# How do I build instances on a grid with Geo Nodes?

I am using geometry nodes to make a grid of icons. I have instanced the icon object over a Grid node. How can I make the instances of the icon appear as if the grid is building from the bottom left to right then row after row? If I have to animate a material to make them appear then I was hoping to use the list of icons to alter properties like color or size as well as.

• I don't know geonodes, but looking at your screenshot alone, you could probably achieve it with two grids, first grid having **Vertices X**=6, **Vertices Y**=#floor(frame/7), and another grid having **Vertices X**=#frame % 7`, but you would also need to position the second grid above the first so they seem like one grid. Jul 15 at 8:52

The Grid node is quite limited in terms of attributes. You can't do much with the resulting geometry after its creation unless you jump through mathematical hoops.

What we can do is use a Line mesh, and extract an index from its vertices position, which we will use to construct our own grid.

This setup will associate an incremented index for each vertex of the mesh.

Then we create the grid with x ≡ idx (modulo columns) and y = idx // columns (integer division).

Result:

Now we filter out the unwanted points by removing indices > our wanted value.

The entire node tree:

Result:

• nice one Gorgious! ;) Jul 15 at 9:26

you can do this with this node setup:

Result:

for color you can use something like this (since you didn't specify your color...i took kind of random)

Video tutorial with step by step explanation:

https://youtu.be/IbuA-JinG4c

• Thank you for this. I was hoping it would be a little more straightforward but I will accept your answer ;-) Jul 15 at 9:20
• I was half way through my answer, but looks like we had the same idea ^^ oh, well..! Jul 15 at 9:21
• I think I will change the accepted answer to reward additional explanation tho :D Jul 15 at 9:23
• does this mean, you will change to mine again, if i would explain it more? :D Jul 15 at 9:27
• Hey that color addition is very helpful! I think that in the spirit of StackEx I would have to award the most detailed earliest answer sorry. I probably should have waited a day to award the token. Thank you so much for helping me. I see that there is much interest here too. I have many more simple questions for Geo Nodes so there will be more opportunities for detailed answers ;-) Jul 16 at 1:02