Making Arrays of Objects In Animation Nodes
Zach Hixson is back with new installment of his Animation Nodes tutorial.
The third part of my animation nodes tutorial series. In this part we will be covering loops, and how to use them to create arrays of object in a grid shape (or really whatever shape we want).
You can watch the full playlist here:
Thank you so much for making this tutorial series, they are easy to follow, short, and look clean. I hope you continue to make them.
thx men for this serie , i wan waiting it for long time , i hope you will ask as for all possibility to this exellant addon
I don’t understand why the grid mesh is bidimensional and not 3D…
I mean, technically it’s neither, it just outputs a list of (x, y, z) vector coordinates. If you want to manipulate the points in 3d space (such as rotating it) you can use matricies. I made a small example here: https://i.imgur.com/eV6un7G.png
Thanks for your reply! The problem is the algorithm behind the Grid Mesh Node automatically sets the Z axis to 0 and, by the node settings you can already tell there’s no room for adjusting anything in the Z axis (let’s say I wanted to output a cube grid – with just the Grid Mesh Node I can’t get all the Z coordinate for my objects, only the X and Y… I’m trying to work on my custom node and/or modify Animation Nodes Grid Mesh node so that it will account for the Z axis but I’m not very good with Maths, hehehe… Here’s the two files that need attention:
https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation_nodes/blob/master/animation_nodes/nodes/mesh/generation/grid.py (The Node file, pretty easy to twek)
https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation_nodes/blob/master/animation_nodes/algorithms/mesh_generation/grid.pyx (The algorithm that calculates the vector locations).
I haven’t reached Jacques yet so I don’t know why the Grid Mesh Node is the way it is, but I really don’t get it why the Z axis has been left out…?
https://www.blendernation.com/2017/02/28/making-arrays-objects-animation-nodes/
Sorry, didn’t mean to post that link.
Anyways, it appears your right. I thought the solution would be simple. Something like duplicating the vertex list, but it doesn’t seem that’s possible directly.
I don’t know much about the current state of Animation Nodes. Haven’t talked much to Jacques recently. I know some developments have been made since the last release, but I don’t know what will come of them as he seems to be doing other projects these days.
As for the code you linked, it should be possible to just do the same thing that he did for the X and Y values, and just do that for Z. It would require adding 2 more parameters to the function header (“Depth” and “zOffset”), and I don’t know how many other files this might break and require to be updated, but theoretically it wouldn’t be too hard, just tedious.
I mean, technically it’s neither, it just outputs a list of (x, y, z) vector coordinates. If you want to manipulate the points in 3d space (such as rotating it) you can use matricies. I made a small example here: https://i.imgur.com/eV6un7G.png