Abstract Geometry Nodes Loop Animation in Eevee (Blender Tutorial)

[Music] how's it going guys so in today's tutorial i'm going to show you how to use geometry nodes to create this really cool seamlessly looping animation these are some pretty basic geometry notes concepts so if you've never touched geometry nodes this is the video for you i'm not going to be going really in depth and i'll be doing my best to explain what's going on with geometry nodes we're not going to be using a whole lot of nodes for this so let's go ahead get a new folder here now if you want a really simply explained sort of intro to geometry nodes video i just posted that on my patreon you can get that linked in the description that's for tier 2 and tier 3 there on the patreon all right so let's go ahead hit shift a or we're going to go ahead and get a cube just like a lot of my classic loop tutorials we're going to be using the cube as our base object now we're gonna hit tab go right up here we're gonna go to the face select i'm gonna hold down shift click that one hit x and we're going to click faces now what i'm gonna do is in here in edit mode i'm gonna hit a to select all my faces i'm gonna hit s y 8 that's going to go ahead and stretch it out because we're in edit mode we don't have to apply scale it is already applied here so let's go ahead and go back into edit mode and we're going to do a little bit of subdivision we're going to click on loop cut and then click that there and then we're going to go ahead and just bring it right about there now we're going to click the middle one and i believe maybe one click gets it to get to some nice squares here we'll click there click once right there on the number of cuts and then we'll do that on every side until we have a nicely subdivided uh cube now it doesn't have to be very dense because we'll be using some geometry notes magic let's go ahead and just hit shift a and grab a cube i'm going to hit g and move them over here we'll be using him a little bit later so let's go up here and click on the geometry notes tab i'm going to move that because we're not going to be using it now what i'm going to go ahead and do is click on our cube here click new and here is our geometry nodes node tree you can title it if you want it's going to leave it there and i'm going to hit shift a and get in a point instant point instance node plug that right there now let me remove this really quick and explain what these points are if you've never dealt with this these are our points right there those little dots those are our points and that's what geometry nodes is going to be looking at for this points point instance node so we'll slap it right there it disappears because that now we need to use the cube that we put in right there so i'm going to go ahead and click cube001 that's this guy and then just just to get it out of the way i'm going to click on him add a bevel modifier and then i'm going to bring up my segments to four and then bring it down sorry hit the wrong thing i'm going to bring it down to something like that and shade smooth so now we have our cubes here now they're really big and they're all going into each other and it's not very nice looking so we're going to go ahead and get in a transform tra shift a search transform and we'll plop it right here now what's cool about this is we can go ahead and rotate everything in here or we can kind of move it around if we want we can even play with the scale which is what we want to do now in this case if we want to scale all of them we'd have to click drag and then kind of move them like this but it's not really doing what i want to do you can really kind of play with it what i'm going to use is the attribute fill so i'm going to go ahead and just type it fill attribute fill plop it right there what the attribute is going to allow us to do is use this value to attack only one thing i want to just bring down the scale of all my cubes so i'm just going to type in scale these are built-in attributes so if you're like how does that work it's a built-in thing it's not something that i just jumped up and typed in so if you type in scale which is how blender is created to do so now when i bring it in my cubes are going to be a certain size and i'm able to use this attribute fill to control all those so that's pretty cool now we're starting now we're starting to have our little tube here now one thing i want to do is randomize the scale of these cubes to kind of get that grid like pattern so but first thing i want to do is play with some distribution here so i'm going to get in a point distribution and then get the point distribute plug it right there and now it kind of randomizes those points so you get a more organic looking randomization of those points now i want to take this and randomize the scale so i'm going to go ahead highlight this and hit g to move it over and let's go ahead and get in a attribute randomize so shift a search i'm going to get attribute randomized again with attributes you're able to point at one thing and grab it again we're going to be using scale so i'm going to type in s-c-a-l-e scale randomizes our scale it's pretty cool but i want to be able to um have a little bit of control of how they're um randomized right now they're all randomizing the scale evenly so some i want to be kind of squished or stretched all that fun stuff so what we can do is on float change to vector vector allows us to have these controls down here now you can see it's a much much more interesting difference in scale so you can actually even play with that a little bit randomize this randomize that it's a lot of fun what i'm going to go do is here i'm click and drag down i'm going to do like 0.5 see how we're looking let's do 0.3 let's so i think 0.4 actually 0.5 is fine all right here we go so now we have our gridded out tube i'm going to hit the tilde key which is right above the tab key for me so we can kind of see down here and hit shift a and get in our camera so now we're starting to slowly build our loop here i'm going to go here on the y hit negative 8 and go back all right so you might say hey can't you just do this with a particle system absolutely you can do this with a particle system the only issue is in my opinion this is more fun more powerful and way easier on your computer when it comes to the computational weight of it so this is i consider this when using particle systems in the way i do for my loops this is much more interesting particle systems have some functionality that the geometry nodes does not have that's why they're working on node-based particle systems that's coming into blender later but using them in this really simple way i find this to be way more interesting and way more powerful and much easier to kind of see and work with when it's node based rather than using it over here like it normally is and that's sort of the point of this tutorial so now that we have this i'm going to go ahead and take my camera here and if you're wondering why i did negative eight so this is kind of the loop theory i'm using what i call my box method for looping so if i go to shift a and add in a plane and i hit s8 my rule for looping things is if i keep everything i'm designing within this box and then instance it out for to make it seamlessly looping it'll loop perfectly so in this case if i hit the tilde key go to the top some stuff is reaching outside of the cube so i'm going to go ahead and grab my cube and bring it in and it's okay if it goes in a little bit doesn't have to be perfectly touching everything i'm designing needs to be within this plane and then when i hit s8 this plane is scaled by eight so when i go to positive eight still the camera is touching the edge so we get perfectly seamlessly loop seamless loop design that's why i did that i'm going to go ahead and take this plane click on this little yellow icon here go to viewport display and use wire so that'll just keep him out of the way as we are designing so let's go ahead and start working on the loop design lighting and shading and then we'll add some more geometry node stuff as we're working to add to the design so what i'm going to do here is click on my camera click on the green camera here bring my um focal length back and then i'm going to go ahead i'm going to highlight these two things here so we're going to do that i'm going to get hit hit m new collection loop i'll call it a loop and then shift a collection instance loop and then we'll just go ahead and holding down control snap these planes so like i said my box method when you use this plane you can visually see if they're touching not overlapping but touching that means you're going to get a seamless perfect loop and i'm hitting shift d bringing it down and then shift d bringing it down let's do it one more time just to be safe with these loops you never know so let's do that that looks right about what we're looking for i'm gonna hit the period key to go back make this sort of the origin and then now we have this let's go ahead and take our camera and loop him so i'm gonna go ahead and go back to layout and hit zero and let's go ahead and loop this so clicking on my camera i'm gonna go to my preferences into editing and making sure if you click on animation that your default interpolation is set to linear that's super super important all right so i'm going to maintain this 250 we'll do 240 actually two four zero uh we'll do 240 i think that'll make it perfectly 10 seconds so i'm going to hit the back arrow in my timeline we start it's frame 0. that's super important make sure you start at frame 0. i'm going to click on the keyframe for negative 8 and then we're going to do instead of positive 8 we're going to do positive 24 so we go through a full instance if we do positive 24 click that now we are running through this loop now i mentioned positive 28 we're actually going through another instance so instead of stopping at this instance we're stopping at this instance so it's just a little bit of math there i'm terrible at math so you don't have to really remember that entirely so there we go so far we're working with a pretty cool loop and we can start doing a little bit of shading so let's click on the cube we can actually click on this to shade it because that won't shade anything so click on cube001 we'll just call this particle just to remember so we have particle here let's click on shading and hit zero so i'm going to click new make a metallic make it a fairly dark metallic because we're gonna be working with some pretty bright neon lights here go back to dark here and then let's make one of these materials i've made a couple times here on the channel so we're going to color ramp plug into the roughness we want to kind of goof around the roughness just a little bit let's get in a noise texture shift a search that's what i keep clicking shift a search noise texture if you have the node wrangler add-on enabled comes with blender by default just go to your add-ons and enable it if you don't control t and then we'll use the object coordinate and then we'll plug the noise texture into here and we're going to start getting some noise now you'll notice it's stretched out it's stretched out here it's stretched out there it's not really going to behave the right way let's try generated see what happens yeah so it's still going to be stretched out that's kind of an issue with these but it's really not that big of a deal for our shading that we're going to be doing particularly if you know a fix let me know and uh i will be sure to highlight that all if you if there's a fix to this problem i'll be sure to pin it in the comments above so let's do that we'll bring this in a little bit and then we'll bring the scale up let's get enough voronoi voronoi texture and then we'll kind of replace this noise texture here so let's go ahead put the vector into the vector and the color into here i'm going to go from illiciting to manhattan i believe so now we have that i'm going to bring my scale fairly far up now we're going to get a mix rgb and mix these two together so mix mix rgb plug that there we'll put him on the bottom socket but the noise texture on the top socket so i'm going to go all the way to the noise texture and then bring it in a little bit so we get a little bit of that voronoi pattern and now we have our interior shading here for our design let's go ahead and add in some volume and some lights because that's really what's going to make this look really cool and bring my particle out of the way so to get some volume i hit shift a and get a cube i'm going to hit s8 so it fills the whole scene control a apply scale and this little yellow icon we're going to go to viewport display here on display as we'll go to wire so he doesn't completely hide everything from view and we can kind of move around i'm going to hit click on the cube hit m and add it to the loop collection so he gets added to all of our collections which is really important so let's click on him we'll go back here to shading and then click new making sure that cube is selected i'm going to go ahead and delete this principle shift a get a volume principled volume and plug this into the volume and give it a density of 0.1 for now i mean it we may change that later so we are going to be in the eevee render engine so this is trying to render in cycles so we'll go here to ev here and then now we have this so far our world settings is at gray so click on the world here and go here to black shift a let's get a light so we'll get a point light here and then we'll make it nice and bright nice and blue something like that i'm going to go ahead and bring him down the line a little bit look how cool this is and then we're gonna go ahead and just bring that brightness up quite a bit now we're gonna start working with lighting this entire scene so let's go ahead and get another light point light i'm gonna bring him down the scene in this case we're gonna make him a very vibrant kind of orangey red somebody in the comment section yelled at me for saying red when i kind of made it orange so i apologize i'm gonna hit g to move him up here and then i'm gonna go and bring that power pretty high i'm gonna hit shift d duplicate it on this side we're going to go ahead and make it nice and blue so right now it's super super washed out so what we're going to do is click on the little camera icon click on color management and then i'm going to go here on the look to very high contrast now i'm at frame 52 i meant to start my camera at the very beginning so i'm going to go ahead and click on my lights here and then bring my lights back something to there and then my camera i need to bring my camera back on the back of the timeline here something like this that looks about right so what's going to happen is if i press play and i bring my camera forward it's just going to leave those lights in the dust all right so what we need to do is we're going to go ahead and parent these lights to the camera so i'm gonna click on this point just click on all three of these guys and then holding down control click on the camera control p for parent click object and now those lights are following our camera and it looks pretty cool i'm gonna go ahead and click on these two lights here this red one and this blue one i'm gonna go ahead and hit shift d and move these down the line even farther i want a lot of lighting going on so that's kind of lighting this up ahead giving you a nice spatial volume thing it's looking pretty awesome now i want some glowing i want some fun i want this to this is kind of boring for me so we're going to go back here well first off i'm going to click on this cube so i'm here click on all of these cubes and i'm going to hit shift d duplicating them all that's also going to be duplicating some geometry node stuff so first off we want to make a new particle so i'm going to click here shift a get a plane i'm going to hit g and move it back all i want to do here go back to rendering all i want to do here is add an emission node so i'm going to go here to the material click new on principled we're going to go ahead and get emission oops i clicked the wrong thing emission here we go so we'll make it nice and blue but that won't matter we'll fix that later here in our ev settings i neglected to add that go here to the camera view we need to add ammunit ambient occlusion bloom screen space reflections and motion blur that kind of improves the whole scene a little bit so we made our little glowing particle i'm going to click on cube002 go back here to geometry nodes click rendering and here on the point instance instead of our cube particle we're actually going to use this plane so i'm going to double click him and call it glow so let's click on cube02 here in the object so like remember we added the point instance which instanced these cubes all over the place in this case now we're going to use the glow instance this glow object oops seems to be oh okay so just like in shading right here you need to click this too so it makes a new um node group here node tree now we can click node so you can't see our little glowing particle and that's because it is inside all of these cubes because it still has the same other settings so what we're going to go ahead and do is add in a transform node shift a search tr a transform we'll plop him right there and then we can just go ahead and bring that scale in so it looks like it's the x so i want to bring the scale in on the x here we'll bring a couple of these particles out playing with that density and then what i want to do here on the attribute scale is kind of play with these to make them these just kind of thin glowing objects and i kind of want to play with that color so let's go ahead click on the glow particle maybe make it the orange something like this all right so far we got something pretty cool and let's go ahead and add one more thing so let's click on these cubes again i'm hit shift d make another thing go back here to geometry nodes notice how it says two click that let's go ahead and get in a transform so tra transform plop it right there and now what i want to do is to bring these out so we'll bring the scale out like this something around i want to bring it past those lights and then i'm going to go ahead and control c on that control v on the z bring it out like this and that's probably way too far out yeah so let's bring them in bring them in and so now we have these big particles out there and then just to have some fun so we're going to go ahead and bring up a timeline so bring that up click here click timeline and then i'm going to go ahead and click at the very end and go to frame 0. having these selected even though we can just do it here i like to have some fun and kind of learn geometry nodes so we're going to stay in here and that's the y-axis so right-click insert keyframe go to the very end make sure you're at frame 0 and type in 360 360 insert let me right click insert keyframe and then now when you press play we'll go back here to layout we have these particles kind of messing around in our scene doing this really cool thing we have now created a really cool really crazy animation loop using geometry nodes in a very simple sense having a lot of fun you can change out all these particles and stuff so there you go guys i hope you enjoyed that i hope you learned something and i will see you in the next video

Channel: Ducky 3D

Views: 35,749

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Id: t9atM0zxdU4

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2021