Blender 2.92 GEOMETRY NODES for BEGINNERS: Procedural Environment

[Music] this video is sponsored by skillshare what's up remington from southern shoddy 3d here and today we're going to be going through the amazing new geometry node system this new feature has a lot planned for it in the future so we'll do future videos covering it as it expands but first the boring stuff we're gonna walk through the different nodes and talk about how geometry roads work for beginners if you want to skip ahead we'll be building a procedural environment using geometry nodes after that but first let's take a dive in and look at all the different nodes that we have to work with so this is a feature that is available in blender 2.92 which isn't officially released yet but it's on its way so if you don't see this feature you may need to go ahead and download an experimental version there so that you're able to follow along here so first i'm going to turn on geometry node editor here in this window and you'll see that we have nothing here so if you want to add geometry nodes to an object what you need to do is click the object and we will click new here and then we'll create a tree there so let's just call this geo and now we can begin working with geometry nodes on that and just as a note this is actually added as a modifier so if we come over here and look we can see there's a modifier there so we could actually go and if we add a second object here and i move that back on the y there and i go add geometry nodes modifier and then from this list i can pick geo those will use the same node tree so that's the basics of how it works now let's just go ahead and look at all the different nodes and then after that we'll dive into how to make a procedural environment like i shared in the opening so to make it easy i've gone ahead and added one of every node here and then grouped them according to their menu so to add a node it's just like a shader you can hit shift a and select from there or you can come up here and add from there so that's how you can go about adding your nodes so we'll go through and we'll look through all of these first up i want to cover these over here on the right the geo input and output you may have noticed these are the ones that are added by default and you can almost think of this like your beginning and your end so that everything in between will kind of be the output so you're inputting your geometry you're adding all the effects and math in between and then outputting your geometry so it goes back to the geometry if you've ever used the compositor tab this is kind of like taking from your render layer to kind of your output composite tab but first we have the attribute math node this allows you to call on attributes and then use map to create an output a list of attributes can be found in the manual but you can call in rotation position and scale which are all super useful by typing those in here random attribute does the same thing but this allows you to type in an attribute here and switch kind of the minimum and maximum value you want to do that so they can be really useful for randomizing things like scale which we'll be using later in depth here we have the color nodes if you're familiar with nodes in blender already you will be familiar with these here looking over here at point now these are specific to geometry nodes and we'll actually be going through these later this is how we're going to make our procedural environment is using these two nodes here but we have the point distribute which allows us to kind of set the density of how we want to kind of scatter our points across that geometry and we have the point instance here which will tell us what objects were scattering across the geometry if that doesn't make sense now it will later i promise coming down here to the geometry nodes we have several options here so we can actually access booleans here within geometry notes which is really nice we can input those two and we can kind of intersect union or difference between those two objects now if you're looking to kind of join objects together which we'll be doing later as we create a procedural environment we have the join geometry that's the same as kind of hitting ctrl j with two objects and putting them into the same object here we have the transform node which is the same transform node that we've used plenty of other times coming over here to the input we have several more options that are going to be useful for here we have the object info which will allow us to kind of determine the object we want to scatter our points on that'll make more sense later it can be used for other things as well but that's what we'll be using it for and then we have a value here so this is a float value so we can just plug this into anything and it'll give us a single value so if we plug that over here into the x x would equal 0.5 and then here we have random float so that we can create random values if you don't know the difference between a float value and a vector value a float value is kind of like a single value so a single number for example whereas a vector can contain multiple float so for example this value here is 0.5 but a vector could have an x y and z number so it's multiple float numbers and each one of these could be that that's kind of the basics there it gets much deeper than that but that's all you need to know for this tutorial moving over here to the vector nodes we have a lot of fancy math nodes over here for these two groups right here and if you're beginner these might seem kind of intimidating but i promise what we use today you'll be able to follow along with and this is stuff that you can always learn later math notes can definitely be overwhelming but even with simple math you can make some cool things like this gear example here where the gears turn automatically when you rotate from one input if you think i should give away this project file for free so you can see how the simple math works or if you'd like to see a tutorial let me know in the comments below if enough people show interest i'll do that we're almost done here and then we can get to the cool stuff let's look at this mesh section last so this mesh section has edge split subdivision surface and triangulate triangulate just converts your mesh from quads to triangles and that's pretty simple and subdivision surface here just adds a subdivision modifier the edge split node just splits from the edges and kind of pulls it in almost like a subdivision but pulling it away from the various edges so here we are with a new project and what we need to do is get rid of the default cube so we're going to go ahead delete that pause the video if you need a moment to mourn and then after that we're going to add a new plane and we're going to use this plane as our ground so i'm going to come up here and i'm going to name this ground now we're going to go into edit mode and then we're going to right click and subdivide and let's just choose a high number something like 24 and that should give us some geometry to work with there then what we're going to do is we're going to add a modifier here for subdivision and make sure that we have even more geometry there and we're going to go ahead and add a displacement which is under the deform section here so we'll add displace here we're going to create a new texture and we'll call this ground and we'll come over here to our texture tab and we'll switch this to something random so you could do clouds or distorted noise and those will kind of work well so i'm just going to do clouds there by default then i'm going to come back here and i'm going to adjust the strength down to something really small so it looks kind of normal so there we have 0.1 so i'm going to go ahead here and i'm going to apply there and we'll right click and shade smooth just to make sure that that's a smooth shading now we're going to tab back into edit mode we're just going to add a bit of kind of randomness to our ground in terms of kind of height so we'll grab this proportional editing up here and we'll turn on our move gizmo and we'll just grab random vertices there and we can move that up and we can kind of scroll our wheel in and out there and we're just going to add a little bit of variation in our terrain there and with that we have a pretty solid ground to start so i'm going to tab back out to object mode i'm going to go ahead i'm going to apply the subdivision so next up we're going to need some environmental assets to kind of populate this now if you want you can go to websites like blends flop or cg trader and you can kind of download a lot of free objects there i'm going to show you how to make three we're going to make some rocks we're going to make grass and we're going to make some cloves and then we can go ahead and apply those there you can make as many as you want but i'll show you how to make those three to begin so what we're going to do is we're going to just turn off visibility of our plane here we're going to create a new collection we're going to call this environment so before we get started modeling here let's make sure you have some add-ons enabled we're going to go up to file here and we're going to go to edit preferences and then we're going to click add-ons here and then we're going to make sure that you have extra objects and curves enabled so if you type an extra up here you can add curve and add mesh and that'll give you more options so you'll see that i have more options there so we'll go to add mesh and i'm going to click rock generator and then i'm just going to click ok and that gives me kind of a random little rock to work with i don't want it to be quite that big so i'm going to scale that way down there and then i'm going to rotate that from my side view there because i kind of want the grounds to rest on the ground right that and you'll notice that this rack generator is actually made from all these modifiers so for this to work we first want to apply the scale so we're going to hit ctrl a and we're just going to apply rotation and scale and you'll see that everything breaks up because of this modifier so what i'm going to do is i'm going to undo and what you need to do is first convert it to mesh and that'll just kind of quickly apply all these modifiers so if you hit spacebar hit convert to mesh and i have my spacebar set to search you may have your set something different we'll see that we have these various options so if we do object convert to it'll then give us various options here i'm going to click mesh you'll see that all those are applied and then i can hit ctrl a and hit rotation and scale and now we have a tiny little rock so rocks are already out of the way so let's go ahead and make some grass next so i'm just going to move this over on the x there and i'm going to hit shift a and add a plane we're going to rotate that 90 degrees on the x there so i just hit r r90x and again i'm going to scale this way down but this time in edit mode so let's go into edit mode let's scale this way down we'll turn off our proportional editing from before scale this way way way down and then we'll zoom in so if you press period on your numpad you'll zoom in you can also just scroll in and i'm going to scale that down even more so that it's kind of a tiny little grass blade there and i'm going to move this up so that the origin point is there at the bottom now what i'm going to do is i'm going to grab these and i'm going to take these up here and then i'm going to hit ctrl r and that'll give me this little yellow line if i scroll up on my mouse wheel it'll give me multiple segments so i'm just going to go ahead click that there and then i'm going to grab these top two points going to turn proportional editing back on and then we're going to scale in and you can see that i have my wheel far too big so i'm just going to scroll that in scale that in and that'll kind of give us some kind of pointed grass tips now what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into side view and i'm going to grab those and then i'm going to kind of pull those over there and rotate those that'll kind of give our grass some dimension now for the sake of speed of this tutorial i'm just going to do this one blade and kind of make it unique if you want you can go through and make several blades that way and that'll give you a more realistic looking grass but for the sake of speed of this tutorial what i'm going to do is go back out to object mode right click shade smooth and then i'm going to duplicate that a couple times and just rotate that kind of randomly until we get kind of like a little bush of grass there what i'm going to do is now select all these objects by kind of grabbing them all i'm going to hit ctrl j let's do a little bit of housekeeping and name this grass and there we go now we have our grass blade there so let's go ahead and move that over here and now let's go ahead and make our clove so what i'll do is i will add a cube and i'll go into edit mode and we're going to scale that cube way down again i'm going to turn our proportional editing to start scale that way down about to the size of the grass blade was almost and then we're going to move that up on the origin point there now i'm going to switch into wireframe view grab these move that up and again hit ctrl r and kind of add in a few points there now what i'm going to do is just add a little bit of kind of variety to the stem there kind of move that around give it a little bit of a bend just to make it feel a little more natural and then what we're going to do is tap back out into object mode there and we're going to add another object so let's go ahead and we'll hide that stem now so we'll go ahead and turn that off there we'll add a plane and let's tab into edit mode and scale this way way down and then what we can do is add a subdivision modifier back in object mode and we can grab this here we'll move that up a bit and then we'll just scale that from the top view you can kind of see how that's giving us a leaf-like look we can up that if we want go back out into object mode and we'll go ahead and apply this there and then we can tab into side view there and i don't want all these in my view so you can turn them off up here or you can press forward slash and you'll focus so i'm going to tab back into edit mode i'm going to grab all this by pressing a press e and extrude up on the z axis there and you can see that we're kind of getting a little leaf shape and we can go ahead add another subdivision surface there right click shade smooth now what i'm going to do is go back to side view i'm going to grab some of these in wireframe view and kind of move it around just to give it a bit more kind of a hanging leaf shape now you can spend a lot of time on this process i'm trying to move quickly for the tutorial as i've mentioned i'm going to go back up here in edit view i'm going to grab everything move that up on the y-axis there and that will just kind of allow so the origin point is there so we can rotate the leaf there so let's go ahead and turn back on this cube we had before and i'm going to press forward backslash to get back to here and we're going to bring this up to the top here and then what we're going to do is kind of duplicate that a couple times and i'm going to do a little four leaf clovers now if i grab all of these and then i select this stem here last and hit ctrl j it will apply that to there and you can see that it got rid of our subdivision surface because this didn't have one on there so we can go ahead add that subdivision surface back right click shade smooth and you can see that now we have little four leaf clovers i'm going to go ahead apply that subdivision surface and then i'm going to move this over here with everything else so now let's just add some basic materials to everything and turn this ground on and pick some basic colors for everything so i'm just going to move these assets out of the way over here let's go ahead grab our ground plane add a new material here call this ground give this a kind of brownish color by bringing that over here and dropping the value let's go ahead and turn on our material view so we can see that we don't want our ground to be too shiny so i'm just going to go ahead turn the roughness up to one let's go ahead grab these over here and we can kind of create some vegetation here so we'll just call this greenery and we'll pick a color here so kind of a bright green there but if you want a more realistic vegetation you can actually add subsurface scattering now if you're on a slower machine your machine may not be able to handle this but if you feel it can hand it let's add a little bit so let's add 0.5 there and you can see that it kind of starts to gray out because it's pulling in the subsurface color so let's go ahead and we'll pull in kind of like a yellowish green color here and we can maybe darken this other green up to give it more of a natural look we'll go ahead and we'll add that to our grass as well and then for the rock we'll create one more cereal call this rock and then we're just gonna add a kind of gray value here let's talk about our sponsor skillshare is an online learning community for creatives and lifelong learners where millions come together to improve their skills skillshare offers thousands of inspiring classes for creatives and curious people on topics including illustration design freelancing 3d and more it's a membership with meaning you get thousands of classes and most are under 60 minutes with short lessons to fit any schedule and to fit all skill levels i personally have a few 3d courses on there if you happen to have an ipad i highly recommend digital illustration learn to use procreate this is a great class for learning how to use procreate which is my favorite illustration app on the ipad i've actually used it in the past i've actually used it in the past before to create environment assets by creating textures for my grass and leaves and other things the first 1000 and click the link in the description we'll get a free trial skillshare premium membership now what we want to do is we're going to take all these assets we have here and apply them over there first i'm just going to go ahead and name this clove to keep things organized which will be more useful later and then i'm going to twirl this up so how do we go about using geometry notes to scatter this on here well if you remember before i mentioned the point distribution nodes and that's what we're going to use currently we can't use that on a mesh so we actually need to add a new object called the point cloud object so we'll go ahead we'll add a point cloud object and let's pull this out of our environment there and we're going to put it there so we can grab it for easy control let's call this our procedural environment now we're going to drag our bottom window up here and with that object selected we're going to go geometry node editor and we're going to click new and then let's pick a name here i'm going to call this enviro as kind of a quick and easy way to add an environment there and now we're ready to begin creating our environment now this may seem complex but i promise you it's pretty simple so what we're first going to do is we're going to add a point distribution and point instance so let's come up here to our add and we'll grab point and we'll grab a distribution and we'll grab another point we'll grab instance so this node will distribute this object on here and this instance will tell us what object to do so what we can do is we can go ahead drag this here and drag this here and then we need to pick the object so let's go ahead and first let's start with our rocks so we'll grab rock and it'll begin to point those on there as soon as we tell it what object we need to put it on so we need to tell it what object so we'll add an object info tab so if you hit shift a and search you can type in object and we'll get the object info tab let's go ahead click that and now we're ready to select our ground there so let's go ahead click here select ground and then we need to tell it that this is the geometry we want to use so we're actually going to plug our geometry up into here and we'll see that rocks begin to populate on there and right now they look kind of basic they all look the same and it's pretty obvious so we're going to add some random attributes now you can control the amount of rocks you have here so let's go ahead let's take that density let's drag that over here and we'll see this density pops up here so let's drag that over so we can see that fully we're going to click our procedural environment here and we're going to go to our modifier tab so that we can see all of our options that we're creating here so if we click density here and we type in rocks we can control the amount of rocks that appear on here so you can set whatever number you think looks best here i'm just going to start with the default 10. now i want to randomize these rocks so let's go ahead and randomize those rocks so let's add some more attribute nodes so if we go to add attribute and we do random attribute we're going to click that then we're going to duplicate this so we're going to randomize the rotation and the scale so if i drag this up onto here it will automatically latch and if i drag this up onto here it will automatically latch so now we need to kind of determine what values we need well scale is a float node because we don't want it to scale randomly in the x y and z we want it to scale kind of uniformly so let's go ahead leave that afloat type in scale and then we can play with the range that we want here and over here let's type vector because for rotation we're going to kind of want to control the x y and z randomly and up here i'm going to type in rotation and we'll see that our rocks begin to randomly rotate around and here with the scale we can see that they've also begun to kind of scale and size now if you want we can go ahead and i'm not going to do this for every object but you're welcome to if you want but we can go ahead and grab this minimum here and this maximum here we can name this to put rock in front of that and put rock in front of this and we can see that now we can adjust the kind of min max values here so i can say i don't want any of my rocks to ever get that big but i don't want them to disappear into nothing so i can do 0.1 there or you can say that you want bigger rocks let's go ahead and press two there and you can kind of see that we start to get much larger rocks so it's a pretty simple process at getting these other elements in here from this point on so what we're going to do is we're going to take all of this hierarchy right here we're going to grab that and we're going to duplicate that and again we're going to duplicate that once more next we're going to select our objects for the point instance we'll grab graphs here for this middle one and we'll go ahead and we'll grab clove here for this last one and you'll notice they're not showing up and that's because they're not being connected into the output so as i mentioned before there's the join geometry which works just like when we hit ctrl j to join all these objects together so we'll go ahead and we'll add a join geometry node so we'll go join geometry we're going to put that there and we're going to hit shift d to duplicate that and put that there now we'll put this here and that combines these two geometry into one and then we'll go ahead and put this here and that combines those two geometry into one so now everything's joined in there but you'll see that they're still not populating and that's because these don't know what object to go to so we need to point instance into here so we'll go ahead grab a geometry node and tug that into there and they'll go ahead and drag one and put it into there so now we can see that our grass is acting kind of wonky because it's kind of rotating all which ways we want so what we can do for the grass is tell it to really only rotate on the z axis so if we type in zero here and zero here this will leave our z axis down here to only be the one to rotate now you'll notice that it's still kind of moving around randomly and that brings up an important point that you'll always want to apply your rotation so let's go ahead grab these three objects hit ctrl a and apply a rotation and scale and to see that now things go up straight now i still feel like they could kind of go left or right a bit so i'm going to go ahead and type in one here and that'll give us a little bit of rotation kind of randomly there now you can play with the minimum sizes here i don't want my grass to be too big so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to put 0.1 for my grass here then i'm going to put something small like 0.35 and that'll keep it from ever disappearing so we have our density value here where we can turn up the graph but you can see that we have to enter quite high numbers to get it to start to cover so i'm going to control z reset that to 10 and we're actually going to add a math note here so let's go ahead and the first thing we'll do is we'll drag this density up to here and then we will go ahead go to add utilities math and put that there and we're going to do some math in between here so we're going to say that whatever this density value is which let's go ahead and change that to grass here right now 10 and we're going to take this and switch this to multiply on the math node now we'll multiply whatever value we enter here by this number below so let's put a big number there like 50. so now we can enter much smaller numbers i think in my final render i had mine set all the way up to 500. if you want you can go ahead and add these other attributes but that's all i'm going to do for now so last but not least we have the clothes which we can see are kind of getting lost so we're going to go ahead and turn those density up and i'm going to turn the minimum value here to 0.5 because i don't ever want those to get too small and then again i'm going to change the rotation here to 0 1 5 which gives us similar to the grass and if we go ahead here and i'm actually going to switch over to solid view here and change my matte cap because without the final render it's getting a bit difficult to see in the material preview mode so there we go we can kind of see that we're starting to get our clothes everywhere and i'm going to go ahead and turn this up to a number like 150 and with that you can see that we have a fully procedural environment and you can go through and add as many of these as you want i'm going to go ahead and drag the density up here and name this close it's just kind of a last step there but if you remember in my final render i kind of had a gnome sitting here and i didn't have as much vegetation around them so there's one more feature i want to show you so what we're going to do is we're going to grab the ground plane we're going to tab into edit mode here and we're going to kind of decide where we don't want our vegetation to appear and you can put whatever object you want there i mentioned some websites earlier that are great for kind of creating free assets and using those so let's go ahead here and we're going to our vertex tab over here we're going to hit new and we're going to just call this vegetation so just veg for now and i'm going to select some points and assign it here so what i'm going to first do is just grab a random section so let's say i'm planning on putting something here so i'm using circle select there and i want to kind of invert my selection so if i hit ctrl i because i don't want vegetation there and i assign here with a weight of one that will give everything their vegetation so if i go back to weight plan i can kind of see what that looks like there that's not where vegetation will be and you can continue to kind of paint in the weight paint mode if you want more control for now let's go back to object let's grab procedural environment and then what we can do is type in veg here and it won't put that there so let's do it with the grass first since that'll be most noticeable if we type veg there and it needs to be capital sensitive so if i type in veg there because i had a capital v you'll see that it gets rid of it and likewise if i do that with the close it will also get rid of it there and you can see i have one lone rock there and i've found that this renders and works much quicker than doing it with particle hair because i think you're not dealing with the simulations if i had to guess that would be why it renders quicker as usual thank you for watching and please tag me with whatever you create on instagram i love seeing what you create happy blending

Channel: SouthernShotty

Views: 151,343

Rating: 4.9353304 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender procedural, blender tutorial, blender 2.8, procedural, procedural in blender, blender 2.92, blender 3d, blender 2.9, blender 2.90, blender foundation, blender guru, blender 2.91, blender animation, blender nodes, blender 2.91 procedural textures, blender 2.8 tutorial, procedural blender, procedural tools in blender, blender procedural modeling, procedural textures, blender procedural materials, procedural texturing in blender, intro to blender

Id: Lb9tJhn9EHE

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020