Blender Geometry Nodes for Beginners - Foliage Scatter

1. Blender Geometry Nodes for Beginners Course Introduction final nologo: Hey, there. I'm Bladen from Free D Trier. Welcome to Blender Geometrals for Beginners. Fully scatter. Get ready to dive into world where your free D scenes can be transformed into lush vibrant environments with just a few clicks. Whether it's grass swing in the wind or flowers blooming across a field, this course will show you how to bring your free D worlds to life using Blenders geometrals. Better if you are a beginner looking to learn the roades or an experienced user wanting to expand your skill set. This course is crafted for you. We'll simplify the world of geomagion nodes, making it easy and enjoyable for you to create stanning folage effects across your free D landscapes. We kick things off by diving into the basics, how nodes function and how you can harness their power. You will quickly get the hang of the node based workflow, and before you know it, you'll be scattering grass and foliage across your scenes with confidence and precision. While practicality might not be our goal, creating believable and engaging environments certainly is. In this course, you will learn how to at those subtle variations that bring your stylized scenes to life. Imagine the rich, immersive worlds found in games, such as word for graph or elder scrolls online, where every blade of grass and every flower bal has character. With our ready to use assets, you'll be equipped to graph environments that are not just visually striking, but also full of personality. Once you master the basics, we'll take things further by daving into more advanced techniques. You will learn to precisely control foliage placement, whether that means adjusting for der and slope or strategically placing flowers and i spots to create natural pliable environments. Efficiency is crucial, which is why we packed this course with assets that streamline war flow. From premade materials to optimized s groups, you'll be able to create professional quality scenes quickly and easily, leaving more time for you to unleash your creativity. When you finish this course, you'll be equipped to create sunning vibrant landscapes that captivate and inspire. What are you designing worlds with a stylized aesthetic like those in legend of Zelda? Or any other vibrant virtual world. The skills you gain here will allow you to create environments that are both magical and immersive. So don't wait. Enroll in the course today, and let's transform your free D worlds with the power of planes geometerals. Don't just dream about mastering Planter. Take the lead and make it reality. This course is your key to unlocking the full potential of your creativity. Let's turn your passion into truly amazing free D art. 2. Introduction to Geometry Nodes: The next. Hi. In this lesson, you will learn the basics of using geometernal modifiers. You will learn how to create a new geometeral modifier and at a two object. Then how you can reuse this modifier and use it on multiple objects. You will also learn how to deal with user inputs, how to group these inputs and manage them inside the No three. At the end, I'll show you some tips and tricks to speed up your workflow. Here we have a fresh Bandersm. Now let's say we want to create a very simple geometernal setup, which will just change location of our object. For this example, we can just use default cube. Let's select it. Let's go to modifier stop. And to a geometernal modifier, just add it just like you would add any other modifiers. We just add modifier, and you can use this search menu here and search for geometers. Now to create a new one. We just hit this new button, and this will create a new Geometernal setup, which is called geometers. You can rename it. Let's name it location changer. Now our Geeteral setup is ready. To modify this setup, you need to go to emerals work space, so I have one here, but you might not have gemerals in your tab here. You can just click this plus button and there is general and Geometerals. Your work space might look a little different, but you can tweak it as you like just like any other work space in lender. Currently, our setup only has these two nodes, which is group input and group output, and you can see that input geometry is connected directly to group output. If I disconnect this, you can see that our cube disappears. If I connect it back, you can see that our cube appears again. Between these two nodes. You can do as many operations as you need. You can add new geometry, you can modify it, change locations or rotations of all objects, and there are plenty of options you can do with geometry nodes. One of the simplest things you can do is just change the location. Let's actually see how we can do this. To change location of object. There is a node called transform geometry. You can find it in here in ad, geometry operations and transform geometry. But it can be really intimidating, trying to find the note you are looking for. I recommend just using shift A, which will bring up this menu. Now you can start typing. You can just type transform, and this will bring our transform geometry, you can hit enter, and we have the same node as we get from this menu up here. Now you can just drag this note onto this connection. Now, if we change, for example, translation, you can see that the cube changes location. You can even change rotation and scale, but for now, we will only stick to location. To reset these values, you can hower over these sockets and hit pack space, which will reset them to their default values, but you can see that scale has defaults to one, so you can just change it to all ones, and rotation should be fine with all zeros. Now we want to control the translation from outside of the geometer note setup. What we need is we need to control this vector by this group input. The simplest way to do it is just drag from this empty socket to the translation, which will add a new input to our group input. Now if we go back to our original layout, you can see that we have a new parameter here called translation, which has three parameters for each axis, and you can see that if I change this, it will change location of our e. S. Also the default values work here as well. If I hit space, it defaults to our value which we had there before. Now let's go a little bit deeper into the group inputs to manage all the group inputs. You can hit n, which will bring up this menu here. Here you can see that we have two inputs. One is our geometry, which is our cube, and the second one is this translation. If I click translation, you can see that type is vector, and the default value is 0.70 and zero. You can also set minimum and maximum values, and also some other things which we will talk about later. To add a new input, you can just hit this plus icon. You can select if it's input output or panel. For now, we will just use input. Let's call this rotation. We will set type to vector as well. You can see that here in group input, a new input appeared in srotation, and we can plug it into the rotation. Now if we go back to our origin layout, you can see that we can also control our rotation from here. You can see that in this modifier, we don't have any units, and here in translation, we have meters. To change that, you can change this subtype, which in year in translation, it's translation, but there are other things like direction, velocity, acceleration, and so on. For the rotation, We will use oil or angles. Now you can see that we have angles here, which is much more user friendly. Now imagine that your setup has more than just these two inputs, but for example, 20, and you want to urge them to be more user friendly. For that, we have panels. To add panel, you can just hit plus and select panel. This will add a new panel for us and we can call it for example, transformation. And we can drag inputs into this panel just by click and drag. I'll just drag translation into this panel and also rotation after translation circuit. You can see that I can collapse this panel. Also here in our layout, I can make this a little shorter or just hide these inputs. If you have a larger setup, this is a very good practice to group similar inputs together to make it more user friendly. Now let's actually try to apply this geometer modifier to other objects. We will add a new object simply with shift A, and for now, I'll use Monkey, for example. And to add same geometer object, and to add the same geom modifier, you can again add modifier and select geometer nodes. But now instead of clicking, you can here select our location changer. Now you can see that I can control this monkey the same way as I can control the cube. Those are the very basics of dealing with geometernal setups. Now let's look into some tips and tricks to speed up your work flow. There's a very nice ad on for blender, which is called node wangular. You can install it by going to edit preferences, ads, and now you can search for node wang. I have enabled here. And all you need to do is just to enable this checkbook. This ad on contains many shortcuts and also new features for node setups like this. Now I'll go through some very basic shortcuts which you can use throughout your journey. For example, if you hold shift and right click, you can it dross this line. If you drag over the connection, it will add this little dot. This is called rear out. With these rear outs, you can make your connections much clearer and more visible. Now, if you have some connections which you actually don't want here, you can use Control and right click, which will add or which is basically a cut tool. If you cut connection, it will delete it. That's also very useful. If you have more geometries, which you want to join. If I would have two geometries like this, I can join them with joint geometry. Note. You can see that this dot isn't just dot, it's val, which means it can have multiple inputs. We can drag both of these outputs to this one input. Now if we drag this here, nothing really happens here in our scene. But if I translate this, you can see that we have two cubes here. This is a thing you do very often in enteral. To do this, you can actually just hold control shift, right click your first node and then drag to the other node. If you release the moth button, you can see that it generates this join geometry node, and we have the same results as before. One last thing which I already mentioned, but it's really simple and if you'll really speed up your workflow is just adding your nodes with shift A, and then just typing a name of note which you are looking for. This is the workflow which I'll be using for the whole curse. So, I really recommend using this one. So, those are all tips and tricks from me for now, and I hope you will enjoy the course. 3. Grass Creation Point Distribution and Instancing: Hello, and welcome back to Blender Geometrts for Beginners Folg Skater course. In this lesson, we will start working on Geometral setup itself. The first thing we'll be working on is the grass part of the setup. We'll start by a very basic point distribution on the surface of our base mesh, and then we will use a bunch of grass objects to replace these points. Here we have a fresh blender scene, and as you can see, there's only a default cube, but I also have here some assets which we'll be using for our setup. Here I have collection assets with grass collection, leaves collection, and flowers collection, and you will be able to download this file, including all of these assets so you can work with me and you don't have to worry about any of these assets. This lesson, we'll be only using this grass collection so we can hide leaves and flowers and we'll only use these objects to create our grass part. First, let's actually create a pace mesh on which we'll be testing our setup. I'll first delete everything in our scene with A to select everything in our scene and x to delete. Now I'll add monkey, for example, subdivide it with control one, and position it so it looks a little better. When I'm done with positioning my monkey, I'll hit Control A, and I'll apply all transforms. Now we can create our geometric modifier. We'll go to modifier Stop. We can apply our subdivision, and we will add a new modifier, which will be geometries. We'll click new, and we can re this set up to Mato. Now when our setup is ready, we can go to geometries work space. First thing we need to do is we need to actually distribute some points on surface of our manky, and then we will use our grass objects and replace those points with these objects. For distributing points on surface, there is actually a node called distribute points on faces, which takes an existing mesh and it generates randomly points on faces of the mesh. If I hit shift A and search for distribute points on faces, and it enter, you can see that there's input for mesh, and it outputs a bunch of points. Let's actually try this. I'll input my monkey to this distribute points on faces and output these points. Now you can see that we still can somehow see the shape of the monkey, but the base mesh disappeared, and now we have just a bunch of points on the surface of our monkey. We can actually join join these points with our original mesh. Now we can see both of these objects. We can see the monkey and also the points on the surfaces. This node has a bunch of more inputs. First, there is this drop down where you can select random or Pason disc. If this is selected to random, it will just really randomly distribute points on these faces. But if you select pasoon disc, you can see that there are more inputs than before. There is this distance men, which if we increase it to something like 0.2, you can see that we have less points here, and I I increase it even more, there are even less points. What this value does is that it generates points in that way that the distance between each two points isn't less than this value. If we set this 20.4, we know that distance between these two points should be more than 0.4. This is great for some applications, but for now, we can stick to the random type. Then there is selection with which you can select which faces you would like to distribute points on. There's also density, which basically controls the density of the points. We'll be using this input. There's also at which is the sat for random number generator inside this node. In our setup, we want to actually control both of these inputs. We'll add these to our group input. For that, we will hit M and go to group tap. Because we are working on grass, we can create a new panel called grass and put everything inside this panel. You can click plus panel and rename it to grass. Now, we'll be putting all parameters which are controlling the grass to this panel. First, we will control density. Let's add input. This will automatically create float input, which is what we want, and we'll call it density. We can set a default value to ten and minimum value to zero. You can see that here in group input, our density appear in group input, and we can connect it directly to this node. You can see that all of the points disappeared, but that's because if you look here, the density is set to zero, so we can hit back space to reset it and our points are back. Now we will also want to control the sat, but we want to have one parameter which will control seats of all random number generators. Let's actually add this seat input before the grass panel. I'll click this geometry and add new input. Type will be in teacher, and we can collect sat. Now we can collect the sat to seat of this node. Now, if I change the seat, you can see that points are distributed in a different way than the other seat. I can also control density. Now when our points are distributed. All we need to do is we need to replace these points with our grass objects. For that, we need to somehow bring up collection of our grass objects, and then for each point, we will choose one of these grass objects randomly and put it instead of the point. First, let's actually create a new input in our panel. In this input, you will select your collection of the grass objects. New input, type will be collection and we can call it grass objects, and the default collection can be grass. You need to keep in mind that you always need to set these values here in the modifier step. I'll select my grass collection here. Now we can bring up this collection with collection infra node. Collection infra node, basically takes this white input and outputs basically all objects which are in this collection. We can hit shift A and collection info. Or there's a little quicker way to do this. You can how over this white circle here. Click and drag like you want to add a new connection, but release it in the air. And now you have a search menu and you can search for collection info, and this will automatically add a collection info and connect this socket to the collection input, which is even quicker than adding this node and connecting it. Now, if we view output of this node, you can see that we have all grass objects here. But what we actually want is we want these objects to be in the zero of the world origin. Let's actually separate these children and reset those. Now you can see that we have all of the grass objects here at 00. For the replacing the points by these objects, we can actually use node called instance on points, which if we look for, There are two geometry inputs. There is first input for points, and then there is instance. Basically what it does, it takes a bunch of points and replaces each point with this instance. Cool thing is that if you input a bunch of instances here and check this pick instance, it will randomly pick random instance and use that one. Let's actually connect our points to this node and also the instances and check this big instance. Now, if we look at the output of this node, you can see that we have a lot of grass, but it actually looks like this shape of our monkey, which looks like it's in great way. If we go to our previous view, we can try decreasing our density and you can see that it looks actually pretty nice. The only problem I currently see is that all of the grass objects are aligned to the axis, just like our objects here. But what we want is if I view this thing here, Basically, if we have grass here, we want to point it in this direction. If there is grass, let's say here on this point, we want it to point in this direction. If it's even here, we want to point in this direction like from the monkey actually. How we can actually do this? For this, there is this rotation input, with which we can control rotation of each instance. If I change this value here, you can see that the objects are rotating. You can also see that this distribute points on faces gives us more than just the points, but it also gives us a normal, which is a vector pointing outwards from the mesh for each point. There's also this rotation data, which should give us right rotation data for the grass. If we try to connect it to rotation, you can now see that the grass objects are nicely aligned to the mesh of the monkey. Let's actually join this with our base mesh. I will delete this connection and put this one. And you can see that our monkey has growing grass on it, which is pretty nice. This was really simple way to do this, but I will also show you a little more complex way of doing this because you might learn something new. If there wouldn't be the rotation value and only the normal, we can still use nodes to calculate rotation for each cross. For that, there is the align oiler to vector. Which has three inputs here. We don't need to mess around with the vector now and we will just keep it on one. But here we have a rotation and vector inputs. Rotation can be vector, basically is a value of rotation you currently have, and you want to somehow tweak it. How we want to tweak it is that you want to align one of these xs to this input vector. Let's say our rotation is zero, so we don't need to input anything, and we want to align z axis because you can see that Here, the grass objects are pointing upwards, which is z axis, and we want to align those arrows to a normal of the point, which is for like this one is this here. If it creates a grass, it has pointing z axis upwards, and we want to rotate it, so it's pointing this way. We will use this normal and plug it into this input vector. Select our Z axis. Now if we use this rotation, we should get the same results as we get with this rotation. You can see that they are slightly different, but it should only be rotation around the z axis, there shouldn't be a big difference. You can choose which way you want to use. Probably the rotation is just simpler, but, this is also the way to do this. For now, I'll be using this align aller vector because I'm used to it. I'll also clean up this a little bit, so I'll add out here and just make this connection clearer and move this closer. Now, our grass is looking pretty good. The only thing is that I think the grass is a little bit big. The objects might be a little smaller, but there is no way to actually control it in our setup. We need to add that. For that, we can control the scale here, which is scale of our instance objects, and if I change this, we can see that I can control basically size of my grass objects. What I actually want to do is I want to be able to set scale of these objects and also randomize this scale a little bit. For this, we'll create a simple node which we'll reuse later, and it's called randomized node. 4. Randomizing Grass Instance Scale: Te. Welcome back to blender geometric nodes for beginners Fool skater Cs. In this las ending, you will learn how to create a randomized note, which we'll use on many places of this cores. This example, we'll be using randomized note to create random scale for each of these nine cubes. Here I have a very simple setup which just creates grid and on each point of the grid, it will instance a cube. Here you can see that we can control scale of these cubes, but for each cube, you want a random scale in some range. First, let's actually add a rear route. Okay. Just a simple reroute. Now hit Control G to create node group. If you hit tab, you will get out of this note group and this node group, we will be reusing throughout our course. We can rename this to randomize and hit tab to go back into it. If I hit n, you can see that we have output and input, which is currents set to color. What we will be outputting is actually a float. Let's select float here. First, let's actually get through how this setup will work. What we basically need is we need to create a range between some two values and then generate a random value in this range and output it in this group input. There are many ways how to select this range. What I like to do is I like to set a middle of this range and then the width of it. The middle input will be called value. And the range can be called, for example, randomness. Let's say for example, that for our value input is 0.5. And randomness is 0.2. That means that we'll be generating random value between 0.3, which is value minus randomness and 0.7, which is value plus randomness. We'll pick a value from this range and output it from our non group. Let's add these two inputs to our group input. You can hit n, and First input will be called value and its type will be flowed. And the second input will be called randomness, and it will also be flowed. For generating random value, we will be using random value node, which has two inputs, minimum and maximum. We can control these two values, as I said, The minimum is value minus so we'll use subtract randomness. And put this into minimum and maximum will be value plus randomness. I can show you a nice trick how to speed up actually this workflow. You can see that we have a math node, and we'll be also adding a math node, but we just addition instead of subtraction. We can just use control shift D to duplicate this node with these inputs and move it down here. We don't want to subtra but at these, we will change subtract to at and we can connect output of this addition to maximum. Now when our random value is generated, we can just output it to the group input. Now if I hit tab, you can see that I am outside of the node group and I am in my starting node set up, and I can connect this output to the scale. Currently, the scale is zero. We can't see anything, but if I increase this, you can see that we can control scale of these cubes, and if I sit randomness, you can see that scales of cubes are changing and they have very different sizes. The problem is that we actually can change the sat of this. Let's add seed input to this randomized node group. We can just drag this empty socket to the sat, which will add our sat control, and now we can control it from outside. Also sometimes the thing which can happen is that all of the objects will have same value t rated with this setup, and to differentiate between these objects, we can also use this ID socket, which basically takes some identifier for each object and it basically works like another st, but for each object separately. In this setup, each cube has different IDs, this is working correctly, but sometimes it doesn't have to work nicely. To make sure we can control this, we will also plug ID into the group input. Now you can actually see that our cubes have same size, which means that ID for each cube is same. To differentiate, we can, for example, plug a index here, which is index of each cube, and now it's working correctly again. Now we have this nice randomized, which has just like two parameters we need to control, so we can just plug these parameters into our group input if we have a larger setup, and it's very simple to create randomized values in some range. 5. Controlling Grass Placement with Max Angle: Hi, I welcome back to Blender Geometri nodes for Beginners Folig Scaler cars. In previous lessons, we made a very basic point distribution with instancing and also created a randomized node, which we will now use for scaling our grass objects random. Next, we will add a parameter to our setup, which will control the maximum steepness of the mesh on which grass generates. If the mesh is steeper than our value, the grass won't generate at these places anymore. First thing we will do is we will actually use our randomized node to scale these graphs objects randomly. If you made this set up in a different file, it's not a really big problem. You can just go to file append find your file with randomized node. And now go to Node stree and select your randomize. Now, if you go to geometric node work space, you can now search for randomize and you should have your node group here. Let's actually use our randomized node. I'll use shift A and search for andomize, and bring in my randomized note group. There are a few parameters. At first, we can connect output to our scale of instances, and now we will be controlling these values. You can see that if f change value, it changes the scale of the grass objects and the f change randomness. You can see that some of the objects are getting smaller and some of them are getting larger. I can maybe decrease the density, so we can see it better. Those are the two inputs which we want to be able to use or control from outside Onal group, Let's actually hit n to bring up this menu, and we will add two parameters. First one will be scale, and the second one will be scale randomness. We can also set default values. For scale, default can be one, and scale randomness can be zero. Now all we need to do is we need to connect these group inputs to this randomized node group. I'll bring up new group input. And connect my scale to scale randomness to randomness. Also we can forget to connect our s to st of our randomize no. Also we will use this ID circuit to which we will connect index index value. This will cause that for each instance, there's a unique index, each instance will have a different random value. Now, if we reset those values and set a scale randomness to something like 0.5, you can see that the grass objects are randomly scaled around one. The next thing we'll be working on is adding a maximum angle on which grass de generates. Basically how we will control this generation is that here we distribute points on faces, we are generating a bunch of points on top of the our monkey, and we will delete some of them, which we don't actually want to use for our grass objects. For that, we will add a delete node between these two connections. Shift A and search for delete geometry, and we can put it over this connection. Now you can see that all of our points are deleted, but we will control it with this selection socket and we will only delete some of the points which we don't want to use. The idea behind this effect is that we have some surface and we have points on it. Let's say, these xs are my points, and each of these points have its own normal, which is this socket right here. I'll draw something like normal. Let's say Let's say these vectors are my normals. What I want to do is I don't want here these points, for example, because this surface is too steep, so the grass might not grow here. I want to delete these points, but not these. How can you actually do this? For this, we will just use this normal value and compare it with With arrow pointing upwards, which is basically the z axis. If we put, let's say this normal side by side with z axis, there's a way to calculate angle between these two vectors. We can say that if this vector is larger than some value, we will delete these points. There are many ways how to calculate this angle Alpha between two vectors, but I'll use the simplest pan in my opinion. The equation says that cosine of our angle Alpha is the product of these two vectors divided by multiplication of lengths. Basically, it's something like this. Let's say our z x vector is A and our normal is B. It's going to be the product of these vectors divided by length of A, multiply by length of B. Because this is cosine of Alpha, we need to do cosccine of this part. It's basically coscsine of the product divided by their lengths. Now all we need to do is we need to recreate this expression inside blender using geometerals. To make this node tree cleaner, we will actually create a new node group, which will calculate angle between two vectors. We can use the same approach as we did when creating randomized node. We can add a new readout and hit Control G, and this will create our new node group. We can hit n to change our inputs and outputs. Our output will be flow value, and subtype can be angle because it will be angle between these two vectors, and there will be two inputs, which will be vectors, so we can rename this two A and type will be vector. Now we can just duplicate this and rename it two B. That's looking. Now let's just do this expression. First, we will do a dot product of these two vectors. I can create connection from A and then search for dot, which will bring up that product and I can connect vector B. Now we need multiplication of lengths of these vectors. I can use the same technique, but instead of dot I write length, and Iuplicate this and connect B to it. Now we'll just multiply these two values. And divide the product by this multiplication. I'll add divide and connect this multiplication. You can see that I'm basically going from inside of the expression to outside. First, I made this part and this part. Then I did the whole division, and now I'm going to do this whole part. I'll just do arc cosine, so I can again create a new correction and write arc cosine. And this will be output of my group output, so I can connect this value to output and delete this out. That's looking pretty good and now we can test our node group. You can hit tab to go outside of this node group and we can rename this to angle between, for example, now we will use this node to find out if each point is on steeper surface than we actually want. I'll create a little bit of space here. Now we'll be calculating angle between vector zero, 01 and normal of each point, which is this socket. Now, if this is greater, so I'll add greater if this is greater than some value, I will delete it. Let's say I'll put here Pi over four, which is 45 degrees. If it's steeper than 45 degrees, the result will be one and it will delete the point. Now you can see that when I plug this into the geometry into the geometry node, you can see that only grass on top of the monkey remained here and grass from the sides was deleted. If I increase this angle, you can see that the grass starts growing on the sides. If it's larger than Pi, basically, these points here down there should have the angle around Pi, which is 180 degrees. If it's larger than one Pi, it should grow everywhere. This is the value we want to be able to control from outside. Again, we will create a new group input. I'll create a new input and we can call it Mx angle. Type will be flowed and subtype will be angle. We can set default to something like Pi over four, which look pretty good, and minimum can be zero and maximum can be Pi. I think I can also delete this expression, so we don't need this anymore. Now if we go to our layout. I also forget to actually connect my group input to this straighter than node. Make this quickly, you can actually just create connection from this B or basically to this B. Now if you write a name of your group input, which is in my case Mx angle, you can connect this group input straight to this node, and you can see that it created a group input with just one of these outputs. Now let's increase my max angle. You can see that the grass slowly starts growing on top of the monkey and it goes to the sides slowly. Now where we have our next angle feature ready for use. Last thing we will do in this lesson is that we will combine all of these nodes into one node group because we'll be reusing this little setup for the flowers, and we want to be able to set different parameters to our flowers and our grass. That's why we'll be using two instances of this node group, which we will now create. I'll move this up because we won't be grouping these parts to our node group. Also great practice when creating a node group and using group input is to always use just one of these group inputs. Because if I would group these nodes like this, I will just box select them with my mouse and hit Control G. You can see that Now if I go outside node group, some of the inputs. For example, the sat is duplicated here, and that's not what we want, so I'll undo this. What we need now is to use just one group input and then group this setup. For this, I think I'll just use this group input, I'll connect Mx angle instead of this max angle. Then we will connect this scale instead of this scale and skill randomness as well. The last thing which is here is this sat. I will connect this sat to this one. Now you can see that this group input doesn't have any used perimeters, so we can delete it. Now great way to make the note or cleaner is to use reroutes to make it. You can use shift right click drag over these connections, and then just move them so they are not touching anything else. I'll use a bunch of these re roads to make this nicer. Now I think this part looks pretty nice, so I can select all of these nodes, including the re roads and hit Control G, which will create this relatively nice note group. If I go outside of the None group with tab, you can see that there's just one group input connected to the sn group and it's looking nice. Now we can move these node here. Last thing is that we will rename this node group and we can use it and we can call it, for example, my distribute points, or you can name it wherever you like. Also, you can see that some of these inputs aren't named correctly, so we will fix this quickly. You can see that density collection is okay, but there are four inputs now. We can remember that it's scale handomness, sat and max angle, we'll just reams. I'll also move up, it's the first perimeter. Now I think it's looking great. 6. Creating Stems Curves and Placement on Mesh: Hey, there. Welcome back to Blender Geometrodes for beginners Folly scatter course. In this lesson, we will start working on the flowers objects, which will be scattered on top of the grass. For this part, we will use a very similar approach as we used for the grass objects. But instead of using existing objects, we will create our own curves, and then instance tops of the flowers and their leaves on these curves. In previous lesson, we created this distribute points node group, which we can now reuse for generating our stems. How this will work is that we will basically generate again a bunch of points on the surface of our object. Then we will replace each point with a curve line, which will be randomly scaled. It will look something like this. Then we will resemble this curve, so it has more geometry to work with. Use noise to displace these points. It will be a little bit more natural. Then we will place flower objects on top of these and also some leaves along the curves. First thing we need to do is we need to generate a bunch of curve lines on top of the monkey. For this, we can use our distribute points. You can use shift D to duplicate this. Now we need to create a bunch of new group inputs to control this setup. You can hit n to bring up this menu. For this part, we will create a new panel, which will be called flowers. Some of the inputs will be the same, so we can duplicate this group input and we'll be generating flowers on the same mesh as we are generating our grass, the geometry will be the same. We might be able to use the same seed for this one, but this can lead to generating flowers on the same spots as the grass, which is something we don't actually want. We need to somehow tweak the seed, so it's not the same as our original seed. For that, I like to use multiply at node, which basically multiplies this value and adds a random value to it. You can for example, multiply it by 42 and add 42. The only value where this can be same is zero because zero times anything is still zero. But when we add 42, it will result in 42, this should give us a nice sat, which will be different than our original sat. We can connect value to the sat. Now we will be creating a new group inputs because density of our flowers might be different from density of our grass. Let's add a new input. We will call it density type is flowed and we can set default two, for example, maybe five will be great. You can see that there is a new density in a group input. It can be a little bit confusing because now there are two density inputs. But if you look at our group input, you can see the first density belongs to grass and second density belongs to flowers. We will use this second density. For now, we'll remain collection empty and we will do that later. Then there is scale scale randomness and nex angle. Instead of scale, we can call these inputs length and length randomness. I'll add two of those new barometers, length can be by default one, minimum zero, and length randomness can be default to something like 0.2. And we can again connect these inputs to scale and scale randomness. The last one is Mx angle. For this, we can just duplicate this value and move it to our flowers panel. Now I'll just reconnect this max angle to this mix angle. Now if we output this node, it doesn't generate anything because our collection is empty. The problem is that this node group needs a collection from which it will pick a random object and use it as an instance. But we don't have any collection, so we need to go around this a little bit. I'll go into this node group with tab. And we will change this a little bit. Instead of collection, it will use instances or objects, and for the grass object, we will move this collection info outside of this node group. I'll remove this collection info with out and left post patent drug, and now collect the collection straight into instances. You can see that this gets read, but that's because this is type of collection, and this needs a object. We will hit n and change type of this collection to object or geometries. And also rename it two instances. Now Ile hit tap to get outside of this node group and you can see that this connection is now red because there is collection and it needs instances. So let collection info. Connect this collection to this socket and now output of this collection info back to my node group. Now if I output this, you can see that it's at bit weird, and that's because we didn't separate and sit our children, and, you can keep this on original. Now it's working as before. H Now when our node group needs only instances, this is something we are able to create inside geometry nodes. An object which we will be instancing will be basically just a curve line, so let's add curve line. Now if I look at this curve line, it just creates this little line which has length of one. But that's fine for now and we can plug this curve straight into instances. Now if we output this, we still can't see anything. That's because our parameters here aren't set to anything reasonable. Also, you can see that here is a little error in this node group. That's because when this is picked, it needs actually a bunch of instances and when this is working correctly. One way would be to connect the pick instances to group input, but we should be able to make a bunch of instances from this one curve line with geometry two instances. If we connect this curve two geometer instances and now this two instances, this is basically a collection containing only one object. It thinks that it's collection, but it's actually just one curve object. But you can see that now it's working nicely and we can continue working on the setup. 7. Generating Flower Stems Using Curves: Welcome back. Let's continue with blender geometries for beginners, fully scale course. I will also beat the values a little bit, so you can see that we can control the length and the randomness and also again Mx angle on which it's generated. I think I will bring density down a bit to something like one. We have just a few flowers. Now let's continue with the stems. The next thing I said we will need to do is we need to resemble these curves, which will basically add more geometry to them. Currently, each curve is constructed only from two points, and we want to make a shape something like this, which needs a lot more points to make it smooth. For this thing, there is a node called resemble node. Resemble curve. Which has few inputs. One of them is curve input to which we will connect our curves. Then there is selection. We don't need to worry about that now, and then there is count, which is basically to how many points you want to resemble this curve. Let's say if I would plug this curve into this node with count five, it will create a curve with five points evenly distributed along the curve. There are also other options like length, which sets a distance between points on the curve. If this is 20.1, and the curve, for example, 1 meter long, it will create a ten points which are evenly distributed. Imagine this is ten points, and distance between each two points is 0.1 meters. This is great way if you don't know how long the curve is and you want same resolution on different length of curves. This is great to use. We'll be also using this length option because flowers have different lengths, and we want them to have same resolution. Let's use this option. To check from how many points our curves are constructed. You can, for example, go to we can add a spreadsheet. I'll bring a new window and change its type to spreadsheet. You can see those are just instances. But if we realize instances, you can see that currently are feints constructed from 154 points. If I increase the line, you can see that number of control points is decreased. What this realized instances note basically does is that after using instance on points, which is used here in this note group, each instance is treated like a single object and we can't access its points basically. But if we realize these instances, the whole group of the instances is changed to one large object with many points, and we can control its individual points. That's why we can actually see number of control points here. Now we want to be able to control resolution of these curves, so we can set how smooth they basically are. We'll be controlling this length input. It's a little bit hard for users to understand these values. I like to create a little calculations to make it more user friendly. For controlling this length, we will add a new parameter, which will be called resolution. Is type will be integer. I'll move it up here and default can be something like ten and minimum 22, for example. What I like to do is we can plug this directly into the length because resolution normally works that if it's lower v, let's make this line. Let's say this is resolution. When it's low, basically there should be a less points then when it's something higher. But if you would put it straight to the length, you can see that if I set it to 0.07, there are 210 points, and if I put it to 0.2, there are only 84 points or something. Basically there's less points, so it's lower resolution when I increase the length. We need to invert this What I like to do is I like to take divide. Let's add Mth node and set this two division, and we will divide one by our resolution. If the resolution is one, output of this will be one, if the resolution is ten, output will be 0.1. If we increase the resolution, the distances between points on the curves will get smaller and we will get more points and more geometry. I'll set this resolution to ten, and now we should be able to control resolution of our stems. We still can't actually see the resolution. Now I'll finally move to the part where you will be able to see how the resolution is actually working. Now we will be basically displacing our points, so it has more natural shape. For that, we will be two main nodes. One of them is set position, which has this geometry input, which is the geometry we want to dip. Then there is this There are basically two vector inputs. The first is position, which where you can input exact position, you want to put each 0.2, and there's also offset, which will just move the points from current position. That's also the socket we'll be using. Let's connect our curves to this germaput. Now if I output this set position. You can see that if I change the offset, it will move the curves. Together because each curve has same input. But when displacing them, each point will have a slightly different value this offset and it will create a nice natural shape. To add this nice noise, we will add a noise texture, which will give us these random values which are basically continuous, it will create nice shapes. This noise texture has this color output, which is basically a vector with values 0-1. Basically, output of this noise texture will give us random color, which if we take two vector space is basically random vector in this cube because each axis can be only 021. It's 021 on x, 021 on y, and 0212 set. Basically it will pick a random point inside this cube. Currently, when we have straight curves, we want to displace those points to all of the directions and not only basically this one direction, we want to be able to displace them in all directions. What we need to do is we need to tweak this value. The random value which we will get from cube, from the noise texture, will basically also include all of these values. It will go into all directions and displace them nicely in different shapes. To tweak this color output, we can use map range, which will basically remap values of this color circuit to something different. Currently, we have values 0-1, so these vectors are set correctly. At minimum it's all zeros and at maximum, it's ones, and we want to remap it to negative ones, two ones, which will basically transform our small cube to larger cube with all directions with also negative values. Now if we plug this vector to our offset, also, I will unhide my monkey. You can see by disconnect and connect this, you can see that our lines are displaced. At this point, they are a little bit jacked, but we will tweak this to make it nicer. First thing we can do is we can decrease scale of the noise, which will make it smoother. Now you can see that they are nicely displaced. If it's something like 0.6, And we should be also able to control power of this noise or displacement. We can scale this vector by some value and change its power. I'll at scale and connect it to offset. Now when it's one, it's still same, but we can increase it by increasing the scale value or decrease it by making it smaller. Now you can see that there will be a little bit problem. I I Also display my monkey and not my grass for now. If I scaled noise, you can see that stems can fly away from their original position because of the noise. For example, this stem started here on the nose, but if I increase the noise power, it will fly somewhere else where it's not something we want. To fix these issues. We'll be also scaling or multiplying this noise by some number, and what we actually want is we want to have noise here at the roots have zero power, and here at the top, it can have 100% power, which should result in that the roots remain in the same positions, and then it will gradually make larger displacements along the curves. To make this possible, we need to somehow find out which points on the curves are here at the roots and which are here at the top. For that, we have a nice node which will tell us almost this thing and it's called splan parameter. This plane parameter, we can visualize this with viewer. You can see that this factor basically gives us zero here at the start and one at the end. There's also length, which gives us very similar values. But instead of for which is 0-1, this will give us length from the start of the curve. If this curve would be, for example, 2 meters long, here at the end, it would be two. In the half, it will be one and at the start, it will be still zero. There's also index, which will give us index of point on one given spine. But for now, we'll be using defector. What we can basically do is we can just plug this factor straight into the scale, which will result in that here at the bottom, the scale for the noise will be zero, and here at the top, it will be one. We can try that. And you can see that our stems are displaced a little bit more nicely. But now we lost the ability to control power of the noise. But we can fix it very simply by adding another scale. You can duplicate this one and then just connected after the first one. Now if I change the scale, you can see that roots of the stems are remaining at the same position, but the rest is displaced pretty nicely. Now we have a very nice foundation for the shape of the stems, but we should add some parameters to make the user able to actually control these values. The simplest way to control this setup is to actually expose this scale value, which will control noise power, and also scale of the noise texture, which will control how smooth the displacement is. We can hit n to bring up our menu, and we will add two new inputs. One of them will be noise scale, and we can default to something like 0.4, and the other one will be noise power, which can be default to one. Now we can bring up our group input and connect noise scale to this scale and noise power to this scale node. I'll also make this little nicer. As you can see, our group inputs are getting longer and longer. There is a nice shortcut if you hit control H, you can hide unused sockets. There will only remain our sockets which we are using, and you can also undo it by again hitting control H. Now if we go to our setup, and reset these, you can see that we can control power of minise and also its scale. If it's something closer to zero, the displacement will be much smoother. I fit something like 0.7, you can see that displacement is pretty smooth. If I increase it to something larger, you can see that it's very jacked. But we can actually fix this with increasing of resolution. You can see that if I increase it, there are more and more points. But in my opinion, it's better to keep noise scale lower. Now maybe even lower to something like 0.7, and now it's looking pretty nice in my opinion. We can also tweak our length randomness. Some of the flowers are much smaller and some of them are taller. Maybe something like this looks nice. Now we have a nice foundation for our stems. 8. Mesh Conversion and Material Setup for Stems: Hello, and welcome back to Blender Geometri notes for beginners Folig Skater Course. In this lesson, we will create an actual geometry from curves, which we made in previous lesson, and also create a simple material, which will have a different shade of green for each stem. To generate mesh from our curves, there is a very simple node, which is called curve mesh. And this node has two inputs and one checkbox and one output. The first input is this curve input, which will be our curves. Then there is profile curve, which is curve, which is basically sweep along our base curve. If, for example, if the curve would be a line, and profile would be circle. This node will generate something like this. It will sweep the circle along the curve. And we will have some curved cylinder. As a profile, we'll be using curve circle, so we can add that we shift a and searching for curve circle and curve will be our curves. Let's plug it in. And if I connect output of this node to group output, you can see that it generated bunch of weird cylinders. Currently, all of them are very thick because radius of the curve circle is 1 meter, so we can decrease it and now it's looking much better. Also, we can see that if we check this fill caps, it will fill these endpoints of our curves and make them solid mesh. This looks pretty nice, but a better thing would be if the stems would be thicker at the start and thinner at the end. The first thing you might want to do is to use something like sprain parameter, this factor and connect it right to the radius. At the start, it would be zero, and at the end, it will be one, and we will just remap it. But if you try it, there will be this spread connection, and that's because this radius is constant and we can change it for different points. Luckily, there is the other way how to do this, and that's using curve radius. To change curve radius. There is a node called set curve radius. Here we input our curve and set its radius. Here you can see that there is a square socket and no circle, which means that we can actually change it for different points. Let's connect it to our setup. Now the radius is very small. I'll set it to one for now. Now if I connect my spine parameter to this radius socket, you can see that our stems are thin at the start and thick at the end. We want this the other way. There are few ways how to do this, but for now, I will choose float curve because we didn't use this and you will get more control over using other ways. Let's add float curve. This f curve has two inputs. First one is factor, we'll keep this on one, and the second one is value. Value is number which we want to basically remap. We'll connect our factor to value. Now if we plug output of this node two radius, this should remain the same because here it's constant. But if we change this a little bit, you can see that they are more thin and then it's quickly going to thicker radius. Or if we do this, you can see that it's thin and it's thicker much quicker or you can basically control the shape of the radius. One thing we can also do is to swap these control points. If I put this to one and this 20, you can see that now the stem is thick at the start and thin at the end, and we can also play around with this third control point, and you can add as many control points as you want. Now our stems have radius or much better shape, and we can also control radius with this radius socket. And the other parameter which curve circle has is this resolution. If I go to wire frame mode, you can see that this has a pretty big resolution, which is basically from how many points the curve circle is constructed, and if I decrease it, you can see that it's more low p. For the stems, because those are usually very thin, we can keep this on lower number, something like eight or even three might be possible because if you look from further distance, you can see much difference. Those are the two parameters which we would like to control, Let's hit n, and we will add it to our group input. First thing I'll add is profile resolution, which will be integer. Default can be set to eight, minimum to three, and maximum can be this big number. The second one is profile radius or we can just keep it on radius, and default can be 0.05, for example, and minimum will be zero. Now we just need to connect these two new inputs to the crave circle. Let's do that. And we can also hide une circds with control H. Now our stems disappeared, but that's because we didn't set any values here, so let's reset these two defold, and you can see that we have nice stems. Now, if we connect this to our monkey, you can see that this is still a little bit thick. I'll set it 2.0 15, let's say. We can also increase density, and I think this is looking pretty nice. The next thing we'll be working on is adding material to these stems because currently they don't have any material and they are just this white default material, so we will change that. First, let's actually add group input to this material, so we'll add a new input and set type two material, and we can just call it material. And we want to set material of these stems. We will add a set material node, which will basically just assign this material to this mesh. We'll connect it and connect it to our joint geometry. As a material, we will pick our material from group input. We can duplicate this group input and just connect this material to this material socket. Now if we go back to our layout, we can create a new material. You can go to this material tab and hit new, and we can call it, for example, stem and set base color to just some green. Now if we sucked our monkey and set our material to stem, You can see that our monkey is also green. That's because I made this material on the monkey and that's default material, which is it assigned to monkey mesh. I'll also create a separate material for monkey, which can be just this white material and assign it. Now you can see that we can actually control color of our stems. But one thing we would like to add is that each stem would have a slightly different shade of green. There are a bunch of ways to make this, and the approach where we will be using is we will first create a random color inside geometry nodes, store it inside the mesh, and then use it in shader. So for storing some values inside the mesh, those are basically called attributes. For storing attributes, there is store named attribute note, which will do exactly what we are looking for. This node has few inputs. One of them is geometry on which we want to store some data. We will connect this geometry input and output. Then there is selection. We'll be storing this to all points, so we don't have to use this. Then the name, which is basically name of the variable or attribute. So we can call it color, and then there is the value. The approach I'll be using is I'll store random value 0-1, and then use it in the shader. To create a random value, we can use random value node. By default, it's 0-1, so that's what we want, and we can plug this value into this value. Now, if we go to Shader, so we can go to our stem material. We can use this color attribute. To add this attribute, you can add attribute node, which looks like this. Here you need to input name of your attribute. We named it color, let's add it to color. Now if we output this factor to the surface, you will see that the stems have different shades of black and white. That's because here, in the geometers, we stored this random value for each point, which means that each point has a different random value, and that's because the stems looks like this. The problem is that we want for each stem only one color, so we can fix this by using this ID circuit. To differentiate between stems, there is a value which is from Mesha islands. We can add this mesh island and this gives us two values. One of them is island index, and one of them is island count. This island is basically a piece of mesh, which isn't connected to anything else. Because these stems are basically like islands, each of them has different index. If we connect this index to ID, you can see that each stem has now a different shade of gray, and we can use this further for changing the color. We can also connect the st to our group input. Let's also add group input and connect sat to this random value. Now we can go to Shader and change the color depending on this value. Let's go to shading workspace, and to blend between two colors, there are again, many ways to do this. But what I like to do, I like to use color ramp, which is basically the color ramp where you input a value 0-1, and it will interpoate between these colors. If I leave this on zero and output this, All of the stems are black, but if I change factor to one, you can see that they are white. Instead of using this manually, we can plug our color attribute to this factor. Now you can see that they are again white or black. But the nice feature is that we can actually change these colors, so we can use one shade of green, and then a different shade of green. You can see that now it's interplating between these two green colors. If we look closely, each of them has slightly different shade of green. Also to make this a little better with shading, we can use this principle BSDF, plug our color to base color, and then output this BSDF to surface. I think this is looking pretty nice, and we can also control the seed, for example, which also changes the generation of our flowers, and you can see that they have nice shades of green. 9. Spawning Flower Petals on Top of Stems: Welcome back to Blender Geometri nodes for beginners Folkter cars. And this lesson, we will add flower tops to the stems, which we finished in previous lesson. Before we start, I would like to clean up this note tree and organize it a little bit because it's always better to keep your nose trees organized. So if you want to change something in the note tree in the future, it's much easier to orient in your nose tree. So we're going to organize it with frames because that makes a notary pretty readable. First thing I will frame is this part here, where if I o, this is our grass objects. So To frame this, you can select all of these nodes with left most button, and then just hit Control J, which will create a frame around these nodes. We can also rename this frame. You can hit F two and name it, for example, grass objects or maybe just grass. Also, you can side there is this redo which outputs our input geometry, and that's on grass so I'll just delete this and put this before the joint geometry. After we finish this. Then in this part, we are creating our stem curves. I'll move this a little bit to the side, and again, hit Control J and call this stem curves. In this part, we are creating a mesh from our stems. Again, I'll frame this and call this stem geometry. Now we can combine these parts together with this joint geometry. I'll connect grass to this joint geometry and now we have everything together. Last part which is missing is our base math. I'll add group input and connect our geometry to this joint geometry. Now there is the monkey as well. I'll also tweak the grass ale bit, so it's a little smaller and I can increase the density. Now when my setup is tweaked, I can start working on the flowers. In this lesson, we will finally use the rest of our assets, which are the leaves here and also the flower tops. As I previously said, for each stem, we'll pick one of these flower tops and put them here at the top and also pick one of the leaf types and distribute them along the curve. Let's go to our setup. As you can see, we have many group inputs now and if we would add more inputs to our flowers panel, I think it would get pretty crowded and hard to use. I think it would be better to have separate panel for our stems and then separate panel for our flower tops and leaves. Let's rename this from flowers to stems. And we can start with the flower tops. We will add a new panel and call it flowers. Because we'll be using our assets, we need a collection input. I'll add a new input to this panel, set type to collection, and name this two flower tops. Here in my modifier stub, I will set my collection to flower tops. There are actually many ways to distribute these flower tops on tops of our curves. But I'll do the simplest one. We'll be using the stem curves. Let's use these for now and we'll be instancing at the end points of these curves. For this, we can use instance on points. Let's add instance on points node, and our points will be our curves. If we output this, we won't see anything because we didn't put anything in our instance. But now just for testing purposes, we can just use, for example, small cube. At cube and set size 2.1. Now you can see that there are cubes. There's a cube on each point of the curve. You can see that they have large resolutions, so there are many cubes. Because we only want two instance objects at the end, we'll use this selection to select only these end points. To select only end points of our curves. We can for each curve get a number of points and then only select point with index, which corresponds to the maximum index on this curve. To get number of points for each curve, you can get it from this line length, where it also tells us point cout, which is just from how many points the curve is constructed and because we are indexing from zero, for example, let's say this curve would have five points, which means there is point with index zero, one, two, three, and four. And we need to select this four. We will take this point count and subtract one and we'll only select points where index is equal to this point count minus one. Let's do that. We will subtract one from this point count. And to select only indexes with this index, we will bring up our index node and compare it. We need to find out where those values are equal. We can add compare node and set type two equal. We can also set type two integer because those are integers. And if those are equal, this will be one, and it will only select our end points. As you can see, this only results in one cube, and that's because we are using this index. If we t this selection, now we have a bunch of points, and if we use this index, for example, it starts on this line, these indexes are, let's say 0-10, then it continues on this plane, it's 11 to 20, and so on. What we need is we need index on only the one curve. We need only indexes here and here, we need at the start of each curve, the index will be zero, and at the end, it will be something like ten or something. For that, we need to use different index instead of this index, and the index we need to use is from spine parameter. Which tells us index of point on given curve and not in the whole mesh. If we switch this index to the EQ and set this to selection, we can now see that we only have cubes at the end points of our curves. Now we can swap these cubes for our flowers. Let's do that. We can bring up our group input. And we will use these flower tops. We'll again use collection info, which will give us the instances, and we need to separate those and reset children. And you can see that now they are in the world origin. We can plug these instances into this instance on points, and also we'll pick instance because we only want one randomly selected from this collection. Now if I output it, you can see that each curve has its own flower top. If we combine this with our stems. We will plug this to this joint geometry as well. You can see that each flower has its own end. But one problem, which I can see is that they are not aligned with the stems because for this one we would like it to be like this. It would be aligned to the direction of the stem. Let's add that. For this, we can get a tangent of this end point, which is basically a direction on which it's pointing, so we can use curve tangent, and we'll be aligning Z axis of the flower top to the tangent. We'll be align oiler vector. And we want to align z axis to the tangent. We'll plug tangent to this vector, and no rotation to rotation. Now you can see that the orientation of the flowers is correct, and they are in straight lines with the stems. One more thing we would like to control is a scale of these flowers. We'll be using the same technique as we are using inside this distribution point where we use our randomized node. We can use it here as well. Let's add randomize and as a seed, we can use seed from our group input. ID can be our index. Now we'll be controlling these two values and its randomness from the group input. Let's add those to our panel. I at scale by default can be one and minimum zero, and then scale randomness, which will be by default zero and minimum also zero. Now we can just plug these two inputs to this randomize node group. Now our randomize is ready and we can connect this to our scale. Now all of them, it looks a little weird. Let's reset these two their defaults, and you can see that I can change the scale of these and also the randomness. We can also increase density of our flowers and set the leng randomness. And you can see that it looks really nice. The last thing which is missing are only the leaves of our flowers. 10. Placing Leaves Along Flower Stems: Hi, welcome back to Blender geometries for Beginners Fool skater Cars. In this lesson, we will finish our flowers by distributing leaf objects on our stems and adding controls for them. Before creating our leaves, we can also frame this setup, so we know what it's actually doing. I'll again hit Control and two flower tops. And move it here. Now we can start working on the leaves. How the leaves will work is that now, again, we'll be working with the curves. Let's say we want to have four leaves, for example, we want to distribute them on the c, like this. We need to pick these points and then instance the leaves on them. There are many ways again, how to pick these four points. But in my opinion, the simplest thing is to resemple the curve to needed count. Let's say we want four leaves, and we want them distributed like this, and here is the flower crop. And we don't want anything here. What we can do is we can resemble the curve in this case to six points, which also includes the flower top and the empty point, we will only instance these s leaves on these four points which are in the middle of the whole curve. We'll basically exclude first and the last point from this instancing. First thing we will do, we will again be using these curves, so we can take those. First thing we will do is we will resemble them to some number of points. This number can be randomized. Let's say we want something 2-6 leaves. We will need to generate this number, and then we will add two because those are the end points and then resemble the curve to this number. Let's first generate random value. It will be integer, and let's say menu will be two and maximum six. Then we will add two at two and resemple the curve to this number. If we visualize this, you can see that those curves have just a few points. For example, this one has here, here, here and here. Aerated two at two and then resemble 24 points. Now we need to instance the leaves on these points. Again, we will be using instance on points. And our points, we will use these curves. For the instances, I'll again use just a small cube for testing, and then we will plug our leaves to this socket. Now if we visualize this, you can see that this curve has a bit more points. But you can see that there are just few points. You can maybe decrease this a little two to four. Now as you can see, the cubes are instance on all points, and we need to exclude first and the last point. I'll use a different approach than before. You will learn something new. For this one, we can use end point selection, which is a node which gives us exactly what it says. It selects the end points. If we plug this straight to the selection, you can see that it only instanced cubes on the first and last point. And what we need is exact opposite. We can just negate this, so we can use nut, which will turn one to zero and zero to one. If we plug this two selection, you can see that only points in the middle of the curve are selected and cubes are on time. Now we can use leaves in of our cubes. First, we will add a new panel for our leaves, and add a collection input for them. I'll also set the input to write collection here. Now we can delete this cube and bring up our collection. I'll add a group input, use collection info to get all instances of our leaves. I will separate and reset children. We can visualize this and you can see that we have leaves here in word origin, and we can plug these instances into this instance and also check this big instance. Now you can see that there are a bunch of leaves. It's a little hard to see, but we might combine this with our curves so we can see which leaves belong to which curve. I'll just add joint geometry. For example, you can see that this curve has those are three different types of leaf leaves, which doesn't really make sense. What we need is we need to pick a random leaf for each curve and just use that one. For that, we can generate a random value. And then just plug it into this instance index. We'll be generating a random value using random value, and we need to pick a random index of this instance. We can switches to integer and we know that it's going to be random number between zero and number of our leaves minus one. First approach we can use is just see how many leaves we have in our collection, which is like seven, but that wouldn't be really practical. If you add some leaves, we would need to change this value. Instead of that, we can actually use a node called domain size, which gives us number of any type you actually need. If you set this two mesh, you can get how many points edges or faces there are, but we need instances, we will set this two instances and it also can give us instance count. We can use this one and subtract one because we are always in indexing from zero, and this will give us a random index. For our instances. Now we can plug this random value to instance index. You can see that it's still not working and that's because it's generating random point for each point, and we need to set this ID. So it generates the same value for one curve, and we should be able to use island index again. Let's use mesh Island and plug this island index into ID. As you can see it doesn't really work. We will need to use a different approach. Instead of this, we can use index of our curves for the ID. The problem is if we plug index here straight to the ID, It doesn't really work, as you can see in this curve, and that's because it's giving us index of each point. We need to actually index of curve instead of points. To change this, we can use evaluate on domain, which means that it gives us index of part which we select here. Instead of point, we want spline, and now this socket gives us index of each spline. Now, finally, it's working correctly. You can see that each curve has only one type of leaf, and that's exactly what we wanted. We can also plug our sat from our group input to this random value. Let's do that. We also need to set a randomized scale to these leaves and also rotate them randomly around the curve, so they are not pointing a hole in one direction. Let's first fix the rotation. First, we will need to align these leaves to the direction of stem and then rotate them around z axis. We'll align them the same way as we did before. We'll use curve tangent and align oil vector. We'll be aligning z axes and we want to align to tangent, we'll plug tangent to vector and now rotation to rotation. Now the leaves are correctly aligned, and to rotate them around z axes. There are a few ways to do this, but I'll use rotate instances after instancing on points because this node gives us instances, with this rotate instances, we can use this local space, which if the leaf like this. If we rotate this somehow, it still has the original local space, which is this down here. If we rotate this now around z axis, you can see that it's basically rotating around the state. We can just randomize this value. We will only be using the z axis, but we can also rotate the other axes a little bit. Let's add random value. And instead of float, we will be generating random vector. Let's switch this to vector, and we can the z, xs will be 0-2 Pi, and the x and y can be something like from minus Pi over 62 Pi over six. Which is something like 30 degrees. Now we can pug this value into rotation and you can see that leaves are now randomly rotated. We can also again use the seed. I will use the seed from random value and plug it into this as well. Last thing we will be controlling the scale. Again, we will add a new two inputs, scale and scale randomness. Se default scale to one and penuum to zero, and create also randomness, which will have deft zero, and penum also zero. Now we can just plug these two values which appear here to randomize node group. We'll add another randomized node group, plug it into these sockets, also ST, and for the ID, we can use index just like before, and the output will be scale. Now if we reset these values, you can see that we can control the scale of our leaves and also randomness. Now we can finally combine all of these parts together. I'll plug these instances to this joint geometry. And output all of this. Now you can see that we have nice flowers here with leaves on their stems and is looking really nice. We can also frame this part. I'll select all of these nodes, hit control, to leaves, and I'll move it up here. We can also use three outs to make this a nicer. 11. Controlling Flower Density with Weight Painting: Welcome back to Blender Geometris for Beginners Fully Scatter course. In this lesson, we will finish our fully scatter setup by adding weight paint support for scattering our objects. First thing we need to actually do is to add a weight paint to our object on which we are using our scatter setup. So we need to go to this panel, and we will add a new vertex group. I can call it, for example, WP as a weight paint, and now we need to go from object mode to weight paint. We will have our vertex group here selected at the top, and now we can paint over our object. As you can see, I can't see anything, and that's because I have my geometrial modifier applied, and if I hide it with this icon, you can see that I can now see where I'm painting with my weight paint. I'll paint something here at the top and maybe I'll just set strength to 0.5 and paint it here at the front. And I think we are good to go for now. I'll switch back to my object mode and enable my game to set up. When using weight paint, it's actually pretty simple to do this. We'll just add a new float input. Instead of using one of these constants, you can actually just select this input attribute, and here we can select our weight paint. We won't be doing this in our density, but we will add a new float input for each grass and stems and then use our weight paint to control the density. Let's go to our goeral setup and first, we will work on our grass part. I'll go here to the grass, and you can see that we are controlling density with just this density input. What we'll do is we will add a new parameter, which we will then multiply by density and plug it into the density of my distribute points. Let's add a new input and call it weight paint. We'll just multiply these two sockets together. Let's add multiply. And connect output of this multiplication to the density. Now you can see that there is no grass and that's because the weight paint is by defol zero, and if I increase it to one, you can see that the grass appears again. If we now switch this input type to input attribute with this little button here and select our weight paint, you can now see that our grass is only at the parts where we draw our weight paint, and if I go to weight paint mode, I can actually draw more grass here. The problem is that the distribution is also controlled by this x angle. If we actually sit it to 180 degrees, it's not controlled anymore because if this is on 180 degrees, it's distributed everywhere, and now we can actually draw our grass with left most button like this. You can also delete it b by holding control and left Most button drug as you would draw something. As you can see, it's pretty simple to eight weight paint support, and now we will also add weight paint for our stems or flowers basically. For that, we can use a different weight paint or we can use the same weight paint. I will create a new weight paint. Let's go to Data and create new t group, and alk it WP underscore flowers, for example. And I'll do the same thing. I'll go to geometerls, add a new input. But instead of in grass panel, I'll add it in Stems panel. I'll call it weight paint. Now I'll go here where I generate my stem curves and multiply density by this weight paint. Now you can see that again, my flowers disappeared and that's because the weight paint is by default zero. Also one thing, if you don't want to use weight paint, you can just select this one and set it to one and it will work just like before so you can control it with Mx angle. And do it like this. Now for the stems, I'll switch weight paint to weight paint flowers, which now doesn't have any data, but we can add it. You can see that if I draw something here, and I can increase density. It will look a little better. Also the max angle is where it's actually also controlling, so I can set it to 180 degrees. Now if I draw here, we can see that it made this flower on the nose of the monkey. Let's say I only want to generate this on top a little bit. I'll add it here. Now we can also control the density at these parts and I'll say I want a little bit of them here at the bottom. And I think it's looking pretty nice. I can go back to object mode, and maybe increase density of my grass. Yeah. This is all for now for the fully scattered setup. But we'll be adding one more thing, which is weight paint material with which you can paint on your object and finalize your scene with beautiful material on top of your object. 12. Special Materials for Terrain and Texture Painting: Welcome back. Let's continue with blender Geometri roles for beginners, fully scaled course. In this lesson, we will look into how to use the setup on a different mesh, and you will also get a free special material which will make your scenes even better. First of all, let's create a new mesh on which we will test our setup, so I'll hide my monkey and add a new plane and create some kind of terrain. Here I have my new t rain and we can add our set up by clicking at modifier, selecting Geomet nodes, and here in Dropdown, we can select our Mato. Now you can see that a few of the things are missing here. First, we will set collection of our flower tops to our collection, which is flowers, and also leaves are our leaves collection. Now you can also see that the weight paint inputs are set to zero, so we need to reset these 21, and we might fix these default values in our ema setup. Let's get into mage noes, and I'll just quickly fix these inputs. Now you can see that our set up blocks a little. I say that because scales are set to some higher values. Let's set these to some smaller values. Something like this, and also material of our stems isn't here, I'll apply it. That's our stem material, and you can see that our meto looks pretty good. We can also test our weight paint controls, I'll add a new weight paint by going to weight paint mode and we can add a new vertex group here and n it, for example, weight paint. Now if I d here, I can see it now, but if I hide the modifier, you can see the weight paint. Now if I use this wave paint instead of one here. I'll just click this icon and switch this to wave paint and same thing for the staans. Now you can see that I can draw my meto on top of my mesh. Now let's look into the material which you'll get for free with this course. To add this material to your scene, you simply go to the file, which you'll get with this course by clicking the file and then selecting your file. Then you need to go to a material folder and select your ground mat, which is our material. Now we can apply this material to this mesh. Let's click our mesh, and I'll go to Material tab, and here I'll select my ground Mt. You can see that from the start the ground has this kind of stone texture, but you can actually change this by using great paint. If you switch from object mode to vertex paint, you can actually paint three different materials on this mesh by using red green and blue colors here at the top. If I draw with red color, you can see that I have this d ground which can be used here on the sides. If I select green color, there's this default ground material which you can use under your grass. For that, it's better to increase the density of the grass, so I'll increase it to fury, for example. The third part, which is here is by using this blue color, and that's our stone texture, which you can use, for example, like this. Of course, you can mix between these three textures by using different shades of these colors. For example, if I choose this purple, which is between red and blue, it will be something my stone texture and ground. You can play around with these free textures, and it's always better to do this menu because it will always look a little better than using just some noise or randomized textures. If I, for example, switch this plane to sphere, I'll grease it a little bit in scale, and I'll also set a vein paint, I'll draw some flowers here on top. Now if I go to my vertex paint, I can actually paint again, my texture, so I'll switch to blue, which is my stone and I can draw it down here. Now, I'll switch to darker shade of dirt, which is red and I can paint it here in the middle. Also it's great to play around with the strength. You can do a transitions between those textures. I'll set strength to 0.5, and now I can paint over the stones and nice transitions. We are at the end of this course and now you should have a solid understanding of Blenders geo materials and how to use them to create dynamic foliage setups from scattering grass to adding reals, the flower tops and leaves. We now know how to control vari foliage appears, introduce natural variations, and enhance your scenes using the provided assets and materials. Armed with these skills, you'll be ready to create vibrant lifelike environments that bring your free D projects to life. Umbra from Free Der and I want to thank you for joining the Fog scatter course. We hope you enjoyed the journey and found it both educational and inspiring.