Your first Geometry Node setup - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's go ahead and make your very first geometry node setup. Go ahead and make a brand new file. From here, at the top, look for your geometry nodes workspace. As always, if you don't see it, you can click on General, and go to Geometry Nodes. In this workspace, you're greeted by two new windows. First is the Spreadsheet data tab. Which tells you all the things that you need to know about your object. And then finally, the Geometry Note Editor. With your cube selected, click on New. From here, you're greeted by two new nodes, a input and an output. At the top, you also have a bunch of buttons and you're going to spend a lot of time in Add. The shortcut is Shift A, so let's get used to that. With your mouse over the Geometry Nodes window down here, hit Shift A, and search for subdivide. And you can do Subdivide Mesh, or Subdivision Surface. Let me show you the difference. Click on Subdivide Mesh, and without left clicking, you can see how it highlights, just like it did in our procedural shader generation. Left click to let it go, and it'll connect the dots. At first, you might say nothing happened. But if I middle mouse over my toolbar up here, and click on wire frame, you can see that a lot is actually happening. You can even take this little dot here, and drag it to this empty dot. And now, over here on the right, you can see how I can control subdivisions, right from my Modifiers tab. Let's go ahead and delete that one, and click on Add or Shift A. Space bar. And let's type in subdivision. And in this case, go to Surface. Drop that here. Select all of these and hit F. If for some reason that doesn't connect, then you can always just drag these two together. And if those didn't connect, I do recommend you go to Edit, Preferences, Add-ons. And make sure that the Node Wrangler is turned on, it'll be a real big help, as it adds a lot of shortcuts for working inside of nodes. Anyways, back in our geometry node setup, you can see that I now have a subdivided surface. I can even mix those two together, so hit Shift A, search. You can see my last two searches were here, so let's bring this subdivide mesh here, and we'll put it in front. Now I can drag this to here, and this one over here. Seeing the name level and level again might be really confusing, so, I can pull this open, or hit N, N for numbers, to pull that open over here. And I can come down and go ahead and just double-click this. And I can say subdivide mesh level. And double click the next one. Subdiv Surface Level. There we go. And now from the right side, in my Modifiers tab, I can go ahead and play with any one of these. And you can also see up here in the spreadsheet how my vertice count and positions are all changing. Alright, now let's go ahead and do a couple more interesting things in geometry nodes. Make sure that I am still in Object Mode up here. And go to Add Mesh Monkey. And let's go ahead and just move this monkey off to the side. Click back on my now smoothed out cube of a geometry node. And let's go ahead and hit Shift A. And we want to search, so space bar, instance on points. Here we go, I'm going to drag that here. Put it between the two, now don't worry, I do see that my geometry nodes have disappeared, but don't worry, we'll bring it back. Next, Shift A. And let's search for object info. Grab the first one. Click the little eyedropper and hover over Suzanne. And left click, you see where it says geometry, let me zoom in actually. And let's drag geometry to instance. Ooh. What's going on here? And for good measure, let's add a couple more nodes, next, Shift A, I'm going to search for a random value. That's one you're going to use quite a bit of. Right, now this is just a regular float, so, between zero and one, but I need a vector, I need three different floats together. And we can drag that into scale. And into rotation. I can even change my maximum, so, let's see here, I'm actually going to disconnect it from rotation. Click on this node, click on Node, Duplicate, put it over here. And I'm going to type in 360, 360, 360. And you can see where I'm going with this. We're going to drag this one into rotation. So now I have one for scale, one for rotation. And for my scale, I'll just set it to say 0.5. Maybe 0.1, honestly, that way it's not too big. There we go. I know what you're thinking though, what happened to my cube? Because the last thing connected to the geometry output is the instance on points, my cube is not going to render. It's just providing data for where those points should be, and then it disappears, there's nothing else. To get it back, it's really easy. You can either click Add, or Shift A as a shortcut, and search for Join Geometry. There we go, it's the second one right here, join geometry. Hover over this area. And then what we want to do is grab this one right here. We want to grab the subdivision version. Now over here, you know what, I do think that these are a little bit too small. There we go. And if you go ahead and drag this value. And you can actually just fiddle with it over here. And look at that, you have now procedurally created a pretty wild looking thing. And because all of this is procedurally made, I can come into Edit Mode, and drag any one of these vertices up. Look at that. And it still sticks to it. And it still modifies and correctly subdivides. And of course adds all of our monkeys. There is a lot to cover in this video, but geometry nodes are very a simple, easy-to-use process to procedurally create really cool forms and shapes. Now in the next video, we're going to talk about how to use that ability to make a trench run for our star fighter. If you need to review this video, feel free to. I know there's a lot to cover, but stick to it, because it's an awesome way to make stuff inside a blender.