Geometry Nodes for Beginners (Blender 5.0)

1. Intro: In this class, you're going to learn Geometry Nodes in a completely different way, not by memorizing node setups, but by understanding how the system actually works at a fundamental level. My name is Ken, and I'm a web designer, three D artist, and content creator. I've been using Blender for about four years now, and I've been constantly leveling up my skills and sharing everything I learn through courses like this one. And today, I'm going to prove to you that Geometry Nodes isn't as complicated as it looks. It looks daunting at first, but it's actually built on a few core patterns that repeat everywhere. And once you see those patterns, everything just clicks. And to make it fun, we're going to learn through a simple mental framework, the Spaceship Docking metaphor will create a mothership install docking ports on it, dock smaller ships, deploy the smaller ships, and build armies of sentinels to ride those ships. And by doing that, you'll naturally understand points, instances, alignment, and many of the concepts that make geometry nodes so powerful. We'll be working in Blender 5.0 O, so you're learning the newest Geometry node system yet. And by the end of this class, you won't just know which nodes to use, but you understand why behind them. You start thinking procedurally, and you'll even be able to read and understand other people's Geometry node setups. Now, for your class project, you're going to build your own procedural fleet and an army of sentinels or something completely your own if you want to put your creativity to the test. So now, are you ready to finally understand how Geometry Nodes works? If you are, let's go. 2. Download Blender 5: Welcome back. So now, here we are on the official website where you can download Blender. This blender.org, and as you can see, the current version is Blender 5.0 Beta. Now, if you want a stable version, you can go ahead and click Download. And here you will find the stable version, which is 4.5. Click Download Blender 5.0. Go here. You will find all architectures, choose whatever architecture you're using. I am on Windows 11, so I'm going with this. So once you do that, I'll see you in the next lesson where we will have a quick overview of the geometry nodes workspace. See you shortly. 3. Geometry Nodes Overview: Welcome back. So now here we are inside Blender 5.0 O. I hope you've installed yours, and even if you haven't, let's go on. Now, I want to add a cube, so Shift A, then cube. And I want to show you what a geometry node is essentially. Now, this is a geometrical shape. And in Blender, if we want to manipulate this geometrical shape, we manipulate the data defining it. The different edges, let me switch to Edit mode, Edit. These vertices if I switch to edge mode, these edges and if I switch to face mode, the faces, if I want to manipulate these faces, edges and vertices, there are two ways to do that, at least that I know of destructive methods and nondestructive methods. If I exit Edit mode for a second by hitting tab, now we're in object mode, if I want to add bevels to this cube as an example, I want to make the corners or edges smooth, the destructive way to do it is select it, go to Edit Mode. And then switch to edge mode, select all edges, or I'll just hit A to select everything, Control B, and add a bevel. Now, that's just pulling outwards. If I scroll the mouse wheel upwards, I'll be able to add more segments to make the bevel smoother. And I can do that as much as I want right now. But once I finish that, there is no way for me to increase or decrease the number of segments here to make it smoother or blocky at will. I have to control Z to undo that in order to be able to control B and maybe now set a new number of bevels. That's destructive. It's causing distraction to the underlying geometry that the cube had. And once we commit the change, there is no way to edit the changes. There is no way to edit this bevel. So that's the destructive way of doing it. If I undo that Control Z, the non destructive way to add bevels to your geometrical shapes or your geometry is to go to modifiers, add and then go to generate bevel. We can edit the size of the bevel like that and also increase the number of segments. Just like we did with the destructive method. But now, if I exit by going to object mode and clicking aside and doing some other things, we still have our bevel modifier here, and I can come here and increase the size of the bevel. I can also increase or decrease the number of segments to edit the fineness or smoothness of the bevel. So modifiers allow you to modify your geometry or your geometrical shapes without taking away your ability to come back and edit the geometry later because you can always come back here and edit it. Now, with all this said and done, I want to undo all that just so we're left with a key, just so we're left with a cube. And now, now that you know we have modifiers as a way to edit geometry, Geometry Nodes is listed under modifiers, which means geometry nodes is also a modifier, a way to play around with this underlying geometry that forms the cube and make the cube deform or move around or scale up and behave in interesting ways. So that's what Geometry nodes is a modifier that allows us to do a lot with the geometry. But now Geometry Nodes is a whole entire system that's very complex, and therefore, this space is not enough to allow us to work with geometry nodes, the way we're able to work with very simple modifiers like the bevel modifier. That's why we have a dedicated space called Geometry Nodes. If we want to work with geometry nodes, this is where we're going to work with them. Now, remember, we've added a geometry node here. Let's see. What modifier have we added a bevel modifier. Let's remove that modifier. Now here, what we have is the three D view port. We have a spreadsheet showing us the underlying data of this geometry in tabulated format. What you're seeing here is represented here by these columns and rows. I'm already preparing a class on how to use this spreadsheet, so we're not going to touch on it right now, but just know we're going to revisit it later in the future. Are the two viewports we're going to use in this class. Let me remind you once again, when we want to manipulate the geometry in our three D viewport, we can do it destructively or non destructively. And we've concluded that geometry nodes are one type of a modifier. So let's select our cube, and now let's add geometry nodes. Now we've added geometry nodes, but there is nothing happening. Why? We've only just added the geometry node modifier to the cube to enable us to now do stuff with nodes in here, connect several nodes here to affect the geometry. Those are called node groups because there are several nodes that you interconnect in order to affect the geometry. And so here, when you hove over this, you will create a new geometry node group, a group of nodes. So if we click this, notice what happens here. We have a group input and group output, and the Geometry nodes group is set up here. I can give it a name. My cube node group. All right. Of course, if you've ever seen any node system anywhere, you know, now in between these two nodes, we add our other nodes here and change what we see here. Now, what we're seeing here in the three D view port is the result of this group output. If we cut the output, we stop seeing anything, but that doesn't mean the cube is deleted because as you can see in the time in the outline, the cube is still there. It's just that the data is not getting to us. In the group output because it's like disconnecting a cable, literally. Power isn't getting this. But once it gets there, the data is able to get to the group output and tell us, Oh, here's the data to show the cube. Now, another thing I should mention is if I delete this node group, a and remove this modifier. We still have our cube. A quick way to add the modifier and the node group directly instead of adding the geometry nodes, and then clicking this plus is to simply select the geometry we want to apply the geometry node to and then click this plus. That adds a node group, and of course, it places it inside Geometry Nodes modifier automatically. So this is just a quick overview of the geometry nodes, workspace, and the things you need to know as we get started. But more stuff you're going to learn as we get deeper into all these other nodes. So I hope now you're ready and excited to get started because in the next lesson, we're now ready to build a mothership. Let's see how to add a mothership using Geometry Nodes down here. I'll see you shortly. 4. Create a Mothership: Now, here we are inside Blender. Now, I want to go straight to the geometry node setup. And in this lesson, our goal is to see how to add or create our mothership. And, of course, a mothership is basically one large object. Of course, we don't want to complicate things right now. We can just use a simple cube. As the shape that represents our ship. So let's go ahead and add a cube, Shift A in the three D view port, Shift A, mesh, cube. And if I add a cube, notice what will happen down here. So mesh, cube. Now, because we have geometry in our three D view port and because the geometry is currently selected, we can add Geometry Nodes setup to it or Geometry Nodes modifier because nodice here, it's a modifier. So if I click this we've added Geometry Nodes modifier to this cube, specifically this cube. If I delete the cube, I've deleted it including its modifiers. Geometry Nodes was the only modifier it had. So let me just undo that. And now, essentially, we have our mothership, but we want our mothership to be longer along the Y axis. So how do you resize any geometry you have in the three D port? You use a node called the Transform Geometry. Shift A, let me just say Transform, and it will be the first option here. Enter Transform geometry. If I drop it above that green line cable, it'll turn white and I can just it'll just automatically attach. Now we have three vectors here. Translation, this is to move it along the X, Y, and Z axis and do all that. We can rotate it along the three axis as well and do that. And now what we want is to scale it along the y axis, so scale it along the y axis. Let me just leave it right there. Let me just type in three. Now, this cube might be very simple, but of course, it's for illustration purposes, and what it represents is the mother ship, the object onto which many other objects are going to be attached, the smaller ships or shuttles. And so we add it as a geometry and send that geometry through a Transform Geometry Node to allow us to scale it move it around and rotate it within the three D viewport. So that gives us control. The goal here is not to be very perfect. The goal is to help you develop that mindset of, what am I adding? I'm adding an object onto which I want to attach a cluster of many smaller things. That's how you should start thinking about this. And that object should be able to move around, rotate, and I should be able to scale it. How do I do that? A good node to do that is the Transform geometry, which allows you to translate, rotate, and scale the object. In the next lesson, let's see how to start docking the smaller ships onto the mother ship or whatever you want to do with this concept. I'll see you shortly. 5. Install Docking Ports: A, welcome back. Now, in the previous lesson, I concluded by mentioning, we're going to look at how to dock ships onto the mother ship. But before we dock the ships onto the mother ship, we need docking ports, places for the ships to attach to on the mother ship. So we need to create attachment points on the mother ship. If I hit Shift A, the points. You see point, these points are what I like to think of as docking ports or attachment points. Now we want to place several points all over the mothership because those are our docking ports. So if we go to point, Distribute point on faces because this geometry has faces. Let's select Distribute points on faces. What we're essentially saying is, let's place several docking ports on this mothership on the geometry that's here. And that's why it's shaped like our mothership. But now there's a problem because we've lost all the faces of the cube. So what happened? Now, this introduces us to another metaphor I like to use for geometry nodes, which is parallel universes or parallel timelines. Originally, if I cut this and connect this directly there, we made a decision here, and this is the future. This is a timeline. If I remove that, instead of that decision of connecting directly there, I decided, let's first of all, transform the cube. And then let's put it directly. Let's transform the cube, make it longer in X in the Y axis, Y axis, and show it. So that's why we saw this future. Then now we only have one timeline. Currently, we only have one timeline for this group input, and this is the only timeline. We introduce these distribute points on faces. It's still the same timeline, but we're introducing more decisions as we move along. So we made a decision here to transform stuff. Then we made a decision to distribute points on the faces of the geometry that's right here. But once we have the points, as you can see right here, the node says points, not geometry, points. So what we see in the future is the points, the docking ports, and where we've placed them. If we want to see the cube as well, we want to combine the timeline that showed the cube. And this timeline that's showing where on the cube these dock in ports are. So we need a way to combine these two so that we show them. But if we try to put them together there, the group output can only accept one input. So we have something called Shift A, Join Geometry. Or if I click away, Shift A, if you go to Geometry, Join Geometry. So if I add this node, and place it here. This is still one timeline here, but now we can introduce this other timeline that had the cube and combine it with this other timeline. And now we have the cube and the different ports we want to place on it. But now, remember, because these are two different timelines on this timeline, the cube is still the original size right here, we transformed this timeline to make it longer along the Y axis. We made it three units in the Y axis. But right here, the cube is not transformed. This timeline doesn't know about what you did in these other parts. It will only get to know that when it gets here. So what we want to do is select this shift D to duplicate it and put it in between here. Now because we've just duplicated this and the value the value was already three here, it's still three and because we've put it here, now this expansion has happened to the Y axis of the underlying cube. Now, in this timeline, the only thing we can see is we have a geometry, a cube. That cube is expanded in the Y axis, control, and lik. And on this other timeline right here, what we're saying is we have the cube geometry, and then we transform that geometry. And before we get to distribute points on its faces, let me just cut that control, right click. And now, first of all, let me cut this line as well because I want us to talk about this timeline quickly. So on this timeline, what's happening is we have the geometry of the cube, and we say we want to resize the cube. So if I zoom out slightly, the same that's going to produce the same result right here in these two timeline. So if I hold down Control Shift and click. We're going to attach a viewer node to this Transform Geometry Node. And what the viewer node does is it's a window into what the current node can see. So what we are seeing right now up here in the three D view port through the viewer Node is what this transform geometry has been able to process. So if I control shift click this one as well. Now what we can see is the result of this node. So the transform is identical. Now, let me delete that viewer node. Now, where the change comes is we make another decision to just go directly to display the cube, and that's it. That timeline is done. But now if I cut that, we introduce another decision here to place to distribute docking ports or points on the faces of that cube. So what we've done here, if I add a viewer node, Control Shift and click, we are seeing what this node has processed, exactly where the points are going to be placed, and it shows the points placed there. So removing that viewer node, when we connect it here, now that's why we see only the points. Combining these two timelines once again is why we are able to now see the two of them. I know I've done a lot of repetition there, but I wanted to drive this home because we're going to do much more of this going forward. And this is something you're going to repeat a lot of the time when you're working with geometry nodes, distributing points on faces. And so I wanted you to understand about timeline thinking and parallel universes existing together. And being able to combine the parallel universes at some point in the future to see what both of them produced. So now, I think this is the end of this lesson. It's longer than I expected it to be, but the rest are not going to be as long as this because that was one of the most important mindsets I wanted you to have as we move forward. So in the next lesson, let's dock the fleet onto these docking ports because each docking port needs a spaceship, a small spaceship. See you shortly. 6. Dock the Fleet: Now we have our mothership and the docking ports we want to place the smaller ships onto. So it's time to attach those ships. Remember, the docking ports are the points. We distributed points on the faces of the mother ship or of the cube. So we distributed points on faces Points. Points are ports. Let me hit Shift A. Shift A. If the points are the docking ports, then the instances are our ships, the small ships we want to attach to the docking ports. So points exist to allow you to attach instances onto. So examples of instances in another scenario, apart from the Spaceship scenario is you want to plant trees on land. You've modeled a piece of land inside Blender and you want to plant trees on that land. Each tree will need to be planted inside a hole. So you distribute holes on that land, Distribute points on faces, distribute the holes on that land. And then on inside each of those holes, you want to plant trees. Each tree is the instance. In our example here, each ship is our instance and each point is our port. Now, are just more analogies to help you grasp this better. So if I grab these two, let's say Shift A, if you go to the instances menu, it has many options here that you will get to use later. But we have this one here that says Instance on Points, we attach it here. This Instance on Points Node basically just means place instances on the points you distributed, but we've not told it what instance to distribute, what shape should be distributed. It could be a shoe. It could be a remote control. It could be a spaceship. What do we want to place there? It could be a cube, it could be a UVsphere. So that's why we have this instance Geometry that is instanced on the points. So we want to say on each point, distribute this particular geometry. So let's pull that out and type cube. We're going to generate a cube natively here. And I'm just going to click here. Now we have a cube node. And as you can see, it's huge. If I click away here, they are huge. I'm going to click in here and drag downwards to select the three input fields. Then hold down shift to reduce the size gradually, maybe up to that point. I think I like that size 19. Let me hold down let me switch it to 0.20. All right. So as you can see, now we're saying Instance place instances on all the points we distributed on the faces of the ship. And what should those instances look like? We tell the instance on points now that we want them to be cubes. We can delete this with X and say shift A, maybe U V sphere. If I attach the UV sphere there, now it's going to be UV spheres like we did before. Let me just reduce the radius, holding down shift to move in smaller increments. Now we have UV spheres. If I move closer. So as you can see, we can distribute different types of things. All right. So that's how to attach ships onto the mother ship. Let me see what we have next in our lesson. One thing you will notice here is some of the ships are overlapping. This cannot happen in the real physical world. Two ships cannot exist in the same space in the world. So right here in the distribute point on faces, that's where we can make the changes because the problem is where the docking ports are placed or distributed. Some docking ports, if I go here and control shift click to bring up the viewer node, Remember, we're viewing what this node can see, and what it can see are the points it distributed. And some of the points are together like these, too. They're together. So we need to change this from random to poison disc and we need to increase this distance minimum. And what this does is it tells the Distribute Points on Faces Node. Let's increase the minimum personal space of every docking port. Every docking port should have some personal space. And as we increase the personal space, of course, that means less docking ports can be accommodated on the mothership. The more we increase the personal space of each docking port, the less the mothership can accommodate. Now, density here means just the number of docking ports or points. But now the number we wanted to play around with is this to make sure every docking port has some personal space. So now, if I now delete that, as you can see, I don't think we have any overlapping spaceship anymore. Yep. There we go. So let me just drag that up. Is there anything else? I think we covered just about everything we wanted, but one more thing I think I should cover. Remember, I've mentioned we're using this UV sphere here, but we can also attach different other shapes. So if I hit Shift A right here in the three D view port, Shift A, I can add a mesh and say, let's say icosphere and it's in here. So G, X to move it in the X, put it right there. Let me shift A to add something else, maybe a cylinder, GX, those two for now. Now, with those two, I'm going to select our original cue once again to bring back our geometry node, and I forgot to click this to keep this geometry node permanently there regardless of where I click. Now, because we have these two new items or these two new objects, the icosphere and the cylinder, one way to add geometry inside the geometry nodes area is through the native mesh, Shift A, mesh, primitives, cylinder. Or if we've already generated a cylinder manually here like we've done here because we have a cylinder here, we can drag and drop it in here, and it will be brought in as an object info node, but they're both cylinders. It's just that this one is representing this one we generated manually. And this one here is a native cylinder within geometry nodes, but they're both cylinders, and you can use any. So I want to remove that and attach the geometry itself right there. And now we have the cylinders. And now you will notice, let me just delete this. You will notice it's too big and there is no way to resize it like we had with the native geometry nodes. So here we can add a transform geometry. So I'll select this shift D and put it right there. And, of course, we don't want it to stretch in the three, so one like the rest. And I want to select the three of them, hold down shift, and scale downwards. That's another way to add spaceships. Now, what I wanted to show before we finish this lesson is notice here that every ship is facing upwards. Everything is facing in the same direction. So how do we tell every ship to face the right direction based on the face it's attached to? Do that by looking at the Distribute Points on Faces Node here, it has a rotation filled socket. And we also have a rotation here on the instance on points. We distributed points on faces or we distributed ports on faces. And when those ports were distributed on the different faces, they were distributed facing in the correct directions. But the Instance on Points Node is not aware of what direction the ports are facing. So we need to pass that information to it from the ports that it's attaching to. We need to tell each instance to rotate in the angle of the port it's attached to. At this point, the ports that are distributed already know how they are facing, what direction they are facing. But here, the instances don't know what direction the ports are facing. So we make it aware of that information by connecting the two rotations here. So that's how to do that. So with that, I think this is a good spot to end this. In the next lesson, let's see how to lift off because right now our ships are attached. But what if we want them to lift off from the mother ship? Or what if we want them to not be sunken deep into the ship? Like, this is not correct. Docked ships don't go deep into the ship like that. They should be on the surface. How do we do that? Let's see how to do that in the next lesson. See you shortly. 7. Fleet Maneuvers: Now it's time to see how to maneuver our small ships. Now, first of all, I think we have too many ships. So if we want to reduce the number of ships, we reduce the density here or increase the distance mean. Let's say that's the number of ship we want. So to be able to move them outward from the attachment space, we can move the ships themselves, or yeah, let's move the ship outwards. And as you can see, because we already set the direction right here, it knows exactly what direction to head in. The ships are now levitating outside the mother ship. Of course, rotation will also happen at a local space. So if we rotate them like this, if I zoom in on any of them and rotate in the Z axis, if we rotate in the Y axis, they're going to rotate in that direction and X. So the direction we want is the Z axis. If we want to scale them outwards, maybe make them longer. Once again, the Z axis. So maybe they are very long shuttles, and let's move them outwards. There we go. So that's how to maneuver your fleet. You can translate them. You can rotate and scale them. In other words, if you have trees planted inside holes, you can translate your trees. You can rotate them or scale them inside the holes they are planted in. This is just one example. So in the next lesson, let's see how to add cargo containers onto the spaceships, the small ships. Imagine we wanted each one of them to have some cargo containers. How can we add cargo containers to them? Let's see how to do that shortly. 8. Add Cargo Containers: Time to attach some containers onto the ships that are docked onto the mother ship. How do we do that? First of all, I want to do some tidying up of our space right here. I want to select these nodes, zooming out. Let me just select these and place them there. Now, remember, to attach these ships onto the mother ship, we distributed points onto the mother ship. Now what we want to do is distribute points onto the smaller ships in order to attach things onto them. Anytime you want to attach something like a cargo container onto a surface, it has to attach to a point. So let's distribute some points on the ships, the small ships. And which are the ships Remember, the cylinder here because each cylinder is an instance. So we want to select the cylinders and add or distribute points or docking ports onto them. So we can duplicate this shift D, and I'm going to place it right there, and now it's attached. And the moment we've attached it, the settings we had here are also the same settings here. So let me just reduce this number drastically, maybe to very few containers. Al right now you will notice some docking ports on each ship are too close to each other, so we can increase the distance mean like that. Maybe let's just leave two per ship. And now remember now we're facing the same problem we had here. Remember the timeline problem. We had this timeline here that we joined to this other timeline that was showing the docking ports. And now down here, we also need two timelines, one timeline to show where the cargo containers are going to show up and one timeline to show the ship, the small ships. So down here, how do we do that? First of all, before we go far, let's look at this as a timeline. First of all, let's know why we need to keep this transform geometry right here. This transform geometry right here is if I remove, let me mute this. Let me select this and hit to mute it. Now it's as if we only have this going directly here. So we are creating cylinders as ships. Each cylinder here is a spaceship here. And to position the ship and be able to manipulate and maneuver it, we're using this transform geometry. And it's attached to the instance because at the end of the day, everything we're sending from here, we're sending into this future to define what every instance should have. So what we're doing is going back in time, first of all, to create the containers, attach them in the right place, and then send them to this transformed geometry because this transformed geometry is what determines the position and rotation of the ships. And so everything we do should come before this transformed geometry and then go in there. So selecting these two, we've already defined let me hit. Now we've already defined exactly where each docking container is going to be attached. Now, before we attach any cargo containers onto the distributed docking ports or points, let's first of all, make sure we send this other timeline that defines the cylinder into the future. Because remember, if I attach this here, those are just the ships. But we also need to send the positions of the docking ports. How do we do that? I know you probably guessed it, but we need a join geometry like we needed up here. So down here, we come up with a shift A, join geometry, put it right here, and then let's send the ships themselves into the future. Now, we have two timelines giving us both results, a timeline showing us the ships and a timeline showing us where the cargo containers are going to be attached. But now, when we distribute points on a face, we're distributing them to attach something onto them. In this case, what cargo containers. So let's attach them as instances as usual. They're going to be instances, but now they've disappeared because we haven't told them what each cargo container should look like. Remember, we have this instance here to say the cargo containers look like a cube. So now, we've attached cube like cargo containers onto each ship. Now, we can reduce the size if I select these three and hold down ship to reduce like that. And let's do some arrangement here. I think we're in a good spot. And remember, what if we want to push out to push these containers outwards, these cargo containers outwards? The same way we were able to push our ships outwards and rotate them based on the faces they're attached to because they were instances. We can do that. Remember, we used the rotation of the points of the mother ship to tell the instances, the ships what direction to face. So we can come here and say, let's use the rotation information from the attachment points of the cargo containers and send that information to each cargo container to tell it how to rotate. And now they're rotated. Now, with that, if I come here and add a trans remember, in order to move the ships in and out, we were using this transform geometry, and we were able to do this. The same case down here attached to the instance is a transform, then the geometry. So here we also have an instance let's attach a transform down here. Transform geometry to transform or move, rotate and scale the cargo containers. So with this, we can now move them in and out like that. We can rotate them in any direction. Let's see that like that. We can also scale them. Let me select the three or maybe one direction. Push them outward slightly. And there we go. Let me just return the rotation to zero. Like that. I love that. So basically what we've done is a dream within a dream if you've ever watched inception. So we had instances. So these are instances within instances. So if I drag this and place it maybe up here, we're trying to get a bit more organized, distribute that. Let's say that you go there. Let's drag all these. Want to get a bit more organized. In the next lesson, let's see what interesting thing we can do next. So don't go too far. 9. Extra Tips: Now in this lesson, I want us to look at a few tips and tricks that I'd like you to be aware of. So, for example, remember the viewer node. It allows us to see what each node sees at that particular point in time. Because remember, we're dealing with timelines, parallel timelines. And so the viewer node allows us to see what every node has been able to process so far at that point in that timeline. So this is the future of this. So by this time, what do we have here. Let me just hold down Control Shift click. Remember, right here, we had the we were joining geometry of the Spaceship. And the containers because in this timeline, we were trying to add containers. So what we have here after joining the geometry is a spaceship and two containers. After transforming the spaceship and it's two containers, we have now the tiny containers. And if we move on to the instance on points, now we have all of them distributed. Once we have the distributed smaller ships, we join them with the mother ship. Remember, we sent the ship into the future. So we have the smaller ships and the mothership attached together here. So if I control shift click here, we have all of them here. It's after this point, let me delete that that we can now move the entire mother ship carrying everything. Shift A, transformed Geometry, and now we can move it in the Y axis, the green axis with all the smaller ships docked in their containers. Alright, so I think this is a very good spot to end this class. I hope you enjoyed everything you learned so far. In the next lesson, I want us to work on the army of sentinels that will be riding these spaceships. Every spaceship needs sentinels or a space army, and we have to create one. So how do we assemble one inside Geometry nodes using everything we've learned so far? Let's see how to do that shortly. 10. Build a Sentinel: Now it's time to build the sentinels or soldiers who will be riding our spaceships. Now, this is a brand new project. I closed the spaceship Geometry Nodes file. Now this is a brand new Blender project. So go ahead and open up a new project. And I'll go straight ahead and switch to Geometry nodes. And let me just say Shift A to add a cube or any geometry here. Let me just say plane. Just want to be able to add a geometry node setup. Now, we're not going to use this specific geometry of the manually added geometry, which is this geometry input, group input, delete that. But we still have this. Now, in here, I'll say shift A and under mesh, we're going to primitives. I want to add a UV sphere. Place it there. And if I connect it, that's a UVsphere. I'm also going to add Shift A. I'm also going to add a cylinder. And if I connect that, we have a cylinder. So we have these two. Now, what I want to do is make them available to our next step, which is assembling them to build a sentinel or a soldier, one single soldier. And these are the two components we're going to use. The first thing we want to do is because both of them must be visible, in order for us to see both of them together, we have to join them before this point in time. So join Geometry, join Geometry like that, that and that. Now we can see both of them. You don't need to do this. If I add a transform geometry, just to move one of them slightly, translate in X. As you can see, we have both of them in the center of the world. Now, let me get rid of that. If I want to get rid of this without disabling without disconnecting the cable while it's selected, control X. Do if I just hit X, it's going to cut the cable. So do Control X. So to begin with, because we have this setup already, the UVsphere is supposed to be our head. So let me add a transform geometry to it. Transform geometry, and I want to push it upwards in the Z axis. So Z axis zooming in. There we go. Zooming out. Let's say somewhere there. I'm not even going to resize the head. All right. Next, we want to move. Let's say this is the torso. So this is the cylinder. So first of all, let me select the UVsphere and hit F two, head. So that's our head. Let me select the cylinder, hit F two, and I will call it the torso. Yeah, the torso. And of course, I also want to push it up, Shift D, and select put it right there. And now its center has also been pushed up to the same center as the UV sphere because they are two by 2 meters anyway. So I want to push this downwards by reducing the Z axis. And I also want to select the X and Y axis and not the Z axis. Holding down shift, I'm going to reduce these two. Oh, wait, that's translation. I want to reduce the scale. Select the X and Y, then hold down shift and reduce the size of the X and Y and not the Z. Just like that. A slim torso. Let's make it slightly. Let's switch the front, by the way, with one on the keyboard. All right, we want to make it slightly longer. So in the Z axis, holding down shift. No, that's translate do Z axis here, scale. Move it down in the Z. There we go. So now we have a torso and a head. If we want an arm, all we have to do is create another one here, so Shift D, create another cylinder, connect it here. And let me pull it to the side on the X. Now let's rotate it in the Y. Before we rotate it, let's also first of all, scale it down in the X and Y. All right. I've scaled it down in the three axes, no problem. Then let me rotate it in the Y, then pull it rightwards in the X, push it upwards in the Z. Alright, now that we have that, if I want a limb here, a leg, all I have to do is select these two. Shift D. Remember, all we're doing is sending these limbs into the future. Alright. This is a timeline, another timeline. From this perspective, we're traveling back into time and creating all the parts we need for the sentinel and then sending them into the future. And then this is where they come together to join and become a sentinel. But back here, we are creating every single element of the sentinel. So drag this and put it right here. It's still in the same position. So let's zoom in here and pull it downwards in the Z, and let's scale it up in the X and Y, holding down shift. And in fact, now let me increase all of them. Pull it outwards. Up to that spot. Now, of course, as you might have guessed, all we have to do for the others is select these two because, of course, this is the Oh, there's also the torso and the head. So we don't want to duplicate the torso. We want to duplicate the arm and leg. So Shift D. Let me just put them here for now, but I can send this into the future like that and this one as well. Of course, we need to translate them. This needs to go this side. In fact, I just need to reverse this, remove this negative, Enter. And this rotation, negative, Enter. Same case applies to this. Remove the negative and put a negative here. Now, I don't like the small size of the arms. So now, this is the let's see. So that's the right leg. So I'll select this F two. Leg R, leg right. What about this? All right. Arm. R. So this is L. And this should be Is this a leg? Leg L. Yeah, let's see. Yeah. He's facing us. So that's why I'm saying this is L. But now, what we want to do is increase the size of the arms, which I don't like right now. No, that's the leg. Selecting these two holding down shift to increase in small increments. Yeah, I think that's a better size. So I'll select that, copy that, go to this, select these two, paste, and there we go. So this is the right arm. We can push the head up slightly. I don't like where it is, or push the torso down slightly. There we go. So now, we've assembled a single sentinel. Now, this looks a little bit disorganized, but what we can do is the legs right there, the arms, the torso. And the head. Then let's move the geometry join geometry very far. So what we have are you can see there's a lot of repetition right here. We have transformed Geometry, Transform geometry. We can organize this better, and I'm going to show you how to organize everything better. But for now, we have our sentinel. In the next lesson, let's go ahead and build the army of sentinels because right now we just have one. I'll see you shortly. 11. Organizing Nodes: You will notice we have a lot of clutter here, and we can get a little bit more organized. And we're going to use some brand new nodes introduced in this version of Blender, Blender 5.0, called bundles. This group of nodes is very awesome, and let me show you how it works. So I'll just say Shift A. I'll type bundle. I'm going to say combined bundle. I can take data from other nodes and box it in here inside the combined bundle node, and just keep it there and make it available anywhere it's needed. And that will allow us to organize the components from the transformations. Here's how. Let's start with a head with the head. If I disconnect that and drag the head here, I can connect the mesh of the head to that place, and now it says mesh. Now I can change now, with this combined bundle, what I can do next is bring this Transform Geometry Node. Node we don't have a head. If I bring this Transform Geometry Node, it's still connected as it was and say Shift A bundles, separate bundle. And put that there. Now, remember we transferred this head data into this combined bundle node. This is like a box, a container for storing whatever you put in it. We've put this head in here. Now it's aware of all the data, and we've transferred that data into this separate data bundle, separate bundle node. And now if we connect that there, the head comes back. I'll do the same for the torso. Just cut this, connect it there. Now, that says mesh one, and I'll take this and put it here. And before we go far, let's first of all, rename this. So with this selected, I'm going to hit N on the keyboard to bring this up, and I'm going to go into Node. Under Node, we can rename this to head. And now, as you can see, it will read head, select this, double click it, and torso. Now, let me hit refresh here and connect them again. Then let me connect this to this torso. Refresh that. So now I'm going to drag these and put them aside. Now, you will notice automatically, everything is going to start getting organized on this side and this side, because if I take this transform, it's supposed to come here and this arm on this other side, cutting that and putting this here and then dragging it in there. And this is like that. What do we have here? This is the RM R. Let's go to arm L. So I'll select that there. Like that. Let me go back here and refresh this. We're going to reconnect. Don't worry. They just need to be refreshed from time to time. Every time you make changes, we can drag these two and arrange them like that just to save space. Put that there. There we go. So now that we've done this, it seems everything has been renamed once again. So let me just refresh this and let me just start renaming them again from the start. This is the head. Second one is the torso. Third one is the R. So make sure this is selected. N, Node. The fourth one is the leg R. And leg. Now, let me connect them. I don't know why we keep losing them, but there we go. There we go. Finally. All right. So you just want to make sure you don't have those refresh icons right here. You just have to know in what sequence to click them. It's a bit confusing, but I'm going to get used to it soon. So with that done, at least we have our components of the sentinel separated from their transformations. Now we can also rename the transformations themselves, the nodes. Like, for example, we can select this transform, and because it's for the head, we can F two, so that when we want to resize or move the head, we know exactly what to change. This is the torso. We have RL. LR leg. All right. Now, let's drag these two out like that. And for organization, I'm going to leak. I'm going to hold down Shift, right lik and drag to create that spot right there. Then hit G. It's still selected. Hit G to drag and put it right there. I'm going to do the same for this shift right leak, drag, then G. Control to save it. Let's move on to the join geometry here. It looks a little bit tangled. All right, let me just cut everything. Control and cut. And now let's start from the very top. Put that there. In fact, let me bring it closer so we can zoom in. I'm going to take this and put it below that. We want to be organized. Just like that. And I feel like we can also create some sort of line. I like organizing my joints in a straight line. So I'll carry these, place them somewhere there. Just to make them parallel. GX. Now, I'll select these two GX. No undo that GX. All right. So now I think we are organized enough, and we're ready to assemble our army. We're ready for the next step. Our single sentinel is now created and ready. Let's see how to assemble the army in the next lesson. See you shortly. 12. Assemble The Army: Welcome back. So here we are. Our sentinel is ready. I just want to select these two NGX to drag them to the left like that, just to put that in the center of those two, like that. Now, going forward, what we want to do because the sentinel is assembled already, we want a way to create standing spots. In previous examples, we were saying docking ports or holes for planting trees or attachment spots. Now, for soldiers, we want to we just want to distribute the places where they're going to stand. And then we're going to instance this soldier onto those points. So we need to instance points on three D space. How do we do that? One easy way to distribute soldiers is with a grid. So Shift A, Grid Node. A grid node is like a plane. So if I put it right here, let me disconnect that. If I put this grid here and connect it to the output, as you can see, this is like a plane. If I switch to wireframe view, as you can see, it is a plane with four faces right now. If I zoom in, I can increase the size in the X and Y, like that. And I can also increase the number of vertices in the X and Y, like that. Now, every one of these is a phase, and so we can distribute points on these faces. If I switch back to solid mode, let's go back in here, Shift A, Distribute Points on faces. Let's distribute standing spots on that grid, just like that. When we distribute points on faces, we're doing that in order to attach what instances. So let's shift A, Instance on points. Let's place instances on those points that we've distributed. And what instances do we want to place on these distributed points? We want to place the soldier, the sentinel that we assembled. So if we say Instance, there we go. But now they are too big. We can add a transform geometry right here. Now, if I shift right click, I'll create that junction or corner and drag that shift right click again, G, and put that there. So we have this soldier, this sentinel we assembled. If I go here to see what our joint geometry can see, control shift click. We can only see the centinel because up to this point in time, we only have the assembled sentinel. We want to make this sentinel smaller, so Transform, shift A, or we can say, ah, let's say transform and by selecting these three and holding down shift to moving small increments, we can make them tiny or actually the right size. So there we go. We have our soldiers. Let's you can increase or decrease the size, as you please. As you can see, right here, if we zoom in, some of the soldiers are standing too close to one another. And that's unacceptable. So remember, we will go here to the distribute points on faces and change this to Poisson disc, and we want to increase the personal space of each soldier. Now every soldier has enough personal space. Now one thing you will notice is that our army is scattered. This is not how an army parade will look, for example. They are typically in straight lines, almost like a grid. And remember, they are standing on a grid, this grid. And this grid is made up of vertices. Now, if I switch to wireframe view, control shift click the grid. So as you can see what we have are vertices, edges and faces. Where the lines or edges intersect, those are vertices. And geometry nodes sees those as points where you can place instances. So we don't need these distribute points on faces when we're dealing with the grid. If I remove this, delete. We have our soldiers. Let me switch back to solid view. If I select the distribute point on faces and control X to remove it without disconnecting the cable, control X, you will notice now all the soldiers are well organized like a parade. So what's happening is that the grid allows us to place instances on every vertex. And that means we can increase or decrease the number of instances by regulating the number of vertices because every vertex has a sentinel now, another thing I want us to notice here is we don't really need this Transform Geometry Node because we were only using it to scale the sentinel before he became an instance. But we can also just decide to scale him down as an instance. So if I come here and control shift click, what we have is one single sentinel. But this sentinel is not yet an instance because we've not yet reached here. So if I delete that now if I go here, when we reach here, this is now where we have the sentinel as instances. And we can get rid of this because now we're no longer using this scale. Notice what happens to the soldiers if I delete the transform geometry. Now they are huge again, but now we have this scale. We can say, et all sentinels be this size, holding down shift. Let's view them from this side. There we go. So that's it. I think this is a good spot to end this. I just thought I should share that before we finish. 13. Final Thoughts: And that's it. Believe it or not, that's it. You've just learned geometry nodes through a mental framework that changes everything. You now understand points, instances, assemblies, transformations, and most importantly, procedural thinking. You've learned to understand the system itself, not just which nodes to connect, but how to think procedurally. And now it's your turn. Maybe you've been following along and doing exactly what we've been doing in class. You can share that, or maybe you've assembled a formation of sentinels that looks slightly different or unique, or maybe you'll apply those concepts doing something completely different. When you're done, upload your project to the gallery, and I'll be there to give you feedback, answer your questions, and celebrate your work with you. Honestly, seeing what my students create is my favorite part of teaching these courses. If this class helped make Geometry Nodes finally click for you, if this Spaceship metaphor made things clearer for you, please take a moment to leave a review. It only takes a minute but makes a huge difference. Just click the review tab right below this video player and let me know what you thought about it. And if you're interested in this kind of content, this is just the beginning. I have more Geometry Nodes classes in the pipeline. So if you're not following me, already make sure you check out my profile and click that Follow button. Go out and build something amazing. Keep creating, keep experimenting, and I'll see you in the next one. A