water geometry as an input and then I sort of add those selected instance-effects to it before it’s plugged into the Output socket of the whole GN group. But this means I actually have to carry a noodle through quite few places in the GN tree.
Is there a way to do this differently? To for example label those instances in a unique way and then have a node tree on the water geometry, that takes them as an input?
Hi, we can’t have several geometry outputs on any given geonodes modifier, so the way to “label” parts of a geometry, as you say, is to tag them with an attribute (create named attribute) and retrieve them later in your “water surface” geonode tree to use for controlling deformation.
Another thing you can do is to use linked geometry to split up your node-trees.
What I mean is:
Say you have a curve that you want to generate a bunch of things from… you can create linked copies of that curve geometry and then do separate geometry node modifiers on the separate linked geometries. This will ensure the generators “follow” the same underlying geometry, but do their generation separately… that way you can separate out specific generators that you can then feed into other modifiers, etc.