Often people asked me about status of Animation Nodes (AN) development and usage in relative to Geometry Nodes. As this is a very tricky question, I hope the following paragraph can serve as a very good reference/clarification in case people brought it up again:
The short answer is that I no longer make tutorials and recommend people to learn AN, although I still use AN occasionally.
1. Geometry Nodes are technically never meant to replace AN because they work on different hierarchy. AN is for object, Geo Node is for geometry. While there are many overlaps between them, there are also certain functions only available in AN, such as controlling group of objects, light parameters, and cameras. AN can also help integrate group of objects with existing simulation system in blender. In contrast, Geo Node requires you to build everything from scratch. Other things only available in AN include working with audio, MIDI, Text data, etc. An example of AN controlling lights can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoJq1.... Note that it's not just instancing light, but also controlling the light powers and potentially other settings.
A concept called "Collection Nodes" was discussed many years ago to actually replace AN functionality, and I honestly don't see it coming within 10 years.
2. Jacques was the original developer of AN, and he is one of the core developer in Geo Node team. Does it mean learning AN will help me understanding Geo Nodes?
NO, their working logics differ a lot, and honestly I think Geo Node is more convenient to work with despite missing native "Falloff" Nodes. That's why I made my mograph node group presets and used them in my tutorials.
3. If Jacques went to develop Geo Nodes now, does it mean AN is dead without development?
Actually Jacques left AN many many years ago. When I joined in 2018 learning blender he was already gone from AN development AFAIK. The development was continued by Omar, who also became a blender developer focusing on Cycle and Viewport Compositor.
Currently AN no longer receives any New Features. However AN is actively maintained with bug fixes by Omar.
While many add-ons became unusable as blender keeps updating its python API / python library version, AN is always upto date with the newest blender version.
In fact, about two month ago I found a bug and Omar solved it pretty quickly.
From this point of view, people can always feel comfortable using it.
At the end, the reason I no longer teach about AN is because most stuff can be done in Geo nodes easier and faster. Learning AN will be more difficult and time consuming and it does not help people learning Geo nodes anyway. However, for people who needs it, AN sometimes can still be un-replaceable and is actively maintained with versioning and bug fixes.
Bradley Animation
Often people asked me about status of Animation Nodes (AN) development and usage in relative to Geometry Nodes. As this is a very tricky question, I hope the following paragraph can serve as a very good reference/clarification in case people brought it up again:
The short answer is that I no longer make tutorials and recommend people to learn AN, although I still use AN occasionally.
1. Geometry Nodes are technically never meant to replace AN because they work on different hierarchy. AN is for object, Geo Node is for geometry. While there are many overlaps between them, there are also certain functions only available in AN, such as controlling group of objects, light parameters, and cameras. AN can also help integrate group of objects with existing simulation system in blender. In contrast, Geo Node requires you to build everything from scratch. Other things only available in AN include working with audio, MIDI, Text data, etc. An example of AN controlling lights can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoJq1.... Note that it's not just instancing light, but also controlling the light powers and potentially other settings.
A concept called "Collection Nodes" was discussed many years ago to actually replace AN functionality, and I honestly don't see it coming within 10 years.
2. Jacques was the original developer of AN, and he is one of the core developer in Geo Node team. Does it mean learning AN will help me understanding Geo Nodes?
NO, their working logics differ a lot, and honestly I think Geo Node is more convenient to work with despite missing native "Falloff" Nodes. That's why I made my mograph node group presets and used them in my tutorials.
3. If Jacques went to develop Geo Nodes now, does it mean AN is dead without development?
Actually Jacques left AN many many years ago. When I joined in 2018 learning blender he was already gone from AN development AFAIK. The development was continued by Omar, who also became a blender developer focusing on Cycle and Viewport Compositor.
Currently AN no longer receives any New Features. However AN is actively maintained with bug fixes by Omar.
While many add-ons became unusable as blender keeps updating its python API / python library version, AN is always upto date with the newest blender version.
In fact, about two month ago I found a bug and Omar solved it pretty quickly.
From this point of view, people can always feel comfortable using it.
At the end, the reason I no longer teach about AN is because most stuff can be done in Geo nodes easier and faster. Learning AN will be more difficult and time consuming and it does not help people learning Geo nodes anyway. However, for people who needs it, AN sometimes can still be un-replaceable and is actively maintained with versioning and bug fixes.
1 year ago (edited) | [YT] | 12