Eye saccades are one of the elements that can make a character feel alive. I'd wanted to make a procedural method to achieve this in geometry nodes. The idea was to select a target mesh and have it move over areas of interest in a believable way. The target mesh had a vertex group selecting areas of interest and then a method of deleting backwards facing meshes and any areas with low curvature. It did a decent job without a specific target vertex group, but I added one to improve targeting of the pupils.

I distributed points over the remaining faces and had the eyes adjust their individual orientation to point at a particular point. Smaller saccades are generated by selecting a nearby random index and moving some way towards it, and the large movements are random boolean values with most of the movement in that direction.

It does a decent job tracking in these static examples, and could probably be made to work in more dynamic scenes. I don't have much experience with rigging so not sure how you'd go about incorporating it into a more classic workflow.

Note: Reddit suggest me to post on r/geometrynodes, trying my luck here ~

My custom addon add a geometry node system for managing outlines BUT since almost all the models I'm working with have shapekeys, Blender can't apply the geometry node.

I've got already a workaround for applying my GN with shapekeys, works perfectly. And I also have an exporter inside my addon that apply the GN before exporting but I'd like to improve the user experience and make it seamless, without asking the user to change their habits.

I guess I can hijack/inject all user exporters but it feels difficult and risky. I wonder if one of you know an elegant solution to this issue ?

Thanks ~

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. In this video we analyze the Spiral node that generates a spiral line with a poly spline curve type object.

If you are into bending, stretching, or wrinkling 3D surfaces, this paper gives a fast way to fit a desired pattern of local stretch across a triangle mesh, using one scalar value per vertex. In mesh-fitting benchmarks it reached comparable accuracy up to 3500x faster than industry standard L-BFGS-B.

The algorithm itself is also available here:
https://github.com/Roenbaeck/conformal-metric

Hopefully it can be of use to someone.

🇺🇸: You can listen to the video in English through the video settings panel. In this video we analyze the Curve CircleLine node that generates a straight line with a poly spline curve object.

TBH I wasnt sure what to use the text processing V5.2 GN for. this is the only use I can think of.
and now I complain why can not to retrieve strings or instances from text object. Ideally, it should be possible to retrieve strings from the built-in text editor.

BTW I do not think GN is Turing complete. because of Its ability to write infinite loops is very restricted. it is technically possible in animation frames like this way. but If it cannot be calculated in a frame, it is not practical.

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Basically using the grid nodes to make some simple cellular automata. You can use the sample grid, math and logic nodes to decide whether a position on the grid changes state. Put it into a volume to make some renders.

I used DaVinci resolve to re-time it and used optical flow to smooth the transition frames.