The best free radial array - Using Geometry Nodes

greetings Hobbies this is our Sansa Vol and in this video we're going to have a look at how to make a radial array for free that's so quick and easy to use you just can't go wrong so just to show you what we're going to end up with this is our radial array that is working off this object and what we can do if you look over in the modifier panel is change how many versions of this we've got so we can change however many we want so three four five six so and so on and you can change the radius to an exact amount so you know exactly how far these are apart you can also if I just bring in something like a quad sphere I'm just going to move that over here you can also really quickly change this to another object for example I'm just going to change that to the sphere and you can see how quick and easy that is to be able to change and manipulate so let's have a look at how we make this so this idea actually came about after a comment from someone on one of my other videos which was looking at instancing and there's a link to that in the top right hand corner and Tony Tio my apologies if that's pronounced incorrectly asked if he could use instancing to make a sort of radial pattern and I said no that's probably not a great idea what you want to use is a radial array and I linked him to one of my videos where I showed him how to do a radial array there's a link to that in the top right hand corner as well and it's one of my earlier videos so if you want to see me blunder and stutter through a video if that's the one to go and watch and in that I go through making a radial array using an empty so effectively you just use an empty and you use that as a reference point as you're making an array you can watch the video in the link if you want to go and have a look at how to do that but it got me thinking could you do a radial array with instancing because in theory you couldn't do it around one point but if you had a lot of points you could make a point per instance and now with geometry notes that's really easy to do and maybe that would actually make a better array or a better method of doing a radial array then using what was previously the pretty standard workflow so let's have a look at how we do this and we'll talk about why this is actually really good and it speeds your life up no end because yeah it takes a little bit of time to set this up but once you've set it up once you can use it pretty much instantly anytime you need it so we're going to do the standard thing of pulling up the timeline at the bottom and turning it into a geometry node editor I'm going to press shift today and I'm going to bring in a cube just because we need to have something there I'm going to select that and then click new to bring up the geometry node and we've got this group input and we've got our group output and we don't want those connected so we're just going to get rid of that connection I should mention I'm using an add-on called node Wrangler that allows you to press Ctrl on the right Mouse button to cut through node links and things like that it's an add-on that comes with blender so you just need to activate it so first of all we need the points that we're going to make this array around so we're going to use a circle for this so shift and a and I'm just going to type in circle and we want a mesh Circle you could probably use a curved Circle we don't want it filled if we just connect that up we've got this at the moment we've got 32 vertices that's way more than we need let's put it down to five so you can see here we've now got the start of our instancing and usefully we can change this vertices really quick and easily which is what we're going to want if we want to put more instances on this radial array we can change the radius of it which is something you can't do quickly and easily with the method of using an empty I mean you sort of just guess and move things around whereas this is going to have an exact amount so that's going to be really useful now notice I'm not deleting this group input we'll talk about why later but let's get this set up first so what we need to do is we're going to have to instance on these points and I've used that a number of times on the channel to do various different things and there's going to be a video coming up on the project to make a building for a sort of fantasy or historical setting so you might like that as well so we want instances on points so let's grab that there put that in and that's got our points and everything disappears until we tell it what to instance so we're going to shift an A and we want an object info node which is going to be there and we want the geometry going into the instance now what this is going to allow us to do is use this drop bottle click on the cylinder and we get all of our instances coming so I'm going to leave that there just for now but we're gonna play around with that later but this is just using it as a demonstration and this is using the same sort of object This Gun Barrel that I had for the original video I did make this again so it's slightly different but you'll get the idea it's got something and usefully it has a side to it and you can see at the moment that we've got these sides all pointing in the same direction which generally for a radial array is not what we want and tahoni Tio was really clear that he wanted things pointing outwards from the center of the array so this doesn't work at this point but we'll deal with that let's just finish this bit off first then so we're going to do is come over here shift an A and I need to realize instances otherwise the instances don't actually get created when you come over to the modifier panel and click apply so that has to go there so now let's deal with the idea of what we want these pointing outwards and this we could do theoristically with our rotation we just need to rotate it round but it rotates everything we need to rotate take each bit individually and that's the hard bit for this now to work out how we're going to do this what I'm going to do is just quickly link back to here and we're going to just get back to what it is so four points at the moment and if I just come in here and apply this for a second so we can see the vertices what's important about geometry nodes is you can start using bits of this to influence what's being instant and what we're going to use is we're going to use the normals of these vertices so if I just come up here I can show you that each vertex has a normal if I just increase this in size you can see these blue lines that are coming off of it so each one of these has a normal that points outwards and that's what we want our object do we want something that points outwards I'm just going to deactivate that because it gets annoying and we're just going to control and Z to go back to the point where we've got this geometry nodes here and let's reactivate that so we want to recognize that there are normals pointing in a direction and we want this to be our rotation and we can do that quite nicely because I over here we've got a rotation socket that we can put this into and if I press Ctrl and a and type in normal we can get it to look at the normal data and in theory all we do is plug this in and this has gone horribly wrong I mean looks quite cool but it's definitely not what we wanted and there's a reason for that the reason is that this normal is set up as a vector so a line pointing in a Direction that's not a rotation which is what we want so we're going to have to convert this into a rotation and actually geonometry node has something to do that it's called a line Euler to Vector you just put it in there plug this into Vector importantly and then we're going to bring the rotation to the rotation and you can see it's sort of got the idea but it's not quite doing it correctly we need to work out where this is and to be honest I just fiddle around with this and effectively if we look at this it's doing it wrong it's pointing inward so all I'm going to do is come to this so I'm just going to grab this rotate it on the z-axis by 180 and then control a and I'm going to apply the rotation and now it's working everything is pointing outwards so if I come back to here we can do exactly what we wanted to we can move around that number of vertices down or up so we can have say for example seven I can move the radius out and everything's pointing outwards let's put that there and let's bring that down so this is exactly what I wanted all we need to know in the future is that when we create this we need to have the outside pointing in the y direction but we can always change things over now the one thing is annoying about this at this point is I'd have to keep up this geometry node bit to be able to do anything with it but actually we can change that as well to make this really easy to customize so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come down here to this palette says groups at the moment we've got geometry which is what goes into this group input node that I said to not get rid of so I'm actually gonna select that and then press minus so it's gone and then it just leaves this blank socket so if I just grab let's say the vertices and put that there we now and you'll notice on the modifier panel over here we've got our geometry node now have a Vertex bit and I can move this up and down here so I don't need to go into the geometry nodes I can do the same with the radius so now I've got that over here as well and what's really cool is if I get rid of this we can actually plug this from the object info node into here so that we can select our object so now I don't need this open I'm just going to scroll this up so you can see and take a screen print if you want to to make this easier for you to make yourself so just pause it and do that and I want to get rid of the geometry nodes and show you exactly what this does so what we've got up here is we've got this node which is called Cube I'm going to rename that you could either double click on it or press f2 to radial array node and then I know I can click on that and then all I do is come over here to object pick my object so I want the cylinder and it appears and I can change my vertices up and I can change my radius to a specific amount so all I need to do is copy this radial array node into anything and then I can now use this to make my radial arrays so what I'm actually going to do is come here let's get rid of that so I'm going to come to the object outliner I'm going to right click and I'm going to copy this object even though we can't see anything other than the origin and I'm going to put this into my asset browser so I've got a separate file for all my assets which is just here and all I'm going to do is paste this in and I'm I'm gonna select it and press G to move it over to where I have my geometry node ones I'm going to make this an asset and importantly I'm going to then take that asset and I'm going to save it to my geometry nodes there and then I need to file and save I've done that very quickly there's a link in the top right hand corner to a video on how to use the asset library and what I've done here and how this all works so do feel free to check that out and if I now open up this alternative file that I've got here where we've got something that looks like a very basic petal and this is going to be the center of our flower if I want to make a radial array now all I need to do is open up my asset browser so just come down here and go to asset browser click that I want this for my user Library I want geometry nodes just drag that in there we go it's there all a to get it in the same place so at this point I know my radial Ray is in the middle of what's going to be my pollony bit I can click my object and that's going to be my petal which is the cube and there we go it's done I can change my vertices up so I've got more or less petals I can move those pedals closer or further apart it makes it really really fast to do a radial array you just drag it in and then put the object to it now before I finish and get lots of comments don't get me wrong I know there's a better way of doing radial arrays than this if I just grab this shift and D to move it over here and then press Q so this is using hard Ops and then go to radial array you've got this radial array where you just move your mouse wheel up and down to change the amount of effectively petals or duplicates you've got and you can move in and out change how far it is with your mouse so yeah that is there that is using an add-on called hard Ops I love hard Ops especially with box cutter but it is something that you've got to pay for whereas this is free also this does have some benefits of doing it this way so I want to modify this petal because this is the thing that's being instanced I've still got a version of it over here that I can change around and if I go into let's say vertex mode mode you'll notice that it changes and takes off the modifiers that we're looking at here and if I grab those G and Y and move them around it changes it in real time so I can see what's going on and then go back into object mode and it's made those changes whereas this version if I go to edit mode to go to vertex you'll notice it brings it back to the petal you can't see all of the other versions of it which is really annoying in some instances because say I want to make sure that I've got the petals as wide as they can be I can go into vertex mode a s and then X and I can see that happening in real time and make sure it's as wide as they can be whereas here I have to go into vertex mode select those vertices s x cool that's my petal going to oh no that's overlapping I don't want that overlapping let's go into vertex mode SX let's make it thinner oh no that's too big again like it's annoying that you can't see it as it's happening that would be really cool if they added that in as an option so even though this undisputably is the faster way of doing it it's paid for it does have its negatives whereas this is free it's quick to put everything in place and it's got some added benefits to of you being able to modify the thing that's being instanced outside without the collapsing down the object to do it so there you go that is our radial array using geometry nodes pretty simple and easy to set up and do have a look at that asset Library if you haven't used that before it's such a useful tool for saving all of your objects that you use quite regularly in your projects have a great day guys

Channel: Artisans of Vaul

Views: 4,563

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Id: xEfZaQkmx5Y

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022