Proposal: Collection Mode for Object Instancer Node

[dapa5900]

Hi @OmarEmaraDev

as mentioned in #1771 it would be great if you could implement a collection mode to the object instancer node with the same functionality that the point instance node in Geometry Nodes provides:

collectionInstances.mp4

Maybe this node would then needed to be renamed to just "Instancer"

Thank you!

[OmarEmaraDev]

Isn't this already possible? For collection instancing, you just select a collection instance as the source object and check Full Copy. For individual objects mode, you use a random list node with a copy object data node. So I wounder if this is really necessary?

[Gerstmann-Bradley]

another note is that you can easily export your data to GN and use GN to instance. In such a case the performance will be much applaudable.

[dapa5900]

@OmarEmaraDev @Gerstmann-Bradley

Sure, it's possible but imo it's not very obvious how to do this, especially for new users. In every tutorial you see how to instance single objects using the instancer node so I'd expect, similar to geometry node's approach, that you can either use the instancer node directly to instance multiple source objects from a collection at once or at least it would work if you'd only need to plug in the all objects output from the collection info node into the object socket (provided you'd also have a seed property). From a user experience perspective I think it's quite unexpected that for instancing one object you only need this one node but for instancing multiple objects you now need 3 more nodes to achieve this. Especially the copy data node is something where I'm seriously wondering how anybody should guess that this is necessary to use...? I'm using animation nodes now for a while already but apart from this use case I think I have never used this node (or saw a tutorial) in any other case so I'm wondering where one should get this transfer knowledge from ...?
So I think a very basic and frequent task like this should have as least hurdles / steps to do as possible that's why I think this option should be part of the instancer node directly as suggested. And in case in the terms of ANs modular nodes philosophy you prefer to keep the nodes more separate I think one should at least try to get rid of this copy data necessity because using the collection info node together with a random list node as input for the objects is at least something that one would expect how this works if you already have a bit of experience with AN.

Regarding the hint with geometry nodes: of course this is something you could do but first of all it also requires extra steps and secondly if performance is not crucial I personally (for my own sanity 😉) prefer to keep everything in the same system and node editor to avoid unnecessary complexity and potential hickups.

Again this is already doable so this is just a user experience proposal to make things easier for very frequent tasks and newbie users.

Thank you!

[OmarEmaraDev]

@dapa5900 Okay. We will work on this after the release as we are currently in a feature freeze.