Fractal Tree (Blender Geometry Nodes)

So I was helping someone on BSE here:

How do I align an instanced mesh to end of extruded mesh in geometry nodes

And then went overboard and made a fractal out of that. It comes down to creating a tetrahedron (process described under the link above), the main node tree that is just a loop repeating another node tree recursively:

…And that another node tree being the one presented by me in BSE with slight modifications:

If you want to see the effect in higher quality, you can click the Youtube link below; make sure you enable 4K even if your monitor is 1080p, as the setting affects bitrate:

My Little Experiments: Fractal Tree (or broccoli)

What the node trees do:

👉 Takes the input, extrudes its faces, deletes extruded tops and spawns itself there, without bottom.

👉 The above means you can merge by distance the geometry to get a smooth shading transition, but beware, this requires realizing instances, and that's extremely slow.

👉 You could instead just calculate the normals as if the geometry was connected; I think it's easy but I didn't care to do it anyway.

👉 The input geometry is a tetrahedron (a pyramid), but any shape should work, though for a seamless connection you need each side to look the same as the base. Plus for anything else than a regular polygon, you need to improve alignment to align by the specific index.

👉 My animation doesn't spawn copies on the bottom of the tetrahedron, but you can do it, by simply connecting "Group Input" into the "Parent" socket of the last "i" node in the loop.

👉 After spending over 9k points on SheepIt Render Farm to render it, I figured it would be better to grow the tree an iteration after iteration instead of all of them at once. Oh well.

⚠I promise no support and give no guarantee the item actually works❗ You’re buying junk! Treat it as an educational material rather than a product. However, I’d love to hear any kind of feedback: bug reports, suggestions, ‘backlinks’ to your work that uses the obtained junk (if you decide to share, please provide info if I can use it in the description of the item). Based on that I may tinker with an idea some more, but no promises are made.

Within the package:

✅ A fractal.blend file with the setup I used to render the animation above.