Arrays of geometry — linear, grid, radial, random, image, mesh, and particle-driven — with 13 effectors to shape them.

A cloner takes one piece of geometry and repeats it. Effectors then offset, rotate, scale, and colour the clones, individually or in waves.

Press Tab in the node graph and open the Cloners tab.

The minimum chain

Primitive ──► Grid Cloner ──► Output

Wire a surface operator into the cloner's Source port.

A cloner never makes its own geometry. With nothing wired into Source it renders an empty scene, silently. That is the first thing to check when a cloner appears to do nothing.

Wiring a texture into Source also works — each clone becomes a flat emissive billboard quad, governed by Billboards Face Camera.

The effector wires into the cloner. Every effector has Effectors In and Effectors Out; chain them by wiring one's Out to the next one's In, and wire only the last into one of the cloner's four Effector ports.

Chain order is evaluation order. The four Effector ports concatenate, so the stack has no practical limit.

Every effector carries a Field Image input and the shared field block — Field, Field Shape, Field Size, Falloff, Invert Field — which limits where it acts.

Cloners

Every cloner shares a per-clone block: Source Sequence, Clone Scale X/Y/Z, Clone Uniform Scale, Clone Rotate Heading/Pitch/Roll, and Billboards Face Camera.

Operator	Extra input	What it does	Key parameters
Linear Cloner	—	Clones marched along a fixed step vector.	Count, Step X/Y/Z
Grid Cloner	—	A 3D array with grid, honeycomb, checker, and brick patterns, plus an octree fracture mode.	Count X/Y/Z, Size X/Y/Z, Pattern, Random Subdivide
Radial Cloner	—	Clones swept around a circle between a start and end angle.	Count, Radius, Start Angle, End Angle, Plane
Random Cloner	—	Seeded scatter inside a box or sphere volume.	Count, Volume, Size or Radius, Seed
Image Cloner	Image	One clone per bright cell of an image grid; luminance can drive depth and colour.	Grid Resolution, Threshold, Luminance Depth, Use Pixel Color
Mesh Cloner	Target Surface	Scatters the source across a second mesh's surface, vertices, face centres, or edge centres.	Distribute On, Clone Count, Align To Normal, Colour From Target
Particle Cloner	Particle System	Binds clone transforms to a live particle system's positions.	Max Clones, Use Particle Color

Grid Cloner caps at 64 per axis. The others go far higher.

Turn on Colour From Target and each Mesh Cloner clone takes its colour from the target mesh where it landed, read from that mesh's own colour map. It updates live, so a playing video on the target recolours the clones as it runs.

There are two ways to combine a cloner with particles, and they do different things. Wire the particle system into Particle Cloner's Particle System port to use the particles as clone positions. Wiring it into Source instead gives you flat billboards of the rendered particle image.

Effectors

Operator	Extra input	What it does	Key parameters
Plain Effector	—	A constant offset, rotation, and scale on every clone, gated by the field.	Offset X/Y/Z, Rotate Heading, Uniform Scale
Randomise Effector	—	Seeded per-clone jitter of position, rotation, and scale.	Position ±, Rotate Heading ±, Uniform Scale ±, Seed
Step Effector	—	Ramps the offset linearly across the clone index.	Steps, Offset X/Y/Z, Uniform Scale
Sine Effector	—	A sine or cosine wave across the clone index.	Frequency, Speed, Function, Offset Y ±
Ripple Effector	—	A radial travelling wave from the effector's origin.	Frequency, Speed, Peak Sharpness
Noise Effector	—	Animated 3D noise driving offset, rotation, and scale.	Noise Scale, Speed, Offset ±
Quantize Effector	—	Snaps the running clone transform to per-channel steps. 0 disables a channel.	Position Step X/Y/Z, Rotate Heading Step, Uniform Scale Step
Target Effector	—	Aims every clone at a world point.	Target X, Target Y, Target Z
Kill Box Effector	—	Removes clones in a region. The field block is the region.	Field, Field Shape, Field Size, Invert Field
Colour Ramp Effector	Gradient	Colours clones from a gradient, and can drive transforms by ramp luminance.	Drive By, Cycles, Blend Mode
Texture Colorizer Effector	Gradient Texture	Samples a wired texture at a chosen row. Unwired, it falls back to a visible grayscale ramp.	Drive By, Sample Row, Cycles
Image Effector	Image	Projects an image onto the array; each clone's offset and scale scale with the brightness where it lands.	Projection Size, Offset Y, Uniform Scale
Audio Effector	—	Live audio level scales the transform. Band Sweep maps the clone index across the spectrum.	Band, Band Sweep, Gain, Offset Y

Troubleshooting

The Kill Box appears to have no parameters — its region is the field block. Turn Field on and set Field Shape and Field Size.

Quantize will not snap the Target rotation — Target's aim runs after the other effectors, so Quantize cannot reach it.

A texture source looks low resolution — textures wired into Source arrive at document resolution and fit mode, not their native size.

Surfaces

The geometry a cloner clones.

Particles

Driving clone positions from a simulation.