NEW Motion Graphics Effects In Blender With Geometry Nodes

hello and welcome to another exciting blender tutorial today we're going to take a deeper look at the upcoming geometry nodes let's get started [Music] okay so what i wanted to do was show you something new that i figured out you could do with geometry nodes again this is in blender 2.93 alpha so the latest alpha build in the experimental download section so we need to do is head over to blender.org and go to download and then scroll down to the dangerous red section and then you just want to download right here blender 2.93 alpha now it is an alpha build so it's unstable things will crash it's crashed to me like four or five times just figuring this out now this will be eventually coming out into the mainstream mainline release of blender i think they're scheduled to do that the second half of 2021. so what are we going to do we're going to recreate a motion graphic effect that you can do in cinema 4d so first thing i want to do is go ahead and get set up and we're going to do the default kind of setup right now for geometry nodes like everybody else is doing and then i'll show you kind of how we can expand it a little bit i'm going to go shift a and i'm going to create a grid i'm going to scale it out again a grid is the same as a plane it's just subdivided so i've got my grid there's the mesh that's what's called a grid nothing else to it it's just piece mesh and i'm going to come down here and i'm going to open up my geometry node editor okay so first thing we do is we click new once we got the geometry nodes window open and come down here it gives us the standard group input group output uh no magic yet and we're going to get a uh get our points set up now remember with geometry nodes the way it works you have to think about it in a different way it's at first you create points along a surface and then after you affect those points like change the scale change their rotation to all kinds of cool effects to them then you want to instance something in the location of all those points because the points don't render they're nothing they're just data points they're just locations in space with rotation data scale data and uh position data right so then we want to say okay i want to use this mesh to instance where all these points are so don't get too confused and the geometry input and output is basically just what's the piece of geometry that this node system is going to live on so we want it to live on the plane it uses the surface of the plane to do this stuff so if you had a sphere it would be along the surface of the sphere so anyways let's uh let's go do that first thing i'm going to do is pretty much always going to grab first a point distribute node that's always more or less the first node when you're getting set up you can see we've instantly lost the mesh and it's turned into these points we can increase the density so you can see they're filling the space of our plane and the next thing we're going to do is grab a point instance node this is typically the last node not always but typically and we're going to for the object we're going to select the cube right and now what it's going to do is it's going to make the cube be the the object the geometry that's positioned wherever these instanced points are now it's really massive so i'm just going to go into my cube hit tab edit mode and just scale within edit mode and that'll just kind of bring it down we can do this within geometry nodes as well but just for simple simplification of our node setup i'll just do it like that so you can just focus on what we want to focus on what we want to do now is we want to use the new um uh texture sample node that they just started talking about so this has just been released so we're going to go up here to attribute and we're going to grab the sample texture attribute node this node can look at a texture and take information from that texture and use it to drive an attribute in your system okay so a lot of terms thrown around there but i'll show you so i'm gonna grab these throughout you may have seen this if you watched some a few videos already on uh on the internet but what i'm gonna show you is new so once we get through this initial setup all right i'm gonna go ahead and drop this in here nothing's gonna happen because we're not telling it to do anything yet and uh we need to input something for mapping and results so the result is simple that's easy to understand that's what is it we want to affect what attribute remember this little light blue circle this always stands for attribute and an attribute is something that lives within the the the individual points that we've distributed across our geometry so an attribute would be the scale attribute or the rotation attribute or the position attribute there are all these different things that you can use as attributes now the key is you have to spell it correctly and you have to type it correctly so lowercase and uppercase matters as well so it won't work if you type it wrong so this is a little this will probably get easier as we go forward this will be a little more user friendly but right now it's very specific anyways so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to be affecting the scale of all these cubes with a texture that we're going to create so i'm going to type in scale it has to be lowercase okay so now the result will be inputted into the scale of each of these little points that we put in all right don't get confused thinking that it's affecting the cube the cube is just off somewhere where is the cube actually oh that's right it's really tiny there's the cube tada so nothing we're not doing anything to that cube it's just sitting over there as a reference that it uses when it instances everything at the very end of this chain i'm going to create a new texture and it gives it a name here i'm going to call this uh my i don't know what i want to call this scale uh change and i'm going to come over to the texture tab and i will pull up and you can see it's here now if i bring the drop down menu you can see we've got scale changes now a texture that's been created so i can grab it and then what i can do is i can also by the way it doesn't matter where it lives this texture so you can only access textures if you have an object selected but i could be affecting this texture on another object like the cube or something else and um it just allows me to change the values of the texture you can as long as it's named and it exists somewhere this works okay so anyways i'm going to switch this from image to blend and that's going to use a gradient and i'm going to switch this over to actually i'll just keep it like this you can see it at first now the next thing you need to know is the mapping so what's the map because you see it's not doing anything to the scale of these cubes yet mapping is asking how how do i need to how do i map this gradient across the surface of the grid and what we want to use is the uv map for this so um it could be named anything but in most cases the default is just called uv map so you just come over here copy the name of your uv map and paste it just like so now you can see suddenly this texture is affecting the scale so the result is going into the scale of these cubes and i can change those values in the settings here you know so i can like change the contrast and that's going to see it it changes there in the view and that's animatable right but we're going to we're going to take this even further next thing i want to do is i'm going to switch this to spherical now it disappears the reason for that is if you see this spherical texture is kind of off to the side it's actually the same here it's off to the side and it's like off the sides of the grid and so that's why we're not seeing anything that can be a little confusing at first that had me pulled for a little bit i'm going to create another object in my scene in fact let's just i'm going to keep this at the linear just for now so we can still see it so we know that we know what's happening everything changes to it i'm going to go shift a i'm going to create an empty and i'll create a plane access center scale it up just so i can seal it see it scale doesn't really matter how we're going to be using it and i will come back over to my geometry notes okay so i've created my my empty now i want to come over to here and i'm going to grab uh go input object info and i'm going to grab that empty all right in fact i'm going to call this thing my scale call it my scale effector because we're trying to emulate mograph and mushroom everything's called effectors over in c40 anyways scale effector there it is now i want to take the location of this null this scale effector and i want it to affect the scale of things right so how do we do that with this new setup well this this textured node is really making it possible because now if we do anything to the attribute the uv map attribute in this object it's going to be updating the way it maps this texture this gradient circular gradient texture so i'm going to make a little bit of room here and i'm going to grab an attribute vector math note this is another one that's new what i want to do is i'm going to add the location of this empty to the uv of that lives on this object so i want to take the attribute the uv attribute on this grid object so i'm going to type in uv map again make sure you're spelling rights u v and m are all capitals i'm going to copy this and i'm going to pipe it in the result because i want to take the uv map as it is i'm going to add some vector of numbers to it so change its location right to move it around in 3d space and i want that new result to then be saved in the uv map again right so it takes the old uv map value adds something to it and then replaces it so that when we come over here and we're using uv map we've changed its value and so it updates over here does that make sense i hope you hope you're sticking with me all right so now type b attribute i don't attribute i want to this allows me to drop down and select a vector so i want to use a vector so i'm going to grab the location vector and i'll drop that in here okay now nothing happens yet but if i move this around you can see we're starting to get a result as we move this null right now this might be as far as you want to go right but we can do so much more all right now if i switch this to relative it's going to be relative to the actual position of these guys it just behaves a bit more like you would expect it another thing i've noticed if you switch to subtract you actually get a result that's more one-to-one with where your null is positioned so you can see now wherever this null is it helps bring it on all right so this is pretty cool right so now what we can do with this is uh we go even further and a couple of things that are really nice we can switch on the color ramp for this texture so this is the texture view again scale change texture and the color ramp allows you to create a ramp of colors that it will apply in this so in our instance a linear in a linear fashion so what you can do now is you can take like the white value which is the bit that's large you can actually you can change these right you change the position to crunch it down but you can also come in here to the white and you can change the values in r g and b and they represent x y and z right so let's say i wanted it to be really tall i could make this one 10 right and now you can see that what's happening is they're not scaling you know evenly they're actually scaling up really high on the zed based on where this null is positioned which is pretty cool so you can go in there and you can set any number in this and uh and really just go to town with how you want this to be shaped i'm going to switch this from a linear ramp um let's see i need to go back to i'll set this back to i'll just do all i'll just do ones on these just to simplify it one one and one there we go now let's switch this to spherical now with spherical uh the you have to remember this is a it generates a sphere gradient in 3d space so you can see if i'm moving this this null now up and down they reappear and reap you kind of picture it like slicing through uh a sphere if i duplicate this and like grab it up you can see i kind of get this like you can sort of see the sphere so bear that in mind if you can't see it you might have to go up a little bit now i can add some other like points to this this gradient now right so let me add another point i'll pop this here and i'll make this one let's say white and then i'll add another point bring it here and make this one black and now you're getting like these starting to see where this can get exciting because you're getting like very different uh patterns come over here let's let's now take this up and let's make this uh let's make this i'll go to vibrancy and make it three just so they get a bit bigger when they come to the end here make my grid maybe a bit bigger so you can really start making some really really cool stuff now imagine like if you were driving this null with some music for example you know and you put like some random ambient motion on this thing you can see how it would start to get really really interesting now let's let's take this up even further so let's take this now and let's say we want two different textures with different attributes different like colors and stuff affecting scale in a different way or maybe we want to affect the rotation right what we can do is we can come here and we can duplicate this so we duplicate the the attribute sample texture i could take geometry pipe it in here and then i can click this little button to create a new texture let's call this one scale 2 scale change 2 and then maybe one more we'll call this one uh i'll click the new texture button we'll call this one rotation change and grab geometry as well so all of these now are being affected by this attribute math so that the position of our null and now we've got all these different types so what we can do now is we can take this and duplicate it so we're instancing even more versions of this thing and then we can come over here and type in join and we can't join this one let's let's not we'll do what we'll do is we'll make this an instance we'll take this and we'll uh we'll have one that affects the rotation we'll do that later do the rotation a minute let's do the two first for now all right so scale change too if i come over here i can now switch to scale change too and again i can say let's use blend and i can use anything i could say let's go back to spherical why not and this time let's say i want it to like scale up on you know the z really high i can turn on my color ramp come over here to my white color and let's take the blue and make it uh 50 right or maybe 20 that's really all we need now it's quite even across the whole thing so let me actually crunch it down so this only happens to the ones that are kind of right in the center right now i grab my scale effector you can see we're getting some really really cool stuff all right let's look even wilder if we go shift a uv sphere scale the sphere up and let's take this and i'll just click new i'd click new because you can't actually switch i think it's a bug you can actually just switch to it if you don't already have german channels on anyway so now this has the same system you can even call this our uh scale or our effector system just so it's clear that it's the same and now if i grab this there it is check this out go back here let's add more density pretty rad hey very very cool stuff and let's uh let's affect the rotation of these these cubes as well but maybe not the the ones that that zoom out like that let's uh let's see what can we do it's uh so that means i'm going to leave this group alone so this is our scale change 2 which scales them out that scales this separate group out now remember this isn't like scaling the same cube twice this is actually a totally different instance of the cube it's a whole new group of cubes and you can see they're intersecting there because they're they're in the same position because we're using the same point distribute right so it's creating a new system of cubes with this density in the same place right does that make sense not the same it's not just taking these cubes and scaling them up anyway so let's take uh let's move this down the chain a little bit i'm going to take this duplicate it and this time i'm going to create a new texture i'm going to call this a rotation change you can see everything disappeared right because it's the results being mapped to scale but i want to change that to rotation so switch to rotation see the scale goes back right because now we're affecting the scale and then this time we're affecting the rotation so i'll come here and i'll grab my new one so rotation change is the one that we want and i'll switch this to blend and i will go spherical as well and uh now this one i'm gonna i want this to be a little different so i'm gonna come over here i might flip it you know so you can see things are starting to rotate but let's say i want to rotate them a lot so i'll come back over here if i would see i might go five and now if i'm moving this around you can see that the cubes are rotating also affects it differently based on the size of the actual object that you're instancing on so i can do that as well anyways geometry nodes coming at you blender 2.93 it's very very exciting stuff you can just imagine how far you can push this and what kind of things you would do you know this is this is great for some really neat motion design effects all right so as you can see you can use these tools to create some pretty amazing stuff we just put a bit of time and effort into it now if you want to check out what i've done here to make this uh text animation uh it's all in the live stream that i did which i put up on patreon or you can get access to it to become a channel member here on youtube at the all access pass level and higher so check those out if you want to see how i made this and get a lot more in-depth look at me playing with this it's about a two-hour stream so a lot of cool things happen but um anyways hope this gets you really excited about what's what's coming uh down the track with blender and uh what's gonna be you know possible in the future it's really exciting some neat stuff happening so i hope you found this really helpful and enjoy playing with geometry nodes in blender 2.93 thanks for watching i'll catch you in the next tutorial i'll see you later adios

Channel: CBaileyFilm

Views: 29,902

Rating: 4.965652 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender turorial, blender beginner tutorial, scifi, create a short film, create a fan film

Id: NbS5CMRXqRI

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021