Transcripts
1. 1) Intro: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the class. My name is Yesh. In this class, we'll
go over creating a cartoon style
asteroid generator in blender using geometry nodes. This class is meant to be suitable for both people who are complete beginners
to geometry nodes as well as for advanced artists. In the first lecture,
we'll go over some of the basic of geometry nodes
in a very simple way. In the next lecture, we'll
create a simple node setup for a asteroid generator and also add a material and
render it out. After completing the course, make sure to share your project in the project section below. That way, both I and other students can
review your project, take inspiration, and
provide feedback. So what are you waiting
for? Let's begin.
2. 2 ) Basics of Geometry nodes: Hello, everyone, and
welcome to the course. In this video, I wanted
to give you guys a brief introduction to
geometry notes in blender. So first of all, what
are geometry notes? Now, whenever you do
anything in blender, you guys know that you have
to do everything manually. So let's say I want to extrude every single
pace of this cube. I have to go in to edit more. Make sure that the
face section is all. Press A to select everything, and then press all E and
extrude individual faces, and then I can drag to extrude. And once I've done this
and once I finalized this, there is no way to change how much I want the
faces to be exploded. Like Let's say I
want to decrease, how much the faces are exploded, I have to do them individually. I cannot just let's say press S and scale
everything down, right? So to do the same thing
in geometry notes, what you do is basically we apply a modifier to the queue, and then we give lender
a set of instructions to follow and generate
the geometry for us. So let's say I move this
outside of the view. And now I'm going to add another cue to do the same thing we did right
here in geometry notes, first of all, open
up a split view. And turn on Geometry nodes
tor and put this away. Now with the cube selected, I'm going to a new, and as you can notice, in the modifier stamp, a geometry nodes modifier
has been added to the cube. Inside the geometry
notes set up, you will see two notes, namely the group input
and the group output. The group input is the mesh that we applied the
geometry notes modifier to. This cube is going to be
passed as the group input, and the group output is the final output that
we see on the screen. Let's say I control and right click drag and cut
the connection away. You can see that
the cube disappears because we are not adding
anything to the screen. Now let's say I
search for UV sphere, place it here, and
then connect it here. Now, as you can notice, even though we used a
Que as a group input, we are still getting
a UV sphere because that is what we are
outputting to the screen. Let me just undo all of
that real quick. All right. Now to replicate this
extrusion in geometry nodes, all we have to do is between the group input and
the group output, press shift and search
for extrude mesh. Now, whenever you take a node and hover it over
to other nodes, as you can see that
the connection between them turns white. Now, if I click, this note is going to be dropped
in between them. And we already have a
bit of an extrusion. At any point in time, I can change the offset
of the extrusion and change how much the
faces are extruded. I can also choose to extrude the vertices or the edges
just from this dropdown. But I'm just going
to keep it at faces. Now, let me just hide it.
Let's do another thing. I'm going to add a curve, a Bezier curve and scale it up. Now, let's say I
want to distribute instances of the
cube on the curve. First of all, I can just drag the curve into the
geometry node setup, and make sure to
turn on relative. Otherwise, the original shape of the curve will be
taken into account. Let's say you go into edit mode and you edit out any part of the curve that edit will not show up in the
geometry nodes. Anyway, coming back to the cube, first thing we want to do is we want to plot points
on the curve. Take this ory of the
curve, pull it out, and then release the mouse, and now search for
curve two points. We see nothing right here, but if we plug the points
into the group output, we will see a bunch of points that have been
plotted on the curve. These are not actual geometry. So if you render the scene out, we will not see these points. But what we can do is we can use these points to place actual
mesh instances on them. So presi such for
instances on points, and drop it in between
these two lots. Now, what we are doing
right here is we are taking the points and plugging it
into the instance points. And we also have this
instance road which I can connect to
the extrude mesh. And now we are taking all the generated instances
and outputting them. And as you can
see, the instances have been created on the curve. I can also change the account of how many instances I won. And another thing I can do is come over to edit
d for the curve. And then take a pencil tool
and then draw anything, and a bunch of cubes will be instanced automatically
on the curves. And now I can just change the count and everything
updates accordingly. That's for this video. I hope this will help you gain a clear understanding
of geometry nodes. In the next video,
we'll start actually making a meteorite
model. See you.
3. 3) Making Our Model, Texturing And Rendering: Hello, everyone.
In this lecture, we are going to actually start making our asteroid notes edu. Starting off, I'm going to split the window and turn on
Geometry notes Editor. Put this away and click on new. Now, right here, what
I want to do is first of p extrude everything like
we did in the last video. And now we want to take the extruded pass
and scale them down. T do that, I'm going to
press shift and search for scale elements and rub that in. Now as you can see if
I decrease the scale, everything is going to
be scaled down equally. But we do not want that. We only want the faces that we extruded to be scaled down. First of all, as
you can see here, we have the top node right here. This is the node that outputs every single
phase that was scaled. If I take this and plug it into the selection,
as you can see, only the phase that we
extruded is scaling down, and everything else is
staying the way it was. I can also decrease the offset. And now we want to
repeat an extrusion, so I'm just going to shift
D and drop it in here. But this time, we actually
want a negative offset. For the selection,
we are going to again take this stop
pace right here. And then we can scale
it down negatively. Again, I'm going to
take the set scale lo. Luck the top in here
because we only want to scale those
spaces, and y. This looks great. The last thing we have to do right here is pre sift and search for subdivision surface
and drop it in. Now I can increase the level of subdivisions
to something like three. Right now it doesn't
look like anything good. But let's say I in this queue and instead
take an cho sphere. And decrease the amount
of subdivisions. And here I use my
geometry nodes modifier. This is looking kind of pole. All I have to do is
decrease the offset. Now, as you can see, the holes still look a little
bit triangular. And to fix that, what
we can actually do is we can and search
for dual mesh. What it will do is it will turn the triangles of the
hypersphere into hexagons. To understand better
what it's doing, I can take this out,
and as you can see, we are getting more geometry
than we had in the cospere. And then we can
increase the offset. And the last thing
I want to do is press shift and
set shade smooth. Drop it in. So everything
is looking nice and smooth. And now, by the way, I
can make this module, I can give the user ways
to just the parameters of this asteroid right
within the modifier instead of having to come
over to the geometry nodes. So first of all, let's
start with the scale. So I'm going to s
for scale elements. And then I can rag
the scale right here since we are not taking
any kind of select shell, when we change the scale, the entire thing is going
to scale up and down. So as you can see,
in the modifier, we have the scale
input right here, and we can scale
everything up and down. Actually, let me take
this out of here, and I'm going to plug
it in at last and now plug the scale in to this. Yeah I think this is a
really nice control handle. The next thing we
want to do is let the user decide how much the initial
extlion is going to be. So drag this into this
empty node right here, and now I can change
the erste scale. And I can also give the
scale elements right here. And then I can give the other ex and the
other scale of shells. Last of all, I can give
the level of subdivision. Right here, I can modify how
much the cube is subdivided. I can basically give any
kind of control that I want. Let's say I want a
more acute curve. I can increase the
scale from right here. I can change the
scale of the sphere, and all the parameters can be adjusted right from over here. So I'm just going to take
a look at what looks good. I think this looks pretty nice. I actually decrease
the scale right here. And now finally over
to the texturing part. So the texturing part is
actually really simple, I can come over to
the Shader alta and also turn on cyc
rendering for this. And now I'm going to add a new material and set the
color to something I like. However, this is not
going to work now because we actually have
to set the material. So let's search for set material right here and plug it in, and I'm going to allow the
user to pick the material. So I will plug it in right here. And now in the modifiers, I can pick the material I want. I'm actually going
to switch from principle SDF to To BSDF. And set the material color
to something like purple. Now I'm going to
increase the size. Here in the shade, I can add some more cool things. Let's say I turn on
mixed shade, Lug it in. Make sure this is
the second option, and now I can add
ambient occlusion. And the areas close to each
other, have some coloring. With the ambient occlusion, let's say an m. Set the avion to something like this and increase the strength. And also I can play
with the distance. That way we have some sort of glow coming out from the
holes of this asteroid. I think it looks pretty
nice. That's it. I really hope you enjoyed
and learned something new. See you in the next one.
Yash Kejriwal
