Geo Nodes - How hard can it be to align instances along a curve?

[RayMobula]

My brain doesn’t compute Blender’s geo-node logic - it’s my nemesis. @StephenWoods

Ok, it’s a very simple task - or should be. Take a curve, Instance an object along the curve, and … align the object along the direction of the curve.

^^^ Even with connected rotation (Curve to Points) to rotation (Instance on Points) it does not work.

I want the planes to automagically align with the curve, so the planes look like this

I spent several hours on this. Curve to tangent node didn’t do the trick either.

[RayMobula]

I’m confused … must be the model, since it works with the default cube.

Argh …

[RayMobula]

OMG!

In the end all I had to do was to reorient the base model.

Lesson learned - use base geometries to validate the node tree as such works, then add the fancy stuff …

[StephenWoods]

Hey, I just saw this question. I’m glad you got this to work. But here is another option.

So the way this works is you use the tangent of the curve to get a vector you want to align your instances to. You can then use the Align Euler to Vector node to choose the correct Alignment. Here I chose ‘Y’ because the instance object is on the Y axis. If it was on the X axis I’d use X instead. This saves you having to rotate the orginal object, which is useful if you are linking it from another file or rotating it breaks something else.

I also used a bezier curve here to show that as the curve bends, the tangent will shift, this means that the object should tilt with the curve.

Its not always obvious on a straight curve whether the rotation on the instances will remain constant on a different curve. Anyways, I hope that gives you another option to play with.