08-Curve nodes-Geometry Nodes( Fields) For Beginners / Blender 3.0

bye [Music] there is no perfect way to start today's chapter even with the limited number of nodes which are introduced in blender 3.0 the number of possibilities which it brings to the procedural setups are in thousands or endless you can say that is something to be really excited about for instance we could we could use curves before and that is not something new all right so i have this very basic curve for instance and uh by introducing a profile curve you can make a 3d 3d shape out of that and we are familiar with all that and you don't need a node based workflow for that well what's exciting about all this it's not just the curve it's about using the curve as guide to derive your procedural setups so i have this single curve which is being used to drive this whole setup now check this out and this is done very roughly so just don't try to focus on this mess here all right i didn't have much time to prepare things so now if i take these i have this very basic shape of the road and then i can distribute the lights on it and then i can bring a landscape and pillars so all of this is being let me let me just bring a better shape all right so that so this is something much more relatable so if you look at this what i have here is this curve and the same curve is being referenced to make this road and then distribute these slides and then make adjustments in the landscape here and then again distribute these pillars now even with these uh four or five things layering up you can see the the amount of complexity we can achieve with the with the basic setup now now this is not a model this is like a setup procedural setup and if i go to the edit mode of this curve if i select these points of this curve now and try to extrude things out then i have more roads and the more pillars and this landscape is actually adjusting according to the to these lines these uh the path you can see so i mean this is not perfectly done and don't try to get into too much of details of what's going on the setup it's not uh very well finished all right but look at the number of things which are happening here and uh if i try to change the shape of it the landscape will accordingly adjust the height of the pillars is kind of adjusting accordingly all of that is happening just from this simple node setup you can see so that is something to be really excited about that is what we are going to discuss in coming few chapters the procedural setups but today we are going to discuss this example which you have seen in the intro just to discuss the very basics of the curves what these nodes can do with within the curve section which are there in the geometry nodes so that we have at least basics out of the way and in the future we won't have to go back and forth discussing the details all right so let's get to the the tutorial then this is ram from cross mind studio welcome back to the eighth chapter of geometry note series if you have stumbled upon this tutorial this video randomly then go back and watch this series from the start if you're a beginner the link is in the description or you can also head to the playlist section the sponsor of this series is renderous if you are a student or professional working in animation and vfx industry or studying it can't really afford a powerful workstation and would like the flexibility of rendering on demand in short deadlines then try out rendero with their fixed monthly subscriptions you can use cloud-based workstations 24x7 check out their prices they have various plans starting from 19 us dollars very affordable and the link for your discount coupon is in the description you use this to sign up use the cross mind x 15 to sign up if you want to avail this discount all right so let's get to the tutorial then [Applause] [Music] [Music] so let's start with the very basic uh setup and uh let's have a look at this section which is called curve and curve primitives and we are going to discuss a bunch of these so just like the geometry primitives the mesh primitives you have curve primitives now and for instance this curve segment and then you have curved circle and then you have a curve spiral star and all that going on all right and just like uh the meshes you can also join these things transform these things and use all those nodes on the curves as well so for instance if i uh use this and combine it with this yeah and increase the radius so i have this shape now if i bring one curve fill node which is which should be here if i put it here then you can see i have this shape and this fill curve is picking the uh the combination of these two curves now so yeah and then you have a fillet curve fillet and combining these you can make these cool looking patterns with the fillet curve so what it basically doing is uh creating fillet kind of like a smoothing the edges out and if you go to the poly here and increase the number of counts then you will be able to see the smoothing going on all right so i'm just going to randomly discuss a few nodes which which are like very essential and basics of how you deal with the curves so there are plenty of things going on here and we might won't be able to curve everything which is here the very basics just to get you started with the curves uh we are going to talk about few nodes all right so i often use this search command and whatever i'm searching here you should be able to find uh in in this list curve curve primitives you shouldn't have much of a hard time locating uh the nodes which you're looking for all right so i find it handy to just use the search command so anything related to curves just go to the curve section or curve primitive section now you can just play around with the resolution or you can also make a duplicate of this and then transform this maybe you rotate this one in the z z direction make much more uh complex setup as soon as you start piling up a very few nodes you will see these complex shapes but just be careful uh just go easy on the scrolls if you have just too many vertices or if you buy accidentally you put too many numbers in here points or in the accounts then your blender could crash because of processing so many numbers or it might would have now let's have a look at the curve first we have a primitive a very basic so let's have a look at this let's forget about all this exciting stuff for now the basics are important what are the few things which which comes to your mind when you look at the curves and uh the one thing is the length of the curve and the the starting point the end point the segment the tangent all of those things are here in the curve section you can see the curve length then you can change uh convert this to mesh if i bring a curved circle and choose this as a curve profile now i can make a tube out of this all right so that we can do and then there is a curved two points which is basically uh going to give you these points on which you can distribute other things for instance whatever i just showed you in the beginning the number of pillars which were going on you can just bring your instances on points so what we discussed in the last chapter the instances so you can use those things with the curves as well primitive cylinder there you have it the radius going on so you can make fences you can make many things with it you can distribute uh on the points and then you have a free sample curve and this will let you resample your curve the number of points uh within the curve the number of segments you can say so then you have curve fillet but what i just showed you here you have if you have any uh corners in your meshes uh in your curves which you would like to smooth out then uh then you can use uh let me just get rid of this yeah just use curve fill it then you should be able to smooth smooth those curves out so these are the bunch of things uh the very basics just forget about all this and then you have a curve handle composition parameter so curve parameter is basically the measurement of the curve the starting to end the length of it the the points the record of the whole basically the measurement of the whole curve that is the curve parameter so this is uh if this is the starting point of the curve then this this will be zero and then there will be based on the more points one two three four then basically all these uh just like we have inputs we have in the input section we have text normal position and everything so if you want to derive few parameters if you're using math or something then you can use these things like that curves tangent or curves uh the length of the curve the tilt of the curve and everything to interlink few other things with it for instance uh if i have a curve to mesh and if i bring a circle sorry if i bring a curved circle then what we just made is this now here i have this node called set curve radius i think yeah something like this so since this is uh we turned this into mesh here then let's plug this here set curve radius so this is just to control the radius of the curve yeah so we were discussing about this and so if i bring the curve parameter here and uh this is zero this is one and this is the starting point this is the ending point if i plug this here then what happens is based on that uh factor it's going to adjust the radius of this curve so now i have the narrow bottom here and then the broader radius here so yeah and then we have the trim curve which you should be able to find here in the curve section here so the trim curve basically as simple as that it trims your curve uh you can adjust the starting point the ending point now at this point it might would look like all of this is a very simple thing like all right uh there's nothing to be too excited about but think of it like this if you have a great play and on this grid if you distribute points and on this if you instance on points just like previous chapter what we discussed so we have this grid we have let's bring a join geometry node here we can bring these curves so let's forget about all this for now let's just just go with the simple curve so let's bring one curved line so let's say if we instance this here now we have these lines all right and we have multiple lines going on so let's make a dense um so let's increase the density so you could make many things with it so let's think about trees forest or maybe hair the fur on animal skin so there are so many things you can do with it all those things we were doing before like a curve to mesh or let's say trim curve now that we have these instances on point so even at this point it's still a curve so we can trim this curve here and what's more fun about this this part is if we bring a texture and use that for the end point now all of these instances will work with this texture that the trim basically will happen unevenly it's going to trim these curves but the thing is since all of these uh lines are basically one uh one curves instances that is why we see all the heights are basically at the same level the the texture is not quite working well so for that we'll have to first realize these instances that means every instance becomes unique kind of so now you have this texture driving these the trim of the curve and just like the meshes you can set position of these points now there are points one is here one is here and what if i transform those with the set points just like the uh i i believe sixth chapter what we discussed the displacement so what if i select the top point of this curve and to do that you have to bring an end point selection which is there in the curve endpoint selection so in the curves you have the starting point and the end point so which point do you want to select just plug that into selection here and let's select the end point here so we don't want any starting point but just the end point and then if you transform you can see what's going on we have these curves basically only the end points transforming in x y and z and again you can use the texture with it let's bring a noise texture which you can plug into the endpoint i'm just doing a rough i'm just roughly explaining it here all right so let's bring a position node here so anything which i'm not explaining here just just keep in mind if you have uh stumbled upon this chapter randomly we discussed these things in the previous chapters so please go back and watch those chapters if if you're feeling lost at some point and if something is not making sense all right now what we can also do is bring one uh v sample curve since we have we don't have much points in the curve everything kind of looks straight and we can't really see this texture so if i bring a resample curve here let's get rid of this endpoint selection instead we are going to bring curve primitive uh curve here yeah and let's multiply this with the math sorry so now that uh yeah now we have these waves going on the curves so more samples we have the more waves we will see so these are few things you can do with the curves and there is a whole bunch of lists in the coming few chapters when we are discussing different scenarios we will need all of these and uh i think it would be better if we discuss it or for each scenario we have a dedicated example let's just have fun take it easy on the very first day dealing with the curves and it's going to take some time some practice to memorize all of these just go easy with it so just to keep in mind when you have curve just think think about like this you have curve parameter which is regarding all of this information of the points the length of it then uh you have curve length which is basically going to give you curve length that curved tangent which is going to give you the rotation of the every tangent in the curve and then you have a starting point endpoint selection and then you have a curve to mesh you can also convert mesh to curve so if i have a cube what i can do is mesh two curve and now this this cube have turned into mesh then if i go back again and curve to mesh this curved circle then i can make something like this so radius something like this if i bring one circle yeah sorry or just to make a easy donut then uh what you can do is uh bring one simple circle and then with on the pro in the profile you can plug the same shape and then you have this done and if you're looking to make some easy animation with it what you can do is try to rotate this profile curve and then you have this nice animation going on so every number in the node based system is is an opportunity for you so it's like so you'll have to practice more to and wait for these happy accidents to happen practicing will help you familiarize yourself with uh with these different things and for instance uh a certain animation like this would have been really difficult if you were working with the basic primitives but in the node based workflow can distribute more let's say cylinders on these faces and then those will rotate accordingly simple things i'm just uh trying to put a point across so let's get to the final example that we have for today's assignment so so that you have something really nice to have with you by the end of the day just try to make something on your own uh just try to think of a good visual around it it's rewarding let's get to the final example then so let's start with the final scene and we are going to bring one new node system here and let's bring one mesh primitive and add one icosphere so we are going to use this instead and on this icosphere let's bring one mesh two points so that every face is a point and then we can bring instances on point just like the previous chapter and on this what we can do is curve in the curve primitives curved line and plug these uh this line here as instances so let me just uh see the preview so every point is now aligned but the problem is the lines are facing upwards just just a vertical i i wanted these lines to face uh in the direction of the normal like this so that is something we need to capture with the attribute and there is no simple straight way to do that i mean uh we can't really use a normal input in the rotation because at this point at at this point it's uh it's not really uh we are not actually connecting normal into this mesh and instance is uh not really picking up the orientation of this mesh so first what we need to do is capture the normals in this one so for that we have a attribute capture node so let's bring one attribute capture capture attribute and plug that here right before the mesh two points and and in this one basically what it does is whatever input you have whether it's a input field input or a whether it's a texture or anything that attribute it can uh capture and i mean it can output a certain uh attribute out of that so let's say if i bring a vector in this like a normal here so since a vector is a three point uh i mean it's made of three floats then i'll have to change this to first vector as soon as i do that you'll see this turned into attribute uh the attribute turned into a blue diamond that is that is a sign of vector so now basically what we're doing is capturing the normal the input is the normal and we are capturing that attribute and this output is basically now in the normal of this ico sphere here so if you are capturing some certain texture or something then you will have to just maybe capture the float or something the gray value and just like how we have gray values coming out of the textures uh like this so in this case we have the vector and now this vector we can uh use to align the rotation of the instances so this is a bit of a new workflow just this might would get getting used to so in the rotation if i plug this one directly it's not really going to give me accurate result so first i'll bring one align it's more like this node is like what we previously had a line rotation to vector it's not now called align euler to vector so some fancy name here so that's completely all right now we are going to plug the attribute and the normals which are coming in and the z direction face it into the into the z the vertical direction and plug that into vector and then not in the rotation since that is a vector that that is what we capturing here so yeah i mean uh for beginners it might sound a bit confusing but that's that's how it's going to work hopefully we'll have a better solution for this in the future so let's bring one frame here so that we don't really get lost in the nodes so now we have lines and based on the number of subdivision on the icosphere we have more lines and less lines so that is fine and now what i would like to do is uh bring some texture maybe muskrate texture just like how we displaced in the previous uh sixth chapter with the set position node now these lines have points and every points can be placed based on the factors or vectors so similarly just like the meshes we can bring one set position here and plug this one into texture and based on the texture it's going to basically change the shape of the lines but the problem is right now there are not enough points into these lines to show up the visual for to show the visual for that texture and uh lines are not really bending or distorting so for that we need to bring one v sample curve node and let's plug that here so as soon as i do that it should it should be showing me some texture so even now that we have resampled these curves uh the texture is not really showing different results on every line so for that what we need to do is make every instance unique by realizing instances so now that we have this every line is unique after this point realize instances so uh yeah let's make it 33 or something now you can see on every line this texture is working as if this was entirely one mesh and not instances of object so that is a good start i believe and now let's do few more things now we have this we have lines we have distortion going on let's make few more adjustments let's turn this into 4d texture and multifractal maybe not so much of scale something subtle 0.3 yeah that is fine and just like how we did the animation in the previous chapter based on the number of the frames we are going to bring a simple driver here to make a procedural animation so that is a good start now what we can do is just like how we have this texture for every points uh distortion we can also use the same texture to kind of decide the height of the trim of every every line so let's bring one trim curve node here and plug the same value in the end yeah let's try to adjust the height of the line and we can do that from either the the lines hide from here or we could also do that from here so it's in this case it's kind of a uh same thing so the contrast is too much for the texture right now the i mean the tallest line and the shortest line we don't want too much of contrast so for that i was trying to adjust this with the map texture node so feel free to adjust these and find the balance that you're looking for so i think uh yeah this is fine now all we need to do is uh convert this into mesh so curve two mesh and bring one circle curved circle and maybe not so many points so that the resolution is going to be too much and might would get heavy so increase decrease the radius to 0.1 now before the curve to mesh i would like to basically bring another node which lets me kind of taper things right now these lines are kind of equally looks like the pipes so just like before what we had uh i bring another node which is called set radius set curve radius so this i want to adjust but what i would like is uh at the starting point to have the radius at the end point to have narrow radius and just like we discussed before for that the right node would be curved parameter here and plug that into radius and you should have this to invert this effect you could uh do that in many way maybe you can bring a math node or simple would be if you could just bring a color ramp and invert this value now you can just hide this one we won't really have to look at this again and uh yeah more or less i think this looks fine let's increase the subdivision for for this mesh now one more thing i want to do here is this textures intensity may be the factor of this texture we can slightly tweak this up with the multiply node so that we have more waviness going on so something like this after this point what i want is another layer of instances so after the trim curve maybe bring one instances on point and uh so let it be here and instead i'll branch another i'll branch another node here which is going to be instances on point and icosphere could be a good instance just to distribute on the top of the line 0.01 sorry 0.01 or 0.1 now what this is doing is basically creating an instance on every point of the curve so what whatever is the the length of the curve and what uh the number of points on that curve so we we see that many instances going on so we'll bring another node called endpoint selection in this and plug that into selection and this will let us select the either the end point or the starting point so let's make this 0 0 and see which one works for us so in this case for some reason and i'm not pretty sure why this is happening and it could be a bug but i'm not sure it could be maybe i don't know how to really work with this the if you see here trim curve node if i dial this dial this a bit so this trim curve node is kind of trimming these nodes and that is very obvious and i can't see these no these curves that is basically that means these nodes are these lines are trimmed out or yeah that should have been the case and once i convert this to mesh i don't see any presence of mesh here so i would expect that those points were uh should not exist here after the trim curve node so for some reason i still see these being instanced on those start point or like i said it could be maybe i'm doing something wrong you let me know if any of you know why this is happening but the good thing is that we have the solution for this so instead of end point selection we just select the start point selection and we'll do a math and since this is a selection path we're doing so boolean math we are doing so we'll bring up boolean basically we'll say that whatever is the start point sorry we'll say whatever is the start point i'm selecting do not select that point so these many node these many start points you do not do not select so in the previous resample curve we had 33 points but after that we trimmed the curve so every curve have different number of points um based on the the trim value and based on the trim number going on so what i do is i'll bring to make these curves have consistent number of points we can again resample this one and maybe make it 43 or something so now i say just ignore these 42 points of the starting and just leave the 43rd point on the on the curve and that should work in this case and now if i bring a join geometry node and plug that here and plug this here so i should have this going on so this looks pretty good i i think uh for whatever simple setup we have this is fine and uh now let's just clean things out pretty straight straightforward now let's set material for these set material and set material so now what we can do is just create a very basic materials for these now for the materials i'll uh give you a breakdown it's pretty flat and you know i don't really work with the complex setups much so i have two materials one for the these spheres the dots which are going on and one for the main body for the main body i used a translucent bsdf and i combined that with the glossy bsdf combined with the in the factory i used this layer weight so basically what's going on is this glossy is kind of for capturing the light at the bottom and the top and the rest everything is kind of translucent so for the light setup i have a very basic light setup and keep in mind uh i made a duplicate of the main mesh so this is what we made and i made a duplicate of that and scaled it down just to bring some visual interest just to make it look uh slightly taller than actual shape i have a very basic warm light on the side from this direction going on and then we have a purple pinkish light on just to break down the different dimensions in the rgb so i have this main source light which is basically capturing this part and then for the rest of the dark areas i have this to just to bring out the silhouette into different colors so a pretty basic setup and once you have this setup all you need to do is just find the different angles just work with the camera try to capture different angles so that is what i did i have so many cameras in this scene so this one is the camera one camera two camera three four five six seven eight so i rendered all of that so now for the render output i used 256 samples and that is all there is to know and in in the denoiser i'm using open image denoiser you can use optic x that is perfectly fine for this scenario so once everything is done i basically worked with the edit a bit so i usually take stuff to the after effects and uh work with the edit and the main main part of that is uh you can take inspiration from the music or maybe take inspiration from the motion of the thing so one one thing or the other you'll have to you need to keep in mind before trying to visualize this thing just don't work with the random cuts or anything just try to visualize something about it maybe it could be uh action action of this object or maybe it could be what kind of uh word what kind of emotion what kind of movement you want to bring out of that edit so that is what you need to keep in mind before trying to figure out your uh your entire visual and audio so for this i think it did look like a kind of feathers and uh specifically dragon's feathers the skin of dragon so i use the music which complements this sequence i found it mysterious and cinematic and uh the interval of the music was the final reveal was quite dramatic so that's what i used to to edit this out and for this text part i basically used simple mask and used the same footage that we rendered out and trimmed it according to uh different sections of the alphabets we have here i mean it looks simple once you know it and uh all you need to do is just come up with an idea and it's not about geometry node or what geometric node can do what blender can do and everything at the end of the day what are you making with it i mean you you're learning something can you make something useful out of that so making something useful doesn't have to do anything with the complexity of it so you can make something useful with very simple setup as well it could be a very simple array of cubes maybe just try to arrange things in uh in the camera in a way and that it looks cinematic maybe it brings a frame should say something does it look mysterious does it look like the object is maybe having too much of velocity moving in the fast base action something about it should uh come out and it doesn't have to be a direct message it doesn't have to be like sequence says this it could just be an impression so this looks like a dragon it did look uh dragon too few of the people i asked to or at least it looks like a bird's feather or some creature so the final part here with the final bang in the music so here i wanted to reveal the full frame instead of these markers so for the first half of the uh segment i have the small small pieces not revealing everything and then i have this full frame so yeah just think of something maybe it's not on this curvy furry ball maybe it's something else how about some wires going on something different it could be first it could be furry monster anything it could be think of some idea and work towards that idea and in every time you practicing just try to practice with a purpose so that even if some happy accident happens even if something useful comes out of your exercises so you have something to render out to put in your portfolio to put maybe on instagram it doesn't have to be too complex simple things are very underrated so just go with that all right try to get used to these uh simple nodes that we have discussed today about about the the curve segment the basic primitives though so just try to bring all these things together and try to make different patterns try to try to combine that with the instances try to combine that with the displacement that we had discussed in the previous chapter or if you want to study this file you can download that from the gum road the link is in the description the all the files that we have been discussing in this series are there on the computer to download so if you make something useful out of this just tag me on instagram with instagram and uh i would love to see it so i think now that we are done with the curves we have discussed a few more things uh for the beginning of the geometry nodes i think we can start talking about the procedural setups and more complex things so i'll see you guys in the next chapter hope you enjoyed this one if you're enjoying this series give it a like and share it with your friends share it on social media whoever wants to learn the geometry notes and if you are new to blender watch the playlist section there are plenty of playlists for you to get you up and running with the blender so i'll see you guys in the next chapter hope and most probably that will be about making something procedural so take care bye bye see you you

Channel: CrossMind Studio

Views: 23,004

Keywords: Blender 3.0, Geometry Nodes, fields, curves, tutorial, full course, blender beginner course, blender introduction series, motion graphics in blender, blender for motion design, cycles, eevee, cycles x, instances, points, Blender 3d, learn blender, blender cinema 4d, make dragon in blender, blender advanced tutorial, blender tutorial for noob, blender dynamics, blender physics and nodes, nodes, physics, crossmind studio, best blender tutorial, best blender channel

Id: 5iwt2fpUYWQ

Length: 40min 2sec (2402 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021