GrowthNodes Overview - Blender Addon Tutorial

hello everyone this is going to be an overview of the growth notes add-on I apologize in advance for the sound of the birds can Muck can't do much about it the main purpose of growth notes is exploring growth processes on the surface of meshes so growth nodes is not really concerned with volume and basically does most of the operation by displacing the surface of an object if you are interested in volumetric approaches to growth there is actually an experimental branch available on github which has a few additional features that goes well beyond what blenders Python API offers these include GPU computer reaction diffusion using OpenGL 2d 3d textures 3d textures are also computed using OpenGL and frame buffers lots of strikezone optimization as well as a dedicated geometry engine fully written from scratch and scythe on which does not utilize blenders mesh api and because of that there's a huge performance boost when you use that specific engine however it does not have many of the functionalities that the regular addon offers what we are going over is going to be the simplified version of the add-on however it is still powerful these are some of the images that have been generated with the regular version of the add-on the reason why I do not maintain or suggest messing around with the experimental branch is that the requires compilation it requires some external Python modules is pretty hacky in order to get some of the opengl stuff working and all in all it's a lot of headache if you are not familiar with code and compiling and all that stuff it took three months to develop this project the master branch primarily has all the features that have contributed to because I'm familiar with those and it's much easier to develop and maintain so both notes been inspired by the wonders this is a project by mi t--'s Media labs mediated matter group in collaboration with descriptive and in their video they're actually doing a lot more that is possible with growth notes in particular for instance in this scenario they have some growth happening on curbs and if you are interested in projects similar to what you see on the screen I would highly suggest to also look into nervous systems ongoing efforts in simulating and digitizing organic growth processes in terms of installation this is like any other blender add on I'm not going to go too deep into it just download the zip from github go into blender and let's see in your add-on section install the add-on from the file and it should show up under the notes section or just look up growth nodes over here the master branch has been test read however we're not still 100% confident and its functionality so be cautious while you use it and with that we're gonna get into the actual meat of what is possible with growth notes so growth was going to be accessible from the node editor which you can access using shift + F or you could just click in any of these regions and select the node editor in the Left panel there are going to be different sections regarding the data that we are going to be using in our node tree or simulation process the Bakke property sync section is going to be available for all node trees regardless if they're empty or not over here we have some control on our frame limits in this scenario we're saying that the simulation is going to start from frame 1 it's going to go all the way to frame 10 we are able to play it back in both directions reversed and forward this allows us to go to set the playback so essentially these two buttons will take you to the beginning and the end of simulation without changing the range if you click on this button it will actually set the beginning and end of your animation to be that of the simulation so for instance if I change the end to be 50 and if I set the beginning to be a 10 I'm gonna set the beginning of my animation to be 10 as you can see right now we pretty much only have one frame that's because in the previous setting 10 was where our simulation would end and now we have set the end to be at frame 50 this slider just allows us to go back and forth to a specific frame and the purpose of this is that you don't go back and forth between the node editor and timeline and whatnot which is also the primary focus of these two sections as well however these two sections textured data and object data are going to be populated when you actually start adding notes so object data will find all the meshes that you are referencing in your node tree and texture data is going to reference all the textures that you are using in your node tree so the way growth notes work is that you select an object or multiple objects and you select different textures and there are a few different nodes that allow you to manipulate the geometry and have control over animation let's see so let's start by referencing our object so let's select simple here 0 1 all right perfect still nothing is showing up here and that is for a reason as you can see the node itself also has this dark red background and this background color is basically indicating indicating that this node is not going to be used in the simulation because it's really not connected to anything so just to show you what I mean by that let's let's bring a texture here as well let's set the texture to let's set the texture to be clouds twirl and also let's add a displace node from the geometry section so so far all of these nodes are essentially inactive however once I start connecting them you can see that the background goes away the texture node is still dark red and that's because we're not using it yet as I connected - my displaced note now we can see that all of these notes are active and participating in our simulation also in the displace note for any of these nodes what I could do essentially is to just use the displace node and only select the object that I want there's a small bug here and that's because since this place note it's not connected to anything we're not actually gonna be computing the simulation so for now even though we could easily just select the texture from this drop-down menu directly in the displace node let's not do that and let's connect a texture node that is essentially doing the same if I change my object or any of my textures you could see that it is directly reflected in this displace node let's go back to what we had now you might wonder what are these textures these textures are essentially these textures are essentially blender internal textures and what do we mean by that is that they're not the same textures that you would use in cycles materials these are different textures that usually hook up into the modifiers or the particle system or in blender internal they just help with your materials world and whatnot if you want to create one of these textures you could just go to blender render and click on the world and then click on the texture and you could just tap click on the world button and in one of these textures you could just create a new one we could call we could do a clouds texture and [Music] let's just call it tutorial test just for now all right back to the texture to the note panel as you can see now that we have an object in our scene object data and animation is actually populated these buttons just help organization only to make things easy to read and follow depending on your own preferences show lists will show you all the objects that are in your scene so for instance if i duplicate this object and also have frame dependent now you can see this frame dependent is selected the reason why simple does not show up here that is because it is not participating in the simulation process so as you can see the background is red let's go back to simple let me delete that the shape Keys section is going to be populated usually if the object has shaped keys so in this scenario I'm going to go back to my shape keys sections I'm gonna add a shape key and now you can see we have different shape keys showing up so this shape keys section that this panel that you have access to it is essentially a direct copy of what you would find inside your object data panel or tap I should say texture data is also very similar there are two options I can toggle the preview over here this is a bug with blenders API and and their UI elements for displaying textures so unfortunately at the moment it's not possible to you texture or multiple textures and essentially you could only have one preview so if you want to see what the texture looks like just click on enable preview it goes away from there and if you toggle preview inside the panel on the left all your previews from the node editor are going to be temporarily disabled let me remove these shape keys before we continue so inside the texture data panel we have access to a few different things we can control texture settings so if I go back to our tutorial test again I guess I need to reconnect it yet there's still some small bugs like I said this has not been fully buck proofed and tested but they're primarily UI box it's nothing that's going to introduce severe malfunction in how the atom works anyways so if you remember for the tutorial test texture we selected clouds if I toggle the preview I can change that to musgrave again this is the bug that I was talking about so there are some problems with the texture preview I can change that to ocean or I guess ocean is not a good one to use maybe noise yeah and anyways this section pretty much just gives you control over your texture the ramp the color settings and all in all it is essentially what you are going to see in the texture tab showing up here and this this was a conscious decision so that you don't have to go back in for worth between these areas if you need to manipulate something you can do it most of the times pretty much from the note itself if it's more advanced or if you need to animate something for instance a texture parameter you could do it from the left pad if you are not familiar with how to toggle these things for the left panel is going to be T or you could select on this small plus button and usually n is for the right panel but growth knows that does not really add anything to this right panel so anyways let's keep this on and with that let's go ahead and make our very first test of what we are going to be capable of doing with this add-on so I'm going to change my settings back to cloud twirl let's make the start of our simulation to be frame 1 and let's make the end of our simulation to be frame 10 I'm gonna just set it to be the entirety of our animation or actually no that's not a good idea because I'm gonna show you one of the cool features of data this is a plane that I have it's nothing really interesting but it's been subdivided a lot to give it some geometry so that we can play with growth nodes is capable of I would say a rudimentary dynamic topology so you could actually start with a mesh that does not have much detail and keep adding to it as you go on but in this scenario since we want to start from the very basic let's go ahead and make sure that we have some geometry or actually I should say a lot of it if you're not familiar with how to do this we could go ahead and just try this right now I'm gonna go ahead add a plane I'm gonna go into edit mode click on subdivide and I'm going to just keep doing this until I get the amount of detail I want you could open this menu by pressing W again this is not really a tutorial for beginners it's pretty much for people who are already familiar with blender I'm just trying to show how you could use this add-on which in itself is a little bit complicated so just bear with me please Angus now we have our objects let's make sure that we change it over here from simple to plain beautiful and I'm gonna just reconnect it just to make sure dad everything is good to go all right so the way growth nodes work is that you have an object and you keep applying displacement on this object what I mean by that is for instance in this scenario if I go ahead get a displacement let's get cloud twirl what we had let's set this to be point 1 and let's set this to 0 let's set this to be 0 over here too if I keep duplicating this on top of itself we are going to get some mesh that resemble that resembles some sort of growth processes and the scenario this could be fungus growth or cellular deformation whatever you want to call it but as I mentioned earlier in this overview the purpose is mainly at exploration if you want some thing that is actually scientifically accurate you should look into ready which is a cross-platform implementation of various reaction diffusion system but the very cool thing about ready is that you could write OpenCL scripts and everything is computed on the GPU it is super fast it all I know it gives you a lot of functionality that you would not have access to in blender but for what it's worth you could do similar stuff and blender mostly aimed at the surface of objects anyways let's just go ahead and see what we can do so I have my object said I have my texture said and I have my displace node let's go ahead and say let's go ahead and bake the note tree so it's gonna take a few moments and we're gonna end up with something like this this is not really that impressive it's essentially what we got from applying different displacement modifiers but if you think about it for a quick second we were able to add essentially 10 modifiers on top of each other using only three nodes in a fraction of a minute I would say probably 1012 seconds and the other cool thing about this is that this is actually non-destructive so at any point I can go back to my initial geometry that I had and you might you might be wondering how is this working basically it's a trick that we are doing using shape keys so every displacement is applied as a shape key now if I set everything to be 1 then what we could do is we could see that hey this is the first displacement this is the second one this is the third one this is the fourth fifth and so on now one of the more interesting aspects of this approach is that blender has this really cool feature that you don't need to have shape keys relative to each other what you could do is actually interpolate between the shape keys so as you can see right now the shape these panels telling me that at 180 my last displacement is going to be applied so what they mean by that is that if I change my evaluation time to 180 then I'm gonna be getting that if I change it to 160 I'm gonna be getting this place eight if I change it to 140 I'm gonna be getting displace seven before I continue let me increase the size of yeah I think that's good okay one of the cool features is that I had to run the simulation only for nine frames but now what I can do is I can animate the simulation for how many frames I want to have let's actually make this very over exaggerated let's say we have 6,000 frames so what I can do is I can add a keyframe for value of zero at frame one or where am I am i as frame nine okay let's just go back to fill in frame 1 add a keyframe at 0 and then let's go to frame 6,000 and add what value was that 180 so now what's going to happen is that nine frames of simulation are going to be animated over 6,000 frames you have a lot of fine-grained control over shape keys which is essentially the simulation data one of the problems with this approach is that we are going to get a lot of intersections dealing with any restrictions is something that's planned for the next release in addition to a bunch of bug fixes mesh sequence exporting these are all planned for future release but at the moment growth notes does not handle self-intersection also in many occasions many different situations you're going to get these jittery very rigid edges and the way that I usually go about fixing those is that I add a corrective smooth make sure smooth type is set to length weight and also apply only smooth increase the factor and you could also increase repeat and you could see the difference here it actually makes the geometry look much much nicer and as usual we could observe how this simulation is occurring so this was the simplest demonstration of growth notes but we're gonna go into more detail in this tutorial one of the things I want to show you is how we could make the simulation and frame dependent so that these variables are actually changing based on the time that we have so in order to do that before I go ahead let me remove all of our shape keys so that the geometry is clean also I'm gonna hide these if you are simulating an object with a lot of geometry make sure that corrective smooth is not visible because if it is the simulation time is actually going to increase all right let's see how we are going to approach this let me do this let's add a another texture I'm going to select wood for my other texture and basically it looks like this so nothing nothing special we have another node in the texture category called texture alternator and basically what texture alternator does is that based on a condition it is able to change the texture so if the condition is false it's going to use the second slot and if the condition is true it is going to use the first socket oh this kind of bothers me takes your preview but it's not working right now because this is working over here I wonder if I change it okay it's tricky but if you're ever in doubt what's going on you can always look at the title of the texture and just find it over here in the texture tab and see what it actually looks like so now let's see how we can change this condition automatically so from the integer menu you could find this node called frame and as you can see while changing while sliding the marker on the timeline the frame number is also changing as well now let's say I want to use the cloud texture for even frames and the wood texture for the odd one so what I could do is I could come here and do an integer math I'm going to say add I want the mod operation and I could actually connect an integer to boolean and as you can see it is automatically translated for me so zero is translated into false so on even frames we're using wood and one is translated to truth so we are using the clouds texture I could go ahead and actually plug this into my strength or mid level but I'm not going to do that right now and even though this is not a tutorial meant for beginners over here this mod operation is essentially just seeing if our Fame is even or odd so I'm looking at the remainder of dividing the frame by the number two so if I divide an odd number by two my remainder is going to be one and I divide an even number by two my remainder is going to be zero and that's what's happening nothing too complicated another way to look at it is if I change this to 5 for instance I'm gonna get true for 4 frames in a row and then every frame that is divisible by 5 without having any remainders so it is divisible by 5 is going to make the displacement use the wood texture and if the frame is not divisible by 5 it is going to use the first one so the conversion from integer or even float to boolean happens in a way that if it's zero is going to be false if it's anything other than zero is going to be true if you're familiar with programming languages this should not be a surprise let's change this back to two let's make sure that our frame goes from 1 to 10 cloud twirl wood plane and we have frame 0 and 1 okay let's give this a try also let me duplicate this object which is going to be called plane there's your 1 for plane 0 0 1 I am going to remove all of my shape keys and in this scenario let's go back and plug in cloud 12 just so we can come here what difference was introduced really by just alternating between the textures so I'm gonna bake the simulation again for this one over here let's go to the modifiers panel and apply the modifier for both of these so also to mention okay before I move on I want to mention that the panels are available here are also available in the 3d view so just keep them in keep that in mind we could drag this down for now and just compare the results of these two simulations so I'm gonna shade both of these smooth let's make both of them let's make both of these be not relative and let's change this to 50 and let's just compare these and see how the animation process for simulation is working out so as you can see the what texture is showing up over here and we have this gross growth process that slowly switches back and forth between the cloud texture and the wood texture if I go directly into top view you could see that just a minor change which is alternating the textures between even and odd frames could drastically change the results of simulation and that's what I mean by saying by saying that this add-on is mainly for exploration um the outcome of your note trees are so sensitive to the values and the parameters and textures that you're going to use that there's really no way to have a simulation that is exactly what you want however with ready you have that mathematical procedure precision which is not really present in in growth notes but I I see growth notes being used extensively for content generation to create terrain to create different objects let's say to quickly come up with asset for a VR experience that nurses the viewer in your cylinder in the realm of cellular interactions and you could go from microscopic to macroscopic you could simulate planets or you could simulate tiny little organisms in your body and whatnot and if you want to see some of the examples just head back to the github page there's a lot of different gifts that show what is actually possible with growth nodes and we're actually going to dive more into that right now so let's continue our tutorial um I'm just gonna duplicate this for now just so you see let me give one to the second layer and let's see unclear the keyframe set it to be zero zero clear and let me also delete all the shape piece or object this fresh that's why this is what's not working so I guess a little bit tricky if you if you notice I remove the keyframe over here and it was still showing up over there that's because the object data is only showing the objects that are referenced inside my node tree and in this scenario I'm referencing plane zero zero one but that was just moved to layer two and what I have selected here is simply plane so keep that in mind I'll probably change the behavior of this for the next release as well if you remember I said we could also change the value of the displacement strength and the mid level and let's actually go ahead and do that in this tutorial in this section of the tutorial and our aim is going to be creating some sort of growth process on this that resembles pulsing similar to looking at someone's neck and observing how how the surface on top of their artery is pulsing so we're gonna we're gonna go ahead and create something that's similar to that let's let's see so let's go back to our texture alternator let's keep that to be wood and that's like something different let's go with marble terrain so just to show you what that looks like something like this when there gives a lot of different uh Asians for each texture that you could play with by default marble looks nothing like what I just showed you but if you go a little further and start playing with these different properties you're gonna get a texture that is going to be unique all right let's let's see so I have a texture alternator here and let's close that for now before I do that just to remind you again for even frames we're going to use wood and for odd frames we're going to use marble train right so yeah let's do this let's say odd and even all right now we know what's going on so how could we go about changing this you already have something like this which is telling us if the frame is even or odd let's go ahead so the value of strength here is pretty small let's see what we could do let's go ahead and get a math node so you could easily convert back and forth between integers float and boolean float sockets are designated designated with the color orange integer with green and bullying's with this purple blueish color you're going to get the results of this odd-even this plug it back into the float map now it's activated um let's go ahead and maybe divide this by 20 okay so if my frame is even this is going to give me 0 if it's odd it's going to give me point O 5 and just go ahead and add just go ahead and duplicate this set this to be multiplied get this value multiply it again to get point five and I'm going to plug this into my mid-level so what happens on even frames my mid-level is zero on odd frames my mid-level is point five okay so yeah I'm gonna get I'm gonna duplicate this float math go ahead and get this divided by a hundred duplicate this again put it into the bottom one you change this to plus and also get this guy so as you can see the values are being updated here based on the frame that I'm on in this scenario 168 but for this simulation we will never get to frame 168 in fact the simulation is going from 1 to frame 10 so let's check the values that we get in this scenario going from frame 1 to 10 what's happening to my mid-level is that it is simply switching back and forth between 0 and 0.5 on the other hand what's happening - strength is that it is slowly increasing as I keep going up my friends now we're on point three then we are one point four but the other thing to note is that the strength is changing is increasing in value differently for even and odd frames so frame one my value was 0.06 and frame three my value is 0.08 frame two my value is 0.02 which is actually less than 0.06 so all frames have a higher strength than even frames and what that means is we are going to be displacing the surface of this object more by the marble texture then we are going to do it by the wood because if I if I move these down a little bit we can see that on even frames we have what on odd frames we have marble and similarly even frames and all frames have different values the relation is that we should note here is that even frames have less displacement than odd frames and they also have different textures anyways let's go ahead bake this and see what we're gonna get all right so what had just happened if you remember we started this section trying to replicate something that looks similar to pulsing so let's actually animate this and see how close we were to replicating such a thing should have set that to 180 if you want to know the exact correct values at which each of these shape Keys is triggered just look if you just say if you disable relative it's gonna tell you what you have to put for evaluate evaluate time so fixing that we could look at this again and if I look at this from sides you could see that we are getting something similar to a pulsing however it we are also applying the growth on this object if you want to compare this to what we had let me just go back so using different textures we are getting very different simulation results one of the things we could also try so now that you know is also going to be very different I'm just gonna go ahead and delete those two other objects I'm also gonna go ahead and delete all the shapes for that one and let's just only use marbled terrain should I change let's let's keep the values the same all right so we got something pretty similar let's reduce this a little bit so just some just as a reminder corrective smooth can dramatically change how the object looks so what's happening here as you can see we are simulating something that resembles these different plateaus and then it starts curling way too much and changing more than expected but the reason why I was showing you this is that if I change this back to five you had a lot of control the cool thing about about how growth notes stores the big data is that if i duplicate this object right now from the same baked information now maybe even let's change this to 1 the same baked data is giving me two very different objects and the reason for this is again we have very fine control over the simulation data essentially what we're seeing over here on the right is an underlying simulation step on for the object on the but at any point we could use only the frame that we want or we could animate these or we could even change them in terms of the value that they represents and you might be wondering okay what do you mean by that so let's change all these guys to one and let's hide all of it so this is an initial one this is okay so frame two is pretty good this is what I have for the second displacement that's happening I can change this max value to five and now I'm getting a very different object and just to revert this back just put this back to one so these are literally duplicates of the same object but you can see that the information that is baked by the simulation process and growth knows allows you to derive so many different states for the same surface which is quite interesting in the next tutorial in the next section what we are going to do is we are going to get rid of all these guys just put everything back in the center and let's go ahead and add a round cube let's go to edit mode and subdivide this a few times subdivide smooth don't know why the birds are singing right now it's so late at night I guess I don't let them go to sleep so let's just use the same just use the same no tree that we had without changing anything for our cue or I should say sphere in this scenario let's go ahead and bake it again from frame 1 to 10 at the moment growth notes does not really show any progress bar and what we have ended up with is this really crazy looking thing the edges are all intersecting doesn't look nice at all but as I mentioned earlier you could always fix this with the corrective smooth modifier let's go back and let's see what is happening so you see initially our simulation is replicating something that looks fairly like a planet we have all these different plateaus and crevasses and you'll go ahead and use this as a simulation progresses we can see that this starts to diverge from what it initially looked like and it's actually animate this from frame 1 to 200 last one's going to be 180 and let's see if we do get that see I think that we were looking for yeah it almost looks like it's breathing fear it's a breathing planet whatever you want to call it again as a reminder exploration is the primary focus of this atom all right so what we have over here is an object that has bunch of different vertex groups if I go to weight paint you could see that for instance I have something like this I have another vertex group that looks similar to that and I have another one that just wraps around the sphere let's go into our node tree select everything and you can remove it for now what is this object called sphere easy enough let's change the texture let's keep that as marble train I'm gonna duplicate this for Marvel Train let's select Group one for this one let's select group two let's say the group three for the other displace note for group two let's select Voronoi for Group three let's select distorted noise these are some textures that I prepared in advance for this tutorial Warren Oy looks something similar to that these are the precise parameters if you're interested to replicate this distorted noise that's what we got alright let's go ahead and bake this no tree from frame 1 to 10 it's gonna take a while because essentially we are applying a lot of displacement oh so what happened what happened let me remove all the shape keys what I forgot to do was change the strength for these displace displace notes so let's go ahead and change those right now let's set this to 0.08 for vertex group to let's say de - let's set it to 0.2 for and for vertex group 1 let's set it to point 0 4 usually 4 objects at this scale a value between a value less than point 4 point 3 works really well it also depends on your texture just play around with these values usually baking stuff doesn't really take that long so go ahead and play with the parameters let's bake this again and see what's gonna happen all right as usual looking crazy but let's go ahead and start applying our corrective smoothes actually you could see one of the issues that came up here our mid levels are said to half what I'm gonna do is duplicate this object just leave it to the side I'm gonna go back here disable all these corrective smooths remove all of these again and set all of my mid levels to zero bake and see what's gonna happen and how different it's going to look from the one that we have on the left so first thing to notice is that our normals are correct unlike the other one that we have over here a trick to fixing that is go to the object data tab and select double sided for your normals and it should take care of it but essentially the objects that we ended up with are different as well so something to keep in mind this mid level actually affects the final product that you're going to get my first corrective smooth is targeting group 1 the second one is targeting group 2 and the third one is targeting group 3 but this is very redundant because right now what's going on is that I have the same values for all of them so let's try something else what if I remove the vertex group so let's do that let's just have one quick they're smooth now what has happened if we go into wait paint we can actually see that for each of our vertex group we have a different growth process based on the texture that we've selected happening and as you keep scrolling through these vertex group it becomes pretty obvious that the growth process is indeed respecting the vertex group parameter so for instance we have a very smooth surface over there and that is because none of our vertex groups are targeting that area so that's how you can use vertex groups before we finish this section let's just animate this and see what it looks like one thing to notice is that prior to this all of our values where 0 to 180 now we actually have 540 and that's because we are using three displacements so 3 times 180 540 set that to be 540 and let's give this a try pretty cool so for the next tutorial we are going to be looking into the topology features of growth notes so bear with me so let's go ahead and add another round cube we're not going to be concerned with the detail of the object that much keep in mind that topology features are destructive that means they're going to change the geometry of your object and essentially you cannot undo that however for the next release I'm going to implement mesh sequence exporting which means you're going to be able to have access to each frame of or two each to the geometry at each simulation step that's the best way to put it for this one let's go ahead and try to simulate something that looks similar to the growth to growth of crystals let's say or maybe corals corals sounds better so let's get our workspace right let's select the correct object doesn't have any vertex groups let's set this to be distorted noise let's go ahead and add a frame note and let's go and do an integer compare and let's say we are interested in frames that are less than three okay and let's see learn we're gonna go from there so let's start with sharp faces and you might be wondering what does this do right now what I have is top and bottom let's change this to be only bottom and also let's change the value of our weight to be to be that of integer compared to so what's gonna happen what is this doing if the art frame is less than three we're gonna get a weight of one and if our frame is bigger than three we're going to get a weight of zero what short faces does is that it's going to select faces based on an angle let's say we're interested in an angle of 60 degrees this is the angle that the normal of the face is going to make with but the z-axis so what do we mean by that in this scenario if I want to draw this properly let's see let's go ahead and select cursor so the normal of that face is going to be something like that the normal of that face is going to be something like this this face is going to have a normal that's probably looking like that and if I go ahead and create an another note that if I go ahead and create sorry not another note if I go ahead and create a line that separate that shows the z axis if that is the z axis if that is the z axis then we are interested in the angle that this blue line is making with the z axis so in this scenario that's going to be my z axis now what is happening is that we are going to target all the faces that make an angle of up to 60 degrees with the z axis so all of these are going to be selected and we're probably going to go ahead and select some of the faces that are in this upper hemisphere if we were to select to tick to check the bottom feature as well we would also be targeting these faces in the bottom hemisphere so let's see now we are going to target these short faces and what's gonna happen if I set this to be from frame 1 to 2 and just bake this really quick and let's not even have displacement happening we have this vertex group now called short faces and if you look at it you could see that all these faces that make an angle of up to 60 degrees with the z axes are selected if I select bottom go back to object mode bake again you could see that both the bottom and the top faces are selected so let's remove this right now let's set this back to we had and let's see what we can do once we have these phases so growth allows you to subdivide an object either the entire object or you could actually subdivide only the vertex groups in this scenario let's go ahead and subdivide the vertex group that were given my discharge case is not and I'm gonna keep the cut count to something that is actually sane which is one every time you grow every time you increment this number by one so if I change this to two let's actually test this before I attempt to miss inform you so subdivide we have four subdivide now we have sixteen yep so every time you increase this number by one the time it takes to process the simulation increases by four and that's gonna happen for every frame every discrete step in the simulation so keep that in mind so now we are gonna go ahead and subdivide this let's do something else as well let's go ahead and after we subdivide this let's tell growth notes to also displace the objects all right so let's see everything looks good let's change this back to point one and let's change this also back to ten or it might be too much let's try Oh make no three okay well I think the object needs to be selected that is probably the issue is try it again yep so make sure you select the object all right we end up with something crazy looking like that but if we go ahead and add our good old corrective smooth friend let's set this to be length weight and only smooth if I look at our object data we have something that resembles growth processes of either crystals or it could be corals if you start increasing corrective smooth as you can see corrective smooth is going to affect these areas too but nonetheless we get interesting result what is more important though is this is something that we initially started with but now if we go into edit mode and go back to basis you could see that growth notes was smart enough to add geometry only to places that we need it which is top faces that make an angle of up to 60 degrees with the z-axis so in a way you are able to define the geometry that you are targeting in fact we call this target at geometry manipulation and you're going to dive a little bit more deeper into it let's go ahead and remove this object and let's add another one just like it and let's select it and I know tree and not always you have to end your node tree with a displace node so let's see what else we could do let's go ahead and add another geometry node and let's go ahead with dissolve the generate what this does is essentially what you get in the generate dissolve in edit mode but let's actually see what it does over here so let's hook up our object and let's actually get sharp faces from over here plug it in and let's set the value to be point zero one what this does is that it's gonna find those vertices that are closer to each other than this value and it's gonna merge them collapse them into a single vertex also another thing that I would want to try it is actually plugging sharp faces to do this place modify alright let's try this let me duplicate this object and let me create one as well should have done that earlier on cube twelve what did we have before this soul I just didn't have this resolve degenerate and that was not plucked okay so I just think this is so as you can see the results are different like expected going to apply the length wait I'm gonna select my other object and copy the modifiers and let's go ahead and play with this this opener shape keys change from relative but if Polly and then forty which is what we're told over here and 140 in our final frame so you select both of these objects and make him and that's why that's what we get it's actually pretty cool result um as I mentioned earlier what you could do I don't remember which is which right now anymore it's just to leave this one what before I fully do that just to remind you as you can see this object on the left is resembling that of the one on the right however what's happening is that this dissolve note is making is collapsing those sharp edges together those is collapsing those close vertices together so all the vertices that were over here at the top are now collapse into way less on the left confusing myself changing the viewport too much also the other thing that I wanted to remind you of again is that we could increase the value way more right and now I guess it doesn't really affect yeah okay well we have all right look this I'm gonna conclude this overview I hope that you find it useful if you have any issues I believe clicking on report a bug with will take you to the issues section on github or just directly go to the issues section on github thank you for your attention and good luck

Channel: knusk

Views: 19,185

Keywords: blender, b3d, 3d, animation, anim, growth, simulation, surface, procedural, texture, houdini, cinema4d, c4d, octane, cycles, render, addon, plugin, tutorial, guide, advance, beginner, modeling, geometry, mesh, object, cloth, fluid, physics, biology, biological, natural, reaction, diffusion

Id: FAKYwJyKOMM

Length: 79min 13sec (4753 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018