Tutorial: Array Modifier with Random Offset using Animation Nodes
Gottfried Hofmann writes:
The Animation Nodes addon by Jacques Lucke never ceases to amaze. You can even use it to add functionality to Blender that was not easily possible before. Like creating your own array modifier with an option for random offset. Frederik Steinmetz shows you how in his latest tutorial on BlenderDiplom.
The Animation Nodes addon got a big upgrade – the current version 1.0 is not compatible with older releases anymore. That’s why we updated our old animation nodes tutorials so they work with the latest version. Since the coin stack example in the tutorial above uses a random input for the offset, you might also want to check out how random numbers work in the animation nodes addon (and CGI in general).
Extremely powerful demonstration! I’d like to see this functionality end up in the trunk so that the API could be exposed to all the modifiers, that way it would be trivial to extend the functionality to existing modifiers, such as adding the random offset to the traditional Array Modifier for example.