Getting Started - Geometry Nodes for Beginners

[Music] you might have noticed in recent blender updates that geometry nodes has been getting quite a bit of attention and you might be wondering what geometry nodes is and why you might use it here's a summary of what i'll cover in this video i'll start with some examples of things people are making with geometry nodes what it's good at and why you should use it then i'll show how to add the geometry nodes modifier and some basic concepts surrounding it i'll talk about adding primitive shapes how to reuse values and also control values through the modifier panel i'll cover joining multiple pieces of geometry adding materials and i'll end with showing how to create this spiky ball before getting started i just want to congratulate the winner of the character modeling challenge sponsored by xp pen and getting their deco l drawing tablet if you're interested in taking part in the next challenge join us over on my discord server also check out my patreon to download all the project files from my videos get coupon codes for free products get early access to my videos and to download files that i don't share anywhere else i also donate a portion of the profits to environmental costs each month links for everything are in the description alright let's get started so the geometry nodes modifier is a tool within blender that you can use for generative modeling and as time goes on it's getting a lot of the functionality that exists already in modifiers and the particle system but with the added benefit of it using nodes which i'll talk more about later if you're familiar with procedural or generative modeling you'll know that there are some advantages over traditional modeling first thing to note is that generative modeling is non-destructive meaning that your actions can be changed or undone really easily in traditional modeling if you want to change something you did in the past you're stuck with hitting the undo button a million times or maybe deleting parts of your model and redoing them for example with geometry nodes i can start a scene with a sphere and if i decide later down the road that i wanted to start with a cube instead it's as easy as replacing one node i don't have to lose all of the progress that i made another thing to know about geometry nodes is that it's not always the best option if you want to sculpt a character it's probably going to be easiest using destructive methods like sculpting tools but if you wanted to place a cube on every single face of an object that has hundreds of faces that's something you can do quickly with geometry nodes that would otherwise take you a long time to do manually geometry nodes might be useful to you if you want to make a lot of something like if you want to make a city you could manually make a bunch of buildings and then decide where to place each one or you can create a building generator with geometry nodes or even a city generator if you can think of rules for how you would like things to be made then you can probably make it with geometry nodes like a fence for example one rule could be place one fence post every two meters and another could be place fence posts only along this curve this is how i like to come up with ideas for projects if you go on blender market or twitter and search for geometry nodes you'll see how powerful it can be let's hop into blender and talk about some of the basics alright so here we are in blender i'm using version 3.1 it's important to note that geometry notes is constantly changing and updating so i recommend you use version 3.1 and if some of the nodes don't exist that i'm talking about then chances are you just need to update it's also worth saying that this isn't a complete beginner tutorial like if you're having trouble just moving around and navigating you should check out the playlist in the description it's from the official blender channel and it's really good for beginners and it's not too long either so this is just the default scene right here we have the default cube and i'm just going to delete these two items over here with x like that and we're actually going to keep the default cube this is what we're going to be adding geometry nodes onto so geometry nodes is a modifier so if you come over here to the wrench you'll see that we can add a modifier and geometry nodes is actually in here so you can click that to get started or you can come up here to the geometry nodes workspace and if you don't see it up here you can just hit this plus and it's under general right here geometry knows so i'm just going to click that button right there and now we're in the geometry knows workspace and you can see here this is where we put all of the nodes and this is the spreadsheet uh we're not really going to be talking about the spreadsheet too much today so i'm just going to push it over to the side a little and to get started you just want to select your object and then hit new right here and it will add a new geometry node setup and you can see over here we have the modifier too you can click and drag the nodes to move them around or you can with them selected just hit g and that also grabs them and drags them around if you want these to snap to the grid to stay more organized then you can hit this magnet right here and it will snap like that also i'm going to turn on one add-on it's free all you have to do is go up to edit preferences and then under add-ons search for node wrangler and turn that on this just gives you some extra options and you'll see that in a lot of tutorials people are using the node wrangler pretty much everybody uses it at this point so when you first add the geometry nodes modifier we just start with two nodes the input and the output and if you disconnect it you'll notice that the cube disappears and the way i like to think about it is that this is the original geometry and when i say original geometry i mean if you come over here and hit tab to go into edit mode this is the original geometry and you can move it around however you like or you could even replace it with something else that's what this is the group output is the result of whatever you do with nodes in here so to get started i'll add in a node and you can add nodes in a few different ways so you can either go to this add menu right here we have all these options or you can hit shift a and we have all the same options here when you're in here you can also hit s to start searching for something so i'm going to hit shift a go to geometry and choose transform so this is a very basic node you can just drop it in right here and it should connect automatically uh this just lets you move your object around like this you can rotate it you know scale it things like that so this is a good example of the difference between the input and the output so when i'm moving it like that what we're seeing is the result of this node that is considered the group output the group input is the unchanged geometry so over here if we tab into edit mode you can see that we have our original geometry still in the same spot so that would be considered the group input another thing that's worth mentioning is that we have multiple socket shapes so you can see here we have these circles and if i bring in something that has a different shape i'll go to maybe a utilities random value we have this random value right here this is a diamond so if we try to plug this into the rotation for example it'll turn red like that and that just means that it doesn't work it's not going to do anything so if you ever see something that's red that just means it doesn't work typically you won't be able to plug diamonds into circles but you will be able to plug circles into diamonds and i'm not going to go into great detail with this because there's a lot to cover and it might be kind of monotonous so i put a link in the description to a page that explains all of the different socket shapes and all of the different socket colors another thing that you can do with geometry nodes is um not use the group input at all so i'll just delete this transform with x and you can see when it's detached we have nothing in here and we can add in a primitive shape so we can hit shift a go to mesh primitives and we have all of these options right here so i'm just going to drag in a cone and i'll also drag in a cube so if we wanted we could just grab this green socket labeled mesh and plug it into the geometry and we get a cone that appears now our group input still exists the geometry right here it's just that we're not using it so if you go into edit mode you'll see that our original geometry is still there it's just not being used we have all of these options to change the the shape of our primitive things like that some of these are going to be easier to tell what's going on if you go up here into into wireframe mode like that so if we change the side segments you can see actually where it's adding the geometry and the fill like that you could also turn this basically into a cylinder so i recommend just checking out all of these mesh primitives and getting ideas for you know what they do how you can change them things like that if you wanted to have two different shapes visible at the same time you can do that with a node called join geometry so i'll hit shift a under geometry join geometry right here and you'll see that this socket is longer and that means you can plug multiple things into it so we'll just drop it in right here and i'll plug the cube in there also and now we have two different shapes at the same time and if we wanted we could move these separately also so i'll just bring that transform node back in under geometry transform pop it right here and we can move the cube to the side like that one thing worth mentioning is that if you wanted multiple cubes you don't necessarily have to bring in multiple cube nodes like this you can just plug it in to the join geometry multiple times so we have this one going through the transform but i can also just bypass it and put it in directly like that and now we have two cubes like that so i'm going to take this transform node and hit shift d to duplicate it and bring it over here also so we can move these around separately another thing that's nice about working with nodes in general is that you can reuse values so for instance if i wanted to be able to scale both of these up at the same time and have the same value we can just bring in a value node so i'll just hit shift a and under input we can grab value right here and this is just a single value so if i set this to one and plug it into the scale which has three values it's basically going to make all three of these values equal this one like that and now we can scale it up and down we can also plug this into the scale of our cone right here too and now when i change this value both of these will scale up at the same time another thing worth mentioning is that if you don't want all of these to have the same value you can use a different node called the vector node you can just go over to input and choose vector and this is the same as the value node except it has three values so being able to control multiple values at the same time and reusing values can come in handy especially if you want things to be proportional to each other so for instance if we wanted the cube to be half the scale of the cone then we can just use a math node so i'll hit shift a utilities math we can drop that in right here and change this to multiply and just set it to 0.5 so now when we change this the cube will always be half the scale so i recommend just kind of playing around with this you could plug these for instance into rotation and we can set this to something maybe higher i'll turn it up to five and now the cube should rotate five times as fast as the cone like that and if you ever want to just change one value instead of all three the node you would want to use is called the combine x y z so shift a and it's under vector combine x y z so we could plug that into the rotation like this and i'll grab a second one and plug it into rotation also so we can make it so that these are only rotating on the z-axis like this i'll plug that in here so now you can see that the cube is rotating five times as fast as the cone like that but only on one axis and we still have these other ones available to play around with so when you start making bigger and more complex node trees and you have a lot of these like nodes that are used for basically just controlling things you might want to have easier access to them so one thing you can do is make it so things are controlled over in the modifier panel and the way you do that is with the group input node you can see that we have this empty slot right here this empty socket and you can just drag that kind of anywhere you want so for instance i'll just take this and plug it into the scale of our cone right here and i'll also do the same thing for the scale of our cube and you can see now we have options over here and we can scale these however we'd like we can also use this to control the z rotation basically the same thing that this value is plugged into right here you just drag it over like that and also plug the same socket into the multiply over here just disconnect that so now we can affect the rotation over here also and so something like this can come in handy when you're making something complex and you want to share it with someone else and all you can just put all of the relevant controls over here so they don't have to sift through all of your nodes now if you want to get rid of some of these you can open up this panel right here there's a little arrow you can just drag that open you can also just hover over this workspace right here and hit n to open it up and close it so go to group and you have all of the options right here so if i want to get rid of the scale for the cone then i can just hit minus right here and it will go away we also have these other options down here so you can rename it you can change the type so we could change the type to something like float and now it just has one value that you can use to scale things up and down with we also have a tool tip and you can type whatever you want in here and now when you hover over that field you can see that it will display the tool tip so this is nice for if you have a whole bunch of things over here and you and you kind of like forget what they do then you can write a little description of what it does here instead of having a really long title or something like that you can also set defaults and minimum and maximum things like that another basic thing you should know how to do is how to add materials so let's just come over here to the material properties and i just want to change this one to i'll just call it red and we'll change the base color to red like that and we'll add a second one too new and i'll change this one to blue and we'll make that blue so now we have two different materials okay um and if we come over here to material preview you can see neither of these are applied if we were to plug the original geometry in over here you'll see that it is red it's the color of the first one but we don't actually have that applied to either of these shapes so we need to bring in a node called the set material node you can just hit shift a go to material set material right here so it's going to matter where you place this now i'll place it right here at the very end and under here you can just select whatever material you want i'll change this to red so because i put it after the join geometry it's making both of these shapes red um for instance if i uh if i bring it over here instead by the way i'm holding alt when i drag this and that makes it so that when you move it it will uh disconnect but it will you know keep the the cable plugged in so if i drag this over here you'll see that only the cone is red because i'm putting it before the join geometry so this is how you can make multiple objects have different materials we could also duplicate this shift d to duplicate and drop it right here and i can change this one to blue like that now we have two different materials one is coloring the cube the other one is coloring the cone an important thing to remember when you're doing this is that materials will kind of overwrite each other so if i were to duplicate this and put it afterward it will overwrite the set material right here because it's closer to the group output basically so just remember that if you're you know putting these all over the place you don't want to overwrite things accidentally all right let's create that cool spiky ball shape now so i'm just going to come up here and hit the x to get rid of that geometry node setup i'm going to click new and this is going to add a new modifier you can access the other ones that we made over here and you can save them also by clicking this badge right here so i'll click that on the other one also and i'll just name this spikey ball so instead of using the original geometry i'll use an icosphere instead so i'll hit shift a s and search for icosphere and we can just connect that up like that and we have this ecosphere right here i'm going to turn the subdivisions up a little higher maybe to three something like that and then i'm going to bring in an extrude node so shift a mesh extrude mesh you can just place it in right here and you can see immediately this is giving us kind of a cool result and this is because it's extruding individual faces so you can play with these values right here to get different results if you turn individual off all of the faces will still be connected now if we want these to all have random offset scales if i want this value to be random for each face all i have to do is bring in a random value node so you can hit shift a utilities random value right here and we can plug that in and now this offset scale right here each face will have a random value between uh 0 and 1 right here so you can change these values if you want this to be even more extreme you can just change these values right here and the seed is going to kind of give it a like a random pattern and you have a lot of options for like how complex you want it to be also like if you wanted you could uh change the radius on the fly like that and you can even turn the subdivisions up even higher for something like higher resolution like that i recommend just going into the add menu right here and checking out a lot of the nodes and seeing what exists right here one thing you could play with is instead of using a random value you can check out the different textures so under textures we have something like the noise texture and you can plug the factor into the offset scale instead and play with some of these values right here and you can see we get some pretty cool effects it doesn't take long to get results that look really cool and again this seems pretty complex but this is only three nodes so try not to get too overwhelmed when learning new things because things might seem complicated on the outside but when you look into it there's really not that much work to do right here obviously this is going to change from case to case but this is an example of something cool you can make that really doesn't take that long an extra step that you can take is changing this from 3d to 4d and moving this w value right here with a node called scene time so shift a and i'm just going to search for time scene time right here and i'll plug the seconds into the w and i'll change the scale down to one and now when i hit play this will animate [Music] all right that's it for this one i'm planning another beginner geometry nodes video about scattering points and instancing so if you don't want to miss that make sure to subscribe i'd like to thank my patrons for their support and i'd like to thank you for watching have a good one [Music] you

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 148,333

Keywords:

Id: szTYXk0t09A

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022