Intro to ALL THE NODES | Blender Geometry Nodes

hi hello everyone I'm gavin. JS and as I mentioned in my last video today we're going to start a new series where we explore all of the nodes in Geometry noes I asked you all if you thought this would be a good idea and I got a few comments saying yes absolutely go for it and I appreciate the feedback so today because even though just a few people said yes they'd be interested I figured why not do it at least for myself so that I can learn and as I'm going through every single node and learning all the ins and outs to better myself and be able to do more interesting things in blender I can share that information with you all and we can all learn together I hope that doesn't sound too cheesy but anyway I've broken up all of the nodes into different categories so that we can go ahead and take a look at what I will be covering because today while I'm not going to leave you without any new information we're not going to dive too too far into this this is mostly just an intro and an explanation of expectations so I've largely broken up these nodes into two categories we've got geometry nodes and we've got utility nodes and as I was trying to figure out how to categorize everything I noticed that we have geometry nodes in Geometry nodes and we have mesh nodes and this is something that I had kind of intuited but I wanted to figure out explicitly what is the difference between geometry nodes and mesh nodes and what I found out is that geometry nodes are really kind of a catchall for anything that has any kind of geometry be it a mesh a curve points instances volumes any of those anything that is in the geometry nodes category can modify any of those subsets so in order to address that sort of hierarchy I've set some of these nodes off to the side and these are largely nodes that fall into the geometry category and can act on any of the groups within the geometry category I've also included the attribute nodes because in my mind those only exist to serve geometry you need geometry to use any of them except for the blur attribute but whatever there are a lot of exceptions in this list we're just going to roll with it and based on that geometry they then read out a bunch of outputs or store information on the geometry so I'm just putting them under the geometry category instead of the utilities category also under utilities we've got a bunch of things that aren't again in the utilities section I just kind of lumped everything together and instead of having utilities within utilities we just kind of brought everything up to the same level here and again I have constants in here even though that's not anywhere near the rest of these in the menu it just it makes more sense and it simplifies things for me hopefully that'll make sense to everyone else also there are a few things that we're not going to talk talk about we're not going to talk about well my own group nodes that'll be its own thing later on and we're not going to talk about any of the hair nodes we're also not going to talk about the frame or reroute nodes and just to get a couple of things out of the way real quick we have the group input node which gives us access to whatever geometry our geometry nodes network is operating on as well as any other inputs that you may want to Define so that it pops up in the modifiers tab or as a tool now in blender 4.0 then the group output node is kind of the same that's the resulting geometry that's where it gets outputed and that's what we end up seeing in the viewport after we've done everything in Geometry nodes and again we can output any attributes we want and what I've found is that this is most commonly done in Shader graph and then we have our viewer node which is just kind of like an alternate to the group output node again it'll show us whatever is being done in Geometry nodes when the I is is toggled and we have a single value it doesn't have to just be a float value it can be whatever you want there but we have that one attribute that by plugging in a value here we can see that represented in the geometry spreadsheet on each of our elements of whatever kind of geometry we're taking a look at this can be really nice for debugging and figuring out what's happening to your data as you're building out a node tree also just real quick because I figure why not cover this it's going to be real quick and then we can move on to other things let's talk about constants constants are great if you know that you have one value that you want to change but it's going to change multiple things across the network it's really nice for testing it's also really nice if you just know that every use case is going to have a specific value or whatever I keep saying value there is a value node but I just know that I mean any of these constants so let's list through them real quick so we've got our Boolean which is just a true false statement it can be true or false and and you can plug this into lots of things and an interesting thing I've done a lot lately is using booleans as integers and integers as booleans because so long as your value doesn't go outside of the 0 to one range range as if it's not a binary option then they're essentially the same thing so do with that as you wish it came in handy a whole lot as I was working through making Conway's Game of Life and there are lots of other things that take an input of a Boolean most notably the switch node that uses a Boolean input to switch between the two values that you can plug into that we've got the color node which can take an RGB value HSV value or hex I personally love hex a decimal but they're all the same it just depends on what you're familiar with and what you're trying to get out of your color space and of course you also have an alpha value for all of those we also have this nice little ey dropper that makes it so that we can click anywhere in blender and be able to sample that color also just for ease of use because not always do we want to type in values we have this nice little color wheel that's nice and easy you just click and drag anywhere within the wheel to select a color and off to the side is our value so that you can increase and decrease that separately and it gives you the full range of color outputs moving on we have the image node here and you can use the render result you can create a new image say if you're texture painting within blender you can open up a an image again anywhere within blender or outside of blender it's just a nice little node to open up a file and we'll have a lot more to talk about with color and image nodes later for how we can use and manipulate them in Geometry nodes moving on we have our integer and integer is simply any whole number ranging from 2 billion 147 m 483,000 147 I bet you thought it was going to say from negative Infinity to Infinity but no cuz computer science uh we have to work within certain limits of what systems can actually do so there are hard cut offs and if you go beyond this range values will just kind of loop back around uh I haven't tested this out in blender I like There's no practical purpose I just wanted to throw in a bit of a a funny there and also in case you weren't a where there are limits on how big or small values can be in computers in general also I didn't think about this until just now but like in computer science you have signed and unsigned integers and so like you can have bigger values if you use an unsigned integer because then you can go up to 4 billion some since you don't have any of the negative range but because we do have that negative range you can't do that here also why on Earth would anybody be doing anything in the billions I'm just yeah yeah I I shouldn't be going down this rabbit hole but I am anyway uh let's move on to material this is pretty straightforward you input whatever material you plan to assign to your geometry uh and use a set material node to actually assign it to the geometry string is also pretty straightforward you can type in any string you want here and then you can do things with that string value just like an integer any number you want but now you've got a float and floats are interesting because they not only allow you to use decimals they are also bigger than integers uh I'm not going to even attempt to read this number I mean I could read it verbatim but I don't want to I look up the size and how it works specifically in blender but unfortunately while I was recording blender's website is currently down so I can't even look up the docks to make sure that everything I'm saying is right if you know anything here is wrong please let me know anyway our last constant node is the vector node and this lets us store Vector that has three components that's very important because of course you can have a vector of any size but in 3D Graphics it's most common and applicable to have vectors of length 2 three and four we'll talk about for later but for now just not the vector node has an X Y and Z component all three of these take values vectors are most commonly used to set the position rotation and scale of different objects but you can use them for all kinds of things if you can think it you can do it math is wonderful but yeah those are the constants that we have available to us in Geometry nodes and also an overview of this series that I'm trying to Cobble together please let me know in the comments what you think let me know if I got anything wrong because I am human and I expect to get something wrong eventually especially because the blender docks are unavailable at the moment and if you like what I'm doing here and want to support me the best way to do that is to hit the Subscribe button I appreciate it and that's going to be all for this one so I hope you enjoyed and learned something new and I will see you in the next one bye

Channel: GavinDotJS

Views: 642

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Id: O9BcI4flld0

Length: 10min 28sec (628 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023