Ready for a paragraph or three?
I’ve had DNorman and Debuk help me out on this, and we’ve all come to the conclusion that you can only perform so many rotation operations inside geonodes until all the local axes on your instances are so skewed and screwed that they’re no longer controllable or predictable. Try any more, and you’ll either get spazzy results, or it’ll mess up something you’ve done previously.
The only way I can see to get around it is to reset the axes on the instances. And the only way to do that is to realize the instances, then perform further rotations on those. The problem is that once you realize the instances, any further rotations will treat the bunch as one single object.
So how do you get around that? Mesh islands. You set things up so that geometry nodes treats every separate, unconnected piece as their own object, provided you do all the math right.
…and I’m having trouble with the math.
I need this so I can orient the branches so they’re all tending towards one area, leaving a bald spot on the opposite end. This isn’t all that big of a deal for regular trees, but for forks, where the branches tend to grow away from each other? It’s nice to have.
Here’s a couple of links I’ve been using to help me out.
…and that’s the story of my life so far.