EASY MODE for Geometry Nodes? - GScatter Addon

hey folks welcome to this geometry node tutorial in this one we're gonna be talking about g scatter so this is a new add-on from the folks over at grassworld who are famous for their really beautiful ground cover plants and they've gone ahead and released this free add-on for geometry notes it basically automates some of the steps and makes it a lot easier for you to really rapidly get your your scattering done so we're gonna have a look at this and also a little announcement i have got a course okay well first of all i have a course on procedural shaders this one's already out linked down in the description and there is going to be a course that i've just finished making on geometry notes so this is like geometry notes for beginners if you are interested in getting into geometry nodes and you haven't really taken that step yet then this is hopefully going to be the course for you so i will release more content on it closer to the release but it will be coming out through canopy games as part of the blender creatives series so there we go let's get into blender so g scatter works with 2.93 and higher so we're going to be using it with 2.93 today it just installs like a regular add-on and then you can go ahead and start scattering so let's start with a basic setup i'm just going to add a plane object let's scale it five times and normally if we're working with geometry nodes we would apply our scale i mean generally i would recommend that you do however with g-scatter you don't technically need to now i also want to just throw on some subdivisions on here so i've just given it a few there not many and i'm going to check on another one and a displacement modifier just so that we can get a little bit of variation in our surface make this a clouds texture make it a bit higher there we go shade smooth so this is all i'm going to do for the ground here and let's rename our object ground we have this ground object and let's say i wanted to scatter an object so let's start with doing custom objects that we make um so just for demonstration let's use the susan i'm going to make it a little bit smaller bring it over here and i might also add a few more so let's do a cone object and a cube there we go so i've got three objects that i want to scatter on here so i'm going to press n i've got my g scatter by grassworld add-on on the right-hand side now so with this open we have a few options we have first start the assets and i'll get on to those in a moment but first of all let's just look at doing a custom object so we've got a surface that we can pick in our surface object and then we can choose whether we want to scatter our selected objects as objects or as a collection in this case we're going to go for a collection and now you can see that in our outliner we have generated a new collection called in this case just collection you could rename that if you wanted and it's also created a new object so we have our ground object still but we also have the collection object and i can rename this in the g scatter add-on as well as the normal outliner so i'm going to call this one primitives here we go and we can see that the object has been renamed in the outliner as well so this is technically a separate object it's not on the ground but you can see if we move the ground or if we start changing the ground mesh it all updates properly so that's really interesting that's a really nice way to work when you have a more complex setup and you have lots of these systems especially for ground cover plants where you've got grasses and long grasses and flowers and weeds and sticks and rocks and so many different things going on it actually makes a lot of sense to have these as separate objects that can be easily shown hidden have values changed without diving into a massive node tree the way that this works basically is you can select your thing in the outliner and basically set a bunch of things such as density so we can change the density of these make them super dense make them not dense at all we can change the position seed and this is really useful if you have multiple different scattering collections they will be automatically given a different position seed so you never get you know the same distribution then under this we have this one a vertex mask so this is great basically i can set my density to whatever i want let's say i was doing weeds and i just wanted a patch of weed so i'd set my density up to be right for the weeds and then i could click on my vertex mask you can see we've now gone into weight paint mode so what i can do in here make sure i'm painting with a weight of one and now i can paint an area that i want my in this case primitives to be to be showing and then maybe i could do like a lower density patch just in the middle there so you can see that there's a bunch of things going on here we have a lot of control and it's so easy to just you know click it and also keyframeable so if you need these to be keyframed for an animation just kind of got you covered now we can also do scale we can set the randomness we can also say whether or not we want to follow the terrain normals or not so for example if you're scattering trees probably don't want to follow the terrain normals you want them to go straight up so that's really useful for that and then you can set the base orientation and the orientation randomness in each axis really useful stuff there so because this is g scatter it's made by the folks over at grass world we can actually use grass world assets so let me just delete all of these things we're going to delete our primitives object there we go so we're just back to where we were before with just our ground object and let's have a click on these two buttons at the top we have the shop where we can buy assets and you can see that we can choose between multiple of these assets which are pre-made and these are from the folks aggressors so you can guarantee that these are beautiful beautiful assets and you can buy them directly from it so these will link you through to the crestworld checkout and there's a bunch of stuff in here you can get the full asset pack here it's 69 but it's definitely worth it if you do this kind of production stuff and you also have my assets and these are ones which come with g scatter which is just insane so you have creeping bank grass which is beautiful this is just like a normal kind of european commonal garden grass and then you have laurel leaves and flowers and all of this stuff so it's a really great collection of free assets that comes with juice cutter now if you are a grassworld user you probably also want to be able to use your grassworld assets and what you need to do is go into wherever you bought your assets from so for me i bought my assets from gumroad so if i go into my library and i scroll down a little bit then we can see that we have the grassworld asset pack for g scatter and it's just in here and we can click download making sure that you're grabbing the grasshall pack for g scatter and then in g scatter what we can do is we can actually install that new asset pack so the grasshall asset pack here let's go ahead and install these assets there we go and it said it's installed the file so now if i go back to my assets now we can see that we have all of these pages of assets there's a lot in here so this is the full grasshold asset pack so i'm just going to show you something really neat here so let's just grab creeping bankrupt small this is one that comes with the free version so we can grow clumps or singles levels of detail you can also set the material quality so by default i would generally set these to high but if you're working on a bigger scene then perhaps you don't want such high fidelity now you can either add them to the scene in which case you'll just get the object or you can set them to scatter in which case you will get an immediate scattering setup let's hit scatter selected there we go it's updated and now we can see on our object we've got some grass here i can hide my g scatter collection select my object and let's say i want to increase my displacement a little bit make it a little bit steeper and i'm also going to just increase my subdivisions make a bit smoother there now let's select creeping bank grass and we can change the density let's get a little bit higher i'm going to go up to 100 and now what i can do is i can do a vertex mask so let's paint some of these on so let's paint around here give it a higher weight and i'm just going to paint them just in this patch here we go and because it's grass what you pretty much always want to do is increase the randomness a little bit on the scale and set your random set rotation to be full so you have a nicely scattered randomized collection you can go a little bit higher here now this is geometry nodes so if i just open a new geometry nodes editor here at the bottom we can see that we have this auto generated node tree so this is all still connected to the g scanner interface however it's geometry notes so it means that we can use geometry nodes tools still on this node tree why don't we have a go at adding some of the tk nodes let's use etk steep so this basically allows us to limit the angle that things are on so now what we're saying is that nothing that is steeper than 45 degrees will get distributed on and i can change that value so i can keep certain assets just to be on flat surfaces there we go we don't have anything on the steep slopes and let's say that we have this being not quite as performant as we want and we want to render a higher number of points so at the moment we're rendering 252 but we're also looking at that in the viewport so let's use the etk utils the density switch up here and i can just chug this on so by let's say i wanted to have 500 render density and only 50 in the viewport so that's a 0.1 is 10 so now if we plug this into the density it looks less however if we were to actually hit render then we would get the full 500 let's see if we hit the use render amount there so this is still connected up to g scatter you know we can still change all of these things in here you know i can change the scale even though i've started modifying the node tree g scatter is still going to work so this is great especially if you're working in a team with artists and maybe some of you are technical and want to use the nodes and some of you are less technical and you want to use a ui this is basically going to really speed you up i'm really loving using it at the moment and obviously i love nodes but being able to do this to quickly flesh out my scene just super quick great super helpful there's not really a huge amount that i can kind of tutor you on because it is such a simple add-on to use so hopefully this has made you realize that you you should be using it check the link down in the description if you want to grab a copy and enjoy the scene that we're going to make with it now i'll catch you in the next one i'm kind of gutted i just realized that my uh my mic dropped out very sad anyway this is a scene that we just made spent like half an hour doing this i'm gonna make a new one now so you get to see it but it's so easy to put these things together with this add-on and they look great because the you know the assets that come with it it's a free add-on it's insane they just look so good they look so good i hadn't done everything i wanted anyway so this is fine so starting with a plane let's make this full screen i know some people when they have issues with recording and tutorials and things they will restart properly but i quite like doing youtube in sort of a bit more of a laid-back way it's more of just hanging out with pals so let's come in here subdivide a couple times let's give this a few let's apply that modifier give it another one give it a displacement which i will turn on in edit mode just so i get to see this as i edit there we go a little bit of distortion there give it a shade smooth i just like to start with this before i even start shaping it just so i know ground is going to have something to work with i'm gonna do something slightly different this time the last one was good but it was difficult for me to um really find so i'm gonna add a couple things from botanic as well these are just gonna be rocks because i want some rocks and trees because i want some shadows but you can just do this with a tree alfa and some rocks from sketchfab or something i just really love the rocks i think botanic have done a great job putting together some really beautiful rock scans like in these two well let's just create a little bit of a bit of drama my uni teachers always used to say that's like oh i just gotta have drama i did uh interior design and creating drama dramatic atrium spaces that was like that was the thing i feel like it's going to age really badly as well on those things which is very much like 20 17 20 20 people wanting big dramatic atrium spaces and you you know you go in and it opens up and it's a multi-floor space because open plan is kind of dying you know people don't really want open plan spaces open plan offices anymore they're kind of realizing that actually people like to have their own space let me add a couple trees here i'm gonna add this maple just because it's a little bit open so it's going to be giving some better shadows at least around the top and i'll just put this off to the side okay so that's me done for botanic g scatter oh actually just before i do kick it in let's grab our i'm using the red clovers from grassworld just because i think they look really good so big clump copy these objects and let's paste them into here okay just pull those off to the side and i want to set up my camera super early because i want to do everything like the least scattering possible because i'm going to do something i'm going to do something dumb we're going to create you and in the course that i've just finished making for geometry nodes 2.93 can be released soon i don't know if i mentioned but uh that i i talk about instancing in one of the i do like a couple of lectures one of them is on like instances and i literally say in that lecture that like one of the you know sometimes you want to work on something that you've instanced after like create real meshes out there but it can be really heavy and the example i give is grasses grass fields because you can create so many instances of grass and then as soon as you put another node after your computer just dies i think i've got everything that i need let's grab gscatter select our ground mesh and we're going to grab a bunch of these so we're going creeping back grass big scatter selected creeping bent grass small scatter selected rip white plantain scatter selected and ripped plantain flower now let's just turn all these off for now and then i can also just do this final one where i'm going to grab my red clovers scatter as a collection let's rename this one to red clover there we go and let's also turn that off great gonna hide that g scatter collection and i'm going to set up the camera add a camera ctrl alt 0 to make the camera at the view we're going to go for a different aspect focal length i'm going to go quite high i'm going to go 200 i want to go i feel like something like this would be pretty cool and then let's just move our camera to our cameras collection and also add an empty sphere in here this is going to be our focus depth of field to the focus there we go so cool thing about super long focal lengths is it makes depth of field even more beautiful because it kind of accentuates it and it also flattens the background and foreground into your like your focal point it's a good look if you like that kind of national geographic super flat nature photography look g scatter creeping bent grass small let's do a vertex paint because i want to make sure that i'm just working in the field of view here there we go so i can see that now i have videos on how to do this with dynamic paint so i have an add-on with a camera call node you have lots of options for making things just fit within your view i am just doing it this way because it's so easy to and with a setup like this that nothing is going to be moving uh it kind of doesn't make a lot of sense not to let's make sure we are randomizing our z rotation and we are randomizing our scale a little bit now let's go into creeping bent grass large so this is our tall bent grass make it a little bit denser vertex mask again this time we're going to be painting these around our rocks so my thinking here is that somebody couldn't really cut these unless they had a strimmer and it's probably going to grow more or less vertical randomize that turn on the randomized scale there we go next one rib work plantain again turn on the vertex mask i'm going to paint these off around the back and a couple there let's make these ones smaller actually so we're going to come away from the density and we're going to come into these there we go just making those a bit shorter there with that other vertex group oh it's just so easy to paint these in it's great flower clumps i love these ones we're going to turn off follow terrain normals turn on rotation turn on random scale turn on the vertex mask okay let's paint these in make them a bit denser and then i'll turn it down again oh so i just control zedded and you see things have gone a little bit awry and we've lost our ui so let's just save blender actually has an option here which you can press shift control control shift w or you can just click save and reload it's actually a really useful option here it'll reload your scripts and things so you can use this to bring back an add-on don't forget this is in beta so so i can just paint some of these around here let's add a little bit more under my scale i'm going to bring down the weight on these a little bit okay finally we're going to add red clover make sure that we have these in the right place got some in the foreground here it's going to be out of focus but hey just to make sure they're there so it's all looking pretty good so far let's just give this a save term come out of the vertex mask and i'm going to change the position seed until i find something open in the middle and then i'm going to grab a couple of these red clover flowers that are single flowers grab this one i'll grab this one shift d i'm just going to move these to my main collection these i'm just putting in the middle of the scene so i'm hand positioning my sort of hero assets and while i do this finish setting up the camera and set up the lighting and things like that so i'm going to need a shader editor so i can change my world shader i know it's very tempting to use hdr eyes but use the sky texture instead this thing is incredible immediately beautiful come down a little bit on my elevation so it feels like sunrise and i want to bring it down so the light catches through i want my hero flower to be in light and i'm going to want my tree to be casting a bunch of shadow on the foreground i think this is starting to look pretty good i do want the camera to be slightly higher move it up slightly while looking at our hero flower oopsie daisy and i might also come into the scene just a little bit i want to make sure that we have some of the redwood plantain flowers around here as well so let's bring these and this forwards and we'll just tweak some of these so rip up plantain let's change this until we have something that we like the look of oh you see there we go so we have some there now i can move these back to next to this i just really love how they look i think i actually do want these to be forwards i do find with working on this kind of thing when you're just kind of doing your own thing making stuff just to kind of see what comes out of it you can tweak for days you can spend so long on this stuff i'm just going to put something in the foreground here i don't like how not empty but uh let's get some more of the ripple plantain in here so let's just kind of bring in a little bit more paint some in basically just trying to make it look populated that's the goal here i want the scene to feel natural real life is incredibly dense that's what you find so i'm just trying to look at this from different angles see how it goes so we we do have a super dense distribution here so i'm quite liking how this is looking at the moment to take this a little bit further we're going to add a bunch more stuff so for a start let's hop into geometry nodes and the important thing here is for me to get the grass just cold to my camera i'm going to use some of my etk nodes here let's grab atk utils camera call and let's drop this onto the noodle like so doing this so everything's just disappointed just disappeared because we do not have a camera set grab the camera and we also need to find out what the field of view is copy this as a new data path sorry there's a new driver and then let's hop back into creeping bank grass and paste driver there we go so visibly nothing has changed but we have a considerably less amount of grass than we did before if i mute and unmute you can see the massive difference there performance wise that's gonna be huge when it comes to doing what we're about to do which is which is not recommended feel free to copy along we're gonna be adding dew drops dew drops to all of our grass came up with a nice little shader for doing due earlier it's super simple as well taking our point instance can't believe i'm doing this and then we're going to point distribute on the grass this is where it gets really heavy and slow so i'm going to pause cycles because i don't want it to be computing especially while i'm recording this and okay so point distributes on attribute randomized because we want to be randomizing the scale of these dew drops oh it's tanking a little bit it's funny because the grass is so low area that you have to have such a high density for this to actually work properly so i'm just going to set up the nodes first and i'm going to create some dew drops that we're going to be instancing as a collection so point instance i'm just leaving this all as defaults really i might set a minimum for like 0.5 or something now i could be doing this with g scatter but i don't know how well it works scattering on things which it's made so just for now i'm going to sort out all the scattering myself okay so turn off whole collection because we're not gonna be scattering a whole collection as one block we're gonna be scattering a few different things so let's come over here and let's use ico spheres we need to be way smaller so let's just make sure that we're working in the collection right now i'm just to turn off all of the uh things that we've got scattering because this is oh god that's so much better okay let's move these to a new collection that we're going to call g like so and i'm just going to basically make a bunch of things like this apply rotation scale shades smooth and we're also going to scale these down way down don't know how big these should be about um bigger than this probably about two millimeters across now we have some dew drops and we're going to be positioning them on our grass so i need my creeping bankrupt small back this is the one which is absolutely tanking the performance we can grab our jew collection and then if you want your jew to appear because the grass surface area is so small we need to go to some crazy high density like 10 000 i'm going to start now i'm going to go straight to 10 000. i really hope this doesn't crash so fingers crossed i see some two drops oh they are everywhere excellent this is perfect very very slow but technically is working so that's you know really all i could hope for and now i can just join this back up so you can understand now why i thought it was important to put on the camera cull first because we are creating thousands of dew drops and i'm joining this up to the out side so now we should get our grass back excellent now these dew drops look a pretty good size actually so that was about two millimeters across and now we're gonna have a look at the shader for them shader editor grab one of these ico spheres change to object create a new one called due and in a sec we might just turn on cycles again we will we're going to be using glass bsdf and i know a lot of shader people out there are just like why but we do actually want the volume scatter and we do actually want the refraction so even though it's going to be heavier i'm going to i'm going to go for it so this is how you make jew that looks alright glass bsdf i'm gonna drop this on here and then we can grab an input fresnel node and then a map range because you know you want this is the thing with jew is let's just have a look at what it looks like now it probably looks okay now just with glass shader we don't see a lot but we're getting nice and close here then we can see there is some jew going on on this grass okay i hate to say it but we're gonna need more dew we don't have anywhere near enough however we can actually have a good look at the shader while we're here so this is loading relatively quickly so i'm just going to make sure that we get to try out the shader just while we're here so to begin with when some g like so okay so we've got some drops on here and at the moment it just looks like they just look like glass balls because that's what they are so what we want to do is we want to make sure that we have some real good fresnel going on we want to basically illuminate the outside so the outer ring ends up looking like it's catching a lot more light up range this on here like so and now we have zero in the middle so let's bring this into like 0.2 0.05 for the black bit in the middle nice so now you can see we have patch which is just going to be normal glass and a patch which we can set to be higher than normal glass so one is going to be like white it's going to be clear glass and then the outside is going to be three so it's actually technically breaking energy conservation however i want this to look magical and glistening and to do that we're allowed to break energy conservation this is why we're 3d artists and there you have it there you go so i can just show you that with the extra bright edges and without so obviously it looks more natural without however kind of more visible and pretty with kind of catches it more in the way that you sort of expect almost from from jew in photos like this now you could always make it more subtle maybe two on your outer rim but we are going to go back in geometry nodes and we're going to push it even further we're going to go even higher on the density we've been bankrupt small coming to our g it's at 10 000 now let's double it did i save so now what we can do is we can do our final camera set up a render wait i was going to show you my bumble bee we're going to put a b in this scene i will want to actually set up the camera properly before we get the b involved the b is cool because the b is animated with geometry notes so the b here i might just frame up those ju nodes and then we can just put them on a bunch of things so we can put them on the plantain flowers and we can put them on the these two flowers as well so just so nothing outside the node graph is loading we're going to come in here and we can actually work a little bit quicker if we get rid of all of our 3d viewports so ctrl g to put these into a group i'm going to want to put my density onto the front because i can't have 20 000 density on everything we put this on jew okay so now i have my jew quick group saving me some time here let's come back in to our ui we can grab our plantain flowers and just in here we can add our jew node group can't reiterate this enough make sure you are saving your work while creating these ridiculous scenes i just really want to get some like dew drops hanging off these i just think that'll look great definitely too many on there so we can go down to like maybe 8 000 for these tall ones there we go so we've got some on there and now what i want to do is i want to actually probably join these two together just so i only have to do this once okay and now what i'm going to do is actually drop the jew onto this red clover flower so we've made a geometry nodes and in here we can add dew and a join geometry and then we can just put g everywhere we're going to be giving this not loads density let's take this down like 5 000. i don't want these to be covered in water let's check on a join geometry here all right that looks pretty good i may turn this up a little bit more okay so this is the b the b is pretty cool because it's this b scan that i found on sketchfab by thomasflynn so shout out to him link in the description but his wings are kind of broken and it's you know it's not really intact if you just cut off the wings and then i made a couple of new wings with uh just a picture of a wing and cut it out ian hubert style and then as you look at this so all i've done is i have the wing and i've mirrored it but before this i have geometry nodes and what the geometry news does is it animates the wing beats it doesn't just want to make them up and down you can see it's actually turning the wing nice so this is like actual flying for you to render this with motion blur so you can see that we're actually getting motion blur how cool is that so i go for like almost none awesome so this is just a really cool way to and super easy as well right okay i'm just going to copy these control c copy objects into our scene oh god this is i hope this doesn't stop responding she's just going to change that left hand one to a text editor mute my graph because it's absolutely killing it now what i can do here is i can move this bad boy over here just coming into land and let's bring back our bank grass and think about doing a render i hope this kind of playtime stream i'm sorry it wasn't much of a tutorial but hopefully it was of some value you should be using g scatter that's the point of this video you should be using it because it's gonna just well i mean you saw there it's so easy and it makes it so much fun i love nodes of course i mean this whole channel is about nodes but just being able to have a ui where it's like okay scatter this skeleton scatter this we're just painting that around saves you so much time so much time just having those presets made for you and they've got some really cool things coming down the line as well i had to chat with some of them about the future of g scanner and it's looking real positive so get it it's free comes with some really great production ready assets so thanks for watching hope this was fun hope this was informative and i will catch you in the next one see you later

Channel: Erindale

Views: 10,574

Keywords: graswald, gscatter, scatter, plants, foliage, grass world, blender, b3d, geometry nodes, environment, archvis, tutorial, stream, flower, bee

Id: mdLcu2RYPtI

Length: 30min 9sec (1809 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 12 2021