Finding patterns, rhythms in geometry & shader nodes.

hello hello so my name is uh Chris from anre Belgium um I have been known for mostly creating interactive installation and generative design since 2010 I mostly do advertising public spaces and uh festivals today I will do a short intro or maybe longer intro of how I came to use blender and at the end we will do so some live noing or coding so it started in um 1993 my first computer uh Ms do computer uh the thing was running 40 mahz give you some perspective it is like 80 times slower than an iPhone 14 which is important for the story because uh we had this button on this computer was a turbo button button and I always wondered why do we have this button and uh preparing this presentation I looked it up because for my father we could never touch the button because the computer was super expensive and it would it would wear out like too fast because we had a mortgage of like four years on the computer so when he was at home we could never touch a turbo button but when he was off we pushed on turbo always anyway the through a button I always thought it was something for overclocking but it's actually uh the inverse or the opposite so the turbo button was used to slow the computer down so if you unpress the button it would slow it down so it could run like older games or older time based systems so that made me think like half my youth we were running at half speed at home so it's a bit sad uh anyway fast forward to now um I've been doing a generative design for like multiple years I didn't use blender I mostly used um things like processing Opa Frameworks uh Cinder so this is a system to generate the letter M based on a genetic algorithm so I have this system made up with a set of rules it tries to make the m so do lot of iterations of the same system overnight to multiple computers and these are all the [Music] outputs [Music] so I'm a big fan of generative uh Design Systems because they generate unexpected results um I'm not very much of a fan of making things which I already know know ahead what it will be because it feels kind of like work to me and I don't like to work that much so uh I like to build systems who work for me and make uh new designs who I can choose of this is also a generative design system where I put children or adults in a box it's called human pixel so every box is a pixel and when you enter the pixel there will be like a recording of you um opening and closing the pixel and I use all these recording to make a generative uh animation again here I also have this unexpected result by using unexpected input also funny detail like when you do it with children they they're all over the place with the cardboard but adults they they close like super tight so it's very boring to do it with adults and sometimes with children you also have like like in a real display like dead pixels and then a bit further I um started to get interested in uh doing 3D scanning and remixing the scans so I was in investing the 3D scanning and uh I got asked to do a 3D scanning session at the puka poop Festival in Belgium Music Festival so we used the ligher scanner on an iPad trying to scan the people I say trying because it's very difficult at a festival everybody's like super uh not so stable and you need to be like in a 4 minute Poe to be like have a scan without five arms so that's why we only did it during the day not during the night and then this scan was used in a system um for re remixing or remeshing the the scan with different uh this my head by the way uh different algorithms of color different shapes then you get a print out this one of my favorites special thanks to the yoga people very impressive to be like that for five minutes and then during the night I coded coded this system which remixed all these scans live so it was like ever changing all real time so it's ever changing U effects so never never the same so we defined a Buns of shaders defined a Buns of um yeah you could call it geometry no but it's not made in blender so it's uh verx shaders and geometry shaders which were all randomized giving this average changing uh effects or compositions so more scanning that's me scanning it was my pre- Corona hair yeah it also you need to be be creative to have interesting poses this was the software I was using before blender of course so it was a customade system with the Shader on the right and then on the left I reloaded the Shader all the time and it changed and then I I try to find like interesting effects and like capture them I'm not really a person who likes to make like their own tools but it's just like uh had to be done so so this was the output of the scan it was used on this uh music festival so I find it interesting if you do a scan in a certain position like it was scanned like this then I translated it into something completely different so you get like a different context of the same scan so more scanning more shaders then finally blender came on my radar so I was using blender for the first time to clean up some meshes some scans and then I thought oh it would be cool if in blender I could also do some Shader coding because that was a thing I was like very very uh keen on doing Shader coding and then I looked it up if there was like glsl shading which is very common for open GL but it's not in blender which is makes sense because it's very specific then I discovered there was a thing called OSL not sure if many people use it but I found it very interesting in the beginning I thought it was maybe too difficult to learn but it's actually very similar to uh uh open G Shader code so I start using this OSL it was very interesting so I made these uh remixes of scans also small detail the hand is actually a different hand is from a statue in a open air museum in anope because scanning hands is very difficult this an actual render so you see a lot of small artifacts from the scanning and also some artifacts from actual Shader so when I was doing these videos it was very difficult to render them because it's all on a CPU and um back then I thinking it's like two or three years ago there was no support for OSL on a GPU and I think there is now um with Optics I I tried it like uh two days ago on one of my old blend files but it didn't work it gave me this error so maybe some people who were more technical on that can help me with that but uh but for one project I needed to make a video and I I I postponed the project already like two times because I was very new at blender and I took the risk of doing everything in blender instead of my own tools and then uh I couldn't postpone the project for the third time so I thought okay I need extra power to render so because I need a lot of CPU power I rented the Amazon Cloud Server because it's quite easy to set up a a Linux server with blender headless uh and I think it's also pretty much affordable like $8 per hour for like 192 CPUs seems like a good deal so I did that and uh I Rend it for a couple of hours to just like speed up the process of rendering and after these hours I would just render the rest locally um on multiple machines I I don't know how it works with you but for me it's like I'm running a part on this machine a part on this machine and then this machine is like faster so it's already done so I I manag some frames from the same animation on that machine manually and then I have to like juggle with all the PNG sequence it gets like very messy so I spent like the whole weekend like doing that like rendering bit there bit there it was like a huge mess but then I discovered I forgot to turn off the the Amazon Cloud Server so actually I had the Amazon server like for the whole weekend running I didn't use it I only used it for a couple of hours so I got this bill like a in in Dutch we have this expression like uh learning money so it's like the the money you you pave to learn something like virtually but it's like actual money so I did learn it a hard way so I continued doing uh shaders with OSL but this time I used like a a predefined model um because it work like way faster than obvious you doing the scanning that's right is more lighter style I think the nice thing is if you make your Shader procedurally you can always zoom in and have more details um so with this one I learned that there was also depth field in blender so I exploded a little bit over there my setup still looked like this so I had this um this Shader material which was mostly one OSL uh note with all these different inputs and then just outputting the uh the bump and the color because at this point I still thought yeah note is not some not based program is not something for me because I've been programming since my 12 and I'm like 42 now so it's like 30 years that I've been coding so I thought yeah coding is really my thing I'm a coding guy so uh so I kept doing coding except here I started doing for the first time Noe based Shader because I wanted to have GPU power because the I still had these Amazon Bild on my mind so I thought okay I need to do it on GPU go faster so that's with this simpler layout a simpler design I start using uh only nodes and there's like a positive thing about using nodes is that you have GPU acceleration but the downside is like sometimes you have some really small part of code and it gets like really big in in nodes I must say I was only starting using noes so I didn't discover that there was also a vector mod node so could be much smaller I think uh this is a function from uh enigo qls not sure I pronounce it well it's a very known Shader guy for doing a he's actually the one of the eventers of Shader toy uh also small side note his name is like not going to pronounce it again because I'm not Spanish but uh always thought he's initials on shaded toy which are AQ I thought it was just because he's like so smart but actually just his name so anyway moving forward the are this all done using node based system so shade the nodes then you huge thing for me and I think for a lot of people was geometry nodes so I start experimenting with like the earlier versions of geometry noes especially the splines were very interesting for me and also a thing I don't like to do in blender is like manually uh doing animations with key framing so I think I'm too lazy for that so um geometry no was really good for me to do motion before that I had no interest of doing motion because you have to key frame everything um so but the first time I could use uh motion but then all procedurally so I like to go fast doing a lot of incremental saves and then go back to see if there's something interesting or not so I think that person personally for me it's like a very interesting feature in the new upcoming blender it's like the incremental saves so these saves are still with the old system so I save it just by number and then I have a folder with all the renders and I I go like really fast so I break a lot of things and then I can always go back check okay this was nice render and I go back to like the initial blend file and start from there so as I said I do almost everything procedurally not because I'm like a I'm like a procedural Fanboy or something just it works really well for me and I can iterate like very fast so this will be like a sequence of images which I made I think in two days or something just showing you like how fast you can go if you make everything procedurally so it's not a matter of like what you're going to design or what you're going to make for me it's mostly like what will I keep what will I throw away that's often how I work I I make a lot of stuff lot of output and then I curate it and then keep one interesting bit and then work on that further okay so like I mentioned before I I start doing motion because of geometry notes because it's so so convenient so so enjoyable so all this motion is is based on a simple um mathematical function so these forms on the left are all sine waves so all these shapes they they move on a side wave some have like a um a bigger uh oscillation so they go further that's why they like meet at different stages in their in their animation on the middle and the right is a different function not sure if anybody can guess like the mathematical function for the animation it's very familiar with the sign function yeah t so because it goes like slow in the middle and then it accelerates like to Infinity then goes back also you can make like very easily like multiple variations of the same program so so the two on the right are actually the same in as in system so it's the same system but like a different camera angle and the dot on the top is just like having more faces than the one on the right yeah also wanted to show like the one here on the left I have the blend file open so if I go through it you'll see they always like have different points where they meet so sometimes it's interesting sometimes it's totally not interesting so often I do like a a small small resolution render or sometimes I skip some frames and then render like the whole sequence from frame maybe zero to 5,000 and then check the day day afterwards like see okay this is interesting I keep this part and I throw away all all the other ones so for me I'm I'm not using blender that that long I think only two two years but it it evolved so fast and so many interesting things for me personally so I think all the things I'm really fan of is like is uh GPU accelerated shaders then geometry notes obviously it's super fun and I also like the connection between the shading and the geometry I know in other 3D software it can be very difficult to like have this connection because they have to export it to some format and then they lose all the connections so that's really the fun the fun part if you have the good connection you can go fast make interesting stuff uh yeah obviously simulation noes is fantastic uh I don't know how to um simulation no to like quickly restart my uh simulation so maybe afterwards if some somebody can explain that to me would be very helpful um so that being said I will do my first uh demo hope it all goes well oh yeah let's let it so this will be like a simplified version of something I make often um so this will be my setup I have like here I have my camera setup I often use uh trackers to like track the uh the lights of the camera something I like a lot uh then I often call this main notes or something okay it's very scary to do this live uh so was already getting ahead of myself actually I'm going to use um a sphere I'm a big fan of like round shapes and then these parameters I usually tie to like some kind of value sometimes I make like a render switch to see like for the render make a better resolution and also s my workflow like things which are really important for like the output I give it like a yellow color some personal thing okay I think the set position is one of my most used nodes is for like morphing all these shapes so I want this this sphere to be like wobbly so I'm going to use the offset of the sphere probably like the easiest way to like have something quickly would be like having a noise on it it looks very um bad so um I want to have my uh my shape symmetrically so how would I do that first I would make my no my noise like a 1D noise and now I have my my noise just um in one dimension and I'm going to use that on the um on the vertices so so you could either like have the displacement on the on the nor normals but then if for instance you have like a phas things will like Collide so for this I just want to have it from the center so I take the actual position of the point I normalize it and then this value I will multiply it by the noise so use a vector mod just drop it in it's not doing much for the moment so check okay it's working yeah it's actually it's logical that's not doing that much because I'm doing it on the whole shape I'm not giving it any different number for all the vertexes they will have the same number so I have to differentiate it I could use and I will use the position in the set axis so I can like use that from the bottom to the top and then I have like symmetrical displacements on all sides so that looks more interesting already yeah this is a matter of taste I can like small scale big scale let's may go for three then what I always do is uh using the the time so the frame so the easiest way is to just add it on top of the uh the set value because it's a noise it's just infinite so you can like add whatever number you want no I don't use a vector mat just a normal mat I take the frame so now we should have already like animation it's not very enjoyable to watch for the moment so I will slow it down by I think maybe something like this ah it's still too fast because I made a mistake so I'm doing no I didn't make a mistake it's just too fast think there's too much detail yeah it was a bit glitchy because my my mesh is like not dense enough to have like Smooth effect so a lower scale would be better I could use a high scale but then I should like increase my meas density but it looks already like a nice uh SE creature so if I want some extra rhythm in it because now it's like very statical Rhythm I could use like a sine wave or something else but I think I go for the sine wave so copy this I will add it as well yeah I must say this is not like a best practice in doing nodes today uh I'm pretty messy at doing nodes so so I have this sine wave which is like too heavy for now oh yeah should use the time which is already slowed down so now if I increase my timeline I should already like have different variations oh no I will use multiplyer that's actually nice because the S Wave is is so heavy dominant in this one that it actually reverse the animation because the sign wave goes from minus one to Z to uh plus one it was not not intended for me to do it this way but it's inter interesting so I keep it then to make it even more interesting I can like rotate it bit at the end the whole shape it's always always interesting to do this at the end because then all your Transformations has been done in the beginning and then you have to do it's like in local space and then at the end you can transform the whole thing so um here I will also use my uh time probably have to multiply it as well it's too fast yeah I think it's still a bit too janky I think I have to slow the sine wave down or maybe like have it have less impact okay it's not perfect but I will keep it like this um so now comes my favorite part is like doing the shading for that it's interesting I think to um to use your geometry or whatever you're doing in geometry and exposing that to the Shader as well I think it's also in nature like leaves they at the end bit they change colors so it's a nice thing if you're creating the geometry yourself then you know what's what the impact will be on the geometry so you should share that with your Shader so actually here where I'm I'm pushing this offsets that's the value I need not this one but it's the oh I see why it's not working my thing my goal was actually to add the noise and the sine wave together I'm actually pushing the sine wave into the uh slot of the noise so should be like this side wave then should go here yeah that's more what I wanted so let's increase the sine wave also important this part is where I where I use the the position the the Z to determ where the noise sh like a sample so if I make this smaller or bigger it will have like a impact on the the details of the noise so if I copy this you get like this so that's definitely for me also a yellow one so this also nice maybe bit less five and I just going to push my camera a bit closer okay I could tweak this forever but we'll start doing the uh the shading so like I said before I need to have this this value where I'm actually doing the deformation I should share it with my Shader so I'm so it's the noise value combined with the sign wave this value at the end here which I used to make the offset that's the value I'm going to save so I can do store attribute named attribute oh yeah I have to do it on the geometry so here the value goes in here restore this I call it push so this will be saved on every point it's actually the value that it's pushing so now if I go to my Shader which doesn't exist yet oh yeah it's the default one I think it's not used check so I will need to set it set material all here we go so then I'll go back to Shader editor okay so a quick test would be like to have this new value the attribute with the name push I think it's working but it's not super clear so I use a color ramp like color ramp is definitely one of my favorite things to use coming from like a coding only environment like doing this color ramping in uh in coding would be really a mess or very very unreadable so this is like perfect um add some yellow okay what I also can do is um have the same one but then in black and white and use that for the uh roughness so when being at the edges it will be uh wide don't want any roughness but I want roughness at the at the ends I mean like more specular so less roughness like this so now it starts getting changes at the end also think I'm going to add some extra material some glass then do Shader mix then the factor I will use the same push actually I want to have the materials be intertwined like now it's going from one material to the other one it's because my my sine wave is like too dominant or it doesn't the oscillation is like too slow so I will go back to my geometry notes and then here the sine wave oh yeah it's because the sine wave doesn't in doesn't take into account the position so I should add that as well so I will share the file at the end of the I can imagine it's too messy now yeah that's better so previously the sign wave was just going on the time so it's like always always like going up with the time but it doesn't make any difference if if you're with your position here or there so now it's taking into account the position it's evolving like that so I'm pretty satisfied with that going back to the uh Shader and maybe also add some color for the glass so this would be normally a good time to like for me to have like a safe increment and then start experimenting more before I break it down and then I cannot get to this anymore okay so let's check yeah I think it's nice so because I use glass I should think just add some hdri I have my favorite one I have this theory that everybody here probably has his favorite hdri which uh and I want to do some kind of event where you have to show your hdri or something like like there's this expression you are what you eat I think you're also you are what your AG your eyes or something also note on that I also want to go there one day to to this hdri which I'm using all the time uh lastly I just want to hide the hdri by using a simple mesh as you can see I'm only using blend like two years I don't know any shortcuts yeah I think it's it I could like tweak this forever but it's almost time so uh I'm pretty happy with the results I Al also hope you are happy with it and uh that you learned something so uh oh yeah one thing I forgot no I don't say that it's also something I learned with blender it's super cool that there's like these AO saves also while doing this presentation of course I spend like multiple days procastinating on the presentation making these renders while I should actually doing the presentation so I thought to give it like some value of my wasted time I'll just add them at the end of my presentation okay thank you

Channel: Blender

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Id: E-BdTZrNXZE

Length: 45min 37sec (2737 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023