Geometry Nodes for Beginners (Blender Tutorial)

so for like way too long I've kind of put off learning geometry nodes it just you know it's a little intimidating right it's a new language basically but seeing all these like super cool renders of what its capabilities are like has me a little inspired here so I decided to kind of dig in and try and make something cool uh with these guys and I wanted to share that with you guys and and hopes that if anyone else is out there feeling a little hesitant about starting to learn Geon noes that they can see what uh that this isn't that hard that basically it's a lot of simple building blocks to make something that looks really complex what we're going to be making today is this kind of um super geometric spherical sci-fi looking uh I don't know sphere I guess um and it looks super complicated but really all it is is these nodes down here I mean this is this is um pretty much the node tree for it uh there there's actually one more uh setup for the uh the sphere inside the kind of cage and that's it's right here that's what this looks like um all right so first thing we're going to do is grab a new project make sure I save that just in case we need to reference it so the cool thing about geometry nodes is that it's actually just a modifier setup so you can add it on top of existing geometry and it will um pretty much disregard whatever the geometry is that you put it on top of so we're not going to really spend any time mess around with this Cube we're just going to go straight to the modifier tab add modifier and then geometry nodes and then we'll click new now that we got that set up we can actually go to the geometry nodes page and you'll see that we have our two starting nodes over here uh you got your input and you got your output and basically anything that runs through the output is what we're going to see in our screen here so if we actually unplug that our Q Cube disappears if we bring it back it reappears so with that in mind what we first want to do is um get our our base geometry our starting geometry and I didn't uh want to start with a cube I I thought um let's go with an ecosphere so the way that you would add geometry in this workspace is by going to either the add tab right here if you know where it is so like geometry and then somewhere in here nope mesh sorry um mesh Primitives and then here's all of our Primitives that you would normally find when you're doing traditional box modeling or we can also hit shift a and I'll probably use this option a lot and then actually search for what we're looking for so what I want to do is I want to throw in an icosphere um and then we'll connect that to the output nodee so here's our ecosphere we can delete that and we can we can play with the radius play with the subdivisions all that kind of good stuff so um I like this for right now and what I essentially want to do is I want to use the icosphere to drive the shape for um cubes that I want to put all over the outside of it and the way that we're going to do that is by adding something called instance on points and this this node get super familiar with it because I feel like 90% of the things I seeing being created are using this instance on points at some part in the process and so right now if we plug it in uh it actually looks like it does nothing but what we want to do is we want to take another piece of geometry and throw that into the instance slot and then that's going to basically put that geometry anywhere that there's a Vertex or a point on the mesh of our icosphere here so shift a to add another node and we're just going to add a cube for right now and take the mesh and go into the instance and now you can see that we have uh cubes everywhere that there would have been a verticy on our icosphere and within here you can you know you can scale your cubes and any way that you want just like we'd be able to in the normal uh layout tab we can also mess with the radius and the subdivisions um let's see I think something like that will work for now honestly we're like 90% of the way done but what we really want to do is we want to swap out these kind of boring default Cube looking things for something a little bit more um tailored to what we're looking for so in order to do that we actually won't use geometry nodes we're going to do normal box modeling with this um and then bring that model into this workspace so let's go back out to our layout we can hide our Geo node rig um let's just rename that so we know what it is Geon nodes one super detailed okay let's hide that now let's shift a to add a cube okay and let's go into face mode and so what I want to do is I basically want to inset a bunch of these faces let's see we're just going to grab them and to use this inset tool you can either grab it from near mening you over here or I believe I is the hotkey for it o come on okay we'll just grab it over here and then nope the bottom okay there we go cool now what we can do is grab all of these faces by holding shift and selecting we'll go over here to our extrude tool make sure that we have extrude long normal selected um if you don't you can just uh hard press long press sorry on this tool and then make sure you find extrude along normals and now when I drag it in they'll all go in like that that's kind of cool I think I want to do this this is what I did in the first render cool so one of the reasons we're doing modeling our Cube this way is that I ultimately want to throw a b bevel modifier on it um and as far as I know right now in blender 4.0.2 um you can't add a bevel modifier or a bevel using geometry nodes if I'm wrong on that please someone correct me but for right now the way we're going to do it is come over here to our modifier tab go to add modifier and then we're going to search for bevel I just want to put a slight bevel on it nothing too crazy just want to round off those edges just ever so slightly um you can see that right here the geometry isn't really ideal um but it's not really going to matter for what we're doing with this project cool so let's apply that and bring back our geometry nodes and then let's just move this out of the way we can actually hide it and then to get back to our Geo noes just highlight your uh your blob of Cubes here and then go back to the geometry nodes page okay so now we want to bring in that special Cube that we modeled and the way that we do that is we can actually just click the outliner click it in the outliner sorry and then drag that down into the geometry nodes workspace so just like this and boom there it is so now if we get rid of this Cube node we can actually replace it with this one so grab the geometry uh output and stack that here and boom there's our new special Cube um all along the vertices of our ecosphere so we can either scale up the icosphere or um I could be wrong but I think we might be able to scale that nope that didn't do it I know there's a way to uh control the size um with a different node but for right now I'm totally blanking on it so uh for this project we're just going to scale up a little bit like that cool and then I don't want all of these facing um just their their in their normal orientation so I can actually um rotate them a little bit here oh you know what I I'm an idiot okay so here's the scale um for those cubes so if we want to make them like each like 0.5 now we have little cubes there's that guy let's hide that real quick and now we can every time we increase the subdivisions we're going to get more of these cubes that looks pretty cool Okay cool so we have our custom Cube spread along each verticy um of our icosphere the one thing that I want to do though is I actually want to have some more Randomness in the scale of our Cube I don't want them all to be the same size so in order to do this we're actually going to use two nodes that um you might be familiar with through texturing and the way we add those in is again shift a and then we're going to add a noise texture and then we're going to add a color ramp cool color ramp okay so um when using Geon noes we want to uh change this from 3D to 4D and then we'll go factor to factor and then because we want the randomness to affect the scale of these cubes will go from color into scale and you can see a little bit that um we now we're having a little more variation in our Cube size and we can play around with some of these values roughness detail you might hear my dog barking in the background she's crazy um okay so there you go so if we start playing once we get some of these just some values put in here and honestly these are pretty random there's not really um a Rhyme or Reason to the the numbers that I put in here I just wanted to give it some data if we start dragging um our color ramp we'll actually see that those VAR that variation uh start to show up a little bit more and we can get this cool little effect by actually dragging the Distortion don't mind me I'm just getting lost in the sauce There we go okay so bringing that roughness down seems to make that a little smoother cool I like that okay so on to the next part I um in the original render I had kind of this like emissive cage um as the inside of our sphere and that all these cool Cube things kind of sat on top of that so the way that we're going to do this is by duplicating this geometry node setup and so you can do that by hitting shift d and then you see how you now have this duplicate right here if you um right click it'll make your duplicate right on top of your original and then what we actually want to do now is click this two right here and that makes two separate instances of our geometry nodes so they look exactly the same because um right now all the nodes are the same but you can see that if we actually shrink the radius we'll get some you'll see that second layer kind of show up but for this I don't actually want any of this in since on point stuff I want to go just straight here boom okay let's clean that up a little bit our goal is to take this sphere and make its its segments not its vertices it segments um a wire frame and the way that we'll do that here let's shrink this a little bit I want to take away some of the subdivisions you know what no let's let's keep it four is a good number for this okay so the way that we do that is we'll actually add a node called uh mesh to curve we'll put that right in the middle and um it's pretty self-explanatory what it does is it's going to take your your mesh from your your icosphere and convert that to a curve you can see our curve right here and the way that we get it back so that we see the wire frame is actually the opposite so now we'll go curve to mesh pop that right there now nothing's happening because we need something to um act as the profile for the curve and we don't have anything plugged in here so what we want to do is um essentially add a circle a curve Circle and we'll sweep this curve Circle along the wireframe of the icosphere so we'll take that run it into here and that's way too big so um with the radius I think we're going to want to go like 0.5 maybe there you go yeah now now you can start to see that wireframe come in here and we can adjust to taste um that's too big let's go like 0.1 maybe okay I kind of like that and then I want to make this a little bit closer to our um our cubes so I don't want it to go past but I want to feel like the cubes are sitting on that wireframe now let's go back to our original node setup we can do that just by selecting it and I think I want maybe some more nope sure don't let's see it feels like I want it to take up more room so we can kind of play with that a little bit more yeah I'm happy with that cool so now what we want to do is we want to texture everything and that means we need to add one more node CU if we like select this and go to add a texture um we have this one in here you can see that it's actually not affecting the the geometry node rig we actually have to tell uh geometry nodes that we want to use a material and so the way that we do that is by um adding a set material node set material cool so now if I were to like relabel this um I'm really bad at labeling my materials so let's just call this uh I don't know test we do that let's make it uh bright red you'll see then here we have test and there it goes so I'm actually going to use an add-on here that I really like um for materials and uh it's funny that I'm doing this tutorial with this add-on because uh the the add-on is realtime materials uh who was made by ducky 3D and his channel is a wealth of information when it comes to Geometry nodes but yeah so I want these cubes to be kind of a metal texture so let's just go to metal and I think I used sci-fi metal on the previous render so let's add that material and again you've noticed nothing has changed because we have to actually go back to that set material node and choose the material there okay I like that metal sci-fi geometry nodes it all it all goes together so now it's select this guy and um you don't have to use his materials I just find it a little bit easier but let's add a basic surface in there and then I want to go find it um oop I didn't add it there we go now in here I think I want to change that to Yellow I really like the color scheme that I had or sorry no I did Red and you know what I realized that I actually made an emissive Shader duh okay so the way that we do that if we're not going to use um ducky 3D materials or any other materials for the inside cage we'll just hit new and then we'll make that red actually that may not matter we'll go to a mission we'll make it red excuse me so you don't need to um change your your base color when you're when you're using emissive materials and then we'll just turn that up to like five um okay and then back in our Geo nodes we haven't added our set material node to this so I'm going to ahead go ahead and add that real quick set material and then pop down and find the emissive material I know it's this one just cuz I can see there's a little glow on it but um label your materials don't don't do what I do cool so now we can see that it's kind of got this like red hot look to it to stylize this render a little bit more I actually want to um go into our world settings and change the color to Black so we can actually really see those uh that cage that inside cage kind of Pop we're not done yet we're just going to add in two areal lights to help sell our lighting um so we'll shift a go to area bring that up we'll go into our light setting over here and we'll make it a little bit bigger and then actually I want to make this a lot stronger so we'll make it like 10,000 I think I need to turn on some [Music] stuff um if you're using Eevee just general practice come turn on ambient occlusion you can turn on Bloom um screen space Reflections and turn on refraction all that good stuff we'll just get you looking as good as possible I think I actually want to leave Bloom off for this that was a little intense um okay back to dialing in our light oh did I even change it no apparently not 10 I want that off I want this weird there we go okay let's make that a little bit bigger do I want it smaller H let's keep it smaller raise it up a little bit oops sure why not that might be too strong now um let's go like 8,000 maybe 4,000 okay cool and then now what I want to do is I actually want to duplicate it um contrl c v and then bring that down and then I want one pointing upwards so we're just going to rotate it on the Y AIS by 180° that's pretty much it so a lot of this is to taste but this gets you most of the way there pretty much all the way there again um you can always come back in here um just highlight whatever part you want go back into your Geo node setup and mess around the cool thing is that this is all non-destructive got completely rid of so yeah anyway I hope that this tutorial helped you guys out I really had fun making this project so if you guys want to see more geometry nodes content let me know in the mean time you guys should go out and try it yourself and if you have any questions as always put them in the comments and I will do the best that I can to answer them and if I can't somebody definitely knows and we'll help out

Channel: Pixel Me That

Views: 2,853

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Id: A3ZKqfnthAQ

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 25 2024