This guy is an awesome teacher. I tried watching other Geometry Nodes tutorials here on UA-cam but the concept was just not clicking, until I discovered this one. Thanks man.
THIS is THE WAY to EXPLAIN! Thank you! 99% of tutorials on YT just tell you what to click without explaining how that works - that is not teaching. Please make more of these, with the logic behind each node/tool! :)
I just want to come by and say that you are probably the SINGLE BEST TEACHER on UA-cam for me. I think you are the best for my specific learning style (which is also detail-oriented/rabbit hole/curiosity driven). Thank you for taking the time to produce those amazing videos, you sure have a fan club of yours!
As a former programmer and current 3D artist I appreciate how you tie nodes to if statements, boolean statements, etc. Working with nodes seems, as you say, a visual extension of scripting.
You should check out... I think it's called serpens? In any case, there is a nodes extension to translate python to nodes and back to make your own extension. And when "everything nodes" is complete it will likely include this, as well as a better scripting of particle nodes and a back and forth between bones/armature and a node representation
As a fellow rabbit, I stumbled across this because I'm an artist interested in Blender. I haven't even downloaded the program yet, lol, but your title drew me in. I'm a total noob with animation, 3D & digital art programs, but recently started to learn Python (super noob there). So glad to learn Blender is Python-based. I've noticed nodes like this in other open-source and AI image apps and programs, but they seemed so intimidating. Watched and listened to the entire lesson on my small phone with captions turned on! Read all the Comments and Subscribed as I plan to learn more from you and those Commenting, and plan to reference this often. I agree with those who enjoyed your pleasant voice and clear explanations of the whys and thought processes involved. I'm encouraged and you helped demystify these nodes a bit. Next step is to rewatch while following & doing in Blender. I definitely couldn't see any of the details on my small screen, but it was good enough to help me follow along, even without glancing at the screen and just listening to your well-explained descriptions of what you were doing and why. Zoom-ins as others already pointed out would be awesome for future vids. Excellent style of teaching! Keep it up and look forward to learning from you! ❤
By far the best geometry node explainer video, with the philosophy, the under the hood explanation, the rabbit hole, all just worked out good and finally learned some geometry nodes. Expecting more similar videos please. Thank you.
dude you are brilliant. the complexity is so satisfying and it feels really good to be so lost in something one wants to learn. i love it. thanks so very much.
if not anything else, then you are just so relaxing to listen... i can definitely say you can make for some wonderful podcasts! but one thing i have to say, your tutorial was very beginner friendly; i mean the way you explicitly (you can guess by now i come from a programming background too) explain all the detailed intricacies is something that we beginners truly appreciate! and all the joys about the software that you talk, they totally involve the audience, or well, at least me in this case. i mean it feels like you are sitting next to your audience and talking to them with utter hospitality! this is the first 1hour+ video that i ended up watching completely ever(although i have to admit i watched it in 1.5x playback speed). no other video ever succeeded in keeping me with the video for so long you are doing a great work out there man! keep it up! appreciate it, really! hope you have a great day
"Think of Geometry Nodes as pre-recorded actions" - among the best high-level bits of advice I've ever heard on Geometry nodes! As someone who very rarely watches 1 hour + videos (Ian Hubert's Lazy Tutorials are more my idea of a good time!), this has been one of the highest value/minute videos ever!! "Why?" , you ask... (since it obviously doesn't take one hour to say "Think of Geometry Nodes as pre-recorded actions"): 1) because I actually learned a heap about other aspects of Blender (e.g. fake users and how underlying mesh data is being referenced); 2) because the "rabbit holes" are actually awesome examples since they are very different use cases (but still showing "I just want to pre-record this action"); 3) because the "You're an addon-developer" part is very clear on how to expose useful variables to an end user (I feel like a power user now!) and; 4) (perhaps most importantly) the video is real about having to "go look stuff up", which is fantastically honest, humble and inspiring. Thanks for taking the time to make this!
This is the probably nicest, most thoughtful comment I've ever gotten. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch the video and give feedback 😃 Best of luck with geo nodes!
I love it that you take the time to explain how and WHY something is done. You know the saying “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” applies here well. Also, visual scripting is very good way for someone who starts coding or is just not so good at it, to understand the logic behind it.
Incredibly well explained! I'm glad I found this as my introduction to geometry nodes. I'm still a total beginner with Blender, but I'm amazed at what it can do.
I love the way you explain things. It just clicks for me. Do you plan an doing more geometry nodes tutorials? Cause I would love to watch more of these :) I also like how you're exploring different rabbit holes!
Thoroughly enjoyed, could easily become a rabbit hole addict - they make the learning process so much more interesting! I normally fall asleep during lengthy tutorials, but instead I'm craving continuity. Long live the rabbit hole! - Thanks.
This right here is the kind of content I like to see! Really good at explaning and not afraid of side quests lol. You've certainly saved me a headache on a bunch of stuff
You made me fall in love with geometry nodes with this video. This means a lot to me moving forward in terms of what I want to focus on in 3D art. I really appreciate you making this tutorial.
Im learning blender like hardcore and it would have been great to see this like one month ago, THANKS for that kind of content, for me and all blender learners
Really delivers on your promise of gaining a GeoNodes mindset. Pleasantly easy to follow along and gain insight as you explore different concepts and tackle some common issues. Awesome Video, thanks mate!
I’ve been searching high and low for an explanation like this. The why!!! THANK YOU!! All these other guys just say click this, click that. Now search for this. And then blah blah blah lol.
Thank you so much for this. Your explanation of the geometry nodes was so good. I had followed other geonode tutes before and not really understood what was going on. This helped me so much. Instant subscribe.
this is exactly what I was looking for. Going deeper into layers and really knowing what are we doing and not only connecting becz someone connected in in a tut. keep it up. looking forward to more geometry nodes exploration videos.
Use case for strings I'm constantly using, is showing a bunch of information related to the object. I'm working with blended projectors and LCD/LED video walls, and some of the information I show are: Aspect ratio, overlap (pixels, projectors only), individual image resolution (per cabinet), total resolution (per video wall), calculated pixel density/size (to determine readability), lens shift and throw calculations (within physical limitations?), and what projector screen is being utilized (may vary with size due to production limitations). Snapshots of this is then used internally to discuss around the solution, and maybe sent to gfx to prepare pixel perfect content to be used in the final renderings (although I use UV vector snap to force anything pixel perfect anyway). Sometimes things are used for communication purposes rather than rendering. One problem is since having to use nodes for separators, concatenations, and special characters, it can get really messy really fast, so all this is dropped into a separate node group. I wish there was a more elegant way of doing this using a multiline expression interpreter.
"Set Material Index" can be used to select a assigned material. then just give the user an integer input to change between the different assigned materials.
This is an excellent tutorial. Approaching it from "this is how you should be thinking of it" instead of just "watch me and then you do the same" is great. It would be amazing if one could create a geometry nodes layout by editing the mesh. So you could go up into the viewport, type "rx45", and it would add a transform node with the right place in the geometry nodes.
I should point out that your specific example is regarded as bad practice - Maya works the way you said and so does Houdini (all operations are recorded as nodes) and practically all the Maya or Houdini basics tutorials start by saying “you technically can do things this way, but you shouldn’t”. That’s because you’re having to manually specify a vertex index to operate on, and that can easily get messed up for example if you change the original input geometry. It’s much better to get your head around creating rule based systems. Also if you indiscriminately create node after node for individual operations it will bog the system down rapidly. That said, I definitely agree it would be useful to have viewport handles (for example for the transform node), or being able to click an item within geometry nodes tree and select it (Houdini can do this). Also better visual or interactive ways of identifying selections e.g working out what vertex index needs to be operated on.
Great tutorial, made a lot of sense. You mentioned about Materials and getting it so that you could change them from the Goenode tool bar. 1:21:20 Materials. I connected the Pink Material input dot on the Set Material to the Geometry Input. This gave me an option to select any materials I had already set up in this blend. It didn't allow me to manipulate the material just select any I have set up in the Shading window
I love this approach. How to think about and conceptually understand the aggregate tools so you can problem solve anything. Thank you for teaching me how to fish instead of just giving me another species of fish that's not quite what I was looking for.
I have been trying to get my head around geometry nodes and this tutorial really clarifies how to think about them. I hope you produce more tutorials along the same lines.
amazingly the countdown timer was one of the most useful rabbit holes I've seen in a long time, very useful (in particular how you troubleshooted the situation)
I'm a blender user for many years It was difficult for me to learn geometry nodes as I didn't get the logic behind it but you helped me a lot into understanding thank you great tutorial
This is the way things should be taught for real. Instead of just giving out recipes like most tutorials do, you're telling us why. So we can become actual chefs that create our own menus, instead of old grams in the kitchen (nothing against grams ;P) with a rolodex of recipes.
50:13 - You can do this in normal edit mode as well, by Ctrl+F, 3 (Extrude Individual Faces), if you do this on a subdivided plane it would look like a normal extrude, until you select one of the faces and move it away, you'll see that each face was treated as if it was it's own separate island so you have internal faces. That's more or less what was happening with the individual being set, each line was extruded as if it was isolated from the other lines, thus creating a break in the geometry. This would then mean that there is no neighbouring normals to calculate the edge angle with. The odd look is probably caused by the original lines still being connected so at the bottom of the mesh they are connected, but at the top they aren't, giving you a gradient along the sides. There might be some smaller differences in how the normal operation handles it compared to this node, but that's essentially what it was doing, creating extra vertices and doubling up the internal edges so that they wouldn't connect to each-other. Which would allow them to subdivide without influencing each-other for instance, creating a hard edge instead of the rounded edges.
Great tutorial! I followed you instructions and created two node. As a person who has experience with programming languages this has some getting used to. Thanks for sharing!
Great work on this video. I've never found a tutorial that got me in the right place to understand geometry nodes. Your method of explaining the process as your were figuring it out (specifically the countdown timer segment / rabbit hole) was extremely helpful. I could follow along without feeling completely out of my comfort zone. Thank you, and please keep doing this style of tutorial for Blender users. I think your Dev background gives the walk-through a much needed depth and simplicity that other tutorial content producers fail to provide. This is Grant Abbot level of teaching but for geometry nodes.
Usually when i listen to a tutorial ive got at tops 5 minutes to find the specific solution i want before i zone out, I watched the 1st 50 minutes before going "hey how long has it been? holy f." i finished this and it was well worth it. very engaging and i loved your enthusiaism for the subject and listening to you learning with us like the infinite recursion helps make the subject feel more approachable. Great video I look forward to more of your content.
Absolutely loved your approach to geometry nodes. I have struggled learning programming in the past but seeing the visual of nodes makes it feel more tangible. Very helpful! 😄
38:50 - The edge angle is calculated from the difference in the normal of the adjacent faces. Why it wouldn't work was because you took the normal, with it's 3 components, and treated it as a single float. I'm uncertain what operation it uses to flatten it, but I presume it uses the distance. Seeing as all normals are unit vectors it would be 1, with the only real variation coming from floating point errors. Or it calculated the dot product with one of the cardinal directions, like (1,0,0) which at least is a bit more useful, but still incorrect for this application. It's important to pay attention the colors of the handles and lines, if the color changes on the line then you're getting some form of automatic conversion going on, in this case you went from the purple vector 3 to the gray float value. You don't always have to care about that, but you should always check for that if something is misbehaving, and put in conversion nodes to make sure it's doing the right thing. Not that using the normal on it's own would help much in this case. At best you could look at face normals and smooth the ones not facing up, but that's functionally different from what you were trying to do, and would fail if you rotated it to be vertical instead.
the rabbit holes were super fun for someone who is getting into coding. I wanted to know if there were better ways of creating if statements through geometry nodes and they were explained quite well.
One simple solution for SEARCH when you are trying to add new node would be to guess what you want: basically it would have beside correct name, few other possibilities that someone would try to search. Every node would have few of those and they would be under "suggestions" bellow and separate from "exact matches" above
This really did shift my perspective and thinking it about just scripting my actions. Nodes were always intimidating and felt challenging due to my lack of mathematical knowledge but this really helped. It was also fun to experiment applying this to some curves I made with the grease pencil. I was curious about adding extra points within the bezier segment to perhaps adjust it more. Well done and thank you!
Every other video I've seen already know what node to use for what they are doing. Where did they learn that? Hopefully this video will explain that to me and every other beginners to nodes.
Great video. I really enjoy that you actually want to dive deeper into nodes, it's super helpful. Keep it up. Also, you can actually enter "#frame" into the value node to use the current frame.
To get the scene length, add a driver to a value node and choose Single property as type, then Scene as ID type then scene as the ID, then in the data path type frame_end, that way it can use the full length of the animation to do many things
I am about a year late but am starting to interested in learning more about nodes. I have been following blender tutorials for many years now and I have to say I have enjoyed your presentation. It is unique to hear your explanations. Since I am focusing on nodes, I would hope you have some more rabbit hole experiences with geometry nodes or any other nodes? I will be watching and listening to this video many times to engrain all the info I can. Thank you.
@36 mins or so, drag (any) nodes input on the left side to the very first (leftmost) Group Input node (there will be a blank "empty" spot underneath). This turns it into a setting within the geometry node panel. You can then adjust just that exact setting without having to search a million nodes.
There's a better way I figured out to do the same thing with drivers in a single node. (40:33). Instead of duplicating the node for "total frames" to access "fps", add another input variable for it in the same node as the total frames node. If you name the 2 inputs appropriately, like "frame_end" and "frame_rate" you can set the expression to "frame_end / frame_rate" which would evaluate to "10.417". That way you don't need the additional Math nodes.
Hey there, it's amazing video! Everything is well explained and easy to understand, even for me barely starting to mess around geometry nodes, it was really helpful to get moving with it. While you cover stitching in the video, I just did an electric line with poles while following, all thanks to great explanation of what certain nodes do.
Such a perfect name for your Channel! I really enjoyed this, and the whole premise of curiosity driven digression. The code explanation is extremely helpful. Thank you!
As a programmer and 3D hobbyist, I can confirm that this is a must-know for any artist who want to TRULY have the power of procedural generation, knowing to ask the right question without knowing the answer immediately is much much better than blinding following something that works for "that case". My only issue with GeoNodes (and most other node based system) is that its not very intuitive for programmers who are used to do everything with an OOP approach.
You did such a great job explaining the nodes and I really enjoyed the various tips and tricks and the various rabbit holes ;) I've started playing with the geo nodes last year, but it always felt confusing and trying to plug stuff together, hoping it's going to work. I surely will check your video again as a reference while working with the nodes. I'll check your other videos for sure, thank you!
Thanks for making these. So many videos show how to do a thing, but don't explain why. I've always just kind of messed with nodes to see what I can do with them. Having a background in software development definitely helps
Thank you very much for this tutorial! I had difficulties using geometry nodes, because I've been using grasshopper for a long time and understanding that geometry nodes uses actually blender tools, but in components was just crucial. In grasshopper it's more mathematical I would say. I just couldn't switch the mindset and now it's clear! Thank you!
Thank you for the WHYs and HOWs, really helpful video, learning this geonode stuff as a non-programmer is pretty daunting. I encourage you to make more Rabbit Hole videos :)
57:31 - I don't know for sure if this is the official reason, but by leaving orphan nodes until you reload the file you can delete a material/node group first, then use it on another object. If they immediately removed it then you'd have to add it to a new object first, before removing it from the old one. Imagine adding a material to Suzanne for instance, then you delete that placeholder geometry, add in a human model from your library and… The material and the work you put into it is now gone, you have to undo to get it back. And if you're new to Blender you might think Blender destroyed your work instead of it being a consequence of you removing an object. Alternatively, Blender could alert you every time you delete something: "Warning, this action will destroy Material_1, Geometry_Node_13, etc, etc." Which would just annoy people that know what they're doing.
That's a good use case, but how it's currently implemented is not exactly intuitive. Good UX means that you can save the file, shutdown your computer, open the file the next day and still reuse the material, because nothing is warning you that the material is getting deleted or asking you for permission. So it feels like a feature that started out as a bug and has been left in for it's usefulness. It's not thought out.
When you do the extrude/flip/join thing, you should also use a Merge by Distance node after the join. That way you get connected geometry, and avoid some weird side-effects that can come up sometimes (subdivision surface is a common one). You also don't need to rename the node group node itself, as it will adopt the name of whatever the geometry node group is that it references. Unless you have a particular reason for using a different name, just rename the node group.
This guy is an awesome teacher. I tried watching other Geometry Nodes tutorials here on UA-cam but the concept was just not clicking, until I discovered this one. Thanks man.
THIS is THE WAY to EXPLAIN! Thank you! 99% of tutorials on YT just tell you what to click without explaining how that works - that is not teaching. Please make more of these, with the logic behind each node/tool! :)
Glad it helped!
I just want to come by and say that you are probably the SINGLE BEST TEACHER on UA-cam for me. I think you are the best for my specific learning style (which is also detail-oriented/rabbit hole/curiosity driven). Thank you for taking the time to produce those amazing videos, you sure have a fan club of yours!
Thank you! 😄
What everyone else has been saying: don't stop making videos like these. I'm here for any and all tangents.
As a former programmer and current 3D artist I appreciate how you tie nodes to if statements, boolean statements, etc. Working with nodes seems, as you say, a visual extension of scripting.
more like: it actually is. for some time now. 😉
You should check out... I think it's called serpens? In any case, there is a nodes extension to translate python to nodes and back to make your own extension. And when "everything nodes" is complete it will likely include this, as well as a better scripting of particle nodes and a back and forth between bones/armature and a node representation
@@michaelwerkov3438 Thanks for the tip
imo that's what makes it "techart" but so many studios have so blurry expectations of what techart is
Anybody remember POVRay?
holy shit; ive traversed youtube far and wide watching many geo node tutorials and today i found the holy grail of tutorials.
i am into the first 5 minutes of it, and am certain you are correct.
Right? He is teaching much more useful theory instead of monkey see monkey do.
As a fellow rabbit, I stumbled across this because I'm an artist interested in Blender. I haven't even downloaded the program yet, lol, but your title drew me in. I'm a total noob with animation, 3D & digital art programs, but recently started to learn Python (super noob there). So glad to learn Blender is Python-based. I've noticed nodes like this in other open-source and AI image apps and programs, but they seemed so intimidating. Watched and listened to the entire lesson on my small phone with captions turned on! Read all the Comments and Subscribed as I plan to learn more from you and those Commenting, and plan to reference this often. I agree with those who enjoyed your pleasant voice and clear explanations of the whys and thought processes involved. I'm encouraged and you helped demystify these nodes a bit. Next step is to rewatch while following & doing in Blender. I definitely couldn't see any of the details on my small screen, but it was good enough to help me follow along, even without glancing at the screen and just listening to your well-explained descriptions of what you were doing and why. Zoom-ins as others already pointed out would be awesome for future vids. Excellent style of teaching! Keep it up and look forward to learning from you! ❤
By far the best geometry node explainer video, with the philosophy, the under the hood explanation, the rabbit hole, all just worked out good and finally learned some geometry nodes. Expecting more similar videos please. Thank you.
Glad it helped!
love the channel name! thanks for the video and method of presentation!
As a programmer I really appreciate your perspective. Geometry nodes were hard for me before but now they seem more familiar than I imagined before.
Glad it helped 😄
dude you are brilliant. the complexity is so satisfying and it feels really good to be so lost in something one wants to learn. i love it. thanks so very much.
I love that I know just *barely* enough about Blender to work a little ahead of the early stages of this tutorial. It's great.
I didn't realize you could just combine an array with a curve modifier like that. I learned so much and we haven't even got into the nodes yet.
if not anything else, then you are just so relaxing to listen... i can definitely say you can make for some wonderful podcasts!
but one thing i have to say, your tutorial was very beginner friendly; i mean the way you explicitly (you can guess by now i come from a programming background too) explain all the detailed intricacies is something that we beginners truly appreciate!
and all the joys about the software that you talk, they totally involve the audience, or well, at least me in this case. i mean it feels like you are sitting next to your audience and talking to them with utter hospitality!
this is the first 1hour+ video that i ended up watching completely ever(although i have to admit i watched it in 1.5x playback speed). no other video ever succeeded in keeping me with the video for so long
you are doing a great work out there man! keep it up! appreciate it, really!
hope you have a great day
Really appreciate the kind words. Thanks!
"Think of Geometry Nodes as pre-recorded actions" - among the best high-level bits of advice I've ever heard on Geometry nodes! As someone who very rarely watches 1 hour + videos (Ian Hubert's Lazy Tutorials are more my idea of a good time!), this has been one of the highest value/minute videos ever!! "Why?" , you ask... (since it obviously doesn't take one hour to say "Think of Geometry Nodes as pre-recorded actions"): 1) because I actually learned a heap about other aspects of Blender (e.g. fake users and how underlying mesh data is being referenced); 2) because the "rabbit holes" are actually awesome examples since they are very different use cases (but still showing "I just want to pre-record this action"); 3) because the "You're an addon-developer" part is very clear on how to expose useful variables to an end user (I feel like a power user now!) and; 4) (perhaps most importantly) the video is real about having to "go look stuff up", which is fantastically honest, humble and inspiring. Thanks for taking the time to make this!
This is the probably nicest, most thoughtful comment I've ever gotten. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch the video and give feedback 😃 Best of luck with geo nodes!
I love it that you take the time to explain how and WHY something is done. You know the saying “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” applies here well. Also, visual scripting is very good way for someone who starts coding or is just not so good at it, to understand the logic behind it.
ok... in the first 20 seconds you grabbed my attention and precisely hit the topic I've been searching for an answer to for the last 2 years.
This is super helpful! The rabbit holes are fascinating and I love the developer's perspective. Thank you for making this!
Thanks for the feedback, glad it was helpful!
Incredibly well explained! I'm glad I found this as my introduction to geometry nodes. I'm still a total beginner with Blender, but I'm amazed at what it can do.
I love the way you explain things. It just clicks for me. Do you plan an doing more geometry nodes tutorials? Cause I would love to watch more of these :) I also like how you're exploring different rabbit holes!
Pls make more Blender Videos. This one was so clear. Thank you so much
Thoroughly enjoyed, could easily become a rabbit hole addict - they make the learning process so much more interesting! I normally fall asleep during lengthy tutorials, but instead I'm craving continuity. Long live the rabbit hole! - Thanks.
This is by far the most programmer-friendly tutorial on geometry nodes I have stumbled upon. Thank you for all the rabbit holes!
Glad it was helpful!
So nice tutorial . Thank u so much for this. It really really helped me to understand. Your tutorial is to neat and easy to follow.
This right here is the kind of content I like to see! Really good at explaning and not afraid of side quests lol. You've certainly saved me a headache on a bunch of stuff
This is the best video I've seen so far on geometry nodes. So many don't explain the why enough. Thanks
You made me fall in love with geometry nodes with this video. This means a lot to me moving forward in terms of what I want to focus on in 3D art. I really appreciate you making this tutorial.
Im learning blender like hardcore and it would have been great to see this like one month ago, THANKS for that kind of content, for me and all blender learners
Really delivers on your promise of gaining a GeoNodes mindset. Pleasantly easy to follow along and gain insight as you explore different concepts and tackle some common issues. Awesome Video, thanks mate!
Appreciate the comment. Thanks for watching!
I rarely comment but your video is amazing and explains incredibly well how amazing geometry nodes are. I truly wanna thank you for this.
Absolutely helpful! Thanks a lot... I also like your style of switching between loose and strict thinking.
You know, I love long videos and rabbit holes, and blender, and you somehow mix all that into one channel... I like that
I’ve been searching high and low for an explanation like this. The why!!! THANK YOU!! All these other guys just say click this, click that. Now search for this. And then blah blah blah lol.
Glad it helped!
Thank you so much for this. Your explanation of the geometry nodes was so good. I had followed other geonode tutes before and not really understood what was going on. This helped me so much. Instant subscribe.
this is the way to explain mindset the philosophy about it not just click , thank you
this is exactly what I was looking for. Going deeper into layers and really knowing what are we doing and not only connecting becz someone connected in in a tut. keep it up. looking forward to more geometry nodes exploration videos.
This made Geometry Nodes make so much sense for me! Thank You! I didn't realize how powerful Geometry nodes really were.
Use case for strings I'm constantly using, is showing a bunch of information related to the object. I'm working with blended projectors and LCD/LED video walls, and some of the information I show are: Aspect ratio, overlap (pixels, projectors only), individual image resolution (per cabinet), total resolution (per video wall), calculated pixel density/size (to determine readability), lens shift and throw calculations (within physical limitations?), and what projector screen is being utilized (may vary with size due to production limitations). Snapshots of this is then used internally to discuss around the solution, and maybe sent to gfx to prepare pixel perfect content to be used in the final renderings (although I use UV vector snap to force anything pixel perfect anyway).
Sometimes things are used for communication purposes rather than rendering. One problem is since having to use nodes for separators, concatenations, and special characters, it can get really messy really fast, so all this is dropped into a separate node group. I wish there was a more elegant way of doing this using a multiline expression interpreter.
"Set Material Index" can be used to select a assigned material. then just give the user an integer input to change between the different assigned materials.
or just plug the material input into the group input lol
Yes! The "why" is super important!
This is an excellent tutorial. Approaching it from "this is how you should be thinking of it" instead of just "watch me and then you do the same" is great. It would be amazing if one could create a geometry nodes layout by editing the mesh. So you could go up into the viewport, type "rx45", and it would add a transform node with the right place in the geometry nodes.
Glad it helped! Totally agree I’d be awesome if there was some way to “record” actions directly into geometry nodes.
I should point out that your specific example is regarded as bad practice - Maya works the way you said and so does Houdini (all operations are recorded as nodes) and practically all the Maya or Houdini basics tutorials start by saying “you technically can do things this way, but you shouldn’t”.
That’s because you’re having to manually specify a vertex index to operate on, and that can easily get messed up for example if you change the original input geometry.
It’s much better to get your head around creating rule based systems.
Also if you indiscriminately create node after node for individual operations it will bog the system down rapidly.
That said, I definitely agree it would be useful to have viewport handles (for example for the transform node), or being able to click an item within geometry nodes tree and select it (Houdini can do this). Also better visual or interactive ways of identifying selections e.g working out what vertex index needs to be operated on.
Great tutorial, made a lot of sense. You mentioned about Materials and getting it so that you could change them from the Goenode tool bar.
1:21:20 Materials. I connected the Pink Material input dot on the Set Material to the Geometry Input. This gave me an option to select any materials I had already set up in this blend. It didn't allow me to manipulate the material just select any I have set up in the Shading window
You should feel very good about having made such an unbelievably useful video. Thank you.
I love this approach. How to think about and conceptually understand the aggregate tools so you can problem solve anything. Thank you for teaching me how to fish instead of just giving me another species of fish that's not quite what I was looking for.
36:48 you could use #frame/frame rate in value node. for example #frame/24
I have been trying to get my head around geometry nodes and this tutorial really clarifies how to think about them. I hope you produce more tutorials along the same lines.
This is definitely the most beginner-friendly Geometry Nodes tutorial I've ever watched.
Thumbs up!
Glad it was easy to follow!
It feels so good to find a geometry nodes video presented in a way that matches my learning style. Thank you! Subbed.
Thanks for watching & the sub!
Man this is just absolutely awesome. This is super cool and beautifully explained. Also, your voice is very relaxing.
amazingly the countdown timer was one of the most useful rabbit holes I've seen in a long time, very useful (in particular how you troubleshooted the situation)
I'm a blender user for many years It was difficult for me to learn geometry nodes as I didn't get the logic behind it but you helped me a lot into understanding thank you great tutorial
Glad it helped! 😃
This is the way things should be taught for real. Instead of just giving out recipes like most tutorials do, you're telling us why. So we can become actual chefs that create our own menus, instead of old grams in the kitchen (nothing against grams ;P) with a rolodex of recipes.
50:13 - You can do this in normal edit mode as well, by Ctrl+F, 3 (Extrude Individual Faces), if you do this on a subdivided plane it would look like a normal extrude, until you select one of the faces and move it away, you'll see that each face was treated as if it was it's own separate island so you have internal faces.
That's more or less what was happening with the individual being set, each line was extruded as if it was isolated from the other lines, thus creating a break in the geometry. This would then mean that there is no neighbouring normals to calculate the edge angle with. The odd look is probably caused by the original lines still being connected so at the bottom of the mesh they are connected, but at the top they aren't, giving you a gradient along the sides.
There might be some smaller differences in how the normal operation handles it compared to this node, but that's essentially what it was doing, creating extra vertices and doubling up the internal edges so that they wouldn't connect to each-other. Which would allow them to subdivide without influencing each-other for instance, creating a hard edge instead of the rounded edges.
Amazing explanation, thank you!
this is so super. the first GN tutorial that clicked for me. please continue going down rabbitholes
Happy to hear it!
Best video on blender I've ever seen. Thanks!
EXCELLENT - and yes, the Why is often left out of lessons. Very helpful.
Thanks for this! Appreciate the foundational procedural thinking and emphasis on WHY.
Great tutorial! I followed you instructions and created two node. As a person who has experience with programming languages this has some getting used to. Thanks for sharing!
Great work on this video. I've never found a tutorial that got me in the right place to understand geometry nodes. Your method of explaining the process as your were figuring it out (specifically the countdown timer segment / rabbit hole) was extremely helpful. I could follow along without feeling completely out of my comfort zone. Thank you, and please keep doing this style of tutorial for Blender users. I think your Dev background gives the walk-through a much needed depth and simplicity that other tutorial content producers fail to provide. This is Grant Abbot level of teaching but for geometry nodes.
Thank you for the thoughtful feedback, glad it helped!
Usually when i listen to a tutorial ive got at tops 5 minutes to find the specific solution i want before i zone out, I watched the 1st 50 minutes before going "hey how long has it been? holy f." i finished this and it was well worth it. very engaging and i loved your enthusiaism for the subject and listening to you learning with us like the infinite recursion helps make the subject feel more approachable. Great video I look forward to more of your content.
Glad you found it engaging, thanks for watching!
this... is the BEST geometry nodes vídeo for begginers i ever seen!!
This Channel is amazing!!!!! Cant wait to see more from you! you are an amazing Human being!!!
Thanks for watching!
Absolutely loved your approach to geometry nodes. I have struggled learning programming in the past but seeing the visual of nodes makes it feel more tangible. Very helpful! 😄
Glad it helped!
Very helpful tutorial. Learned a great deal as a Geo Node beginner! Thanks!
Subbed fast! I really appreciate this kind of tutorial. I like the tangents and focus on why all while working towards a goal at the same time.
38:50 - The edge angle is calculated from the difference in the normal of the adjacent faces. Why it wouldn't work was because you took the normal, with it's 3 components, and treated it as a single float. I'm uncertain what operation it uses to flatten it, but I presume it uses the distance. Seeing as all normals are unit vectors it would be 1, with the only real variation coming from floating point errors.
Or it calculated the dot product with one of the cardinal directions, like (1,0,0) which at least is a bit more useful, but still incorrect for this application.
It's important to pay attention the colors of the handles and lines, if the color changes on the line then you're getting some form of automatic conversion going on, in this case you went from the purple vector 3 to the gray float value. You don't always have to care about that, but you should always check for that if something is misbehaving, and put in conversion nodes to make sure it's doing the right thing.
Not that using the normal on it's own would help much in this case. At best you could look at face normals and smooth the ones not facing up, but that's functionally different from what you were trying to do, and would fail if you rotated it to be vertical instead.
Another great technical explanation, thank you.
the rabbit holes were super fun for someone who is getting into coding. I wanted to know if there were better ways of creating if statements through geometry nodes and they were explained quite well.
Thank you for this amazing free course.
Thanks for the why, it does help in figuring things out and repeating it. Keep up the good work.
One simple solution for SEARCH when you are trying to add new node would be to guess what you want: basically it would have beside correct name, few other possibilities that someone would try to search. Every node would have few of those and they would be under "suggestions" bellow and separate from "exact matches" above
Handsome fella talking about geometry nodes, all here for it!
This really did shift my perspective and thinking it about just scripting my actions. Nodes were always intimidating and felt challenging due to my lack of mathematical knowledge but this really helped. It was also fun to experiment applying this to some curves I made with the grease pencil. I was curious about adding extra points within the bezier segment to perhaps adjust it more. Well done and thank you!
Glad it helped!
Every other video I've seen already know what node to use for what they are doing. Where did they learn that? Hopefully this video will explain that to me and every other beginners to nodes.
Great video. I really enjoy that you actually want to dive deeper into nodes, it's super helpful. Keep it up.
Also, you can actually enter "#frame" into the value node to use the current frame.
Glad it helped! And great to know about “#frame”, thank you.
To get the scene length, add a driver to a value node and choose Single property as type, then Scene as ID type then scene as the ID, then in the data path type frame_end, that way it can use the full length of the animation to do many things
Ok, so you figured it out lol, paused to type before I saw that.
Appreciate the willingness to help still!
I am about a year late but am starting to interested in learning more about nodes. I have been following blender tutorials for many years now and I have to say I have enjoyed your presentation. It is unique to hear your explanations. Since I am focusing on nodes, I would hope you have some more rabbit hole experiences with geometry nodes or any other nodes? I will be watching and listening to this video many times to engrain all the info I can. Thank you.
tutorials should be more like this! explaining the why instead of what to do
You are a truely gifted educator! That was a hilariously funny rabbit hole :) Thanks for making these videos.
Glad you like them!
@36 mins or so, drag (any) nodes input on the left side to the very first (leftmost) Group Input node (there will be a blank "empty" spot underneath). This turns it into a setting within the geometry node panel. You can then adjust just that exact setting without having to search a million nodes.
There's a better way I figured out to do the same thing with drivers in a single node. (40:33). Instead of duplicating the node for "total frames" to access "fps", add another input variable for it in the same node as the total frames node. If you name the 2 inputs appropriately, like "frame_end" and "frame_rate" you can set the expression to "frame_end / frame_rate" which would evaluate to "10.417". That way you don't need the additional Math nodes.
I 've learnt a lot, and I think this kind of video is perfect to learn, as we can see the reflexion behind the process
Hey there, it's amazing video! Everything is well explained and easy to understand, even for me barely starting to mess around geometry nodes, it was really helpful to get moving with it. While you cover stitching in the video, I just did an electric line with poles while following, all thanks to great explanation of what certain nodes do.
Amazing, so glad it helped!
Such a perfect name for your Channel! I really enjoyed this, and the whole premise of curiosity driven digression. The code explanation is extremely helpful. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful 😃 Thanks for watching!
PS. Great term "curiosity driven digression". You should coin that!
As a programmer and 3D hobbyist, I can confirm that this is a must-know for any artist who want to TRULY have the power of procedural generation, knowing to ask the right question without knowing the answer immediately is much much better than blinding following something that works for "that case".
My only issue with GeoNodes (and most other node based system) is that its not very intuitive for programmers who are used to do everything with an OOP approach.
You did such a great job explaining the nodes and I really enjoyed the various tips and tricks and the various rabbit holes ;)
I've started playing with the geo nodes last year, but it always felt confusing and trying to plug stuff together, hoping it's going to work. I surely will check your video again as a reference while working with the nodes. I'll check your other videos for sure, thank you!
Thank you for the feedback!
Excellent tutorial with deep-level bonus content. I subscribed specifically for more rabbit holes!
Glad it helped & thanks for the sub!
So happy I took my flashlight with me. Really good video.
Thanks for this. Quite a big project for a fresh channel! Much respect, look forward to seeing the channel grow 💪🏼
Thank you!
First time I opened up my geometry nodes workspace and thank you 😭 this makes so much more sense now
Glad it helped!
I love the fact that this was just the video that I needed to make things in the right way!
Happy it helped!
Thanks for making these. So many videos show how to do a thing, but don't explain why. I've always just kind of messed with nodes to see what I can do with them. Having a background in software development definitely helps
Thank you so much!!!! I tried too many tutorials but this is the only o
Surprisingly easy to watch for a hour+ long video!
Thank you very much for this tutorial! I had difficulties using geometry nodes, because I've been using grasshopper for a long time and understanding that geometry nodes uses actually blender tools, but in components was just crucial. In grasshopper it's more mathematical I would say. I just couldn't switch the mindset and now it's clear! Thank you!
Glad it helped!
Thank you for the WHYs and HOWs, really helpful video, learning this geonode stuff as a non-programmer is pretty daunting. I encourage you to make more Rabbit Hole videos :)
Happy to help!
57:31 - I don't know for sure if this is the official reason, but by leaving orphan nodes until you reload the file you can delete a material/node group first, then use it on another object. If they immediately removed it then you'd have to add it to a new object first, before removing it from the old one.
Imagine adding a material to Suzanne for instance, then you delete that placeholder geometry, add in a human model from your library and… The material and the work you put into it is now gone, you have to undo to get it back. And if you're new to Blender you might think Blender destroyed your work instead of it being a consequence of you removing an object.
Alternatively, Blender could alert you every time you delete something: "Warning, this action will destroy Material_1, Geometry_Node_13, etc, etc." Which would just annoy people that know what they're doing.
That's a good use case, but how it's currently implemented is not exactly intuitive. Good UX means that you can save the file, shutdown your computer, open the file the next day and still reuse the material, because nothing is warning you that the material is getting deleted or asking you for permission. So it feels like a feature that started out as a bug and has been left in for it's usefulness. It's not thought out.
When you do the extrude/flip/join thing, you should also use a Merge by Distance node after the join. That way you get connected geometry, and avoid some weird side-effects that can come up sometimes (subdivision surface is a common one).
You also don't need to rename the node group node itself, as it will adopt the name of whatever the geometry node group is that it references. Unless you have a particular reason for using a different name, just rename the node group.
Great points, thanks for sharing.
))haven't seen the video yet but subscribed to see later because of the correct "Why" question!
Thank you! I'm deep in the geometry node depths right now, but this definitely helped :)
id love a materials library tutorial, i cant seem to find anything that explains it well, thanks for this!!