2022 Collab: Week 45 "Tooling: Geometric nodes" - VOTE CLOSED

[FedPete]

This is the Blender collaboration 2022, week 45 challenge. Don’t be afraid to join, a lot of us are beginners. This is all to practice, have fun, learn, and get together.

This week’s subject is “Tooling: Geometric nodes” .

• “Tooling: Geometric nodes" - Create an object or a scene of objects, using the geometric tooling of Blender. For example a mouse maze, geometric constructs, like buildings, and roads, … be creative in your subject, but try to experiment with geometric nodes.
• Subject selected by the previous Week 43 “Abstract Art” winner: Gordon

The rules are simple. 1 subject, 1 entry, 1 week.
You create whatever object or scene or whatever you can think of that has something to do with the subject. It can be as simple or complicated as you want, all entries are welcome!
Post your picture here in this thread. And at the end of the week, we start to vote. And if you are the winner, you may choose the next subject and win a unique badge.

Deadline: 2022-11-12T22:55:00Z

• Last week’s collab: Blender Collab: Week 44 “ Frontiers and Exploration ”
• Next week: Gnomes - week 46.
• See all previous challenges in Hall of fame 2022
• Hall of fame 2021, 2020

If you want to stay informed of the @ BlenderCollab ?
Subscribe or unsubscribe to this “BlenderCollab” group.

[Gordon]

Today I played around with some mesh primitives and found out about the extrude and noise texture node. My plan is to try at least one new node per day and then put it all together into some Geometric City scene. We’ll see how it goes.

[Gordon]

Update. Followed another tutorial today. I’ll try to combine this with yesterday’s work to try create some fancy centerpiece in my scene. And then create some city around it.

[FedPete]

Seeing this, the collab should have been number 43 “Abstract Art”.
I like it very much, you are on a good way!

[Gordon]

Yeah I started a bit abstract. I’m going to try some buildings for the city today. Thanks!

[Gordon]

Update. A city is taking shape. This will most likely be in the background and then I’ll put some more detailed structures closer to the camera.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and with randomized materials also.

[FedPete]

Amazing! The founder of Blender Ton Roosendaal said, geo-nodes can be used bij AI systems to generate content …
I know it looks simple, but it isn’t.
Great progress.

[Gordon]

That’s incredible. I’m sure we’ll see some pretty amazing things coming from geo-nodes in the future. I’ve just scratched the surface and already seeing a lot of possible uses for it. Very fun!

[Joey_Cuevas]

Didn’t know Geometric Nodes existed, had a lot of fun working with the noodly boxes

[zeRgenTa]

Looking good!
If you want to add a space where roads would be to your cityscape, you could plug a brick texture into the select socket of the distribute points node. Just so you know, using a texture as a boolean is like weight painting, its resolution is directly related to the number of vertices.

[Gordon]

Ok I’ll give that a shot. Thanks!

[FedPete]

It’s really hard to do. Machine limits. And my second time tying to understand nodes.
It’s like learning Blender … again. What I did with the mouse and other tricks, writing it out in geo-nodes.

I’m following a course, too difficult to do it on your own. So many types of nodes and calculations. But here it is.

[Joey_Cuevas]

Looks like a Minecraft biome with hex blocks. Really cool

[FedPete]

I’m currently making a video because it has so much flexibility built in.
But it also reaches the maximum of my hardware. The tutorial uses 250K Hex nodes. I’m glad it works with 2500 on my machine.
Just rendering slide 44 of 880 …

Note: 14 hours later, rendering frame 500 … I render to .png, so I can stop and continue at a later (nightly) moment because my laptop is so slow.

[zeRgenTa]

I decided to come back after a break to give a brief overview of what I did.

• the junk in the corner was made by extruding some simple shapes (except the springs, which are just a spiral).
• the Barrels were made with the curve to mesh node, and the curve radius is being controlled by the spline factor plugged into a float curve.
• The tire was made by extruding a circle a few times and rotating it based on the Z position. I only made one half and multiplied the z position by zero, flipped the normals, rotated, and merged the two halves.
• The bushes in the back were made by extruding a grid (with the faces deleted) to get a volume wireframe, which I used in conjunction with the edge paths nodes. Then all that was left to do was distribute some point and make the leaves (using the same method as the barrel.)
• There isn’t anything that interesting going on with the wall and ground, just instancing stuff on points and displacement.
• The grass is a plane that use edge paths nodes to get some curves that are then ray casted onto the ground, added some thickness, and some blades of grass.

I left out the chain link because I did it a while back and don’t remember exactly how I did it, but I know I displaced a curve with sine waves and arrayed it on a curve.

[ServiceTech]

This is a very good render! excellent execution!

[zeRgenTa]

@ServiceTech
Thanks! I didn’t have enough time to do any tweaking with the lighting and camera, so was a little worried. I updated my post with some information about what I did if you are interested.

@FedPete
I’m curious about what that node tree is doing… never mind, I just spotted the link, I’ll check it out later.
I see a couple of noodles going all the way across the tree from a group input node; Just so you know, you can have as many group input nodes as you want, and even hide the sockets you’re not using with Ctrl-h. It helps keep larger node trees tidy.

@everyone
This was the first time I’ve used geometry nodes this extensively. I learned a lot, but the most important thing I learned was that you can have placeholders for your objects based on if it is in the viewport.

I really don’t think I could have finished this scene without it.

[Gordon]

Was busy Friday and Saturday, but I spent several hours trying to put together a scene this morning. It was really fun learning about geo nodes. I will continue to explore this tool!

The newest addition were the stands that are scattered around the scene.

I will share the list of YouTube videos I learned from as soon as my VPN is up and running again (I’m an expat in China).

[Gordon]

That’s a fantastic setup you got there. As you said, the flexibility is really amazing, and a still render doesn’t really show off the possibilities. I also wanted to render an animation. I keyframed the cube and sphere in my scene, but I had poor time management again, and didn’t have time for an animation.