Almost Infinite Facades - Blender 3.0 Geometry Node Buildings

buildings buildings buildings you want to set but you don't want to spend days modeling i got it here's one way to build a modular set that can keep on giving like long cove co covina california i'm going to combine some ancient techniques made popular by the ian with some geometry node stuff simple geometry no stuff so don't worry let's go start with an image it can be any image i found this one on a public domain image site so it's totally cool to use i chose to bring this in as an image plane on the floor you don't need to do this as most of the work will be in the uv texture space for positioning later but whatever add in a plane and space it out over the image this part is not really necessary but i like seeing the image in the viewport next we give the plane a shader select principled shader and hit ctrl t because we have node wrangler working and in the image icon select the image we brought in before there now the image is on our plane magic baby yeah now go over to the uv workspace on the left side of the screen select the points and drag them into position to frame one apartment you'll see the image clear up on your plane and that's a good thing we can now get rid of the image plane we don't need it anymore and in fact we we never we never really did now here's an important part for this to work with what's coming scale the dimensions of the plane to be a standard measurement i chose 5 meters wide by 3 meters tall 4.3 meters or something like that as a story but this works for this you can use real world scale if you want just keep sum ratio i turned the roughness up on the shader here to get rid of the shine too here's where we can use the ancient technique of extruding and faking relief made popular in blender lately we use ctrl r to add loop cuts and slide the cuts into place on all the major relief lines you can use the knife tool too at this resolution it won't kill you to have some extra polys but you you do you go in and fix the uvs if you need to then grab the windows and extrude them slightly you can also cut around the air conditioners and extrude them out as well the uvs will stretch on the tops and sides but check later if they're an issue you can also reproject them and find a good texture area for them later if it's a big problem lastly extrude the edges back a bit to give it some thickness if you want we can also select the windows and give them a new shader then make them shiny by bringing down the roughness on the new shader too if it helps just make sure you assign the new shader to the selected polygons do this a bunch of times and you'll now have many variations put them in a collection i called mine facades here's the part you've been waiting for or not i have no idea go to the cube rename it whatever you want i chose geonodes because it's original i like to select all the points on this thing and merge it all together so i have one point there's no actual reason to do this other than i saw red jam do it and i thought yeah yeah that's cool i'm gonna do that now with this thing selected go to the geometry nodes tab and hit new this is not meant to be a full geometry nodes tutorial by the way and i'm going to keep it very simple from here there are far more complex and elegant setups you can do this is not one of them it just works and it lets me keep track of things in a relatively tidy way this stuff is so new and it's like probably all going to change again anyway in a month but for now add in a new collection info node pick the facades collection and check separate children what a horrible name for that next add in a mesh line and plug it into the group output add in an instance on points node between them and plug in the collection info node into the instance and check pick instance now move the z offset up on the mesh line by 3 meters this is the height of our building facades what this is doing is stacking the facades every three meters and attaching them to the points on the mesh line see that gap there it's not supposed to be there it's the sun in the collection once i take that out i get the results i want again the count on the mesh line controls the amount and height of the stack fun times now to lift the whole thing up and sit it on the ground add in a transform node and set the z to 1.5 meters it's half the height of the facade and sits it on the ground to be able to control the variation more and this is optional we can add in an attribute statistic node hook it up to a random value node and plug that into the instance index thanks bradley animation for this tip it totally works then plug in an index node into the attribute statistic node and get the index values into the chain and plug geometry out from the collection info node to the attribute statistic node to tell it to use a geometry and there we now have a seed value we can use to do the rando thing ah working prototype i usually do this with just cubes first but you'd be well into a minecraft video by now if i did it just admit it you you know it to tidy this up i can select everything except the output and hit control g that will make a nice little group to expose some controls on the main group node we can dive back in and attach some parameters to the group input node in this case collection count seed position and translation when we jump back out we now have those controls exposed and we don't need to ever go back in we can now make a bunch of these and randomize them and move them in whatever add in a joint geometry node and some more transforms between them duplicate a bunch of these position them and now you have a setup you can even create a system that instances these things crazy i know for this i went back in and i cleaned up the texture this was a bit boring so without spending too much more time on this for a quick video i went in and modeled some clothes lines shelves ac units and awnings i'd also added in a replace material node after the side walls and replaced the original texture shader with a duplicate one with some color correction to give it more variation i also modeled some clothes just to add a bit more to this and like you can totally go crazy here with all the details for real though you could just trace and extrude the whole back wall of this and get one piece and not bother with geometry nodes at all for a background but this gives you more power and you can make those cubes anything you want like this or this or this the file's up on patreon if you want along with skyscrapers trees and a whole bunch of other fun stuff the link is in the description enjoy

Channel: Kev Binge

Views: 264,303

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Id: otoDfPJECh4

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022