Animate Leaves Growing in Blender Geo Nodes

[Music] yo yo today we're going to be making this unfolding or growing leaf and blender using geometry nodes it's not super realistic but I think it's a lot better than just scaling the leaf so before I start I just want to thank you guys all for 10K Subs I haven't uploaded in a while but it seems like most you guys are still following and watching the videos and finding them useful so that's good to hear I've been working on some asset packs and more tutorials soon I'll be dropping a asset pack for blooming flowers sort of similar to the growing fruits that I released a few months back so that'll probably be on blender market and I'll make a video when I upload that the leaf texture in this Geon node setup will be free in the description to download you can follow along or just download that and use it the leaf texture is cc0 so you don't have to worry about any licensing so I'm going to start off with a plane this is going to be our leaf and I'm going to use a empty just to get the base Bic shape of that leaf so I'll upload this Leaf texture and I'm just going to rotate it so it matches the green y AIS line so that's pretty good I'm going to take the plane underneath it and we'll subdivide it twice and I'm going to turn on proportional editing on sharp sharp is the best really for making raindrop or Leaf shapes I found I'm going to take all these points and just drag them in and kind of shape up that [Music] leaf so you can use this technique on a higher poly mesh Leaf I'm just using a PNG so the Alpha from the PNG is pretty much going to cut out these parts so that's good for the shape I'm going to delete the empty now so I'm going to add two loot cuts down the center just to make a stem and these two little edges down here will take the these and extrude them out so that's going to be our stem maybe I'll just scale this up a [Music] bit okay and now I'm just going to go over everything and add some more Loop Cuts just to make it a bit more even add some Loop cuts to the [Music] stem control one to add subdivision so open up new material contrl T and we'll add in that leaf texture just going to change this to texture so we can see it a bit better go to top view select everything and project from [Music] View and it'll scale this up to match it again I'm using a PNG so it doesn't matter if these edges are over the image cuz all that translucency is going to be removed and for the stem each of these Loop cuts that I made I'm just going to shape along the stem so it's going to give it some color so now we'll get on to the geometry nodes so before I start I'm just going to apply rotation scale just to be safe and I'm going to go into edit mode select everything and I'm just going to move it up so that origin point is going to be at the end of the stem so now I'm going to add in a empty just plain axis this is going to be what's controlling the uh folding for the leaf so I'm just going to scale it down a bit we'll go into geometry nodes and we'll bring in this empty set it to relative because we're going to be using the relative position of it so we'll take the empty and I'm going to put in a position as well use a vector math on subtract take the position and plug it into the bottom one and take the empty and plug it into the top one then next we're going to do do a separate XYZ this one's pointing in the y direction it's down that green line I'm going to be using the Y so I'm going to plug in this subtract into here and we're going to use a capture attribute plug it into the geometry and again we're going to be using the Y so we'll use this later that's just going to be capturing the location of this to use for the control so next we're going to use a vector rotate and this is what's going to be giving it that roll we're going to need a set position which is going to change the geometry so we'll plug the vector rotate into position and this axis angle you're going to want to change to the opposite of what you're using here if you're using Y your Leaf is facing the Y Direction Change to X next we're going to want separate XYZ again and I'm going to take the location and plug it straight into this and then I'm also going to take the location and plug it into the center of this Vector rotate so we'll make a combine XYZ and again plug in the [Music] Y get a vector math and put it on minimum plug it into the bottom here and then we're going to copy this position and plug it into the top now this is going to go into the vector then we're going to bring in a another minimum but we're going to do it through math not a vector math change it to minimum and we're going to duplicate it and change this one to multiply so plugin value to the Top Value on multiply this is where we're going to use the attribute that we made up here so we'll plug this into the minimum here change this value to zero and we can plug this into the angle so now you see there's nothing nothing there if you move the empty though you can start to see it but you will probably notice that it's only half of it for example mine is on the Y AIS this x I just have to change to one and it's going to give back the other side so you have this whole setup you're good for the roll there's just a few more things you need to do to actually see it now so you can see when you drag out the empty the leaf appears but it's not rolling it's kind of just appearing I'm going to key frame the position here go to frame 50 you can go to whatever you want for the speed of the unroll it's up to you just going to position it so the whole Leaf appears so now the way that you're going to get it to roll is to use this multiply so depending again on the rotation and scale you might need to go higher or lower than the values that I'm using I'm just going to be using ne5 though and nothing happens until you actually bring this empty upward W so I'm going to scale it on the z-axis and you can see now that that's going to start affecting that I like to bring up the middle key frame just a bit too and right around the end to bring it up too might want to bring this up a bit more so now that's pretty much the roll animation so it looks okay right now there's a few more things that we're going to do to increase the realism a bit more so we're going to add noise now so we'll add another set position and we'll use a noise texture use a vector math with subtract [Music] on5 drag the factor into the vector I'm going to change it to 4D just cuz I want the noise to be animated and we'll add a scene time with a math [Music] node so when I plug that into the W um let me take this subtract plug it into the offset it'll start to move just some things we got to change here I'm going to also add a scale so we can adjust the strength of [Music] this little bit less I just want a little bit of a kind of motion to it but if you do want to use a higher noise and you notice that the stem here isn't really sticking to the origin point a way you can fix that is just before the scale here duplicate the subtract and change it to multiply you use a position and a map range and if you plug the map position into the value on the map range and plug that in [Music] here it'll give you kind of like like a gradient so it's going to stay still on the bottom Point here and the rest past that is going to be moving now we have the curl effect here and then we also have this noise effect so there's just two more things that we got to do now one more thing before we uh affect the bending of it right before this noise I'm going to add a transform geometry and I'm going to animate this on the scale cuz I want it to be this relative size when it's it's done rolling out and then in the very start I want it to be shorter on this x AIS so it looks like it's growing while it's rolling doesn't look the best right now but once you add the bends it looks a lot better again we're going to be using another set position for this you may already know this if you don't this is the easiest way to pretty much replicate the simple deform in Geometry nodes just going to need a set position a vector rotate a combine XYZ and a separate XYZ and then you're just going to want a math node in between set to multiply and also a position so you're going to want to plug the position into the vector plug the position into the vector on separate XYZ and plug this combined XYZ into the angle and plug the vector rotate into the offset for the set position I found though that it does scale up the object you can just add a transform geometry and set the scale to.5 so now if you plug in a certain axis let's say y it will bend in that direction we want this to bend down like this on both sides and then I also want it to bend down like this so we just got to find that out so you can control it with this multiply and you might also want to change some of these axis points just always change it to one and then have the other two as set to zero Let's Twist here okay so this is one so X and straight to X make sure these are also the same so if you're plugging in X to x x to X it doesn't really need to be that you can get some weird effects from not doing that but I find that it just works the best like that so again if your Leaf is facing a different direction this may be why for you just play around with the values here and the inputs so this is one that we're going to want I'm just going to keep it there and not animate it just yet I'm going to duplicate everything here and we will plug it in to here again take it from the transform geometry into the set position here and the transform geometry out to the input or the output now we have this Bend and then I want to try and figure out what the other Bend would be here's the example we'd want to change the axis so it's none of these three axises so play around with these ones and see if any of these [Music] work okay so for this girl on the sides they go down it's the X and on the middle axis so I I'm assuming that's y y would be one and then for example when we want it to bend down like this it's on the Y AIS and I believe this would be the X so it's pretty much just inverted I'm going to start animating this one where it bends down like that so I think it's fine most of the time there and then right around near the end I want it to bend down and kind of bounce back up [Music] slowly maybe it'll be a bit more dramatic if we put it down [Music] more yeah so now we have that kind of a bounce animation to it we can back this curl so I don't want it to curl too much in the very start maybe it can have a little bit like that and then once it goes to the full unroll I want it to curl down a bit like this and then again just like the other Bend here I want it to come back up a bit just so it doesn't look like it's just stopping so for example right there kind of just stops now if we animate it bouncing up a a bit and just scale that back just looks a bit softer and I'm just going to change these scale settings a bit [Music] too I think I might change the overall scale too it's a bit too wide I might change this to 7 this is just personal preference though so if you have any problems with the leaf not really giving you a good curl these are really the settings that you want to play with just the multiply here and then play with the height of the empty that you're using you can use this to unroll a bunch of things really it's pretty much just recreating the simple deform in Geometry nodes but it's a bit more controllable on this curl that you have here I couldn't find out how to really do this easily with simple def and with geometry nodes you can animate this however you want so you can try some other things too like on this last Bend which is just the up and down bend that we created if you apply the uh value here to the Z as well as the X it gives it a different look kind of brings it down a bit more and it's more dramatic so there's some things that you can try you can see if you just instance the leaf on any object the animation transfers but they're all unfolding at the same time so if you want them to be different you can either change the leaf to be animated with key frames on a vector math node instead of this empty you'd still use the empty so I'll just show you here you can select the empty from the very start and just delete the key frames go back to your Lea and right before or right after the empty node you can just add a vector math and controlling this will pretty much be the same you pretty much would just have to copy the position of the empty and just transfer that to this node in the same way and then now if you take this and duplicate it make a new geometry node setup so it doesn't affect this this one and just press a to select everything you can change these nodes so you can do this again and make this a new collection change this one to here maybe you can also just export it as an olymic so you go up here export as olymic now if you go to import that you can see it has the same animation you might need to redo the UV or change the UV and if you do just make sure you have this UV unselected so everything should be blue but UV and if you have this selected though it will uh kind of like lock the UV and you won't be able to change it so if you want to use the Olympic you can just use this Frame offset so duplicate frame offset make sure you uh make it a different user click the number there offset again click the number to make a new one and again they're offset just like these ones throw them in a collection and you can use the collection in whatever geometry node setup you want now you have a bunch of different leaves un rolling at different times and it gives it a lot more realism doing it like this than if you were to just use one so yeah that's pretty much how you can do this again you can use this for pretty much any type of leaf that you want or even paper whatever object it's just an easy way to unroll something again the leaf texture and this geometry node setup will be in the description for free to download if you guys have any questions just throw them in the comments and I'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: Cheuqs

Views: 26,909

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Id: KmPVWNqxLS4

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 09 2023