FREE Blender Geometry Nodes TERRAIN GENERATOR - Easy Terrain from Simple Geometry!

what's up guys Justin here with the CG essentials.com so in today's video we're going to check out a free Geometry nodes tool for creating terrains in blender let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so this free blender Auto terrainer is from Samuel Francis and basically what it is is it's a tool that takes your simple geometry and then uses geometry nodes in order to add displacement so that you can really quickly create terrains um using just very simple geometry so I will link to this in the notes down below he has a free version and then also the paid version right here um which the free version basically comes with the entire geometry node setup it's just that the uh the Five Dollar Plus version is one that's going to uh basically come with some additional biome um type stuff but uh the free basic version should work just fine for you if you're looking for that free tool so you just click on the free button right here and just enter in zero dollars um in order to download that if you do want this other one or if you just want to support the developer you can definitely select this version and just type in a value of five or more dollars in here like this but let's go ahead and take a look at these and see kind of how they work so when you download these there's going to be two files that you can download um so depending on which one you purchase right the first is just for the free version so what it is it's got this kind of example file built in here that's the free auto terrainer and basically what this is is this is an example file where if you click in here and you look at this if we were to go into like wireframe mode for example and actually I don't even want to do that I want to toggle this modifier off so if you take a look at the mesh that's in here right here this is a very simple mesh and what this is doing is this is using the geometry node functions over here in order to add displacement in order to subdivide this so that we can get this kind of like we can get this uh this terrain looking version so if I toggle these geometry nodes back on notice what this is doing is this is coming in here and this is basically adding displacement to the surfaces right here in order to generate a kind of a realistic looking terrain and so note that what this is doing is this is in addition to adding all of that displacement it's also coming in here and it's adding the grass to the surface all in the geometry node setup so if I wanted to toggle those off for a minute and just take a look at this terrain I could go in and disable those but if I click on this notice how you can go into the settings of the geometry node and you can adjust things about the displacement using these sliders right here and it would be nice to see a version of this where these are all kind of options over here in the geometry nodes not that you couldn't do that yourself pretty easily but basically what you can do is you can come in here and you can adjust things like the strength of the displacement so for example if I look at the surface right here and so I can adjust strength of that displacement in here as well as the seed so if I wanted some like randomization in here or I could also adjust the scale though you want to be a little bit careful with that one because a little bit will go a long way on that one but notice how you can come in here and you can make those adjustments in order to kind of customize the way that this looks so you can adjust the displacement and the level of detail on your surfaces on your Cliffs right like this you can also do the same thing on your ground which is going to be your surfaces that have this like lower angle right so I can come in here and I can adjust like the strength of the displacement again you've got your seed in here as well as like the scale and notice how that scale is going to make a massive difference in here so a little bit is going to go a long way on making those scale adjustments so I might change this like a .03 though and notice how when I change that to a .03 I get a lot more ups and downs so you can use these Sliders in order to adjust this and one of the cool things about this is it's really easy to apply to a new object right so if I was to come in here and do a shift a just add a plane and I'm just going to move this plane over remove it down and let's just take this simple plane and just make some adjustments to it real quick so I'm going to scale it up and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to extrude this up so I'm going to select the surface this then I'm going to extrude it over maybe move this up right here then I'm also going to scale this Edge a little bit so very simple right we've just created a very simple surface in here but what I want to do is in my modifiers I can go over into my geometry nodes and I can find that terrain modifier and apply it to the surface right here now there are definitely some things you're going to want to change about this so like for example I'm going to adjust the displacement on my uh on my Cliff face right here and also maybe a little bit of the roughness in there and I'm going to add a little bit more strength to the vertical surfaces in here maybe add some additional detail like this but notice what that's doing is that's coming in here and that's basically applying that geometry node setup to this surface one of the cool things about this is if I go back in and I un disable those particles this is actually coming in here and it's spreading those particles across this surface as well so I could also tab into this object and add some Loop cuts in here and as I add Loop Cuts notice how I get a little bit more detail my Surface but then I can adjust those as well so for example if I wanted some additional ups and downs in here I could come in here and adjust this geometry and because this is all driving based off of that really simple geometry making those changes is really easy and remember that within this geometry node setup you can come in here and you can adjust things like your grass density so you're shorting your tall grass in here as well as the seed in order to in order to kind of randomize out the way these objects are being placed in here but it's doing all of this kind of automatically and so in addition if you get the five dollar version this is going to come with a desert generator like this one and this one's more set up to create kind of a desert biome and so this one isn't using the geometry node setup in order to scatter everything on the surface it's doing it more with the particles and so this is more designed to uh to mimic more of a desert situation rather than a um you know the more green situation that we saw but then then in this one you can come in here and you can do the same thing right so you can make adjustments and notice how this is actually going to change along with your geometry right here so you can use this in order to quickly generate that desert piece and so let's say that you wanted to take these and you wanted to run them in a new blend file right so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to pin the free one in here well the way the this at work and let's go ahead and let's generate our surface real quick note that applying your rotation and scale is going to be pretty important but let's say we had a surface like this one what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to go into our file we're going to want to append so what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to go find that file so in this case the auto terrain generator and we want to append the node tree so I'm just going to take all of these nodes and append them to this file and notice what that does is that brings in like your grass objects as well which can be really helpful in a second but we're going to go into our modifiers and now that we've appended that we should be able to pick the terrain modifier like this and it's going to apply that Terrain to your surface right and then again you can come in here and you can kind of make those changes and I kind of made this kind of small so you might scale it up a little bit and then do an apply for rotation and scale but notice how that brings that in and that automatically starts applying all of those node options in here and this one in particular the free one is really easy to set up because it's automatically bringing in these scatter objects and scattering them with the geometry node setup but again since that node setup is in here you can make those same changes right you can adjust the strength of the displacement the seed all of those different things and notice how it's automatically generating this in here so appending this to a file is actually pretty easy and so one factor that I don't think is necessarily a gigantic limiting factor but um it is one to be aware of is at least at the moment when it outputs this group like this if you go in here and you apply this it's going to apply the um it'll apply the displacement in here and then you can export this mesh but it's not actually applying the particles that are in here and I'm wondering if we can't add a realized instances node right here at the very end of this node setup and then do that yeah so if you add a if you add a realize instances node what that'll do is that'll actually realize those instances and create them as a part of your mesh well then you should be able to take this whole thing and Export it to a Unity or something like that now a warning about that when you do realize those instances and apply that modifier this is going to break that geometry node functionality right that's the way the modifiers work if you apply them they're no longer modifiers but then this geometry is kind of finalized and you can export this to another program so maybe save like another version of that and then apply that that way you still might have a live version in here that you can work with but you can take whatever you create with this and Export it to another program through that step all right so I'll link to this in the notes down below leave a comment below and let me know what you think 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: 29,239

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 terrain generator, blender terrain modifier, blender geometry nodes terrain, blender geometry nodes, blender free terrain generator

Id: MPbUpM9wt14

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 15 2023