 I'm Aaron and I am a procedural artist working in Blender. What does that mean? Well Blender is not really renowned for its procedural tools but we've always had things like shaders and scripting and modifiers and add-ons. However in 2.92 geometry nodes got added to the fray and with 2.93 and beyond we're seeing some major improvements. So as a bit of a showcase we're going to be having a look through my splash screen file. This is the 2.93 LTS splash screen. This scene was made entirely with geometry nodes. There was very little I should say. Proper conventional modeling things like the petals and the shadow caster. That's all that I made myself. Everything else was instanted positioned manipulated within geometry nodes itself so we'll be having a look at that. When you open the file this is what I'll greet you. 3D viewport and no tree. These are where all the magic happens but the outliner is also very important. You can see I have a lot of collections here. Some are disabled entirely, some are hidden in the viewport and others are visible. I know that going through somebody else's logic can be a little bit intimidating so I've broken it down into bite-sized chunks as best as possible. You'll find the node tree is divided into frames each one containing a single element of the scene whether that's the basket or the paint pots or the scissors and so on. I've tried to ensure that it's all just a single thing so when you see a frame with a color that's one object of your scene. In some cases I felt like the nodes themselves were fairly self-explanatory. For example this red frame contains the nodes that create the back wall. We find a node group that creates the positions for the brick wall and then another group that randomizes rotation and scale and then we instance a collection called bricks. In other cases however things are not so clear so I've added some additional text inside the node tree. Hopefully this is going to help you understand the logic a little bit more. Now you'll also find a lot of these green colored nodes. These are all node groups that I've made as useful tools or shape generators that just really help the process. It stops me from needing to go back and forth making stuff myself and just wasting time. If you're interested in these then you can find out more about them in the links included in the read me on the left. This brings me on to the next point. I've also included some hopefully thorough read me text. In each of the four tabs at the top you will find a read me about that section. In fact the last one is entirely a read me. These contain an overview of the file and how to get the most out of it as well as links to me if you're interested in following my endeavors elsewhere. We've talked about the file so now let's use it. These collections all have a different visibility for a reason. If I enable the brushes and dust you can see that the scene gets hidden by all of this stuff so that's why I've kept it disabled in the viewport but enabled in the render. If you hit f12 then you're going to get the proper render even though there are certain things that you cannot necessarily see in the viewport right now. Similarly for the shadow caster this is what creates that window of light but when we're actually working on the file it kind of gets in the way. The flowers are one of my favorite parts of the scene so let's have a play with those. If I disable the scene collection here and enable the inputs main flowers collection here then we can just find the flowers alone. The file should also be much more responsive for you. Click on one of the flowers and now we can change some of the values in the node tree that makes it. All of the flowers are based on this phyla taxis node which essentially is just a special kind of spiral that emulates the distribution of leaves or petals in a flower. Now we find the real strength of procedural workflows here when we start changing stuff and realize that even though the whole scene is finished we can still come in and change something like the number of petals when we go back to the main scene that change will still be there. Okay go ahead and change the geometry node setups to your heart's delight. I will be going into the shader tab now. In the shader workspace we have some more text about how the scene works as well as links to the wood textures that I got from cczerotextures.com. All of the other shaders so everything which is not wood is a hundred percent procedural so if you're interested in procedural texturing you're in for a treat. Once again I'm fairly reliant on group nodes to do a lot of the heavy lifting. We essentially have no UV unwrapping in geometry nodes so if you want to use textures with something that you've generated you're going to need to get comfortable with the other coordinate spaces. In my case you'll see a lot of these basher nodes. These handle box mapping or triplanar mapping and then randomizing the rotation and hiding seams. It basically lets you texture anything with anything procedural or image texture regardless of whether it's seamless. Save some time when you can just bash textures on everything. The main Suzanne object has a bunch of materials assigned to different parts so be sure to look at the different slots. You'll also find that any instance objects you find in the inputs collection these will have their own materials. So the way that geometry nodes works with with materials is instance objects will bring their materials and if they have their meshes deformed or the mesh is entirely generated within geometry nodes then you're going to need to assign the material to that main object. The next tab is for compositing. Post production is so important and yet so common to see renders shared online without any post work done. This is a really fun step where you get to see things come to life in a way that you couldn't get in camera. So let's hit f12 and we'll see what the compositor is doing. Okay so the initial render is okay but there's stuff that can be improved. I make sure to render a mist pass alongside the render so I can do specific color correction with the depth. This helps add some more atmosphere and it lets you work in some more subject separation to make things pop a bit more. The mist pass isn't denoised by default and that's an important one to remember so just throw a denoise node on there first and then I'm going to pass it through a color ramp for the tried and tested orange and teal vibe that I overlay onto this render. I'm going to use another color ramp here as well just with crushing the whites and blacks and I've also flipped it so blacks on the right and I'm using this with a multiply just to give me a little bit more separation and push back that back wall. Next up is color balance. I want that romantic summer evening look so I'm adding some more reds into the shadows and lifting them slightly. It's going to flatten it and help with the painterly look. I add a vignette to darken the edges a little bit and then I flip horizontal and crop to improve the composition. Just for a normal render I may not have flipped but I wanted to make something more appropriate for a splash screen so I needed a space for the blender logo. So that's it for the compositing I think it actually adds so much to a scene so be sure to try the compositor in your own work. Now the last tab here this is just my final thoughts which is basically how it sounds it's just my final reflections on the project as I left it. If you're interested in the actual process of making this scene then you're in luck because I recorded the whole thing and on my channel links in the description you can find a 14 hour 40 tutorial. It's not quite tutorial all the way through it's more just my thinking as I go through the process but you can follow it and some people have. If you want something that's a little bit more consumable then there is also a time lapse so that is available there. If you're interested in geometry nodes or procedural workflows in general then I have videos on that I have tutorials available on my channel so come hang out and we'll learn to wrangle some nodes. Finally a massive thank you to the developers of Geometry Nodes and Blender and be sure to go and check out the demo files. There's a huge wealth of knowledge available from loads of different artists covering all sorts of different aspects of the software and while you're there why not download the latest version of Blender. It's really good.