I wish I knew this before using Geometry Nodes (Blender)
It feels like so many tutorials are just step-by-step guides and don’t explain the WHY and HOW behind geometry nodes. How do geometry nodes actually work in Blender and how do you know when to use them?
The goal of this video is to bring a new perspective to geometry nodes so that you can be confident as you build your next creation.
00:00 Why?
02:13 Without Geometry Nodes
06:00 With Geometry Nodes
07:12 "The Philosophy"
13:05 Recreate the stitch
20:44 Recreate instance along the curve
27:21 Attributes
33:04 Rabbit hole #1 (scene time & text geometry)
36:38 Drivers
42:10 Extrude a face
43:18 Shade smooth
50:15 Join geometry
53:06 Groups
57:14 Garbage collection
58:06 Group inputs/outputs
1:00:05 Switches (if-else logic)
1:07:00 Rabbit hole #2 (references & fake users)
1:11:30 You're an addon developer
1:17:46 Input defaults
1:18:54 Materials
1:22:52 Up next
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?
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! ❤
This guy is an awesome teacher. I tried watching other Geometry Nodes tutorials here on KZhead but the concept was just not clicking, until I discovered this one. Thanks man.
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.
I just love how this started with stitches and then you went more nuts than squirrel shit. Seriously i learned so much. Thanks!
Haha, the rabbit hole syndrome is for real! Thanks for watching!
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 😄
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely helpful! Thanks a lot... I also like your style of switching between loose and strict thinking.
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
There’s wannabes and half ass tutorial list on KZhead and then there’s you, a professional in my humble opinion. I can’t thank you enough for teaching me this in such a fluid way you literally explain in such a way that it just clicks please don’t change you’re style keep this sort of quality over quantity.👍🏽
Happy to hear the style works! Thanks for watching!
@@RabbitHoleSyndrome please continue making these kinds of videos i LOVED this format alot.
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.
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)
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!
Before this video, I always thought Blender is by Aliens for Aliens only.
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.
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!
You know, I love long videos and rabbit holes, and blender, and you somehow mix all that into one channel... I like that
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.
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!
This made Geometry Nodes make so much sense for me! Thank You! I didn't realize how powerful Geometry nodes really were.
This is the best video I've seen so far on geometry nodes. So many don't explain the why enough. Thanks
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.
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!
absolutely LOVE this one - thank you for your time ♥
Thanks for the why, it does help in figuring things out and repeating it. Keep up the good work.
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.
EXCELLENT - and yes, the Why is often left out of lessons. Very helpful.
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.
love the channel name! thanks for the video and method of presentation!
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
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
Man this is just absolutely awesome. This is super cool and beautifully explained. Also, your voice is very relaxing.
Thanks for this! Appreciate the foundational procedural thinking and emphasis on WHY.
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!
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.
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!
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!
Thank you so much!!!! I tried too many tutorials but this is the only o
Thank you for this amazing free course.
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
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!
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!
Thanks for this. Quite a big project for a fresh channel! Much respect, look forward to seeing the channel grow 💪🏼
Thank you!
Very helpful tutorial. Learned a great deal as a Geo Node beginner! 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!
This is definitely the most beginner-friendly Geometry Nodes tutorial I've ever watched. Thumbs up!
Glad it was easy to follow!
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.
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!
Excellent tutorial with deep-level bonus content. I subscribed specifically for more rabbit holes!
Glad it helped & thanks for the sub!
Great tutorial video... now using Geometry nodes.... much easier, as you explained, to look at them from a programming point of few... very helpful... cant wait to see more.... ;-)
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!
Best video on blender I've ever seen. Thanks!
Thank you for this explanation!
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
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.
Excellent presentation! Thank you for your time in making this!
Thanks for watching!
Wow. Really great stuff. Thanks!
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!
this is so super. the first GN tutorial that clicked for me. please continue going down rabbitholes
Happy to hear it!
Thank you. Well explained.
Thank you. This was awesome. It helped alot.
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!
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.
Thank you for your video, it was super useful!
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!
First time I opened up my geometry nodes workspace and thank you 😭 this makes so much more sense now
Glad it helped!
Extremely helpful. Thank you!
You bet!
Geometry nodes are an incredibly powerful set of tools that allow detailed manipulation, and creation of almost everything in Blender. Geometry nodes are an incredibly frustrating thing that is a huge reason why Blender isn't leading the graphics world in everything. Blender is like buying a flight sim just for having some fun and finding out all the controls are 100% realistic and you need to be a qualified pilot to fly it. There is only one setting for the interface, expert. If MS Paint had the same interface you would need to set up nodes for colour, opacity, line thickness, line type, all before drawing a line. I have been using computers forever, everything from vanilla unix, vax workstations, right through to today. The nodes are really almost like background stuff the user shouldn't have to deal with unless they are truly at expert+ level. You see this with some of the add ons. You place them and they generate the 80 nodes that make themselves work. Background.
This Video is made for me! Thank you so much.
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! 😃
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!
"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
Great tutorial!!! Subscribed
))haven't seen the video yet but subscribed to see later because of the correct "Why" question!
@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.
Amazing video - im not done yet and I already know this is an incredible tutorial
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.
That was an amazing video fo yours. Thanks a lot for your digging ;)
this is the way to explain mindset the philosophy about it not just click , thank you
thank you so much for sharing this method with !
Thank you so much for that valuable information ❤
Happy to help!
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!
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!
id love a materials library tutorial, i cant seem to find anything that explains it well, thanks for this!!
This Channel is amazing!!!!! Cant wait to see more from you! you are an amazing Human being!!!
Thanks for watching!
I love the fact that this was just the video that I needed to make things in the right way!
Happy it helped!
Handsome fella talking about geometry nodes, all here for it!
Some great stuff in here man, ty
I came for geometry nodes and learned how drivers work. Thanks
This is really useful to me, I feel like we think the same way. Or maybe you're just a great teacher, either way it was easy to follow and I understand geometry nodes a lot better now. Thank you!
Glad it was helpful!
Hey man! This is an amazing tutorial, thank you for making it :)
Thanks for watching!
Pls make more Blender Videos. This one was so clear. Thank you so much