[Blender 3.2] Animated Branching Vine Geometry Node

A geometry node setup that takes a curve input and generates animated geometry along that curve using a Parent/Child hierarchy. The first parents are assigned by the distance to the object origin and all others by the distance between curve start and spline.

Additionally, there's instancing, leaf blend shapes and surface collision functionality. The blend shapes work by mixing between the relative positions of the vertices of the first three objects in the collection (fourth one is the stem). You can toggle between this and instancing a random object from the collection. If the base radius is set to 0 and the instance collection is empty, only the curve is outputted, along with a mask at the tip (TipMask) as a stored attribute, which allows retrieving only the animated curve and following this with another geo node setup for more specific tasks.

To use this with Ivy Gen and the Sapling add-ons:

1. Enable those add-ons from Edit > Preferences > Add-ons (they come shipped with blender).
2. For Ivy gen, after generating the Ivy (generation starts from the 3D cursor), set the origin of the curve object to be the 3D cursor from Object > Set Origin > Origin to 3D cursor. From the curve's object data properties > Geometry > Bevel > Set Depth to 0 so geometry can be set from the modifier instead.
3. For the sappling addon, disable bevel in the geometry tab during tree creation.