NParticlesAverage

[hdarren]

It would also be cool if we could get other operations other than average. Minimum, Maximum, Sum, Median, etc. Of course, Gradient, Divergence, and Curl would also be cool.

I agree, this should be in the final product.

From the release notes, it would seem that the search results are cached? Meaning that if we wanted to sample many values from the particles, it wouldn’t be re-doing the search each time?

The outputs from any single node are cached, so that means you can re-use the queried position as many times as you want. It also means that it does the search then computes the average for each channel specified in the list so its not searching the particles multiple times.

Sampling the average in a spherical or conical region

This isn’t too much harder to do, it just requires potentially unbounded space to process. I foresee complaints about it locking up Max with a particularly bad choice of radius or particle distribution.

[hdarren]

I could see a compromise where you sample N particles, but return not just the average, but the distance to the Nth particle so we can evaluate not just the sum of the values, but the sum divided by the volume.

I agree. This should be an output provided by the node.

Also, it might be efficient to sample N particles in volume V, that way preventing runaway particle counts.

An interesting idea. I’ll likely add it as a preferred option over the straight-up volume approach to see if its usable. I do plan on adding the purely volume based approach too though.