BY-GEN V9 is Coming! (Biggest Update Yet)

all right hi everyone i'm just making this quick video to let you know that something very exciting is coming version 9 of the biogen addon is on its way and it's going to be the largest update i've made for it so far and the reason why it's so large is because it will have a full geometry nodes integration that's kind of the reason why it's taken so long to get to this point i was waiting for the fields refactor to happen for geometry nodes and since it became accessible to us i could start working on python integrations for the tool for those of you that don't know biogen is my add-on for doing generative modeling inside of blender there's lots of stuff you can do with it it's not just generative modeling it's also kind of randomization and all sorts of other stuff but gen modeling is like the main flagship feature the thing is so far we've always been limited by the modifier stack which is great but it's well inherently limited by the fact that it's only working in a linear way in addition with it being completely linear we also don't have much control over the logic for different conditions that things should happen and also we don't have much control over the source content so input meshes that we can use for the generation process with the implementation of geometry nodes the possibilities for generative effects we can make for meshes explodes so to give you a quick run down of the things that are going to be in version nine i'm aiming to have three major categories for generative modeling we have surface effects which are effects to happen over the top of a mesh surface so you could traditionally think of these as like scattering techniques but their intention is to make it look like it's been modeled in a generative way i can show you demonstrations of this on the screen here we can see that we have a main input mesh which is our target but we can choose different effects to lay over the top this is really cool because not only does it work as a way of making new hyper hyper-complex mesh surfaces but it also doubles up as a scattering technique such as with this barnacles demo given the control the geometry nodes allows for it means that we can also do things like painting the effects over each surface see strictly speaking we can have a limitless number of styles and possibilities for things that could be added on top of a surface and we can have control over where to place them so that's section 1 of biogen version 9 which is the surface fx second to that we have the mesh effects now this would be what we would traditionally consider the modifier styles to be in the old versions of the add-on that's just where the modifiers were used to manipulate the original geometry of the mesh so surface effects are above measure effects are the mesh itself so i guess this is what you'd officially call the generative modeling part of it we provide it with an input mesh and then we choose a mode to use and then it's going to modify what we've made the idea behind this is that it takes us less effort to make something more complex and detailed at the moment i only have demonstrations to show you for the surface effects because that's where i focus most of the attention so far because this update is still in development i will show you more progress as we go along so surface effects mesh effects and the third one is a volume effects now don't be mistaken i'm not talking about volumes in terms of lighting you know all these nice atmospheric effects now what i mean is volumes in terms of the internals of a mesh the space inside the mesh is what you would call its volume and i think that if i want biogen to be a functional and useful generative modeling toolkit it needs to encompass all areas of the mesh so we have above the actual mesh itself and inside the mesh so we have an entire column of generative possibilities so the volume effects would be for things like say you had the outer casing of a machine and you wanted to have some complex structures inside but you just you didn't have the time or you could be bored to do all the detailed modeling for it provide biogen with the original mesh and it will do the insides for you that's the idea behind the volume effects surface mesh and volume now each of these main categories is going to have its own mode browser or asset browser however you want to think about it it will let you select in a very visual interface what modes you want to use now just to make this as useful as possible biogen is now moving from what's essentially a hard-coded add-on to a asset pack system which means it's now completely modular and extendable so yes you'll be able to make your own packs for baijin and that opens the possibility of like you know selling them to people or doing whatever you want with them this means that from a drop down you'll be able to choose different packs in different categories and each of those will have different modes i've also designed in a way where theoretically you shouldn't have to restart blender to load the new content packs the reason why i'm confident enough that a content pack system works for baijin is that because with geometry nodes we can have as many input meshes as we like to build up an effect it means that there's practically an infinite amount of variety stylistically for all of the effects you can make which means that when version 9 comes out i'll be planning to do extra content packs for it afterwards and i'd like to do themed ones a bit like you know a game add-on or something like okay well here's the base version of bigen v9 with a wide selection of general effects that should be useful for anything then here comes the seafarers pack where we have like you know all these different kind of coral and barnacle and like rope effects and stuff like that with this potential means we can get as stylized as we like and i think that's going to be very cool so i imagine the kind of things i'm going to be showing you on the screen now are the different experimentations i've been doing realistically it doesn't take much time to build up a new style the combination of python with the geometry nodes fill system is so powerful that it can literally take you just a few minutes to make a completely unique design one of the really cool things i discovered as well is that thanks to the real-time nature of how the geonose trees work is i can literally sit there with my source mesh like this character modify a mesh next to him in 3d space and watch as it changes the surface effect on the character it's so dynamic it's so real time it's so cool and it's just such a simple object having such a huge change over the visual the possibilities are limitless and i'm really excited about it that's why i'm spending so much more time on this update being really serious about it and hoping that i can deliver a product that's just super high quality for you ah he used the word product what does that mean well biogen has always been free and it will always be free the main functionality is always going to be freely accessible to people but given the direction things are going and the idea i have for adding more content packs to baijin over time i am leaning in the direction of doing a complete paid version of my gen as well as the free version so the free version will have all of the base functionality with the original artistic content so like the default content that will come with it and then a paid complete version that will have all of the new asset packs that will come after the fact so the functionality will be exactly the same in both versions but one of them will have just so much more artistic content with it so that's the plan i'm thinking about doing now but you know i'm welcome to feedback and hearing your different opinions but like i said it's not ready yet but i'm going to be transparent and tell you where i am in the process so the content pack system is completely done it's all extensible now the interface browser is also completely done there were lots of bugs with that especially in regards of when to update things sometimes opening different blend files would break it but now it's working perfectly fine and i've also left buttons in there to help you open where the content packs are located and also refresh the content inside a blender so i think they'll be very useful for people that want to install packs in the future but don't have to look through all the app data files to find out exactly where to do it i focus entirely on doing these surface effects first before doing the mesh effects and volume effects the reason for that from a developmental standpoint is so i could see exactly where the issues would lie with that kind of system because i've never done a proper content pack system like that or even an interface like that i wanted to see kind of where the issues would lie between those two points connecting so all of that content is done inside of one python file which i can then duplicate and adapt for the other categories so i'm extremely confident about getting the other two categories done the only bottleneck now is the geometry node side of things once all of these categories are complete and i feel like the feature set is ready i will then spend time fleshing out the base version of majin version 9 with as much content as i can they'll be the original content accessible to absolutely everyone for free i want to make it as fun as i possibly can people have made so many cool things with baijin but i think it's really just like scratched right above the surface in terms of having other people make content packs i'm making sure that for the actual content packs that i'm including with the original package if you open those up because those are blend files there'll be text in there explaining to you the key things to keep in mind if you wanted to make your own so basically any aspiring people that want to extend the add-on can go and have a look at all the files read the documentation inside of the files and get making things for themselves so if you want to be informed for when biogen version 9 is released there's a few things you can do the first thing quite obvious you know subscribe to the channel i'm going to be mentioning on here when it comes out and i'm also going to be giving you updates on the development process but keep in mind that the release is not going to be the next video i'm going to have some other videos lined up before then but i will say i do want it released this year so it'll probably be either sometime in november or december but if i change my mind i might do a sudden surprise release like any day but the thing is since it's adding so many features and there's even some features i haven't mentioned yet because i don't want to get people excited but i will try and see if i can add them in anyway relating to generative materials i kind of want to give it like its moment to shine so that's why i want a proper release day for it you can also follow me on twitter because i'll definitely mention it there and also if you sign up to my gumroad mailing list you'll get an email about the release on there as well when it's ready i've noticed that i've been getting a lot of requests from nft artists about generative type work because there's a huge trend of doing randomization type content for making nfts i've never publicly shared my opinion about crypto and all that kind of thing on this channel and i won't i'm not particularly interested in helping individual people bring their nft series to life but i will say that bygen does have a strong emphasis on randomization features so that side of the tool set will expand over time so i don't do crypto out myself but i'm not above trying to capitalize on people that do so keep an eye on this space because i feel like this tool is going to be a lot of fun i'm finally happy to be working on it again because i'm actually really enjoying the process and i hope you're looking forward to it as well oh i should also say before i close this up there have been a bunch of other project updates so the keeper artwork that was in my art breakdown video that's now been added to gumroad of course some changes have been made the original artwork used the mega shader from my modular metals pack but i had to remove that because it contained most of the modular metals package in it so it wasn't really fair so i replaced it with a new procedural material demonstrating how to get edge and ambient occlusion data it's making use of two of my custom node groups so they'll be educational for you if you want to learn how to make those effects the background of the original artwork used botanic assets but obviously i can't package those up so they've been replaced with some abstract geometry and some abstract material as well the random noise volume object material has also been included and the modifier stacks have been preserved from the original workwork as well for the rigged based characters pack there's a new rigged human male using the ik rig and i've also included template armor pieces to help with building character armor sets now the idea behind this is that if you wanted to make armor pieces for your character you wouldn't have to build them around the original body you would just be able to look at those pieces and go okay well this is a general whip for the arm so i can just build around this frame instead i kind of made it for my own benefit but i think it'll be useful for other people as well so yeah that's all the updates i just wanted to throw out there a huge biogen update incoming version nine as well as other project updates so thanks for watching everyone if you want to support my work you can sign up to the patreon otherwise please enjoy the rest of the content i hope you're having a lovely day and i will see you next time you

Channel: Curtis Holt

Views: 20,956

Keywords: bygen, addon, blender, generative, procedural, free, parametric, modeling, artwork, crypto art, effects, by gen, version 9

Id: 7FU8KZmF7f0

Length: 10min 7sec (607 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 14 2021