Aligning instanced objects along a normal

You might have noticed that when experimenting with instancing objects, when you want to instance objects onto a curved surface – for example, a torus or an icosphere – the objects you instance will not curve along with the normal of the mesh.

To fix this, you’ll need to make use of two nodes:

• The Normal node: This node will just output the object normal as a diamond-shaped node connection.
• The Align Rotation to Vector node: This node will convert any inputted vector value to an aligned vector value. For this exercise, the input of this node is the Normal node.

So, let’s start this journey by creating a simple instancing example:

1. Open a new Blender project and add an Icosphere. Don’t forget to add a Geometry Nodes node tree to this Icosphere as well. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to move on to making the node tree.
2. Let’s start by dropping...