 Good morning. Good morning. That might have been a really premature guys. Let's see. So thank you for being here It's like freakishly early in the morning like 10 a.m. And I'm really not a morning person, but I really hope that you all are that might help me a little bit So the presentation is going to be about procedural fantasy city creation using geometry nodes Super quickly about me. My name is millis. I'm the union. So I have like two minute long surnames So I'm not gonna waste half my time explaining it, but I'm a digital math painter I'm a concept artist and an environment artist all these kind of general roles and I spent maybe five or six years working in London at the big VFX houses on movies this kind of stuff and Over the last couple of years I've gone freelance and been working on smaller projects But the cool thing that that's enabled me to do has been to Create my own pipeline quote-unquote where kind of blender has ended up at the center of it and This presentation is sort of about my journey over the past you're to learning it and you know kind of experimenting with geometry nodes and I really hope that You can take something from this because I learned a lot and I hope that you can all enjoy now Let's see if the clicker works It does okay, so These are like a selection of screenshots that I kind of made with the basis of this procedural 3d city that I made in blender and Throughout the process I kind of had I guess a theme for it Or you know, maybe I just came up with that like for this presentation But I did have a premise or a goal and kind of questions that I wanted to ask and I hope wanted to answer and The main one being can like an untrained monkey sort of typing You know Shakespeare's works learn the general geometry notes from scratch over the course of Whatever amount of time, but hopefully reasonably quickly And you know having no technical skills. I'm not a programmer. I can maybe write hello world this kind of stuff but I'm just using the provided tools and kind of going from scratch and The next kind of premise being Can I go beyond the typical scattering approach when it comes to creating cities because I always used to just you know Scatter a bunch of houses, but if you zoom in nothing really conforms to the ground these kind of things So could I use geometry nodes to create something with like a little bit more order and or you know Hopefully more controlled chaos something like this and Take it a step further for my workflows and you know if you can fit into my pipeline all these kind of things and In many ways the project was definitely not maximally efficient I went down a bunch of rabbit holes that you know I couldn't get out of and couldn't figure my way out of and I had to back out and learn different things and there are certainly a lot of creators in this community with far better skills than me and As I talk if you have any ideas don't shout them out But afterwards, you know, you can tell me and I'm open to hearing suggestions for how I could make things better This kind of stuff. So big. Thank you to the community for you know all the help and support even though usually I kind of just invisibly stalk the forums and Kind of giving a disclaimer on this whole project I'm a big cheater and I use Photoshop. I use comp to make my images look prettier and I don't want to disguise that fact in any way but Blender has kind of been the Workhorse of this entire project. I would say 90 plus percent has been done in geometry nodes And then as you can see here, you know, I have photo bashed in some people this kind of stuff on top For like a little bit of concept art. You could take us a step further, but you know time limitations all this kind of stuff and I kind of developed this manual procedural manual Sandwich way of working where you know, hopefully I can do some sketches some simple blockouts of something I want manually and then use that as a base to do a bunch of procedural work and then, you know, go the last mile doing manual work again and My goal right now is to give like an honest assessment of this whole project And I hope that you can join me on the personal journey as I go through this Next slide Okay, so here's a bunch of buzzwords. I only think in buzzwords I you know throughout the whole process obviously I'm not having natural thoughts and this is totally not just for the presentation to make it look smart or something, you know all these words but the basic idea was to kind of start the work from a simple base which was the central ring and Kind of grow the city out of it. So I have an anchor that is manually placed. I can manually control it you know, it can be a square or whatever and I Generate the city out from that the cliffs are kind of generated from the bottom faces of all the buildings or all these tower structures, so Usually I think in the real world, you know, the ground comes first and then you kind of build on top But here I just did it backwards because it seemed to me like the city was The the main part of the show and you know the landscape kind of just then how to conform to that and I made a bunch of sand and stuff at the bottom and Okay, stick into reality was not my primary concern with a lot of these formations But I guess that's also something we say when we fail to hit photo realism. So then it becomes a style and Yep So, you know, there's some judgment that maybe you can throw my way on that But I kind of like this idea of these ridiculous cliffs holding up these buildings that kind of stuff and You know the rule of cool and all of this kind of stuff but the whole process was really a big exploration and Kind of like with all my projects in blender, you know there was a lot of playing around involved and kind of treated the whole thing like Lego modularly and whatever and so the basic setup actually for this is that I Did like a really redneck DIY loop of you know, the central ring generating some towers from which I spawn some bridges from Which has four more towers from which has four more bridges and you know having sort of like this fractal layout or pseudo Fractal and then at the end you kind of can go through all of the generation noises and do some seed cherry picking Which takes like three weeks to settle on one because you know, that's kind of like a really addictive part and I think I kind of went with the top left one and Here's like an example of you know without any buildings on top without any houses, whatever just a setup of the Towers and the bridges and This terrain is just sort of like that taken remashed Kind of just with some shaders applied to make it look like rocks Here's a bunch of nodes that I made for this project. I was supposed to count them. I have like X written down so that many maybe a few more actually and thank God you cannot read anything because this nonsense and Geometry knows kind of enables this creation of little groups things like this from which then you can build bigger and bigger and bigger things and And kind of really stack your whole project, you know where you can start from like really simple basic building blocks and Kind of put together something really big and as you go this process accelerates because you have more and more stuff to work off of and you know, some of these even made made it through the whole process to change too much and Certainly there are creators in the community who are really really good at this and better than me and there has been some overlap in that But I think it's really rewarding to kind of understand the inner workings of your own stuff So then when something does explode, you know how to fix it and So I kind of roughly let's say split them out into levels I mean mainly just for the presentation. It's kind of arbitrary, but you know at the base level you can have something really simple just like selections Some very very fake bevels some subdivisions that are random whatever and then from those you can build like a next level of stuff Which is sort of targeted material of applications Let's see what else kind of some scattering stuff mesh island based selections and then from those You can kind of build the next level which here I have You know stuff like laundry wires fences stairs, which then you know, you can see how that starts becoming like basic solid building blocks of buildings and stuff like this and then from those you do make houses you can make What else minarets markets Temples all this kind of stuff and then stacking those together you can kind of have your overall big city layout I'm really glad this one is too blurry to see And yes, I did do those connections manually I'm kind of really hoping for loop nodes to come out and and kind of make this obsolete and of course then you have this when you go back to your old nodes and You know, I think we've all kind of like gone through this spider web process Usually with other people and you know here see I didn't put like an output on this node so there's no escape that little detail and Here's a bunch of work in progress stuff. So obviously Blender has much more to offer than just Geometry nodes and there's still all sorts of stuff going on like modifiers and I use vertex groups and shading to accomplish some things and We're still in this intermediate stage on the way to I guess everything nodes I hope where I have along the way found some bottlenecks where I kind of end up being like okay I need to decimate something and you know squash down the setup into a decimation and And then kind of expand further but funnily enough You know, I would leave the project for a couple of weeks and then come back and realize half my setups are obsolete because Just the software is evolving so fast and it's gotten like 10 updates since I last opened it and I have to update I mean, it's either that or like Someone else in the community comes out with some node set up similar to mine But infinitely better because they have like a three digit IQ and I don't And so, you know, I kind of you know, then steal stuff from them and Keep it really quiet, but that's why I'm not gonna publish some of it because I don't know where it starts and ends so yeah, I definitely went through a lot of versions of this project and kind of a learn as I went along and At this point of no return it's time to make some mood boards because you know, once you're in the middle of the project that is the correct time to start and I don't know if any of you work professionally, but that's how we do it in big leagues That's not a joke Here you have some photos that I took From Alhambra mainly in in Granada, Spain For the fourth that was a huge inspiration and for the city itself a lot of stuff from India and Nepal I mean, I think the inspiration is really clear and You know, it always helps to have some real life reference to aim towards the kind of see the level of detail this kind of stuff and I did do some shading. I did zero retopology UVs, you know, it's like the You know the monkeys with the sea no evil here. No evil speak no evil. I don't Jesus Christ. I don't touch that everything is tri-plane art and I kind of had this experience where I went With having more and more and more materials as I expanded and then you know kind of I made this on a laptop So at some point it overheated and I had to scale it back down a lot to just having a limited number of materials Which I'm gonna call Giga shaders not because they're good because they covered a lot of things and You know, you can have at the scale that I'm working out here one wood texture or something like this and Based on object ID, you can vary it a little bit and suddenly like it seems like there's a lot of different types of wood All these walls are taking from my photographs. So based on location height normals I can adjust them to kind of You know conform to what I need. Here's a lot of trim textures sort of stuff I used for fences which was more efficient than doing a lot of stuff in geometry Thank God the video works So this is kind of like, you know speaking of variety this is a selection of the kind of Buildings I made for the tops of these tower structures and you know for the texture stuff actually a lot of it comes just from modeling detail lighting stuff like this so you can Kind of rely on that at this scale quite a lot and so I wanted to have a lot of variety so I made some temples and parks some housing districts markets minarets and a lot of them are connected with bridges wires all this sort of stuff just to kind of you know Have it hopefully look more organic and you know one is I'm the only guy who zooms in no one ever does People just scroll through our station. So no one's going to see this anyway and Here's like the house setup that I had made Which here I'm kind of showing with like a floor plan that I'm Adjusting as I go along But in the project it's sort of the tops of those huge tower structures that I plug in and use as a you know base Okay, I forgot I had this so that's kind of like how my whole explanation of this feels you know the step one step two and You know there is obviously that kind of Element to this explanation of it, but you know It's not that much more complex. You kind of just take the floor plan assign some island indices to kind of Determine how many floors the building is gonna have extrude it that amount Subdivider sides to make some windows and doors and then draw the rest of the owl And you know around you can do some markets and some other stuff And I'm totally glad to explain this but I'm think I think I'm talking too slow or I have too many slides But you know here I have it sped up 2x and I'm not gonna lie I was not planning to say that I was planning to pretend that the setup is much faster than it is But now I kind of feel embarrassed now that I'm here So it is slightly bit you know slower than this But you know you can just create a whole city based from this and it's kind of like you know some Grebals on steroids really and I'm not scattering anything. Everything is actually just extrusions and stuff from that base so You know using vertices faces edges you can create different stuff like fences wires poles the markets and Here is the This is the video. That's not gonna work. All right be like that so this is the same setup applied with a different I guess coat of paint which is you know also different Kind of types of windows and doors and all this sort of stuff But you know, I'm trying to make it versatile so I can reuse it in the future and as I'm going along I am trying to make it more Coherent and stable, you know if I create a new building currently the previous stuff still gets affected in some ways so with this I was really trying to fix that it does work and There's you know some stuff flickering so I think I need to merge more vertices by distance, which is the Band-aid to everything and Here's another screenshot. I don't have a title. I just put this in so I can like breathe because I'm not good at breathing I'm talking at the same time So in large part I made two overarching setups for the city and the castle area just because they required slightly different Approaches, but you know, they start from the same base different stuff happens in the middle and at the end a lot of the These tools that I had made are reused and whatever doesn't look good gets hidden by fog and stuff like this That's the master tip So this is sort of like that same thing showing the central structures, you know for the castle and the idea was that you know I can plug in any sort of base and Have the castle formation all these buildings actually conform to them perfectly whereas if you just scatter stuff, you know, you're gonna have these kind of Connection problems and obviously when I show it like this, you can tell which ones are sort of generated from the same base whatever but My argument is kind of that if you go to a real castle, it is kind of generated, you know All the towers are generated from the same Setup I guess and then affected by whatever is underneath them and actually like here with the toppings title I wanted to be really funny and put like a pizza slice, but that would be too cheesy I'm sorry And then okay, so another sort of filler slide, but you know, there does come a point when I start thinking I'm kind of tired and let's do some things in a way that's slightly more cheaty and So that I think kind of happens around this connection point in the middle And you know perfection is the enemy of progress all this kind of stuff And I want geometry nodes to be another tool in my belt rather than you know Replacing everything and so I think with the castle itself That was the perfect point to sort of illustrate this approach where okay, the towers are procedurally generated You know the terrain all this but there's stuff in the middle. That's actually from the Plaza de España in severe Spain Just from the Google Earth data, which is another really interesting kind of worms But I don't have the time for that sadly, but you know the focal point is then organic and so If you do too much in procedural setups, you have like these diminishing returns So if you only have to mix one of something probably better to just kind of bash it out manually and whatever you have a lot of then You can do that stuff procedurally and So I forgot all of my words No, okay, so there does I Don't know. Yeah, like there does come this point where You kind of go. Okay. I've made enough procedural stuff and Maybe it is better to kind of try different approaches and I think you know the official answer to that Is to say something like okay, there is a time cost calculation, you know all this which there is But also there is just an element of okay. I'm tired of this. I have a craving to upload something and get some likes on art station and Yeah, and so at this stage I kind of did that and I've played around with a lot of interesting new tools I mean everyone's kind of seen stable diffusion, so I've been using photo bashing and and that to create the spaceships and whatnot In all of this I did have a spaceship set up kind of done But the reality is that it was not as good as some of the other ones that I have seen at this presentation, so I'm not gonna put it in mine is extremely extremely janky and Yeah, so this is kind of like a good example of you know, just the paint over stuff And I think like look I'm one guy working on a laptop half the time on the kitchen counter with like a fun printer at my laptop and so You know, I don't have huge resources, so I kind of cut it there But the cool thing is you know, I've managed to render this out And this is kind of like an emperor has no clothes moment where you see it without all the fog But I kind of made the camera fly really fast so that you know, you can't focus too much on the details, but You can do some really cool virtual photography using kind of procedural city approach because you know you're in this process of discovery, right and You know, you can kind of peek around corners take some photos and I really enjoy that and You know, I hope that this kind of illustrates where I was At this stage where I finished the 3d so some lessons to be I kind of learned I guess You can separate elements into individual project files and that really Kind of enables you to work faster on smaller things You know, I wanted the host house setup. I kind of did it in a whole different setup and that really helped and You know just for speed this kind of thing because if you work in one project it explodes Yeah, so small atomic building blocks Better than giga ultra combo nodes. That's why I kind of did all this stuff where I You know made everything kind of procedural and bite-size and and and that kind of has really worked well for me and It's unhealthy This does not match No one cares this procedural seed you use because I always spend like hours and hours on this and in the end they all kind of look the same and Yeah, I mean, yeah, people just scroll through stuff really fast So, you know, if your overall setup looks good, the seed doesn't matter too much and More wires are always better. So just laundry and telephone cables and all of this kind of stuff How am I doing for time because oh? My god That's not and then if in doubt add more volume metrics You know and I kind of tried this in 3d. It was a little bit heavy. So I did it mostly in 2d and Booleans are not your friend. So I've made this mistake a lot and lastly, okay, just to wrap this up Blender is still not fully a hundred percent of my pipeline You know, I still do this stuff in 2d whatever but it has really eaten up Everything else that I was previously doing in other softwares in 3d. So that's been amazing And I'm kind of really, you know refreshing the developer pages like come on come on come on Do more stuff I'm really ungrateful because I don't contribute. I just talk but You know guys, this is the slide where I would put my contact details But I'm like minus nine thousand skill level at self marketing. So I forgot But you know, I haven't like there's so many, you know, very few dudes out there with my name So I'm sure you can find me. I wanted to say obviously. Thank you to the community. You're fantastic clap for yourselves my way Even better, thank you to the devs and now you can start at the end. Thank you very much