Easy BUILDINGS AND ALLEYS with Procedural Alleys!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com in today's video we're going to check out a geometry note setup that allows you to quickly create um both buildings on streets as well as alleys in blender let's go ahead and just jump into it all right so procedural alleys is a tool that's jumped up to uh one of the most popular items in the blender market so I thought we could do a video just kind of taking a look at what it does how to use it other things like that so I will link to procedural alleys in the notes down below but basically what this is is this is a tool that allows us to generate buildings using geometry nodes and it allows us to set things like the depth of the building the width of the building other things like that and it's really easy to use okay so first off because I've seen some questions about this on the main video this isn't an add-on this is just a geometry node setup so you either open up the file that this comes with or you can also set that up as an asset which is a little more complicated but I'll show you how to do it so what you do is you open open up that file when you open up that file you're going to get something that looks kind of like this and so what this is is this is the base geometry node setup and so if you click on it you can go over into your modifier properties under geometry nodes and you can see how this has the procedural alley geometry node applied to it and so what that's going to do is that's going to give us the ability to make changes to this alley function right here so notice how I can adjust things like the width of the building so that's basically like how many panels this building is going to have as well as things like the height which is going to be how many levels the building has and things like the depth which is how deep the building is going to go on the side now notice how when I adjust this on the side this building is adjusting as well and this is basically using geometry nodes to randomly generate all of the stuff that goes on the side of the building so you can also adjust things like the scale of the building if you want it to be bigger or smaller using the settings over here here now we can take a look at some more of the settings in a minute but note that there are three different geometry node setups that this comes with so this comes with the procedural alley which is basically going to generate a building with two sides and a front there's also the procedural alley only front so if you just want to create buildings on like a street or something like that you can use this in order to do that and there's also the option in here to generate only the laterals or only the sides and so that's basically going to generate the sides of the buildings with the air conditioning units the stairs the pipes other things like that so we've got these three different ways that we can generate buildings using this tool and so this is just applied to a singular shape right here it doesn't really matter what the shape is because it's just going to come in here and generate this anyway so I've applied this to like a cube it doesn't really matter for your final result but let's say that we wanted a second building over here what we can do is we can do a shift duplicate it and move it over here one thing to note about this by the way is the shaders that it's using are kind of heavy so what you might want to do while you're actually just like working on your building is you might want to work in solid mode like this until you actually need this just because it is a little bit heavy I mean it's not terrible but it can definitely save you some load time and notice how I can adjust this new building that I've generated here with a different set of settings right I can use this to have like a different depth a different height other things like that and then you can do this as many times as you want so let's say we wanted another one we could generate this over here so maybe something a little more narrow like this so you can use this in order to quickly generate these buildings now let's take a look at a few more of the settings that are in here and so notice how if you adjust the seed in here the windows that are being randomly placed in here are being adjusted so you can set the detail seed like this you can also adjust how many of those details show up in here so if you wanted like more of the AC units and little towels and things hanging out here you can do that using these sliders you can also adjust the probability of curtains being on the inside of the Windows like this and so we've also got other things in here like these Edge details so the edge details are things like cables that are being placed on the intersection between these objects because these again are kind of on a grid right so you've got the different faces in here like this that are being generated on a grid and you can adjust the seed of those Edge details like this and notice how when I do that I'm giving getting different Edge details in here I can also adjust the probability so those don't show up on every one of these and so you can come in here and play around with these in order to get different results and so note that if you go in the documentation tab over here it talks about what you can do to add your own assets basically all you would do is if you wanted like a new Facebook building or something like that you could model that yourself and then add it to one of the collections and once you add it to one of the collections then it's going to use that as one of the random things that gets placed in here now note that it gives you the measurements of these because because these are being placed on a grid they need to be a certain width right or they need to have certain dimensions in order for this whole thing to work so if you do model new windows or other things like that these are the dimensions that you need to model them to in order to add them in here it also tells you where the object Origins need to be because these objects are being placed based on their Origins now let's take a look at a couple other things so first off say that you wanted to apply this and then instead of this continuing to be procedural say you wanted to like export this or have it just be regular geometry well what you can do is at the very bottom here and I hope more developers and geometry node creators start doing this they've got an option here to toggle on Realize instances if you toggle on Realize instances that's basically going to tell your geometry node setup that you can realize this and then you can come in here and apply it now one thing to note about this is the shading does seem to get changed a little bit when you do this so you might need to adjust some materials in here so notice how down at the bottom when I switch this over to realize instances some of this stuff is no longer getting textured the way that it was before I don't know of a way around that right now but if we do change that to realize instances and then go up to apply can click on the drop down we can click on apply and we're going to go ahead and click on make object single or data single user and apply modifier that's going to come in here and that's going to apply this modifier so now this is just kind of a regular piece of geometry in here like this so you can definitely do that note that there are some things that are a little bit odd when you do that that you may have to come in here and clean up I like I said I don't know if there's a way around that at this point now the other thing is you can set these up as assets for your asset browser it's just a little bit weird um assuming that I'm doing it the right way and so what I've done is I've clicked the drop down right here and I've gone into the blender file option and within the blender file option you can find those procedural alley node groups so that's basically going to be these groups right here and they just show up in the blend file what you can do is you can right click on them and you can use them Mark as asset to set them as assets and then you can save this in wherever your asset folder is so once you do that if I create a new file like this and I'm not going to save my changes but let's say I create a new file like this and I go into my asset browser and I go find that folder that I save that in so for me I have a folder called uh geometry node setups but if I look at this notice how those geometry node setups are now in here now I can't just drag this into my scene what I need to do is instead I need to jump over into geometry nodes we're going to click on new [Music] and we're just going to drag the procedural alley in here and we're going to drag the geometry into the geometry output like this now if I go back and I click on that Cube and you want to make sure that you've applied a geometry node modifier to this object I can go into the modifier settings and notice how nothing's happening yet what I want to do is I want to set this to reference that procedural alley now I have this in here and I can adjust it inside of my scene the other thing that you're going to want to do in here is you're going to want to toggle off all of these collections because what it does is it brings the asset collections in with that geometry node setup so the way that I've been doing that is I've been toggling off my objects so that I can just see my collection and then within my collections I'm just going to do a shift click to select them right click and we're going to hide all inside so now I've got this geometry node set up inside of this completely new file and I can use this in order to make those same changes as we did before so you can add this to the asset browser it's just the way that I've found to do it is a little bit clunky if anybody knows a faster or better way to do that let me know in the comments below and so I am excited to start seeing more of these geometry node based tools becoming available at multiple at some point somebody's going to build more of a framework that's really easy to slide different parts and pieces in and out maybe do like different asset packs or something like that but for the kind of buildings that this creates I think it does a really good job but leave a comment below let me know what you think 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: 16,319

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 procedural alleys, blender procedural buildings, blender productral building add-on, blender procedural building add-on, blender building geometry nodes

Id: CBwbUSV8Grk

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 23 2023