Varying shader texture offset in Geometry Nodes based animation

Question

I would like to offset the texture for each of the moving circles created with Geometry Nodes so they do not all look identical. I thought this could be done with the initial starting coordinate of each circle, but I cannot find a way to make use of this in the Shader. This is the Geometry Nodes set-up:

Things I have tried:

• I tried to use Capture Attribute (and also Store Named Attribute) with the initial positions, just after the Distribute Points on Faces node. But they always get lost, either because the values end up being 0 or because they are not stored in the instances (or final meshes) that come out of the Geometry Nodes. I tried to use it in the Shader like this, for example:

• I found the following which seem relevant, but could not work out how to adapt them properly to my use case which includes animation. https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/254677/156592 https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/245919/156592

• I also tried Mesh Islands and was thinking I could use their index, but they seem to combine several circles when they are overlapping

• I tested to use Random output of the Object Info node in the Shader, but that makes it flickering. The offset seems to change per frame rather than being fixed for each circle.

I am new to blender, please apologise if terms are used incorrectly and if I got concepts wrong.

Answer 1

In the setup below, I'm capturing Random Values on the instances at the very end of your nodetree, and using those values to first add to and then rotate the generated image mapping vector. Since Store Named Attribute is set to the Instance domain, Attribute node in the shader should also be set to Instancer, instead of the usual Geometry you use with meshes:

_{Vector Rotate, is of course, optional. I'm capturing a random value between $0$ and $6.2831...(2\pi)$ so we get a nice radial distribution}

That's rather easy, however it seems to go a bit haywire when you play the animation:

After looking at the setup for a bit, I've come to the conclusion that this was due to how the circles are instanced on the endpoints of the curves that are getting trimmed at every frame. A sphere gets instanced at the endpoint and gets a randomly mapped texture. Curve gets trimmed. A new sphere gets instanced at the new endpoint and gets a new texture. And so on and so forth... This is my guess, but it is pretty likely what's going on. So, I changed how spheres get created: we want to create them once and then move them around—instead of creating new points that move around and instancing on them.

Convert the circle to an instance at the very start, with a Geometry to Instance, then make copies of it with Duplicate Elements set to Instance. To ensure there are as many instance copies as we have curves, use the Spline Count from a Domain Size—Curve. We want to place them at the curve endpoints, so using a Sample Curve at Factor: $1$ get the Position of the endpoint and move the instances there with a Set Position: