Make Crystals in Geometry Nodes! (Blender 3.4)

we're going to create a crystal scene using geometry nodes I've broken it down into four steps that you can see in the chapters below I'm going to create a circle and I'm going to lower the verts to five so I'm going to just click here select five and I'm going to start by filling this and then extruding up and then I'll extrude again but this time I'll merge at the center so this will be the base for our first Crystal we're basically going to use several pretty simple tools Ctrl R for a loop cut we'll use the knife tool with K to just do some cuts and we'll also do let's say the bevel tool so those are the three tools and we're going to just move things around and try and make it look a little organic a little less hand done and in general you could create crystals like this uh specifically all in Geometry nodes but I personally like to create the individual crystals uh manually because I think it gives a better look and artistically it gives us a lot more control and allows us to change things however we want aesthetically so this looks pretty decent for the first Crystal and we're going to generate a lot of these so feel free not to be too precious with each one you can take we're going to randomly generate and cluster these so later that noise will make it look really good so I'll create another Circle um created right here again I'll just fill it extrude it up uh maybe I'll I'll do it again but this time maybe I won't do a pointed top I'll just have it kind of be flat and I'll do the bevel again and maybe I'll cut some lines here use the knife tool and of course feel free to look at reference so you can get something that you think looks decent maybe this is too much out I also sometimes like to turn this on which you can toggle with o so then I can change a bunch of verts all at the same time and give it kind of an organic feel I think this one looks pretty good as well uh maybe I'll just do something like that and I also sometimes double tap G to do like a slide move for a single vert and my only thought is maybe this is too far out okay I think that's pretty good and we're gonna just actually I'm gonna make this flat also um I just like to have a very clear base to where the bottom of the crystal is and let's just keep making them we're gonna just uh make a few of these maybe this time I'll do like a very tall one again I'll merge it at the center let's turn off the the proportional edit do something pretty simple for this one maybe we even do like a little extrude here kind of take your time with this one and it can be a meditative process all right let's do another same as always fill extrude merge a center you do all sorts of things maybe this one will have a wider base or maybe this one will overall be a little skinnier I do kind of like it when I do a little bit more manual like knife tool things with it um I think it just gives us some nice angular geometry that sometimes the you don't really get with the bevel and now that I created that I can just kind of like pull them in to give it kind of that natural chipped feeling and you could do it a lot or a little um when we get to the shading we can always adjust this more and make it look pretty cool and you can also actually bevel just a single verb by doing Ctrl shift B which can also give some interesting shapes I think that's pretty good and obviously like the more of these you make the more uh uh Dynamic it could look or the more variations you could get I'm actually going to try one with six now maybe I'll do another with kind of a a flat top you could also just do some Cuts up here and let's do another that is also six this time let's merge at the center so we have both a flat top that's merged at the center and one that's not and I mean you could technically just leave it like this but I do think it looks a lot better at the end if you've put in some uh variation yourself and even have it be not perfectly straight all right and let's see we could kind of go like this forever but because this is a tutorial I'm going to try and make it a little quicker I'll just do one last one uh let's try and get a slightly different shape so maybe something a little more stubby let's fill that fill that okay let's let's use this one as the base and you could of course do some more extrusions all right so I think that'll be it for now again you could kind of tweak these and and make these look as uh interesting as you would like spend some time on it all right so yeah I think they look pretty decent okay so these will be our crystals um later we're gonna have to do some shading so I actually want to do a really quick UV edit you can just go into UV editing tab here you could just select all of them press tab select all with a and you could do U cylinder projection and it was cylinder projection it does matter which uh view your camera angles at so just trying to go on the side of the objects here two-cylinder projection it looks something like this it won't be perfectly in here but that's fine we just want kind of like the X and the Y coordinates to play with later all right so we have our base here and I'm going to just hide this and we can call this crystals and we're going to create a new collection we're going to call this scene I'm going to create a new mesh go into geometry nodes new Geo node I'll call this Crystal we can go ahead and delete that plane of that mesh and I'm going to start it off with a mesh Circle so this will be the base for which we create our Crystal cluster and I'm going to do a distribute points on face and an instance points instance on points and we're going to do our crystals here pick instances separate reset okay so now we're basically uh let me scale this down so you can see it better we're basically picking random crystals from our Crystal collection and now what we want to do is basically figure out the distance from the center so the center crystals can be larger and more straight and the side crystals can be smaller and more angled so to do that it's pretty simple we're going to just do a position node and a vector math and we'll set this to distance and now we can do a vector or a map range throw this into the value and throw that into the scale so now I can have basically as 0 I want it to be one and then on the edges we can do something small and we can kind of always tweak these values and see what really works but this is a pretty good start and now we just want to deal with the rotation rotation is going to be basically very similar I'm going to just duplicate this map range node and I'm going to do a a line Euler to Vector throw this into the factor put this into the rotation so it's all kind of lopsided because right now we're all only in positive values so I'm going to do minus 1 to 1 here so we kind of have an interesting cluster here and I'm also going to do a random random value set this to vector and let's delete this delete this maybe I'll do a minus pi and Pi here just to start we can see how it looks and we'll do a Vector math we'll add these two values and it's pretty interesting um we kind of just like play with these and see what when it starts to look really interesting or good um we could also tweak these values if we wanted to to change that rotation tweak the scale I also like to add back the group input and I'm going to basically wherever there's a seed I'm going to throw this into it uh I do think we should also add some Randomness to the scale so I'm gonna actually take the random value again we'll do a random value from zero actually let's do it from minus 0.1 to 1. actually sorry 2.1 and we can do a math add just to give it a little more variation we can always play with these more later too let's and yeah we can basically just like keep fiddling with this and it may there may be some overlapping geometry but uh we can make it look pretty good later and I forgot this seed let's put this into this seed so we have three seeds and we can basically also just click here and see what it comes up with and once we have the shading on it it'll be uh pretty fun to see so let's think we could tweak this also and we could obviously also change the size of the circle and the density and we can always change the mapping and the intensity of this so I'm actually going to create one more thing do a math a plain math node a value and let's throw this in we're going to do multiply minus one this will be here and this will be here and now I could do one here and kind of tweak the amount that this is rotated not 11 looked pretty interesting um okay let's kind of start with this as our our Crystal formation we can always generate new ones later so the last thing I mentioned or this the third thing I mentioned is to do the shading so I'm actually going to hide this geometry node scene open the crystals and let's go into shading I'm going to create a Shader let's call this Crystal and let's turn on Cycles GPU and now we're going to up the transmission and I guess we could have this open too I'm going to just move this here because in the scene I also want to add a light I think spotlights look pretty cool on crystals specifically so I'm gonna try something like this let's just bump it up super high maybe even higher than that all right so now we have a spotlight I want our background to be black and I'm going to go into world and create an environment texture just so we have some additional light besides the spotlight uh I am going to go into my resources folder in hdri uh let's try I don't know Chinatown let's see maybe we do let me see what these look like maybe we do Fifth Avenue just so we have a little extra light and I'm gonna do a light path duplicate that make Shader is camera array so basically we'll have a black background but this Crystal will have some of that HDR lighting still and we basically want all these to have this Shader so if I select all of them have this be the active selection I can unselect that and do control L I can do link materials so now they all have the same material and in the object shading now we can tweak this so first off the color will make a big difference for how these crystals look and there's a really cool texture called Magic texture so if you can see it creates kind of like this trippy effect but if we were to put a layer weight here and use the facing vector it gives us really that amazing Crystal iridescence so I'll put that in here it's already looking pretty good um and once we add things like the I don't know like the floor playing these Reflections and lights will really start to shine um so yeah the next thing is basically the bump map I'm gonna do a bump and for the bump map I'm going to just do a bunch of different waves not wavelength but wave texture and I'm gonna do a color ramp and I'll set it to constant so you can see it kind of gives us these really cool patterns and we're going to want to create a few different ones at different scale so let's do we'll do like a really big one here I'll actually go from Big to small so we have this really big one then we have the smaller one Let's do an even smaller one where I take less of that and I I bumped this up something like that I'll duplicate it again let's do this one on the Y or the Z and we can maybe bump this up and maybe we do one more we this might be Overkill but we can always tweak it later and let's make it really thin maybe something like that now we want to mix all these so I'll do a mix Shader not sorry mix color which is now just the mix node we'll mix them like this and we're going to set this to screen so this is what we get with that one we'll do this over here this over here and we'll do one more uh so there there is a few things that I would change here with the bump I wouldn't actually have all these be perfectly white we'll get some nice variation if we just kind of tweak these values uh and we can choose which ones we want to be more prominent than others maybe this one I'll leave closest to White and we'll also do this one let's see maybe I'll actually change this a little more yeah I think something like that will end up looking pretty good so it looks a little complicated but it's pretty simple and I can just put this into the height and that gives us this normal map I'll throw it into normal put it here and it's starting to look like a crystal so a few of these I don't love um I think it's this one and this one let's try y instead and we try that something like that it's starting to look interesting and I also like to add a noise so it's not just straight lines and this one we can do something like this and again we'll do a mixed node throw it into here let's do a multiply and throw this into height okay something like this it's going to start looking interesting we need to mess with the lighting a lot as well and then I think the roughness is is too high maybe something just very small and we'll let the scene really let it let it shine we're starting already to get these crystally effects all right the last step is to create the environment and the lighting okay so I'm going to go into layout here Hide crystals again I'm gonna have this one let's rename this to Crystal batch reset the position and the environment is going to be pretty simple I'm going to basically just create a plane and I'm going to subdivide this a bunch something like that I'm going to go into sculpt mode and I'm going to just like put some some bumpy areas doesn't need to be perfect let's move the spotlight something like that maybe angle it I'm thinking the camera will be over here looking at the crystals and let's go back into sculpt mode here and just make a little bit of a divot something like like this I think as the scene will look pretty good we can put this down into the ground and I can make this plane smooth I think that's pretty good now I'm also going to add a well let's let's first do the shading of this and let's see where our Spotlight is so we're talking about the camera being over here uh the spotlight is obviously too big so we're going to want to make that smaller something like that and let's make this let's add a Shader on this and let's just do like some noise and a mixed color maybe we'll do like some really dark colors see if that's coming out at all I think it is it's just a little hard to see on the screen with all the noise also do a bump so it's not completely flat and let's bump this up to like 500 we can also do one at 100 maybe well again we'll do like a mix we'll mix uh yeah we could do a mix float actually sorry I needed to mix colors so that I can use the uh the mixed method maybe we do a multiply cool we'll throw this into height all right so that's starting to look like a decent ground and maybe we add like a plane that can be like kind of like an interesting uh looking puddle and I'll say water I'll make no roughness and let's just change the color to something dark something like that we're going to want to tweak this so it doesn't see the the HDR hdri that we have in the background but we can play with that a little more later and I don't want the crystal sitting in a puddle so I'm gonna I'm gonna just uh tweak this a little try and get the puddle to show up in a few places something like that okay and for this plane we also want some little crystals on it so it uh feels integrated into the scene and I'm going to do that in Geometry notes I'll do a floor and we're going to do a join geometry because we're going to distribute on this and let's join there and we're going to do instance on points and here we can just do let's say an icosahedron instance this they're all massive so we can't really see anything right now okay so that's we can start to see it but uh it's a little too small we're going to do a set material on just that and we'll just choose the crystal material again and in terms of radius let's actually do a a random value and we can do something like uh oh it's not letting us do random here okay so I guess we'll have to do random on the scale here let's start it at point one and we can kind of do 0.01 to 1 or one's way too big okay so something like that will up the density to like 5000 that is a bit much but if we add something like um like a must crave texture and put that into the selection it starts to look interesting and we can basically just take this Ctrl shift duplicate it and now instead of like icosphere we could do a UV sphere and we could make it super small I could change the scale of this um small in terms of segments and rings and let's put this let's put this in two this is too big you get these little triangles uh let's turn it into 40 so we can move the W position maybe we go back to five maybe even bigger something like that and in general both of these should have random rotations so let's duplicate this Vector we'll do minus pi times two and pi times 2 and let's do that here too and maybe we tweak the scale it's probably just a little too big I want to point actually we want this to be 0.01 let's make this one 0.001 something like that and if we go into the render mode starting look pretty interesting there's a lot of things that I'd want to do in terms of creating an atmosphere so like I would create a a cube and then I'll change the viewport visibility to wire in the shading tab we'll create new let's do density or sorry volume a volume scatter here set it to something very small let's see 0.01 maybe 0.03 then we can get these light rays and in general and now it's just like a matter of tweaking tweaking some colors tweaking the size of this environment but I think this really just comes down to like some color grading and some minor little tweaks to make it look complete so I'm going to stop the video here and just do a time lapse where you can see me finishing this piece foreign so there's actually one thing I noticed this strength for the bump map shouldn't have been so high I left it at the default one and if I just bump it up just a little bit it gives a much better look I also added depth of field to the camera and I'm gonna just keep tweaking here [Music] foreign [Music] saturation node here to change the color of my crystal so I can still get that really cool angular iridescence but I can also control what color palette I'm interested in [Music] showing you my compositing setup is super simple I use a color balance I drop the front a little up the middle up the the end and I put very slight colors on it and I add a glare node onto it [Music] after some tweaks this is what the end result is looking like I hope you enjoyed if you found it helpful drop a comment drop a like a sub appreciate you watching see you in the next one

Channel: Robbie Tilton

Views: 11,283

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Id: z2gsOkF8q1U

Length: 32min 25sec (1945 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023