In the last week or so I committed and took the plunge into the Geometry Nodes. What at first, looked like a vast pool with lots of opportunities to drown, soon felt like a comfortable and familiar bath. Geometry Nodes is designed to feel familiar like the shader node system. Of course, the complexity is one or two degrees up from shading, but the same principles apply.
My first experience was this toffee factory, which focused mainly on point distributing. After I made an environment with Geometry Nodes, I was ready to try something else. Let me just say “Magic is possible with Blender!”.
A lot of us have probably felt jealous of C4D’s Mograph module and even more of the Houdini effects. So our hope is that “everything nodes” will close the gap.
In this video, I’ll explain the techniques I used to create that sorcerer shot you saw here.
I used Blendercloud’s Vincent and gave him a small makeover. Aiming for a voodoo/fortune teller vibe.
Let me know what you think, down below or over on Instagram!
Some more context around the video, because there is a lot of attribute magic happening. Which at first was confusing to me too!
Now I like to think of attributes as containers. Each container is labeled, some are labeled in the factory, read created by Blender, others have to be labeled by us.
A container can be filled with a variety of values and indexes.
Think of vertex groups, UV maps, and vertex colors. Those would be available as attributes in geometry nodes. They are referred to by their name. It’s considered best practice to avoid naming attributes the same, this is referred to as a naming collision. (For example, naming vertex colors and vertex groups “Hair”)
If there is a naming collision, only one of the attributes is accessible in geometry nodes.
Attributes with any other name can also be created by nodes when the name is used for the first time, think about mesh selections/masks.
Another thing I struggled with at the start was the fact that a mix/math of attributes doesn’t have a clear output, which we can connect to the next, say factor input.
We’re used to having a mixed color node with two input sockets and a clear output socket.
Attributes are stored and overwritten from left to right, following the string of events.
I hope you enjoy the tutorial, as always stay creative! See you next time! Ciao!
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