Chapter 1: Using Geometry Nodes to Create Dynamic Scenes

Geometry Nodes is one of the latest additions to the ever-evolving world of Blender and is one extremely powerful tool. It allows you to create and change an object's geometry in more complex ways than regular modifiers, and it allows you to create complex scenes quickly and in non-destructive ways, meaning you can always go back and tweak some of the parameters, making it extremely dynamic and versatile. Welcome to the exciting world of Geometry Nodes!

One thing to note is that Geometry Nodes is still being developed extensively by the developers of Blender, which means that new nodes will be added, and more workflow options will be available to you, making it one of the most exciting new features to come to the Blender toolset.

In this chapter, you will learn how to use some of the most popular nodes, and you will get a feel of what you can do using Geometry Nodes. You will learn how to distribute objects on points, using Math nodes to calculate attributes such as the distance between objects, as well as how to modify certain attributes such as scale, position, and rotation. Additionally, you will learn how to randomize certain attributes, which is important when creating dynamic motion graphics scenes.

This chapter will give you a good, but basic, understanding of Geometry Nodes, and later in this book, we will make use of other methods that will build on this chapter.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Introduction to Geometry Nodes in Blender
• Creating and manipulating geometry using nodes
• Using textures to control attributes
• Animating with Math nodes

  Technical Requirements

  All the projects in this book have been created and built on Blender 2.93.x. The projects should work perfectly fine with Blender 3.x versions too. There may obviously be slight changes going forward as they develop Blender 3, but most of the changes they usually do are minor and should not break any workflows. However, the Geometry nodes chapters will work strictly on versions 2.93.x, since these nodes are updated with every version change. Version 2.93 has Long Term Support (LTS) till 2023 and you can download it from here. https://www.blender.org/download/lts/2-93/

  All the projects of this book have been uploaded on Github here: https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Taking-Blender-to-the-Next-Level