Blender 2.92 Geometry Nodes Tutorial: Easy Mograph part1

[Music] so [Music] hey folks this is james welcome to another video this video is first in a series of videos i'm going to be doing it's aimed at someone new to geometry nodes that wants to jump in and do some interesting looking mograph with little setup time and most importantly a minimum of math notes we'll be mixing a handful of nodes with the familiar modifier stack to create some cool looking visuals that can easily be expanded upon so this is the first thing we're going to recreate so hit play it's quite an interesting looking animation a good thing to start on and you can get certainly get a lot of variations out of this as you can see very simple setup we've really just got three nodes there this one's actually optional that's also being driven by this modifier stack so two modifiers here so the combination of those things will give you this so on that note let's get into it so really only need three objects first one is just a cube all right now we want to delete all the points in this are all the vertices back to edit mode i'm going to call this geo nodes some people are wondering why i'm using a blank object for this the reason is then you can use a node to routing some you know instance geometry just gives you more flexibility so put the geometry nodes modifier on let's just zoom that in a bit another cube put this on point one this is the cube we're going to use to instance so we want to add a bevel to that 0.01 and just a bit of shading on that so we'll do harden normals you can see the warning comes up so you're going to come into your normals turn on auto smooth as you can see you get nice smooth uh bevels there now i might actually bump that up one more so segments make it three just in case you get close so that's looking good i'm just going to rename that as instance uh instance cube just gonna rename this collection to scene and might just add a couple more collections in here so there's gonna be object instances and another one called surface surface objects and actually how about we rename that instance objects all right the reason i'm doing this you'll see later is that the drop downs in the nodes give you potentially the selection of the whole scene if you don't name things correctly you can easily get into a lot of trouble all right so we'll hide that it's going to create a grid all right so default grid's fine 10 by 10 and so i'm going to put this in here and call this surface surface grid i'm just going to save this as i go just in case and i should note that i am in the 2.92 release version so this series will just be using 2.92 because that is the release version keep it simple we'll do some crazier stuff with 2.93 a bit later okay now with that you start the node setup first thing we want is a point instance now uh what i did earlier was i deleted everything on here so even if i do this if i select the instance cube nothing will happen because there's no geometry there so we want to disconnect that and add in object info with that surface grid and there you go as explained before the reason i do this is so that you've got more flexibility there if this is routed in from this original geometry you're kind of stuck with that geometry but this way we could potentially have a number of different objects and just swap between them as you can see by prefixing things with either instance or surface it's a lot easier to see what you're going to put in there because if you accidentally put in geo nodes you'll be in a world of hurt you probably crash blender all right so now that we've got that it's kind of our starting point and now on that grid we're going to start in adding a few modifiers the first is the array now turn off relative you want to turn on constant we're going to try and create a stack of these so if we say 0.1 or actually 0.2 i think was what i had before and put in 10. so now we're getting like a 3d grid of cubes we've got a voxel kind of grid of cubes and the other one we want is the wave modifier right now straight away see something's going on there so i want to change this to just replicating what i had earlier height of two meters and for the time you want to slow that right down 0.02 having a bit of trouble seeing what's going on there because there's no there's nothing to differentiate those cubes with the shading so i'm just going to put this into look dev mode okay just the default settings default hdr come up to the scene settings and put in the io and crack that right up okay that's a little bit higher about one all right now i can kind of see a little bit more what's happening in the scene it's probably a little bit higher 0.5 or thereabouts just whatever works for you all right and we're most of the way there already so what's happening here as i've explained in other videos this modifier stack as you would know from if you've used blender before is modifying the points or the vertices in that original mesh now if i hide the geo nodes you'll see what's happening there so that's what the underlying geometry is that we are going to instance on all we actually we already are instancing on but geometry nodes itself sees that basically as a series of points so each of these points or vertices which geometry knows i should point out sees as virtually the same thing so we can use that terminology kind of interchangeably we're going to get a cube instance onto every one of those points so whatever modifiers you use essentially is giving you a kind of like i guess a point cloud of points then the geometry nodes instancing onto so anything we change here gets updated in the geometry nodes i think you can use most of the modifiers here but for the moment we're just going to stick to these two now it's kind of looking a bit dull so we can add a couple more nodes and that's basically going to be it going to keep this video nice and short for once all right so first thing we want is to add in the attribute randomize as you can see that auto connects nothing's happening at the moment and i might just quickly point out people are probably thinking that this setup we could have done with the old jupiter which i believe yeah they've changed the name of it i think it's instancing now so you could have parented this cube under here and got this same result i'm pretty sure haven't tried that in a while but what you can't do is stuff like this all right so if we say scale okay straight away we're getting something going on there so what this is doing it's giving you there's an attribute that's built into geometry nodes on every one of those points called scale and that dictates the scale of the instances so in this case that's saying there's a minimum of zero and a maximum of one so some of them are probably so small we can't see them so we're going to say 0.5 and 2. of course you can make that anything you'd like and now we're getting something that's looking more like the original and you can use that seed and basically go through that and get exactly the kind of random settings you'll want all right one more node and that's it now i said minimum of math nodes at the start of this tutorial so we're just going to use one make it nice and easy all right now what this is going to do is transfer that position of any of those points into a rotation so if we type in position and then we type in rotation all right straight away you'll see something going on as mentioned scale is something that's built in to geometry nodes there's some a little bit hard to see in 2.92 but in the next version 2.93 that's come out whereas in alpha at the moment you get a drop down and so you can see what's built in and what's not so suffice to say position rotation scale are all built in what they call an attribute which means it's data that's stored on every single one of those points that we can use to manipulate that data through the nodes so in this case what's going on if i play that it's taking that position it's adding in here now i haven't actually put anything in there so it's just seeing that as zero probably better to say float change that to a float and zero you get the same effect and so don't really need to know what's happening there but position and rotation are vectors so it is essentially transferring that position xyz value to the rotation to xyz so it just gives it's just an easy way for us to get something happening there you can see as it gets to the top rotates around as it comes to the bottom there's less rotation because that position is closer to zero i actually like doing it with the multiply putting in say two common side view and then you can see you can really crank that up and get a large amount of rotation you can see as it gets to that top it's rotating a lot it's to the bottom it's rotating less so that's a bit much something like two or three kind of looks cool and that's it we're done just as a final thing just to make that look a little bit nicer just going to add in a camera make sure we're looking through the camera and lock that camera to view all right now looking through the camera and of course we want to put in lots of depth of field everything looks better with lots of depth of field so put that down to maybe about one something like that hit play and now actually one other thing that i did have in the other video was adding just a more interesting shader or material to the cube now of course i should have put that up in the scene so you want to just keep keep your stuff for your instances so that instance cube just use the default material it's going to come in here shader editor it's just going to add in the or is it object info just a way of getting a bit of randomized so you could either put in random there now problem with this actually that does work all right i'll take that back some setups with the geometry nodes that can flicker but that actually works fine so that's good so then we can do put in a ramp and then change the color up so i think before i had something like a very very desaturated blue going to a desaturated pink and there you go and the one that i actually did have in the example file is this so it's looking at the location of each of those cubes they're running it through the ramp so you're getting kind of changing those the color of those cubes as they go through the positions all right so yeah that's that wraps it up for the video i'll do a few more videos in this vein uh yeah so if you have any questions or any feedback please put it in the comments below as usual if you like the video please like and subscribe until next time

Channel: Redjam9

Views: 16,360

Rating: 4.9949174 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ZAK8x0FqagA

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 17 2021