Geometry Nodes for Complete Beginners - Part 1 (Blender Tutorial)

welcome everyone to this geometry nodes for beginners blender tutorial Series so in this six-part blender tutorial series I'm going to show you how to use geometry nodes for beginners now if you're a complete beginner to blender and you've never used blender before then I think it is a good idea to watch some beginner tutorials and just learn the very basics of blender like the basic interface and some basic 3D modeling and basic short cut keys but as long as you know the basics of blender then this tutorial series is geared for beginners and it's geared for complete beginners on the topic of geometry nodes so here's an overview of what you'll learn in the tutorial Series so in part one I'll be explaining what geometry nodes are and geometry nodes is basically just a modifier that you add to objects and I'll be showing you some very basic things like using geometry nodes to change the geometry to add some different effects to the geometry and also to move geometry around and I'll also be covering a few shortcut keys and how to navigate using the nodes in the geometry node editor and then in part two we're we're going to be creating a cool little geometry node setup where you can draw curves and then the curves become a flower so in part two we'll start by adding a curve object and then we'll also be creating a leaf object and I'll show you how to add the leaves onto the curve then in part three we're going to be creating a flower with the geometry nodes and then we'll be adding the flower to the top of our curve then in part four I'll show you a few more details like making the curve thicker as it goes down I'll also show you how to control where the leaves are placed on the curve and I'll be showing you how to add materials to a geometry node setup and I'll also show you how to draw curves so that you can just draw the curves and then generate different flowers and then in part five I'm going to show you how to add custom values so that you can just use the geometry nodes on the modifier side panel and you can edit the flowers then in part six I'm going to show you how to distribute all the flower objects on a plane to kind of make like a meadow scene with some flowers and we'll be using a separate geometry node setup to put the flowers on the plane now real quick before we continue continue these free tutorials are made possible thanks to my supporters so if you'd also like to help support me and this channel to help me keep on creating these free tutorials some great ways to do that are by checking out my gumroad store and my patreon page where you can get access to 3D models and assets tutorial files artwork project files procedural materials geometry node setups and much more blender content on my gumroad store and my patreon page and you can also purchase the finished flower project files of this tutorial series on my gumroad patreon I'll have the links in the description and you can use that for study material as you're learning the basics of geometry nodes all right so here I am in a new scen in blender and the blender version that I'm currently using is version 4.0.2 that is currently the latest stable version as I film this video and I'm going to also have my screencast Keys here in the corner so that you can see what buttons I'm pressing during the video so now let's start with the fundamentals of this video which is what is geometry nodes well geometry nodes is actually a model modifier which edits the mesh of an object so it's called geometry nodes because you're using nodes to edit the geometry of a mesh so to add geometry nodes to an object you just want to select the mesh object and we can click over here on this little wrench icon on the side panel and this is the modifier properties so you can click on ADD modifier and you can add different modifiers to this object so for example if I click here on the search I could add like a bevel modifier and you can see now the bevel modifier is added to this object and so this modifies the geometry and there's different settings you can change like the amount and the segments there's also another common one you could add if you go to the add menu you could search for the subdivision surface and just add the subdivision surface modifier and this is going to smooth out the mesh you can edit like the levels viewport and the render values to kind of smooth out the mesh so geometry nodes is a modifier just like these other modifiers so if I just click on the X here to get rid of this I can click on ADD modifier and you can see because geometry knows is a common modifier to add they have a shortcut right here to just add geometry nodes so we've added geometry nodes but you can see the modifier hasn't done anything and that's because we haven't actually added any geometry nodes data so let's click on the new button here to add new geometry nodes to the object so I'll click on new and now we have geometry nodes and you can rename this geometry nodes data if you want to because within one blender file you can actually have multiple different geometry node setups so right here I could type in Geometry nodes one and then you can see there's a drop down here and this is going to show you all of the different geometry nodes that you have in your scene but right now I just have one now to edit the geometry nodes we can't really do much right here this is kind of just showing the geometry nodes you can open these little arrows here but you can see there's not really many settings so to edit the geometry nodes we need to go to a new workspace so there's two ways to get to the geometry nodes editor so that you can actually use the nodes within the geometry nodes one way to do it is to split the blender window here and then add a new window which is geometry nodes so to do that you can hover your mouse here in any corner and you can see there's that little like plus icon there like a Crosshair and you can click and then drag out into the workspace and that is going to split the workspace so you can see we now have two 3D view ports but then each one of these windows here you can see like right here there's this little button here and like right over here on the outliner there's this button here we can use these to change the editor types so if I just click right here instead of it being the 3D viewport I can change this to the geom omry node editor and if you click with your middle Mouse wheel to move around you can see there are now two different nodes now another way to get to this is to just go to the geometry nodes workspace so right up here you can see there are different workspaces so for instance if you're doing sculpting you could jump over here and it will take you into sculpt mode or if you click here on UV editing there's like a UV editor well there is actually a geometry nodes workspace right here so you can click on this and it's going to show you a geometry nodes workspace and if you don't have this geometry node workspace for some reason you can scroll with your mouse wheel to and go over to this plus icon and then you can click on the plus icon to add a new workspace now to add a geometry nodes workspace you can go here to General and then you can add geometry nodes now your geometry nodes workspace will probably look much more like this so you can see there's actually a 3D viewport right up here then right here there is geometry nodes and then right over here there is also this other option here and this is the spreadsheet now why my geometry nodes workspace looks different is just because I customized my default blender startup file so that it looks a little bit different now this right over here this spreadsheet beginners really don't need this data this is really used for more complex geometry node setups and this is basically going to give you more data within your geometry nodes so you can see there is mesh right here and this is like giving you the mesh data and this Cube here is going to have different vertices on each corner so if you select the cube and then go into edit mode by hitting the Tab Key you can see there are going to be different points points here and so these points are actually being displayed right here and there's actually position values for where these points are so if I select this point here and then hit G to grab and move it around you can see this is point 2 and then you can see there are all of the X Y and Z values for where the point is so if I move the point closer to the center of the 3D scene if I stick it right in there you can see the point is going to be much closer to zero and if I bring it in the very center it's going to be almost zero however if I move this point out by hitting the G key to grab and moving it way out you can see these numbers here are going to become bigger so these options here are really just used for more complex geometry nodes but for most things you really aren't going to need the spreadsheet so if you want to close the spreadsheet then you can click right here when the Crosshair appears in the corner and you can hold down your mouse and then you can click and drag over and then you can drag back so you can see whichever area is dark that's what window it's going to close and you can see your mouse is also turned into an arrow so then if I just let go that is going to close that workspace so I like to have the 3D viewport right over here and the geometry notes editor right over here but you can set up your workspace however you want and on default there are two nodes that the geometry nodes have added there is the group output and the group input now these little boxes right here these are the nodes and so if you just click and drag on the nodes you can move them around and then also here in the geometry nodes editor if you scroll with your mouse wheel you can zoom in and out and if you click down with your middle Mouse wheel you can move around to preview the geometry nodes now you can see that these nodes have these little dots here these little points and the points have these wires and the wires are connected up to the other nodes and so the wires are how the different nodes communicate so different nodes have different values and they have different tools and things that they do and then you can use the wires and you can plug each node up to each other and then that's how they communicate so this group input value is going to be any data which is in your 3D scene so this Cube here this is the data of the group input because if I go into edit mode you can see this is the geometry of the cube now the group output is going to take any data which you have before the group output and it's going to actually apply it to the object so for example we could add a new node in here and we could add the node in between these two nodes and stick it here in this wire and then that would edit the actual geometry and then when it goes to the group output it'll actually apply it here to the object so a really easy example is to go to the ad menu so to go to the ad menu you can press shift a or click here on ADD so when you press shift a there's going to be many different nodes and geometry nodes really has a ton of different nodes and you can see they're all cataloged into these different categories what I'm going to do is go up here to the search now to search for a node you can either click on the search or after you press shift a you can just directly start to type so what I'm going to do is start to type sub for subdivision surface and you can see because I started to type it automatically went to the ccle so you can see there are many different options here it's giving us we want to add the subdivision surface so let's click on the subdivision surface and then you can see now it is following your mouse so you can just drop it wherever you want but if you hover it over the wires you can see the wire is going to turn that white color and if you click there to place it now you can see that this data here which is the cube that is going into the subsurf and then there's different values to control to actually edit the subserve and then the final mesh is going into the geometry so that it can show up on the object so this subdivision surface node is pretty similar to the same subdivision surface modifier that we added earlier so there are different settings here like the level and the level is going to be the amount of detail so I can click on the arrows here to turn it up and down so maybe I'll turn this up to like a four so it is pretty detailed and then there's also a few other settings and if I actually click here on the end and then drag it over I can make it a bit bigger so there's also the edge crease so you can just click and then drag on this value to make it bigger or smaller so if I turn the edge crease up now you can see that the cube looks much more like a cube but then the actual subdivision is smoothing out the edges or I can turn this down and it's going to be more like a circle now you can also click on a value and if you click on it you can actually type in a specific value so I could then type in like 0.5 and then hit enter and then that'll change to 0.5 or you can also drag these values so now you can see we have a cube but the cube look kind of subdivided on the edges so that it is smooth now another node that we could add is the shade smooth node because let's say I want to shade smooth the edges here cuz right now it looks kind of rough so if I again press shift a for the add menu we want to shade the object smooth so I could start to type in set shade smooth and we have a set shade smooth node now I want to put it here in between the subdivision surface and the group output and why I'm doing that is because the nodes communicate from left to right just like if you're reading so again we start with with the group input then we go next to the subsurf and then right after that I want to shade it smooth after I subdivide it so we're going to stick it right here after the subsurf but before the group output so stick it here so again it reads from left to right so it does this one then it does this one and then this one and then finally the last one so because we added the set shade smooth it's telling it to smooth the geometry after it subdivides it and also here on the level I could turn this maybe up even higher to like a six so now you can see we have a cube with smooth edges now there's a few more useful things to know to navigate in the geometry nodes editor so if you just click and drag you can see there's going to be a box and you can click and drag over the different nodes and then let go and that will select both of them and then you can just click and drag and move them around you can also click on a node and then you can hold down the shift key and then select multiple nodes and then you can move them around and just like in the 3D viewport and blender you can use S to scale you can use R to rotate and you can use G to grab you can use those same shortcut keys in the geometry nodes editor so you could hit R to rotate and you can see it's going to rotate the two nodes that are selected and scaling won't really work because you don't really need to scale the nodes you can click and drag to make them bigger or smaller but then G for grab will move the nodes around so if you like click and drag and box select all the nodes then you can hit G to grab and move them around now regarding these wires here you can unplug them by clicking on the end of the wire and dragging out and now the wire is unplugged and then if you let go it'll just remove it and the starting of the wire is going to be over here on the left because again you read from left to right so it starts over here and then it goes right and right and right and it reads all the nodes so this is going to be the ending of the node and this is going to be the starting you can see if I try to pull out a wire here it's not going to remove the wire it's going to add a new wire so you can unplug a node by just clicking here and then letting go to get rid of it and you can see because this wire has been unplugged these nodes are not communicating anymore and because they're not communicating you can see it looks as though the mesh has disappeared the mesh is still there you can see if I move it around that little origin point is still there but because the nodes aren't communicating the other nodes don't have any data of what the original mesh was so then to plug back up the wire you can click here to pull out a wire and then you can drag over here and you can see it's going to connect and then if you let go it'll connect it up and so now the nodes are communicating now you can also cut wires and to cut wires you're going to hold down the control key and then you're going to right click and drag and when you control right click and drag you can see this little knife tool comes up and you can drag over wire and then let go and that is going to cut the wire now you may have also noticed when I was dragging out the wire if I drag out a wire but then don't plug it up to anything if I just let go like right up here you can see it's going to go to the add menu and so what this is is it's going to add a node wherever the end of the wire was so for instance I could search again for that subdivision surface modifier and you can see here it is so it says subdivision surface in Gray and then it says mesh so I'll click here and now you can see because I let go right there it's going to add the subdivision surface after the wire so this is really useful for creating geometry node setups so for example I could drag out here let go and then I could search for the subdivision surface drop it here then I could click out here again and let go and I could again search for like the same set shade smooth and I could click on this and then drop it here and then I could do this again so I could drag out let go and I could add another one which will be using later in the series like the instance on points now I want to delete these nodes so to delete them just like the 3D viewport and blender you can select the node and hit the delete key or you can select the node and hit the X key so X or delete is going to delete the nodes now the cool thing about geometry nodes is that it's not limited to this one object because as I mentioned earlier it is a modifier so because it's a modifier you could add it to multiple objects so for example I will press shift a here in the 3D viewport and I'm going to go here to mesh and then I will add this monkey head and I will hit G to grab and move the monkey head up here so now I could add the same geometry nodes modifier to this monkey head so if I click on the monkey head and then click here on ADD modifier here on the modifiers I can add geometry nodes now to add the old geometry nodes that we added we can click here on the drop down and it will show us all of the geometry nodes in our scene so I will choose geometry nodes one and you can see that it has now done the same exact thing to the cube so it has added the subsurf and the set shade smooth and why it can still look like a monkey head but have the same modifier is because of this group input so the group input is just using any data that is actually on the 3D mesh and I'm actually going to turn the subsurf level down because it is a little bit High detail so I'll turn this maybe down to a three but then I could edit the geometry nodes so for example I could change this Edge crease here and because the geometry nodes is added to both of these objects when I edit this subdivision surface here or edit the GE geometry nodes it's going to affect both objects because again it's just a modifier that you can add to any object so let's actually rename this modifier so if I click here on Geometry nodes I could rename this to Sub Surf and smooth so I'm going to rename it to subsurf and smooth so now we have just created our first geometry nodes modifier and that is a modifier created with geometry nodes that will subdivide the mesh and smooth it so now any other object like if I press shift I can go down here and add like a cylinder and I could also press shift a go to mesh let's add an ecosphere now any object which I add this modifier 2 it will add the subs survey and smooth it so if I click here on this object let's add modifier we can add geometry nodes we can choose the drop down and then we can choose subsurf and smooth and now it's doing the same thing and then this one here add modifier geometry nodes click on the drop down and choose the subsurf and smooth now there's another really useful node which I want to show you which is great for beginners and that is the transform geometry so if you go to the ad menu by pressing shift a you can find it here but I just prefer to use the search just because I always have specific nodes that I'm looking for so I can just start to type transform and you can see here's the transform geometry node so when you are transforming data in blender that is going to affect the location the rotation and scale you can see here it's called translation but that's the same as location so what we can do is we can put this transform geometry somewhere in our geometry node setup so you could really add it over here at the end over here at the starting it really doesn't matter in this geometry node setup but I'm just going to add it to the starting so first it's going to move the geometry then it's going to subdivide it and then it's going to shade it smooth so I'm just going to click on the transform geometry and I can hover it over the wire and the wire turns white and then if I let go we have now dropped it in here so it hasn't done anything yet and that is because these values are the default so I can now use the X translation to move that over and the Y and the Z and if I just like give each one of these objects random rotations so let me just kind of rotate these objects and move them around now if I change the X translation you can see it's going to move each object over by its x-axis because we've rotated the objects the x-axis is changing for each object so I can move this I could also rotate it if I wanted to and I could also scale it and to scale all of these values at once not just the X Y and Z but all of them at once you can click on the first one and then you can drag down and then after that you can drag left and right so I could like make this smaller or bigger so as you can see this transform geometry node is super useful because you can move around the mesh all right so before we finish this part there's one more concept that I want to explain within geometry nodes so this group input as I mentioned it uses the geometry which is in the 3D view Port so if I go into edit mode by hitting the Tab Key you can see there the is the original mesh so that is the original mesh that we had before we used geometry nodes but then you know we've transformed it so we've moved it up we've also added the subsurf and we've set it shade smooth well with geometry nodes you don't actually need to use the group input so if you don't want to use the actual geometry in the 3D viewport if you want to just start over completely you can just use a different geometry so if you select the group input you can hit the X key to just delete it and now you can see because it's not using the original geometry of the object it appears as though the geometry is gone however if I were to delete modifier if I hit the X here to delete the modifier then the object would be back because the geometry isn't actually deleted it's just being hidden from the modifier so let me press contrl Z to undo that because I still want this set up so because we don't have any geometry we need to add some new geometry So within geometry nodes you can actually add default primitive objects so if I press shift a for the ad menu here in the geometry noes editor I could go to mesh and then I could go to Primitives and you can see there are the different primitive objects that you can add in the 3D viewport so there's the cone the cube and the cylinder and all the other ones so I'm just going to add a cube for example so we'll add a cube and we can drop it here so now instead of using a 3D mesh of a cube we can use a cube node in the geometry nodes now the nodes are not communicating so it's still disappearing so to give the transform geometry the cube data we can pull out a wire from the mesh and we can stick it into the geometry and now we have a cube which is completely in Geometry nodes and then you can change the size of the cube by dragging these values and you could also subdivide it by adding the different vertices here if I hold down the Z button and move my mouse to go into wireframe you can see I can change the vertices X Y and Z and that is basically going to subdivide that Cube and if I zoom out here you can see that the other objects that I've added have turned into a cube so even though this was originally a cylinder and this was originally an icosphere and a cube and a monkey they have all turned into cubes because they all have the same modifier and so we're basically telling it to not use the original geometry so it's ignoring the original geometry and it's instead just using a cube if I go into edit mode of these objects you can actually see the original geometry as a wireframe but I'm not using the original geometry because I deleted the group input and I'm instead replacing it for a cube all right so this is going to wrap it up for part one of my tutorial series on Geometry nodes for beginners so I hope you easily able to understand and I hope you were easily able to follow along and thank you for watching so in the next part in part two we're going to start by creating our geometry nodes curve flower modifier and I'll be uploading one part each day of the tutorial Series so when part two is released it's going to be right up there on the end screen and also the link in the description and if you found this video helpful and you'd like to help support me and this channel then a great way to do that is by checking out my gumro store and my patreon page where you can get access to the finished project files of this tutorial that you can use as study material and also on my gum store and patreon page you can get access to 3D models and assets tutorial files artwork project files procedural materials geometry node setups and much more blender content on my gum store and my patreon page and all of your support really does help me to keep on creating these free tutorials so I hope you enjoyed this thank you for watching and I will see you in part two

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 34,365

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, geometry nodes, blender, flower, modifier setup, geo-nodes, geometry nodes flower, plants, blender tutorial, geometry nodes for beginners, complete beginners, beginner tutorial, blender beginner tutorial

Id: tWvgHbZXCtA

Length: 23min 21sec (1401 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 08 2024