Geo nodes for boney pillars

So my friend Rados asked me for some support in developing some scenes for the animated movie they're developing. love the idea, happy to be asked! In the movie, or, generally in the world that is in development, there's a feature that will come into play often: an architectual feature between 3d print and organic growth that is defined by it's non-standard forms. For the scene I was asked for I needed to come up with a solution to build these structures en masse, so naturally I thought of a more parametric design that could then be adapted more easily. As I'm working with Blender I knew this was a very good reason to try to get into Geomtry Nodes - again. 

I quickly came to the conclusion that a pipeline that translates its input into a volume and from there back into a mesh (For Example Curve -> Mesh -> Volume -> Mesh) easily gives me the general aesthetic of these structures' surfaces and spatial expansion. Combined with a little noise in the positioning of vertices that was a good start.

So with the aesthetics more or less solved the question was how to make it so that the pillars can dynamically adapt to a terrain. I tried a handful of approaches and ended up with the following:

• create two objects in the scene which act as targets, one for the floor, one for the top
• reference both in the node tree and join them via bounding box - this creates an outlined space
• in this space spawn a 3D grid and use this as a lattice you can use to grow a curve from floor to bottom using the shortest edge path node
• modify the edge cost with some noise 

That's the basic setup in which this works - it's actually not too complicated.