How to get started with Geometry Nodes in Blender

our geometry nodes the coolest thing to ever come to blender maybe they might be i'm sort of thinking they are so in this tutorial we're going to go through a really simple introduction of how you can use geometry nodes particularly to create a very dense environment and scatter some foliage all over the place this is super cool and i'm really excited about this awesome new feature in blender so let's check it out this is the collection of foliage i used in the image demonstration you can actually download this pack from my brand shiny new website motionblindstudio.com and i've got it on sale there so go check that out for starters though let's just start with the blank screen in blender and check out how to set up a geometry node system to work with here so i'm just going to delete everything and i like to rename these tabs just so if i ever want to add a new layout tab i can you know differentiate that and what i'm going to do is just split my window up here and then you'll see if you come over here this new geometry nodes editor that's the new addition to blender 2.92 and this is just fantastic everyone there's so many awesome things that we can use this for so uh all we need is something to scatter some points on so man scattering by the way is not the only application for this but we're going to demo that so i'm going to just add a plane here i'm going to control a and apply this scale now we just hit new here and you can name this whatever you want um just leave it as geo nodes for now and what we can do is let's add in a let's just do a suzanne head over here and move that aside and then i'm going to shift a and add in a sphere and move that over here now i'm going to grab our plane again and if you can see over here this is what it's doing under the hood it actually applies the geo nodes as a modifier so that we can view turn the display off in the viewport you can also add it over here geometry nodes so this works the same way the shader editor or the compositor works we can just start adding in nodes now one of the first nodes you'll need is a join geometry node because this allows us to join the actual particle distribution with our asset so this plane asset is being think of this socket right here as this plane and we can distribute points on top of this plane using nodes so if i grab a i'm just going to type point distribute node and plug that in you can see our plane turns into a bunch of uh little points little volume point things particles here uh so that's great if we want to join that with the geometry because you might be like oh where'd my plane go well just take the output again and into that join geometry node and there it is so currently this isn't going to help us much you can see we can dial up the density of these particles but it's not doing anything and that's because we need to tell blender what we actually want to instance on this plane so if we drop in an instance node you can see we can now instance either an object or a collection so let's just grab suzanne and voila we have a bunch of suzanne heads and we can change the density here i'm going to get into a little bit more of of how to fine-tune this but something that's really cool here and really makes this incredibly powerful if you remember just a normal particle system setting has a lot of its own limitations particularly if you wanted to uh have a tree that has branches and then if you want that branch to have its own level of branches and its own sort of particle system well you could only go one level deep well that's where this really blows all that wide open and uh we can get sort of infinite levels of customization so i'll show you what i mean let me take the density of this down let's just go 0.1 so there's not too many suzanne heads there and if i grab this suzanne head and just i'm going to go ahead and just run through the same steps so i'm going to grab this at a new geometry node and we're just going to do the same thing we're going to do a join geometry node and then a point instance and point distribute node and we take the geometry into that join and this time let's grab that sphere right there and there you can see the added effect here if we dial this down now this suzanne head has a sphere popping out of it and now all of the susanne heads that were then the second level distributed onto this plane once again have that same sphere so you you can see what we do we could we could add another an object poking out of the sphere and then it would keep going down the different levels of these geometry nodes and that might not seem like that exciting of a thing but it's actually this gives us an enormous amount of control all procedurally using nodes to affect second and third sort of generation of particles this means really cool things for foliage and trees and things like that speaking of foliage let's demonstrate just how awesome this can be and we're gonna jump into a little bit more complex setup here with some actual foliage so uh i'm gonna oops i don't need to delete my plane might as well all right bring that plane back uh control a apply the scale and this time we're going to use some actual assets here so um if you're following this along for a foliage tutorial then you you want to either model your own or download some or you can download some from my brand new shiny website motionblindstudio.com i'll have the link in the description and basically i'm just going to link that folder this full hpac was set up so that you could take all the guesswork out of having to do any work and just really experiment with geometry nodes so i made it specifically for this tutorial it's got shaders and everything 14 different assets and if you just link it to your scene there's one master collection here but you can see i broke everything else up into a collection so that we can easily distribute those so if i just link the main ground foliage pack you can see it shows up here in the outliner and these are all the assets we have a tree stump and then a few rocks a weeds clump and then a few grass clumps a couple of flowers some mushrooms and some pebbles so that's sort of a really great launching point if you wanted to do some quickly scatter some foliage on the ground and that was exactly why i made this so what i'm actually going to do is just hide this pack initially and let's grab our plane and i'm going to create new geometry nodes and i'll name this foliage and then we're just going to run through those same steps again adding a point distribute node a point instance node and a join geometry node and you can see if we instance a collection we have the whole linked collections that we have that i linked here um ground foliage pack right there and we could link everything within that pack but that's not gonna help us too much because there's that one big tree stump um so it's better to just use some of these other collections that i have split up specifically if you're using this pack um so let's grab grass clumps if we just link that one here so you might be saying well that looks kind of strange and that's because we have it checked where it's trying to instance the whole collection if you uncheck that then it'll just pull different clumps from that grass clump collection group and you can see just like that we have a really easy launching pad and we can dial up the density however we want you'll also notice that you don't need a high level of geometry to scatter these points it can just be on just a single polygon if you look closely the scale and rotation of each individual clump within this collection is exactly the same so that's not super usable what we want is to be able to randomize this in sort of an infinite number of possibilities i'm going to press n to get rid of that sidebar give myself some more space here in between the point distribute and the point instance node we can add a few attribute randomizers here so i'm going to press shift a and add in attribute randomize and this node is super powerful because what it allows us to do is basically just type an attribute such as location rotation or scale right in here so if i type scale it's going to randomize the scale of each of the distributed points on it from a factor of 0 to 1. so if we crank this up to 10 then it's you know going to do a factor of 0 to 10. so what you can do is just sort of dial that back to something that's 0.151 0.5 something around there is good just to give a nice variety of scale there you don't want to go less than zero because that uh will start inverting the direction of your grass unless that's something you want but just be mindful of that zero to uh whatever value you want there and then of course we can randomize the seed of that as well so this is super useful for just quickly modifying a scene right on the fly like that again we can dial up the density of the grass right here and the same attribute randomizers will be applied because it's coming after that distribute node i'm going to duplicate this node again and then this time i'm going to type rotation in in the attribute field right there so the rotation one for something like this we really want to use the vector option here because what this allows us to do you can see these inputs here these are x y z if we set the x and the y to zero we really only want to rotate that asset around along the z axis and if you press n you can see the transform options there if you ever get lost so really what this is saying is it's randomizing from a factor of 0 to 20 right there well we want it to be an infinite number so we can go all the way up to 360 degrees so that each asset within this collection can have a random value of 0 to 360. and then of course the random seed value allows us to affect that as well so now our our foliage is looking way more random and just a few clicks we're already getting something interesting i am going to subdivide this plane a little bit just to show you what that does if we crank this up to uh something around well let's go around 30 and then we can play with this fractal right here you can see that the the grass clumps are responding responsively to that which is super cool so uh i can shade smooth this plane and then just grab a point here we could do some proportional editing if we like and the grass is staying perfectly attached to that which i think is really cool how you can just adjust things on the fly all procedural and all customizable now if we were making a scene here we would obviously want to add in a few more uh assets so what what's really great is we can just duplicate this whole node setup we don't have to create a new particle system we don't have to do anything fancy we can just grab these nodes and if we want all these uh exact nodes duplicated and keep the connection to the plane we can just press ctrl shift and d to duplicate those and it'll maintain that connection over here and then if we just sort of grab this join geometry node down here to give us some space we can duplicate this join geometry node and feed it in right up there and then just plug our new sort of group here into that join geometry and now all we have to do is swap out that collection for a different collection so let's say we want to add some flowers into our scene and there you go the flowers are scattered now but they're using the exact same settings as our grass clumps so what we can do is of course just quickly modify those if we want to scale the flowers up if we want to change the rotation or the seed value or more importantly the distribution value if you want the field full of flowers there that's fun to say feel full flowers or you know if you just want them to be sparse you can do that as well the other really cool thing here is you see this density attribute input right there that allows us to input vertex point information so if you say wanted flowers to only sort of be around here on this plane well what you can then do is come over here to vertex groups and create a new group let's name this flowers and we can actually use weight paint here and just kind of paint wherever we want the flowers to be if you want to see this effect be responsive then what you can do is just type this name that you created for your vertex groups and just copy and paste it right into that density attribute node and now all the flowers are confined to whatever vertex group you're painting here so we can dial up the density to really show this if i just anywhere i paint you can see those flowers are being scattered just like that which is really cool and we could do the same thing for the grass if we wanted the density to be confined to a certain area of vertex groups we could do the exact same thing so now we have a nice little field here i'm going to turn the density down of those flowers and let's keep going let's add one more layer just for demonstration purposes i'm going to ctrl shift d on that and then duplicate this join geometry node again plug in that next layer and this time if you're using the foliage group that i provided for you then some of the assets are broken up into collections and some are just individual assets because there's just one of them so like the clump of weeds that's just one asset there wasn't a group of those so we can actually just link an individual object as well and you can see those uh took on this same vertex group so i want them to just be everywhere so i'm going to delete that density attribute node and now we have this clump of weeds scattered all over this plane and i can adjust the seed value of the rotation um and then get some random values there just like that i'm going to check the density of that down to 0.5 and then i'm going to take the scale down a bit too so that the weeds aren't everywhere and now that i'm kind of liking the way that's looking i might increase the density of my overall grass so that there's just more of a field there and this is just it's so great because you have a nice organized little system here and because there are nodes if you watch my other tutorials you know how much i like organizing my node group so you can add a frame here if you want to get really fancy and put each of these little sections into a frame so if i want to make a fancy group here name my frame weeds give that a specific color and then we can do the same thing with the flowers so there you go so now you have a nice really usable little template and then you could save this out and easily know exactly where to go if you want to affect each individual group so if you want to change the density up change the rotation around this is really powerful for making grow animations because obviously these values can now be animated so if you wanted to set a keyframe on uh say the max scale value and have it grow up like this then you could have sort of a a growing animation or the same thing with the density if you just wanted to have things scatter pop on like this um i think about you know using the same process for a tree and having you know a time lapse turned to autumn or something you can have things animate this value on and off and that's something that i think is really cool there's a bunch of other nodes in here i'd encourage you guys to just check them out and see just play around with what each one does like a mesh boolean that can do some really great things there's there's really too much to go over right now but another one i do want to just a simple one is this value node and this can be really useful if you plug in this value say to like the seed aspect of each of these then um what you could then do is once you have your entire sort of system set up and say you get a camera in your scene and you want to just kind of randomize everything a little bit you could just click through this different value right here and that randomizes the seed of all of those groupings so that's that's a really cool thing and just another another way why this this method of geometry nodes gives you such an unlimited uh number of customizations and and abilities to quickly scatter different foliage things and and make something really cool really quickly so again so much you can do here i can't go over everything i really wish i could but hopefully you guys get a good idea of just how easy these geometry nodes are and how they're really nothing to be afraid of i was really hesitant to kind of jump into them but after sort of seeing what they can do and how quickly it is to especially scatter things like foliage it's really cool um i'd love to jump into it more but i wanted to keep this video short so i hope you guys find this useful and if you do end up downloading that pack not to oversell it it does help me out a lot it helps me keep making these videos and it's just uh right now it's on sale for six bucks right from my website so link in the description go check it out and please share with me what you guys make with this and uh the different methods that you find with geometry nodes i think these are going to keep getting a lot cooler and we're going to be able to keep doing a lot more interesting stuff with these in the future thanks again for watching everyone i'll see you next time good day i'm andrew price that's not right

Channel: Kenan Proffitt

Views: 67,521

Rating: 4.9588175 out of 5

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Id: sZhRcpJGqjs

Length: 18min 49sec (1129 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021