How To Make Crazy Renders With Easy Geometry Nodes

okay what's up so I want to show you some cool stuff here so real quick before we even get started I'll just put some images up on the screen of like the stuff that we're going to be doing but let me tell you about why this is actually very important so when I started blender like total Noob uh when I was first starting out I had the problem that most people have which is it's hard to make things that actually look good because you know you get the software you want to create cool things but it's you don't really know how to make things look realistic or fit together and look cool so I was struggling to actually make anything that was good what happened was I actually discovered ducky 3D's YouTube channel and I think this was a really big inspiration for this technique that I'm about to show you he had a video on particle systems and I watched that and I realized that there was a lot that I could do without actually making something that had to be super realistic so when I started using this technique I went from just really bad renders that didn't make any sense at all too actually interesting images that weren't realistic but they don't they didn't need to be so I could make tons of cool stuff and it was kind of like the possibilities of what I could do just all of a sudden expanded because of this one technique and I've used it in client work now I still use it all the time um so yeah let me let me show you what this actually is basically a quick overview is we're just going to be using particle systems to create complex shapes that would be really hard to model by ourselves and we're going to use that and just Spam it around and just make a cool environment using kind of clusters of particles like this so I'll show you exactly what I'm going to do here this will be a very specific example but you can just you can model whatever you want and swap it for different different pieces you don't have to follow exactly step by step what I'm doing but I'll just show you an example of how this works so let's take a cylinder and just make sure the I'll take the vertices down to like six or something because I kind of like this hexagonal type of thing so something like this will be a good starting point and basically my goal at this point is just to get some cool type of shape that's that's it like it doesn't matter what it is so I like these uh hexagonal cluster type of things so I'll just really quick model um just a really basic type of little thing here which will be scattered everywhere so doesn't matter what it is just take some Edge Loops bevel extrude Parts really doesn't matter you could use a square shape it I'm just using this as an example we'll just um inset certain faces extrude that boom delete those and maybe just take this down a little bit okay good enough for now okay so let's take that and you can see if I go into rendered view it's just white so let's put a basic texture on this basic model so I'll just hit new let me go to my folder of stuff from textures.com so I'll just open this up and something kind of grungy I think is going to work well so something like this so this is just if you go into textures.com go to the concrete section of the like regular photo section this isn't a PBR texture this is just a regular image of concrete so you could go and photograph your own if you wanted to or just download one from textures.com something with a nice amount of detail and grunginess I think is going to work well for this you don't have to do this if you want a cleaner look go for something cleaner but for this example here's what I'm going to use so let's take that drop it in here and I'll just run that straight into the base color let's apply the scale and then select all vertices unwrap it with a cube projection and I'll just pull up the UV editor so I can see what I'm doing just move that roughly like there or something doesn't really matter I could take certain parts of this and scale them up and align them but I am not going to spend too much time doing this so something like that good enough for now you can see just some basic grunge is all we need so what I'll do now is actually just take the same image run that into the roughness take a color ramp drop it in there and something like that will be fine just so there's some variation in the roughness doesn't really matter let's quickly uh bevel that so just a quick bevel that'll be fine just something and maybe let's make a couple variations of this so let's take this if you go to edit mode go to options on the top right check this box with your correct face attributes what that means is now when I move these vertices around it won't stretch the texture as opposed to if that's off it will stretch it so just turn that on uh just make some quick variations of this it doesn't really matter what I'm doing just as long as you have some different kind of sizes and maybe I'll move the texture along so it's different too um yeah just basic basic variations doesn't really matter okay good enough for now so let's move these to a collection now and um so just hit select all those things you just made hit M new collection doesn't matter what it's called and now what I'm going to do is take these and scatter them onto an object so we get sort of a cluster of these pillars um and then I'll use those clusters to form some type of cool environment so I'm rushing through this but I would suggest spending a little bit more time getting these to look a little bit nicer than I am here but just you get the point here okay so I'm going to use geometry notes to scatter these but you don't have to use this you can use you could also use a particle system like a hair particle system the only reason I'm using geometry nodes is because it's just a bit easier to scatter stuff with it I find but if you don't like it you can just use a hair particle system doesn't matter okay so let's go to the geometry node section press new and this is I'm going to kind of speed through this because this is the basic like uh super basic geometry node setup that you've probably already seen before if you haven't I'll just link to a video of somebody else explaining in depth of what this actually is but basically like it's just like a particle system just randomly scattering these objects onto another object so distribute points on faces so now we uh just get a bunch of random points let's take a instances on points so we want to instance these things onto those points we just made and we can take a collection info instead of an object info collection info because we have all these objects inside of a collection choose the stuff collection that I just made run that into the instances and then there's three boxes we need to check for this to work those three things are these right here so separate children reset children and pick instance check all those boxes and or else it will not work okay so now we have these objects being scattered onto this plane and you can see if I scale up the plane it's going to scatter more of those objects um you can see as I scale it up it's going to do that that's in edit mode by the way if I scale it in object mode it's not going to do that unless I apply the scale same thing as doing this so now what I want to do is I want Randomness I want Randomness in the rotation as well as the scale kind of like you'd get in a particle system so if I turn this up it's going to rotate all of them same with the scale but um I want it I want some bigger and some smaller so you could do that with a random value if you just if you just search for a random value plug that into the scale so let's do like the minimum maybe 0.2 maximum something like that doesn't matter and then same thing for the rotation we'll just take a another random value switch it over to Vector so that we get controls for the X Y and Z because we only want to add Z rotation not X and Y so just plug that into the rotation zero everything out and let's just turn up the Zed so we're just getting random randomness on the Z I could snap this so if I take a vector math and plug that in here between where the the random values going into the rotation if you change this to snap and this is there's probably a better way to do this but this is just a quick quick way um as I turn this up it's it doesn't really seem like it's adding any order to this but eventually you will actually land on a value that snaps them to the proper angle and you'll see what I mean like right here for example so 2.95 and it's close enough not perfect but it's close enough and a little bit of subtle variation is going to be fine so basically the point of that versus just having them all rotated the same is now they're going to be randomly rotated but um it'll snap to like the proper uh angle that it should be at so it's still in line but it's still randomly rotated if that makes sense if I take that out you can see yeah or if I have no rotation now they're all lined up the exact same but if I use this then they're they're lining up and they're like snapping to these uh like they're lining up with each other but then it's uh we're still getting randomness okay you don't have to do that but it just a bit of random motivation is always nice okay so now that I have this let's go to rendered View and you can see right away like Cycles just makes this look so much better with adding shadows and stuff so there's a lot you can do with this you can just scale it down like this and kind of spam it around or you can um you know expand this a lot have tons of stuff like this um yeah there's there's really unlimited things you can go you can do from here so I'll just show you an example of what you could do let's go to rendered view over here just go to the camera perspective I'll go back to solid here so maybe let's take some water I'm gonna also add a plane down here just for a base underneath it like a floor it's actually scallops down maybe let's do it in edit mode so the texture stretches with it so yeah I'm just going to spam these around a little bit and get some cool stuff um so you can see just by taking the same exact cluster moving it around in different places and changing the scale you can get a lot of variation really really fast um so let's just do this maybe take another one of these over here over here maybe another one like up here that's kind of cool having some above and look how much complexity we're getting with just a couple of basic models that we made so let's do some uh some just quick lighting just to get this to look good so maybe let's do a sky if you haven't seen my uh tutorial when I'm making skies I recommend you go watch that so that's I'm just using the exact thing that I showed you there so let's just take any image of yeah a nice sky so just boom unsplash um let's see I have a folder for this guys let's take this one looks cool okay take that run it into the emission right into the base color and maybe the alpha as well and we can actually take this and just duplicate it around so we get uh Reflections from the environment this is kind of like a janky hdri but it's kind of cool that's kind of nice and then let's also line this up a little bit better so right there yeah okay cool okay yeah so you can see by just taking this one model that we made literally just spamming it around a bunch of times um with random rotation at scale you can get some really crazy stuff uh Without Really knowing what you're doing um so let's just do something like that boom let's just give this a quick test render just to see what it looks like and there's a lot more that I'd want to do here to get this to actually look good but this is a nice starting point for um like this is how a lot of my stuff starts it's just like messiness but still cool idea and it's too bright right now so I'm just going to take down the environment so it's just cool so let's do some quick volume so just Cube over this uh new texture take a quick volume scatter 0.01 and point uh 2.8 on the this on the anastasopy um display as bounds and then you can see what that's doing maybe let's take a quick Point light and just take that way up make it like yellow uh that's that's too much let's do a little bit less cool that's pretty nice looks like it's Sun and yeah cool maybe we could even zoom out to like 16 millimeters that's kind of sick actually so let's try that yeah you know I'm just messing with like the positioning of these to find uh just a cool composition that works well with this anyways you get the point um I'm not going to make this into an actual finish thing but you get the point of how this could be super useful um I'll show you again here are some examples of where I've used this in like my actual artwork so you can see you can instead of scattering it onto a plane you could actually scatter this onto any object so here's one with like um scattering it onto a skull model kind of the same technique but just instead of putting it onto a plane just putting it onto a face or a skull so you can do that but then once you have this cool shape it just comes down to like finding cool lighting and a cool composition to to set things up with that's really it like you can there's so much stuff you can do with this that's that I think that's everything I wanted to cover so yeah go out make some cool with this show me if you want send me send it to me on Instagram I always love seeing that and um yeah see you around peace

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 174,244

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Id: ln1IpYnufxc

Length: 14min 30sec (870 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022