Blender Geometry Nodes Are Awesome! And Now... Easy to Learn!

hello ladies and gentlemen it's mike here at game from scratch and welcome to a geometry nodes tutorial what i aim to do is set out and show you how to use geometry nodes in the simplest possible manner but first a bit of a primer of what a geometry node is now these were added in blender i think blender 2.93 is when they started showing up and they're a big feature of blender three this here you can see is blender three beta in action and here is one of the examples you can grab this is the now the node network controlling the procedural generation of what you see up here and geometry notes are going to be huge in the world of game development for blender developers so you see here what it allows you to do is create objects that can be controlled using a variety of parameters here we just switch out the um the seed that's being used to populate the trees there the sparseness of our trees the sparseness of houses and so on we can also change out the grid that's being controlled here so we can add more rows or take them away and you're seeing we're getting this geometry updated immediately this gives you an idea of the power of nodes the problem is almost all of the examples out there are complicated don't go thinking that this is the extent of what is creating this oh no this is part of a three-part thing there's the nodes controlling grass generation here's the nodes controlling the tree grouping and here is the overall nodes for creating the grid so uh you can get into some really quite complex examples not what we're going to try and do here what we're going to try and do here is create about the simplest demo you can do now the cool news is once i sacrifice the default cube here uh i have an entire text based version of this so what we're going to do is create a voxelized network basically what we're going to do is turn any model that we pass in into a cubed version of it very simple and straightforward and as you can see the entire thing is documented in incredible detail that we are about to go through so if you want uh this will be linked down below if you want to get into it if you miss a step whatever else this is available out there by the way for this particular version i am using the blender 3.0 beta the earlier version should work the thing is some of these notes have been changed and some have been deprecated i'll also show you how to enable deprecated nodes at the end of this video and by the way if you want to go ahead and check out that example or some other geometry node examples that are much more complicated than what we were going to cover today they are available here as well so i will link all of the relevant documents down below but what we are going to do now is jump into blender and get started on what i hope is the simplest tutorial you find so we're going to start things off we're going to go ahead and create a new mesh of type monkey and i'll uh look down the y-axis at it again so right there all right there we go so here is our monkey and now what we want to do is set up a geometry node for this guy you can see here you've got the option of going to geometry nodes over here i don't actually like the default layout for that workspace so instead what i'm going to do is just bring this guy up and switch this over to the geometry note editor now do keep in mind i am using blender 3.0 here so if you do not run the newest version nodes are going to have different names and so on so i'm going to go ahead and create a new node network and there you go that is quite literally the simplest geometry node setup you can you got an input you got an output and done all right end of tutorial well no maybe we'll actually make it do something so what you want to do is add some nodes in between uh and what we're going to do is go ahead and add go down to mesh and we're doing mesh to points what this will do is take whatever mesh is passed in as you saw immediately it connected itself in there and turn it into a series of points and then it spits it back out on the other end you could actually that in itself is a kind of cool result but let's keep going adding a little bit more detail here so what you're seeing right now is we got these weird blobs in are being entered in let's instead because we're going to turn this sort of into a voxel type setup we're going to go ahead and add in a new node here as an input so we're just coming here you can do a search by the way we're going to create a node of type cube so babe cube goes in like so and now we're going to take this series of points we created and we're going to create instances on the point so we're going to come here add again you can search or i think it's instances here instance on point so go ahead and create that guy right there so you got another node so you see how this goes it's basically a left to right network that ends here in the output point over here and now we're going to wire these points up so instead of wiring this guy here we don't want that what instead want to do is have this points feed into points over here and mesh feed into the instance like so and then the end result of this guy will be wired into the output and then boom you can immediately see what happens as a result now there's a couple of catches with this is our cubes that are being created our instance cubes over here are way too big now we could scale them at the instance level or we could scale them over here let's scale them at the source so what i'm going to do is make these about a tenth of the size so a tenth of a meter on each one there you go so we've got a much more kind of a voxely looking monkey going on right here so you can definitely see how the nodes all work together to to make an end result here but another thing you may notice is well it's not filling the entire monkey in so what we're going to do now is we're going to add a little bit more detail just by simply doing a subdivision in between the group input here and the mesh to points we're going to subdivide down our original geometry so then we'll have more to work with here so i'm going to go ahead we'll add another node and again everything can be searched for so right here sub and we want to do subdivide mesh like so and we're going to drop that guy in there and then we do the number of subdivisions is controlled right there so now you see we have a pretty voxely looking monkey it's kind of uh let's bring this guy over here it's kind of an end result to be honest that is amazing how much you can actually accomplish using geometry nodes in a very short period of time but let's add a little bit more functionality to this guy now one thing you notice is we passed in this subdivision level so we got this two going on here well what is the chances we want to actually have that control so sometimes the mesh that's being passed in might be dense enough and might work just well sometimes we want to have this as a parameter so what we're going to do is add in go over here to group in the uh the properties section so press n to open that up if it's not already there go to the group section and see you can set up inputs and outputs we're going to add an additional input so right now the default input is you get the geometry the whatever mesh is being patched in is what you start with but we can add more so we're going to go ahead here and we're going to add a new input this is of type integer because it can only be whole numbers uh and we can do a subdivision like a tool tip that will show up when you uh set this value so it's like number of sub divisions like so give it a default value i like the value of two and finally we give it a name other than that so sub divisions like so so now we have a parameter that's being passed in and notice here on your inputs suddenly you have another value and all we need to do is just basically literally drag and drop that in and we immediately see okay this isn't two so what's going on here well this guy has the values attached to it so you see over here we'll switch down to their mode they see you can set the number of subdivisions right here as a parameter so if you want to go higher you can go higher now one of the things that you're going to find is i think i just make my computer very unhappy because i scrolled this value too far to the right so i don't know how many subdivisions i just created uh it's going to be oh it's not too too bad okay it's 374 negative all right so that was a stupid value to put in so what you probably want to do is set some reasonable minimum so you want to go low lower than i actually probably don't want to go lower than one subdivision and you probably don't want to go higher than say let's go six so we're gonna control that value and then we can also enter the value directly right there so there you can see now we could actually go ahead and set this up to a higher value if we wish and we'll get more subdivisions get more blocks out of it so you see very easy to pass input into these things now the cool thing here is this could be created in the library this geometry node entry all of this stuff i could copy it down make a new instance of it get rid of susan completely here but what i'm going to do is show you in the new scene so i'm going to create a new scene up here so basically just go ahead click this little button right here and we'll create a new scene and i'll call this test scene like so and now i can create any kind of geometry i want so for example i'm going to come in here i'm going to create a usb uv sphere so mesh uv sphere boom like so now i can come on down here to modifiers go here geometry nodes like so and i can now go here pop down pick which one i want like that guy right there and we now have a cubed setup going on here now what you probably want to do is go back to our default scene here and we can give this guy a name that actually makes sense so we'll call this say voxelize all right like so so when you actually go ahead and pick it out of you create a library of these things whatever your selection will actually make some kind of sense when you've got it there but again i want to change the the levels of values our voxelization tool is complete and really that's the end of the tutorial this shows you probably the smallest most discreet uh geometry node based graph you could do that would give you an actual result now it's a matter of just coming in here and playing around you can have geometry nodes uh call other nodes so you can nest the node down so you could create one to make leaves another one that creates branches one that creates a tree trunk and those will all work together to create you a tree for example and there are great examples out there like the ones i've linked down below so if you want to get into more depth they are out there this is the beginner's primer showcasing how you can easily create such a network and how you can reuse them in your own projects definitely a powerful tool now one last thing to show you before we finish up if you're following along to another tutorial especially one that was written in the last a year i almost guarantee you it's using nodes that were deprecated with geometry nodes in blender 3.0 and up a lot of the early nodes got new names if you want to turn that functioning back on functionality back on so you can get access to those deprecated node types come on in here and go to edit and then go to preferences now what you want to do is under interface turn on developer extras when i click this look down here so developer extras turned on experimental right here go to experimental and what you want to turn on is geometry nodes legacy now do keep in mind if you're working on a project for the future these are all ultimately going to be removed but you come in here you are going to find there are a ton more geometry nodes available now but unless you're following a specific tutorial trying to do something in an old way there's really no reason to be using those old notes because they are going to all be removed uh and i think they're marked to be removed by blender 4 but they're being replaced with other workflows kind of this stuff is all definitely a work in progress so if you do use the um the deprecated stuff just do be aware of that some of these older nodes are going to go away so you probably don't want to use them but that's how you turn it on if you need them if you want to follow an old tutorial and then on the topic once again of tutorials there is an entire text-based version of everything we just did so if you lost if i lost you at any point in time it is all here walks you through everything we just did and congratulations you just created your first simple node network for geometry nodes hopefully you can see how you can use this especially in the world of game development procedural uh content generation is a very powerful thing and as more and more node functionalities added to blender this is going to be a bit of a game changer so hopefully you found that useful if you did please do hit like and subscribe and all the rest of that stuff and let me know what you think comments down below i will talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 15,555

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.93, Blender 3, Blender 3D, Blender3D, Game Development, GameDev, Geometry, Geometry Nodes, Guide, Nodes, Tutorial, Voxelize, Voxels

Id: FWxYSXGw7Qw

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 13 2021