Geometry Nodes Tutorial Blender 2.92 Alpha

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're going to take a quick look at the upcoming geometry nodes let's get started [Music] okay so if you want to play around with japanese it's going to be coming out in the next uh release of blender which probably isn't going to come till february of next year so we've got a bit of time uh before that happens but you can still play with it and get in there and experiment with things and kind of get prepped for what's coming if you want to get a hold of it what you can do is you come over to download blender this is just blender.org if you go to download blender then you can come over here and if you just scroll down a little bit you get this red dangerous looking section that's the one you want download blender experimental brings over here and you can get 2.92 alpha so this is an alpha build so it's again uh i wouldn't open any of your current project files with it uh it can just you know up here it warns you uh it can be unstable and it can mess up your files using your own risk so yep so let me just i'll just pull this up a little bit create myself just a little bit more room and we'll start simple so i'm going to go into the modifiers tab on this cube right here and i'm going to click add modifier and i'm going to go down here to geometry nodes and i'm going to drop a geometry node on it now it's just going to look like this which you know there's no controls nothing and that's because javascript nodes gets its own new node graph so come over here open up the uh you know the window things we can have we've got geometry node editor right here so i can pull that up and now you can see we've got some brand new spanking nodes very very cool there aren't a lot of notes to start with so in february when this you know goes live we might have a few more i'm not exactly sure how much more they're going to add to it but at the moment the idea is from what they're saying is it's going to be kind of a foundational build they're going to continue to add to it over time so potentially in the long run we'll have a lot of really exciting things we can do but there are some limitations at the moment so i don't want you to get too excited about thinking you do everything that's possible there's actually kind of a limited use case scenario for this so anyways i'll just show you the basics how it works so if we take these two geometry you have an input and have an output and it's not doing anything but you can do cool stuff so we've got this little add menu these are all the nodes right here just you can kind of just scroll through there's not a whole lot so you can actually kind of have a look at all of them um and they do several different things but the main thing that what you can do in this mode is if we switch to let's see if we go to transform i'm going to transfer no amount node out i can put this in between these two and now i can like move this cube around right i'm not moving it in its control panel this is actually just within the the node which you know okay that's great that's not very exciting though we could already move cubes around you know beforehand so what's new about this well what i can do is i can do a join geometry node and i can stick this here at the end and now what i can do is i can just make a little bit of room and i can grab the output right here and stick it into this second node and now if i move this i've got two cubes right we haven't duplicated our cube what's happening is it's taking the geometry of this base cube one is being piped up here and it's moving it over 3.9 meters this way the base one is being piped directly in here and then it's joining it and making kind of a new piece of geometry that consists of both of these and then it's outputting it so that's kind of cool right like you know and you can start to stack these up so we could just do another one here and i could do another one here and uh let's see and then we could do this right here right and so now i suddenly have three cubes and uh let's say i rotate this group and now it's like oh wait a minute this is kind of cool what's happening here then i can individually like maybe then scale these guys or you know uh and it's non-destructive so all of this is you know you can go in and play with it and do other stuff now you can go into edit mode even and i can grab one of these faces right and i can hit e to extrude scale it down grab it on the x and bam it's going to do it on all of them and suddenly i've got a um i mean it's a spaceship clearly there's another really cool node uh here called the uh point cloud node or sorry an object it's called the point cloud object so let's create that object i'll get rid of the cube so we're not confused so what is this new thing a point cloud is what it sounds like it's a cloud of points and these points are just randomly generated they've got different sizes and they're in space um if we render uh it's not going to show up there's no nothing to this it's like a particle sort of we can use point cloud specifically with geometry nodes that's kind of what they're there for so if we come here you can see only one modifier you can add to a point cloud i need to make this uh point cloud i can give it some some life so i could like let's create a let's clear a cube right i'll move it off to the side and now in here what i can do is i can reference that cube so i can grab an object info node we can select our cube and now i want to basically make this cube appear everywhere there's one of these points now this can be a little confusing at first i know you'll have to get used to it once this you know fully gets released in february of next year um but you have to think about point clouds in sort of two stages first you affect the point cloud and then you add the geometry to it okay i'll show you what i mean there are two nodes in the point options we've got point distribute and point instance point distribute distributes the points so if i take this input from geometry and i stick it over here everything's going to disappear and the reason for that is and this is what i mean by it's kind of confusing a point in city node is a node that distributes points across a piece of geometry right now we're referencing itself there's actually no geometry in a point cloud node so we're saying take this thing with no geometry and distribute all of the points across the geometry since there is no geometry it can't distribute across anything so everything just disappears so we come over here to this thing let's say we take our cube okay and let's take the geometry output of the cube and plug it into the geometry endpoint of the point density now you can see everything's shown up on the cube so i can see how dense i want this let's put like a ton of these on here or just a few and now we've got all these points living on the cube or you know for example we could take a plane and we could say let's use this plane so let's grab our point cloud and let's now grab the plane and now all these guys are you know distributing across the plane okay so that's great but what can we do with this well one thing we can do is we can randomly change their size and stuff we can we can affect them in different ways so there are two nodes called attribute math and one's called random attribute okay so what we can do with these is we can say let's take and random attribute and let's stick this right here and i can give it a minimum x and a seed and then we've got this attribute value now this is something you have to type in okay so i can type in an attribute like scale i'm going to type in scale and uh i'll change this you know we do a seed or whatever but we're not going to see anything change on here right so the only way we can begin to see stuff is if we begin to reference uh and begin to instance actual geometry into where all these points so let's take this point instance node and i'm going to plug my geometry into this and i'll plug the geometry output into this everything will disappear again because now this instance note what this does the point instance says okay i'm going to instant a piece instance a piece of geometry at each of these points so um since there is no geometry in this object section it's not interesting anything anywhere so we need to select something so let's select uh actually let's make something let's do the cube we'll instance the cube so bam if i zoom out now we've got a bunch of cubes and they're all across this thing and uh now our random attribute thing is actually affecting stuff so i can drag this down you know let's drag this like way down to like here zoom in and now you can see i've got a random scale of cube across this whole thing and it's working so it's kind of like a particle system you know you can have like a random size of stuff anyways you could go a bit further than this you could switch this from float to vector and now what we can do is let's take all these down [Music] and then let's take the zed and bring that up maybe to like point three and now you can see uh we're getting you know different random height variations where it's a bit stronger on the z level whereas on the the x and the y it's not actually it doesn't have a lot of variation bring that in a bit almost kind of looks like a city uh let's take this uh let's go with the city example so let's say i'm going to make a city and i've got a river that's going to run through the center of my city so i want to basically have this procedural city where i can have buildings and wherever i put this river i don't want any buildings this is a great use case for this kind of a thing okay so i'm going to start off and i'm going to create a plane i'm going to zoom this thing out and i'm going to subdivide my plane um i might just use a subdivision surface and just crank that up and i will uh let's see i'll also subdivide it in here too so i've got like um stronger edges so it's more of a square and i'm going to take my plane and i am uh see i'm going to go ahead and go shift a i'm going to create a point cloud i'm going to come to my point cloud and go into my modifier stack and i'm going to add a geometry node now i need to get a building so i'm going to just create a cube and i'll just grab it off to the side now let's not do any modeling to the cube let's do it all in geometry nodes just for the sake of it okay so uh let's take our point cloud okay and i'm gonna go for um i need the uh object info node like we just talked about i'll grab a cube the cube there and then i'm going to go for a point distribute and point instance [Music] and then we also need to get our plane um actually this one i'll bring the plane into this one because we can grab the cube for the instance geometry so let's take the plane geometry let's pipe it into here to the point distribute node to say i want you to distribute across this plane and then we take the geometry output and we'll pipe it into the output for the point cloud so this is now what we're seeing is the result of this we can take our point instance node we can drop it here right and now we want to change the scale i can do that a couple ways i could scale so notice if you scale this guy it's not going to do anything so if you go into edit mode for this guy though and you scale it there it is going to actually properly scale all this stuff so we can start it off like that all right so now we've got a very simple setup let's go into this object right and let's say all right i want to create a new geometry node system for this object i'm going to create a transform and i'm going to scale it up on the z so look and there it is it's scaling up on all these guys now i do want to move my um my origin point so if i go into edit mode and let's switch to transparent mode and i'm going to select faces and i'm going to grab that bottom face i'm just going to shift s cursor to selected and now if i go to edit mode i can select object set origin to 3d cursor and that will put the object or the origin right at the base of that cube now all the transformations we do after that are going to kind of scale up from that point as opposed to in the middle of it so now um you can see that all of these these guys are sitting right on this plane um and we could say you know what may be cool if you had like sort of like a secondary tower on these guys and it's like uniform across all of them so i'm gonna go here i'll say let's grab a a join geometry node and i'll bring that here i'll create a new transform node and i'll pipe the geometry into that and i'll pipe it in there and then this one will scale down to like 0.5.5 and maybe move it up on the z just a little bit so it's like sticking up out of the top of these towers and then like you know maybe we want to taper them a little bit so then let's uh let's go back to our base geometry and let's uh let's hit i to inset and bring that in and grab zed just kind of bring it up a touch and now you can see it duplicates that across both of those pieces of geometry then uh okay so now i come back over into my my point cloud now i want to create some randomness to this so i'm going to come over here to my attribute and i'm going to go random attribute okay so now here's the question where do you stick this okay now you might think oh let's stick it after here because we want to affect all this geometry but if you stick it over here basically and i type in scale um it's not going to do anything and that's because at this point once you've instanced your geometry across the whole thing it's uh it's sort of a different different entity altogether this random attribute node is it's really about affecting the the points before you assign any geometry to them okay so we want to come over here and now you're going to see it's going to do what you want it to do so i'll come down and we'll affect that you know now it's affecting the scale on these guys but let's actually give ourselves even more control let's go to vector and now we're going to be scaling um the uh the xyz at different levels and now the buildings really look different uh you know we could go even further with this we could say you know what i want a different group so let me come here and i will duplicate this and i'll bring this geometry node in here and i'll take this one into here and i'll create a join geometry and i'll stick that here and i'll bring this one up and then i need to take my point instance drag that on here and now i've got like a totally different group of buildings you know and i could say this one let's make this one a lot less dense and i'm going to make these really tall and kind of like really thin now again this is all dynamic so i can go back to my original beat you know over here and i can you know add another one of these another one of those pop this into here pop this over into here and then like you know do some like scale on the y and then on the z bring it down bring this down to zero you know now they've all got this thing on their base let's uh let's create this river thing that we talked about so let's come to our plane object this is where we you know it's referencing um because the point cloud remember it's looking at the object info it's looking for the plane right and it's referencing this object to then place the points across and so when it's asking for the density attribute here um drag that out so you can see the full text density attribute it's asking for what's what's the attribute that lives on this piece of geometry that i can use to determine how much density we need to go to that object the plane and then we can come over here and let's uh yeah under this tab right here we've got the vertex groups and this is where it's going to be looking specifically vertex groups all right so let's uh let's paint we could paint it by hand but why not let's do it dynamically let's let's do this really cool so i'm going to create a plane and i'm going to scale it on the x and i'm going to hit tab and i'm going to type f3 subdivide and i'm going to subdivide it a bunch of times and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here i'll add a subdivision surface modifier to this guy and pop it up to 2 and then i'm going to add in a curve so shift a curve bezier and i'm going to scale it up like so um and then i'm going to take this mesh actually scale this curve up a bit further and then i'll come in here and i'm going to add in a curve modifier and i'll select that bezier curve okay so let's put it back at the zero point you know it just kind of flies off if you've got it off like if you look if i move this thing it's gonna like exponentially move off so just be mindful with the curve modifier i'm gonna scale it on the y until it looks you know kind of riverish now what i can do is i can take my plane remember this is the plane that our point cloud is referencing to know how to distribute all these buildings go to that specific lane and i'm going to add a modifier to it and i'm going to add one of these the vertex weight proximity node now the vertex weight proximity modifier sounds like a mouthful basically what it does is it takes the proximity of another object and it uses that to paint the vertexes of this object dynamically so if i click it and then i select the vertex group i want to paint which we don't have one yet on the plane do we uh come over here let's create a vertex group so we'll call this um we'll call this riverbank and then let's come back to our modifier so we want to be affecting the riverbank vertex group which the moment is just empty i'm going to take my target object and i'm going to select my plane.001 which is our river i could rename this probably be a bit clearer now i can say all right i want to use uh the geometry project proximity mode and we're going to use vertex so we set this to overbank we set this uh to the target object which is river now i need to come into my plane and i need to select all my points all my vertices i need to make sure they're actually assigned to this uh vertex group to begin with so i'm just going to click assign and now all of these are in there you can know that for sure if you hit deselect and select and it selects them with that group selected so that's how you know they're in there now this modifier is going to basically modify everything that's been assigned to that group okay so i can use it now i can go to my point cloud and i can type in or just go over to our plane actually and grab the name of it so riverbank back to my point cloud i can paste it in here paste it in here and now i'm able to control things so okay so we come back over to our plane and go to that modifier and now i can change these the highest and lowest uh values like so to basically get different kinds of fall off so if i make these really close to each other really similar i can kind of make sure they're right up against it or if i wanted you know a bit more fall off i could you know turn them up um likewise you've got controls here's of different types of fall off so we can we can also you know opposite and make it like just where the river is so uh it's pretty cool so you can imagine you do this more than just buildings you know you can do this with um with trees with grass with rocks with you know all kinds of stuff what's neat is this is fully you know dynamic so i can go into edit mode and i can grab you know one of my vertexes here from my curve and i can just like rotate shift z i can just move it around so i can change my river you know [Music] just like this i could move this on the y and say okay i want the river to go through this way and everything is just going to update anyway so this was kind of helpful uh sorry it was a bit confusing a little all over the place but i just wanted to jump in and give you some info on how this works so you could have some fun with it too and uh i hope you have a fantastic rest of your day and i will uh catch you in the next tutorial see you later bye [Music]

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 21,700

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, particles, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: v6-a5bGYzxw

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020