Help, I need help with one thing

Guys, i get confused now…

There are now:

Animation Nodes
Geometry Nodes (everything nodes project)
Sorcar
Sverchock

IM LOST
I want to understand, what should i put now my energy into using and deeply learning.
but most importantly, what the heck are the differences.
Please help!

  • Geometry Nodes: Very important, since is the official way of doing things. Though geometry nodes is super-new project and can do only the most basic stuff. Not quite impressive at this point in time but gradually will become more advanced and get more complex, such as something equivalent of “Houdini” but open source. So this is somehow unavoidable since it will be the standard way of doing things and gradually we will depend more and more into these workflows.

  • Sorcar + Sverchok: Somehow they complement each other, they compete in terms of features etc, so they have the same principles on what they are trying to do. But since they are different projects made by different teams each one have their own todo list and their own proposed set of nodes. I have looked into these a bit, they offer lots of advanced and exotic features, I almost never need. So you will have to glance their documentation and some tutorials to see what is feasible, and when the need arises you would jump into it, to get that feature.

  • Animation Nodes: Historically this was an experiment of a single developer, about making procedural animations (not specialized 100% in modeling). Since now he works at the Blender core team it is logical that all his expertise will be translated into the “Everything Nodes” project. But indeed at this current point in time there is no other better way to make difficult procedural animations, such as for example having a 3D car get assembled on the fly, in no way you would create keyframed animation.

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Thanks a lot. So i will stick for now to AN+Sorcar and slowly switching from Sorcar to Geo Nodes as they expand.

Sverchock is for my need total overkill. It can do an insane amount of things. I have the feeling it is even on par with Houdini on some things. Amazing.

Now we have so many nodes that you have to comprehend what the heck you should do with all of them. :smiley: Which is totally not easy given the unlimited amount of possibilities :smiley:

Geometry Nodes has the advantage of being built directly into Blender, so it uses the full power of compiled code, and you know it is going to work if you don’t desire upgrading just once a year with the LTS releases (as many addon devs. might prefer their safety and stability).

Besides that, a lot of heavy plugin users of all apps. eventually face the dilemma of their favorite solution going EOL (due to the developer moving on or going out of business). At least you get the code for Blender’s addons, but the code might be pretty complex.