I have done some geometry instancing things in my Geometry Nodes and wanted to offset them a little bit by the normal of the face the instances are on. However blender doesn't let me plug the Normal node into the Translation property:
This seems to be because the Transform node only supports single values, not values per-point. I tried using the Translate Instances node, but this does not seem to work either:
I assume this is because the Normal node somehow loses its information when the points are changed to instances, so I think I need to somehow store the information on the instance and then retrieve it for the Translate instances node, but I couldn't manage to make it work with any attribute nodes.
Right now I'm using a workaround like this:
However this also rotates the instances, which is fine for the use-case I have right now, but would like to avoid to further extend what I'm doing. (offsetting with random rotation after having it aligned to the normal doesn't work like this, it would then translate not along the normal, but along the randomly rotated normal)
Do you know any way how I can make the translation work using the Translate instances node?