Realize Instances Node

The Realize Instances node makes any instances (efficient duplicates of the same geometry) into real geometry data. This makes it possible to affect each instance individually, whereas without this node, the exact same changes are applied to every instance of the same geometry. However, performance can become much worse when the input contains many instances of complex geometry, which is a fundamental limitation when procedurally processing geometry.

Note

If the input contains multiple volume instances, only the first volume component is moved to the output.

Attributes

When merging attributes from multiple geometry inputs, the highest complexity data type is chosen for the output attribute. In other words, if a weight attribute has a Boolean type on one geometry input and a vector data type on another geometry, the weight attribute on the output geometry will have a vector data type.

Named and anonymous attributes are propagated from the instance domain to the realized geometry. If the same attribute exists on the geometry and on an instance, the attribute values from the geometry has precedence over the values on the instances.

In order to avoid creating duplicate values, the id attribute has special handling. The id values or indices of each instance are combined with id values from the points on geometry data.

Warning

Like other geometry nodes, this node always outputs generic typed attributes. So instead of a Vertex Group attribute, it will create a “Float” attribute on the result, and it will create a generic 2D vector attribute instead of a special “UV Map” attribute. Some other areas of Blender don’t properly handle generic attributes in version 3.0.

Custom face corner normals are also not transferred currently.

Inputs

Geometry

Standard geometry input.

Selection

Which top-level instances to realize.

Realize All

Realize all levels of nested instances for each top-level instances (overrides the value of the Depth input).

Depth

Number of levels of nested instances to realize for each top-level instance.

Properties

This node has no properties.

Outputs

Geometry

Standard geometry output.