Animated Branching Vine is a Geometry Nodes setup that generates animated geometry along an input curve using a parent-child hierarchy. The initial parents are determined by their distance to the object origin, while subsequent parents are assigned based on the distance between the curve start and the spline.

The node setup includes functionality for instancing, leaf blend shapes, and surface collision. The blend shapes operate by mixing the relative vertex positions of the first three objects in a collection, with the fourth object acting as the stem. Users can switch between this blend shape method and instancing random objects from the collection. When the base radius is set to zero and the instance collection is empty, the tool outputs only the curve and a tip mask as a stored attribute, enabling integration with other Geometry Nodes setups.

This setup is compatible with curves generated by Blender's built-in Ivy Gen and Sapling add-ons, provided the bevel depth is set to zero on the generated curves.