CRYSTAL KIT for Blender is Here!

oh what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out an awesome add-on for adding crystals to your models and blender let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so Crystal kit is a brand new add-on from the guys over at asset kit you might remember them from the trash kit add-on that I did um a little while ago that allows you to add and Scatter trash um that for whatever reason I really enjoyed that add-on um it was a really good tool for scattering garbage um in your blender models well this is a new asset kit from them that specifically uses geometry nodes in order to generate realistic looking crystals so a little bit Niche but if you need something it can do that this could be a great fit all right so when you download this it's going to come with a folder that looks like this and you're going to take that folder and you're going to unzip it remember this is an asset pack it's not an add-on meaning that it's using assets and geometry nodes so you need to extract those and then link to them in your asset Library all right so once you do that you're going to have a folder that looks like this and what you want to do is you want to go into your edit preferences and you want to go into your file paths and you want to add this as an asset library now you can append these separately which we'll talk about in a minute but for now we're just going to add that Crystal kit folder and use it as our asset Library file and then I usually set this to a pinned rather than link so that when I bring these in they're not linked together but that's kind of up to you but then you can save your preferences and we can view these inside of the asset browser so if we jump over into blender and we look in the asset browser under Crystal kit notice how that's going to have all of your individual crystals in here that it's going to use in order to scatter along the surface and so what we want to do if we want to bring these in is this is the geometry node setup right here well if I drag this into my scene right here it's going to basically add all of those crystals to your scene and so notice how you want to uncheck the option for instance in here so we want to uncheck this right here so that these get brought in as individual objects then I'm just going to take them I'm going to deselect my sphere I'm just going to move these off to the side over here so they're in my scene okay and so as a secondary method if you do want to get these in you can use the append method as well instead of using the asset browser so if you to file append and then you go find that blend file that's in that folder and then you can just go up into collection and you can just bring in that Crystal kit Geo nodes collection right here so that's going to append that to your folder so if you don't want to use the asset browser you can do that this way as well and so you do have a collection of all different kinds of crystals in here right so you've got kind of like the wider crystals you've got crystals with a little more color and they've got a fair amount of detail in here um one of the cool things about this is they're going to look like they're reflect refracting light as well so just note that there's a lot of detail and these actually look really good just from a detail of the crystals standpoint so um now these are in our scene and our geometry node setup can reference them so not only we brought these in but it also brings in this object right here which has the geometry node setup applied to it well now because that's in our model we can actually link back to that by adding a modifier to our object so now that we've done this what we can do is we can select the object that we want go into our modifiers Tab and we want to add a geometry node set up to this and specifically we want to click on the drop down and we want to go with the AK Crystal kit Geo nodes so what that's going to do is that's going to apply the crystal kit geometry node setup to this object and notice how it's done that in a way where we can access the attributes of the object right here and so there's a few different things that we're going to want to adjust in order to get more or less crystals scattered on this surface so first off you've got your density which is going to allow you to set how dense this is now you're going to want to couple this with some other things so for example you want to adjust your Z contrast that's going to give you the ability to get objects spread further along this object right here but then the patchiness is going to allow you to set how big those patches are right here so notice how I can adjust this in order to to get those the lower the patchiness is the more it's going to apply the crystals to your object and so note that you can in the geometry node settings also shift where the patches are using the patches shift option in here so this gives you a lot of control over where the crystals are going to be placed on your object okay and so say that you wanted to shift the makeup of this right because right now it's using um these crystals right here is kind of the primary crystals well the way this is set up what this does is this is picking um one of a few different kinds of crystals in here for the primary type I think there's seven options total but if you wanted to change the primary or secondary Crystal types you can just adjust this value right here and so notice what it's doing is it's picking different Crystal types in here so if you wanted to pick these that have kind of the flatter sides right here you could do that now one thing you might be noticing pretty uniform at the moment well what you can do is there's a few different material types in here as well and you can select the different material types in here so notice how I can set those primary crystals to be a different color like this and then you can still shift and adjust this but the cool thing is say that I didn't want to do that for the first Crystal right say I wanted to bring this back to normal you could do that for the secondary crystals as well so you can click on the option for secondary enable what that's going to do is that's going to add a secondary crystal in here that's being scattered and we can adjust things like the height the width other things like that in here but notice how I can add those secondary crystals in here based on that other type and then I can adjust the material right so we can set it so it's got kind of this darker piece right in here and then we can adjust the size on those as well in order to kind of get them to be the size that we want so we've also got the base objects so the base objects are going to be the ones that sit on the very base right so down here at the bottom you can see how these are the base crystals you can adjust the scale of those right here to make them bigger or smaller but those are kind of the smaller crystals that are in here okay and so you can also use curves to set where your objects go right so if you go up into your collections there's an option in here for paint and add curves here so if I select this curve right here and tab into edit mode and then I'm going to go ahead and set this to surface and select the option for draw but if I draw in here notice how this is going to allow me to use Curves in order to set where the crystals are going to go like this you do want to make sure in your settings down below that you've checked the box for use brush curves now notice how if I uncheck the box for brush curve invert what that's going to do is that's going to set this so that it erases crystals where your curves are so you can use these two options in here in order to set um where your crystals go and so down below there's an option for animation and if you check the box for animation Auto what that's going to do is that's going to automate an animation of the crystals growing on your surface like this so you can use this to actually create animations of crystals growing on an object if you decide that you want to do that there are some settings in here that you can adjust having to do with the animation patch size and speed if you want to do that as well but if you want to create those animations of crystals that's going to be a good option okay so there's also a collection in here for manual animation so if you check the box for animation manual and then you place your object in this collection right so I created this cube right here notice how as I move this Cube along here it's going to animate that crystal growth based on where the cube is so you can use this to manually create that crystal growth animation alright so one another thing to be aware of is when you're rendering this it's really only a Cycles rendering tool and it's partially having to do with the way that these refract the light you just can't really simulate that in EV but one thing to be aware of is if you are rendering these and you've got a new file right you're not using the example file this one right here where the lighting's already set up you do want to make sure that you go into your render properties under cycles and you want to go over into your light pads right here and you want to make sure that you set your volume bounces to at least three that's going to allow the light to actually Bounce Around inside of the crystals themselves now note that because this is refracting light it is pretty heavy when it's generating these renderings but on the flip side they should look really good when you're rendering them assuming that your lighting is set up properly because it is using those light bounces so just make sure that in your light pads under Max bounces you set that to at least three so overall if you're looking for a tool to generate crystals procedurally this could be a good fit but leave a comment below let me know what you think about a crystal kit or any of asset kits asset packs I just love having that conversation with you guys as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and I'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 3,639

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91, blender crystals, blender procedural crystals, blender crystalkit, blender trash, blender trashkit, blender assetkit, blender asset kit

Id: 9N0jfXqNUGU

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023