 You guys hear me? Yeah, super. I'm gonna try and get this thing on the road I'm already sad that I didn't make it two hours, but looking at the amount of people standing up Sorry that this is an hour. I hope you make it through There's some space at the front if people want to sit at the front feel free to like when your legs just give out Come to the front and sit down All right, so welcome to the creating animations with point clouds tutorial. I think is what I call this We'll try and see if we can get through an entire animation But I think The way I record these and then bring them into blender is probably the most interesting parts I'm gonna start with that and then we'll move on and see what we can do with it in geometry nodes and Yeah, I don't know. I don't use my laptop that often. So if it crashes a lot, that's not me. It's a laptop So first of all acquiring these point clouds, how does one do so I Have an iPhone 12 pro here and it has a time of flight sensor on it. They call it lidar It's not really lidar. It's actually time of flight, but you know marketing. What are you gonna do? But the cool thing is you can just grab an app put it on there and you can start scanning a whole bunch of stuff Unfortunately, I couldn't find a video recorded earlier to show you guys, but basically it's really just a one-click solution It's only on the iPhone 12 pro 13 pro and the 14 pro and the larger ones I haven't found anything for Android yet But I do know there's phones with that same sort of sensor in it If somebody does figure out how to do it on Android, please let me know because I'd like to have it If I can show it to people on other platforms, it's all be great But for now, I just do this with an iPhone now keep that in mind when you see these point clouds because they're actually quite interesting Also why a point cloud and not a mesh. I just think it looks cooler It's really that simple It's sort of interesting data to work with as well, but we'll get to that when we get to that So what do these point clouds look like? The first thing I thought I was gonna do is I was gonna scan a point cloud of one of the men's bathroom and do something with it But then I thought maybe that's a little too creepy, but at least I could show you the point cloud So this is scanned in one take there. You can see the urinals gotta love that and As we let it sort of build You can fly around the point cloud a little bit and you can't see anything because I'm too zoomed in come on Yeah, I don't use this application very often as you can tell you can kind of see here through the window We can see the the bathroom stalls and that kind of stuff and again This is just from a phone walking around it at this took I think I Don't know a minute even maybe even less just me wait until everybody leaves the bathroom So I don't look like a creep and then just kind of go on ham I tea in my hand I was like looking around So it's kind of crazy to see what you can do with a phone These point clouds they come up to about I think it's 12 or 13 million points in a single scan pretty wild So for some of the people that know what I do You know I've also done a lot of photogrammetry in the past and Photogrammetry is really cool, but you can't really scan anything reflective So a lot of indoor areas are immediately just not easy to use and easy to scan This sort of solves that you get some kind of funky color shifting on reflective surfaces, but it looks cool So rather than doing the bathroom, I thought let's just go for the full thing and I have three clouds here I have no idea if they're gonna load in together. There we go These are three scans and I managed to scan the entire Staircase that we've all been going up and down the last couple of days So these are three scans combined. I use an app called sitescape s I T E S C A E P A P E. Anyway, come up and ask me if you can't remember I'll I can show it later as well if somebody has some questions and They have this little button and it says one out of ten and it makes you think you can do ten scans Consecutively, but only if you pay them fifty euros a month But you don't have to because if you just end your scan and then stay in the same place start a new scan They're all a line anyway, so haha So that's kind of fun you see I missed a little bit here But that only adds to the fun if we get into it I'll load it up in blender and I'll be able to show you a little bit better because I'm yeah I'm not used to using this application as much so I'll show you two ways to get the scans into blender One is the cheap aka freeway and the other one is the paid way Paid way has some advantages, but I'll talk a little bit about both now First of all if I want to get these scans into blender As anybody you're ever used PLY files in blender It's not seeing a lot of hands. It's not a very common format The importer is Fine, but it doesn't support vertex colors, and if I want any sort of colors I need to have those vertex colors because it comes into blender as a mesh as verts And I need to kind of be able to yeah do something with them So fortunately before I start cleaning up this cloud. I had it ready here There are two ways to do this on github There's somebody who kind of rewrote the PLY importer and you have to kind of swap out some files in blender But it means you can get vertex colors from a PLY file And this one's this is the freeway that I was talking about but you have to do a little bit of work But with that you can only import stuff and the thing is you run into the sort of the limitations of the importer Like I said these scans are 12 13 million points You can imagine these those three scans that I combined if I'm trying to Import like 50 million vertices. It's gonna take forever. It's gonna be a pain in the butt So you need to do all the scan pre-processing before you bring it into blender rather than if you use this Add-on which I'm definitely gonna. Oh, it's on sale now I'm definitely gonna plug. Yaku did an amazing job. This add-on is called point cloud visualizer It is GPL. So I'm sure you could get a version somewhere but for free, but I've been using this for the last year and a half two years. Maybe You can load up these really really big scans into blender. It takes care of all the drawing in the viewport So it's actually pretty performant and then you can do all the sort of Processing and everything in blender directly and convert it to something you can use in blender very easily But I'll show both as far as I can But it's good to do if you're gonna do anything with point clouds honestly, it's the best 75 bucks I ever spent so So what do you do when you're a cheapskate and you don't want to pay for anything? Then you use cloud compare cloud compare is also an open source application. It Does exactly what it says on the tin. It's for handling point clouds You can mesh them you can do all kinds of crazy stuff to them But mainly I just want to load in the full set here and just show you the workflow Let's see open my beacon folder. I'm just gonna grab those three clouds Apply all really all it's doing is it's telling me oh, there's a bunch of data for each point There's not only I think I don't think these do normals, but they do vertex colors So it's just saying telling it okay apply all that data keep it. I don't want you to throw it away I want you to keep everything that's in those points So now you can see there are three distinct pieces so I started from the top So that was my first scan and that's the last one and that's one one in the middle The cool thing is and I'll I'll show you this in blender later because it'll be more easy for me to show you The cool thing is you can sort of see people walking past so you get these shadows of people that are moving It's really fun. So I figured we'd try to do something with this now again I don't use cloud compare very often. So I'm gonna struggle through this a little bit. I'm trying to What am I trying to do if it doesn't work, then it's not a big thing cloud create single point cloud there We go. Thank you very much. So now it just merges those together. We can turn off the other ones and it didn't do what I wanted to do So yeah, basically what you do is once you get all these together in cloud compare Then you've got this little button here. That's called Sub-sample a point cloud and then you can just get a random sampling of a number of points I've rendered 50 million points in blender. It's possible It's not very fun to work with because it gets really slow because they're all vertices and it needs to do some conversion So generally I stick to about two three million. I have a two million scale down version of this We'll see how well it works. I might have to scale it down a little bit depending on how the laptop does But you could get a PLY from here And then you could import it into blender with that free tool that I shoot you from GitHub Or if you want to add an extra step to the to the process I haven't tested it Yes But I but I came up with it two days ago is then you can open this PLY that's merged into mesh lab And then for mesh lab you could probably export like an OBJ with verdicts colors If you want to over complicate it go for it There's probably simpler ways to do it for free But I just really used using this tool and I'll show you exactly why So if I were just load one of these in I've got it loaded up I just get point cloud visualizer and go to the folder and I'm just going to load one of these raw scans and And you can see it just dumps it immediately into blender I can manipulate it like anything else and it looks really really nice in here. I can actually go in and show you See all these people they give me weird looks I Apologize if you're in there, but I always make sure people aren't you know very recognizable so But there you go and then you get all those point clouds now I'm not going to do the whole process of simplifying it because it's easy enough to figure out I'll show you where it is Here you get this little point cloud visualizer thing you can Why is there a cap on this table? You can Just select it and then you go into I think it's filter and you can see it just goes forever and you can do stuff like simplify Just a percentage or whatever But actually what I want to do is I want to bring in a cloud that I've already simplified and then convert it to something We could use in blender so we can get started in blender finally But it's cool because down here you could convert it very easily and then points for mesh geometry nodes So we're going to dive into some geometry nodes and then you can see me struggle through that But it's nice because it immediately creates everything you need to just get going But I'll obviously show you everything you need to know and it's nice because you can just say okay I just want like 2% of these convert this and it's going to take a second and There we go and now we get 2% of these as vertices and they have The colors in the vertex color now and the color attributes because we're changing names and blender now and Then you can do kind of cool stuff with it, but I'm going to bring in a cloud that I simplified earlier So I'm just going to throw this out And I'm going to do this with the point cloud visualizer just to keep it fast and You can see I've already merged the three together once it loads Please load. Why is this one taking forever? There we go This one's 2 million points you've see already simplified it down quite a bit and Now we can actually start doing something with it in blender. The only thing I still need to do is do that conversion I'm going to start with I don't know if 2 million points. I'm just going to convert it and see if it crashes or not Yay computers come on. We believe in you. You can do it There we go, it did it so now we have a 2 million vertex Mesh and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to slice off the top and slice off the bottom So we can make maybe a looping animation. I don't know. We'll see if we have time to loop it but I definitely want to Let's undo that go into wireframe mode so we can get all the points Delete the top vertices delete the bottom vertices and this is already looking promising So when I'm creating like looping animations, I'm always trying to make sure that I'm working with like predictable units So do I mean by that? I can see this is 20 meters tall Is it 20? Yeah, I think so so that means I can move my camera 20 meters things stay really easy to calculate I can move the mesh another 20 meters down and then I know it'll loop perfectly without having to go calculating stuff This is just force of habit because I don't even know how many looping animations I've made at this point, but it's good to kind of get it in there while you're working So what did this give us? First of all, let's actually render this and see what happens Turn stuff off and let's put in a sky texture just to make things easy There we go, so you can see it immediately already renders because it's doing some stuff in the background. So first of all it gave us a shader Which is bringing in the point cloud colors that it generated Piping it through a gamma conversion because I guess they do it in linear space or something I don't know as long as it works, right? And then it's just giving me a diffuse shader now Why is this being rendered because they're just vertices because we already also got a geometry node set up And what it did for us this little amazing node It's called mesh to points basically what it does you can get your Edges or vertices or faces or whatever you want and convert them to a point now What is a point in geometry node? It's like an infinitely perfect sphere that isn't a real geometry It's sort of instance render geometry, but it acts as a like a normal sphere But you can see it renders insanely fast even on the laptop It's like decent and you can set the size of it so you can do some really fun stuff with it And this isn't working because I think you have to do it through the thingy here. There we go So if you set them a little bit bigger, you can see they get bigger You can see our hallway is already starting to take shape Remember, I just walked around with my phone. This is wild, right? Like obviously we are most of us here are familiar with photogrammetry, but to me this is just insane You see all the different colored rooms And the doors at least and we get a nice representation of thing now This is two million points ish because I cut off the top and bottom We'll see you might have to dumb it down once you start doing stuff in geometry nodes if it takes too long But we'll see what we can do Now where can we go from here because really all I need to do to make an animation And be done with it is I set a camera and some of you may have noticed that I put the top of the The staircase at zero zero zero and then the bottom is at about minus 20 again It's just because my brain sort of works that way at this point. I know if I have let's see Let's do Obviously, I won't be able to render out the complete animation. I'm just telling you guys that now Setting expectations and all that so now I can set it up to where I'm going to do 240 frames And 24 frames a second. That's 10 seconds should be fine And what we can do is at the first frame We set a single key frame on the z-axis for the camera and then we go to frame 241 and set it at 20 Why do you want it at 241? Well, if you loop something you want the frame after the last one you rendered to be the same one as the first frame That you rendered because otherwise you get two of the same frames and it stutters Yeah, I'll let you think on that one for a little while So now what happens is we're moving through the thing and I set it to plus 20 because I'm an idiot and There we go. Let's set it to minus 20 And now we're looping through the thing. So now you can see we're flying through the staircase Hitchcock would be proud and I'm gonna set up the camera like really extreme We're gonna have fun with the camera and have like a crazy extreme angle and it's still pretty pretty decent I'm still getting my 424 full 24 frames a second and that's the cool thing about working with this stuff in geometry nodes It's actually really fast. So well, I say that now and I'm gonna start doing stuff to it So the fun thing is let me just check on the time. Okay, we're doing good. We're doing good. This will work. This will work So now let's get really funky with it So there's two ways that I generally animate these clouds The first is getting deep into the node tree and then hating myself when I open up the file again a week later because I didn't give Anything names and the second one is just use modifiers because modifiers are still incredibly powerful For example, if we just throw in a simple to form modifier Yes, there we go You'll see I'll start doing stuff to it, but it doesn't work Well, once you've turned this mesh into points with geometry nodes blenders like this isn't geometry So you got to put it in front of that any geometry node tree. So But what we can do is for example, we can twist it 360 degrees again Why do I do 360 degrees because of the loops? I'm always thinking how to loop stuff So I have to get perfect connections between all the different parts But now we get this really cool sort of Almost abstract staircase and at this point, you know, let's just call it art and keep it saying keep it easy But you can see, you know, you can really start messing with your sort of sense of reality with these now I don't know. I kind of like this is interesting, but let's get it make it a little bit bigger But you know what every good funky render needs fog. We got to have some volume metrics And that's another cool trick. I'll show you. I'm using a sky texture at the moment and if we were just to throw in a volumetric Shader in the world Slot, so let's go to world Constantly moving these things up and down There we go if we're just to grab a Principal volume and plug it in Everything's black. Why well, this is a funky little head scratcher The Sun texture is infinitely far away and the world volume shader is infinitely Large so the light can never reach because they're canceling each other out Yeah, took me a while to figure that one out So what do you do instead? You just grab a cube scale it up and really just put the shader on the cube rather than the world So let me share everything. There we go. This way too long. Maybe maybe not something like that Make it a little bit bigger Just scale it up a bit Like that a bit there we go And I just want it to be all-encompassing and like big enough to where you get the effect now again Everything's dark why we're inside the cube, but now we can give it that same Principal volume shader and I don't know why I'm doing this on a laptop, but there you go and It won't load the first time you put it in because bugs and then when you re plug it in or when you re render There it is Why is it black because the density is too high? We set it to point one and now we get this really cool atmospheric random Trippy abstract staircase. I don't know The fun thing with this is that it reacts really well to the Sun so you get these really cool like sunshafts and all that kind of stuff See if we bring it down a little bit and we can rotate it and Depending on how much time you would put into this what I tend to do as well is if I fly through these I'll animate the Sun to like go 360 degrees and up and down man. You get some wild stuff Yeah, lots of fun as usual now This is cool This is kind of the workflow for most of the ones that I've posted online and that kind of thing But I want to dive into geometry nodes a little bit and really push it really see how we can you know make stuff crash That's always fun. So I'm just gonna turn off the volumetrics for now And I'm gonna turn off the modifier again Really, I want you to just more more be inspired by what I'm trying to show here rather than show you like a very specific thing to do So geometry nodes who loves geometry nodes my homies Who hates geometry nodes and thinks it's needlessly complicated be honest, it's fine. That's what I thought first so Okay So obviously geometry nodes is pretty cool The fun thing is because we get that one from the The add-on that I used you would have to build this yourself if you import it through the other stuff But honestly, it's just meshed to points and then this set point radius It's just to give you like a little control here. I never understood why they put it in there I guess so people don't have to look at the node tree because they might be scared of it or something I don't know and then you got to make sure you set the material of the points as well If you disable this they're just gonna be white and you're gonna be scratching your head for like 30 minutes Like why is it just rendering the materials on and then you're like, oh, right? You have to set the material on the points because of geometry nodes But then we can actually get started so somewhere in between here We're gonna do all the cool stuff. So I've been absolutely obsessed lately with Yeah, the well not lately, but I've always been obsessed with the art of I'm not gonna say his first name because he's Polish and I'm gonna put treat but big scene ski. He's a Yeah, a Polish artist who made these absolutely beautiful things Well, I say beautiful. It's not for the faint of heart. So you've been warned Like this is one of his more famous works and you can see there's just immense amount of detail in there This is not geometry nodes. Obviously. It's painting. So mad props to the man He painted that stuff by hand we get to do it with nodes like this one's pretty interesting You know one could say it's even a little bit topical at the moment But yeah, all these like crazy worlds and and really demonic things and that just truly horrifying work I love it But I've always been inspired by that really like these really Detailed textures and there's like all these little fine Sinui things hanging everything together. So let's see how creepy we can get this staircase. It's basically what I'm trying to say Yeah, first thing I'm gonna do before I do anything. I'm gonna drop in a delete geometry node There we go and I'm just gonna create a little control to where I can delete most of geometry before I apply everything Because then I can work on like a sparse data set and then just Turn it off once I'm done and just hope it doesn't crash once I'm done So to do that really quickly you put in a delete geometry and then you have this little random value and in the random value You've got the Boolean value and basically that's just gonna give you a selector a Boolean selector for polygons Yes, or no with a probability of 50% by default. So I plug this in here This is gonna delete 50% of the polygons really quick and easy If you wanted to be a nerd about it, you could plug this into here and then use it here I'm gonna set this to like 0.9 So I'm left with about 200,000 points because I started with 2 million They should be fast enough to work with in the viewport, but again Yeah, I practice this on my computer at home and then realized all right. You have to do this on the laptop But I do this anyway just to keep things flowing a little bit quick So first thing I'm gonna do actually, where's my Mesh to points actually I'm gonna put these Somewhere else. I'm gonna do this whole conversion thing at the end It's gonna make everything really messy, but that's fine In the geometry here and then plug that over there Okay, I apologize in advance for the mess that I'm gonna make There we go So now we've got a clean working space to get started So how am I gonna get all these really creepy lines and things? I'm not gonna do exactly the same thing, but I'm gonna try to approximate it So what we're gonna do is first things first. We want to get a curve line Curve circle, but a curve line We go let's put that somewhere over here And the curve line is just a line, I mean I can show you It's just a single curve line, but I'm gonna start scattering that onto the points So get away get out of here if you were And to do that because the mesh is already points what we can do is Actually, can we do the spot after the point radius? Maybe we could Sorry, I changed my mind about what I was gonna do today like five minutes ago. So bear with me So now we still have the points there we go I'm gonna set that material thing to the side here for now and just focus on this So you've got those points, which is cool because then we can instance on points And now we put these curves in here So now we get lines on every single point you can already see it's starting to struggle a little bit I'm already hating myself for switching directions, but there we go Maybe put this That's better So now we have a whole bunch of lines and then what I like to do is just to give them random rotation I'm gonna try and zoom in enough here and maybe just maybe a better idea would be to Do this vertically so then we can look at the tower and we give her lots of space for the geometry notes Even though it runs horizontally, but you know, whatever So I'm gonna grab another random value because I will randomly rotate these so Geometry no not geometry Utilities random value and I know I can type but I don't know why I always do it through the menus And I want a vector because our rotation is a little blue thing. I'm a Bob Which means it needs a vector which means it needs XYC. So it needs three floats and We can set the random value to vector and that's just gonna give us Random values between zero and one now zero and one doesn't really translate very well to rotation And this is where the fun starts For some crazy reason This is in radians. So if we want to get 360 degrees, what's the quickest way we do pi times two? Enter and we get 360 degrees You get that one for free What else do I want to do I want to get a random scale So I'm just gonna duplicate this and I'm gonna set this to float Because I only need a single value because I want to scale them uniformly So I'm gonna do point one to maybe two and now I got a whole bunch of really weird creepy lines sticking out all over the place So Now the fun part now We're gonna map the end of each one of those lines so the closest point it can find that sounds a lot more complicated than it is But I just want to say what I'm gonna do before I do it so and people aren't like huh So what do we need to do we need to make a selection for the last point of each line And we need to map that to to the original geometry So first of all to make that selection in the curve And this is why I use the curve as an instance at the start and not a mesh line You've got a lot more control over the segments and the points and all that kind of stuff We have this wonderful little thing called spline parameter, which doesn't explain anything But what it gives us in this factor It gives us a value from zero to one from the start of the curve to the end of the curve So the first point gets a value of zero and the last point gets a value of one now because I created the line with two Points I get a zero at the first point and a one at the end point. There's my mask. I already have it I don't have to do anything else for it, which is really nice The only other thing I need to do before I start manipulating these curves. These are still instances. So in blender's brain It's like this is not real geometry Which means if you're gonna do any sort of geometry Cooperations on it won't work. So you need to make it proper geometry first Which means if I go to instances, there's this realized instances thing Basically, it's gonna tell it now make this just one curve object with a whole bunch of different splines in it So when we do that nothing really changes again, I could open the spreadsheet, but we're not here to look at spreadsheets Are we? But it's good to know I'm just trying to explain the idea behind it. So basically now We have to think of this in curve terminology This is now a single curve with I don't know a few thousand splines in it Because each curve segment that is separate well not separate But each separate curve is made out of it's own splines which are the pieces between the points I'm just trying to iterate this so you know, you can kind of follow along I guess So how do we map this now now my favorite note to do this is the geometry proximity node Basically what you can do is you can tell it okay I want this target object and then I want you to find the closest points to the geometry that I'm messing Even I have a hard time explaining it I just you know that it's in in the name for this one at least but what I want to do is I want to grab this realized Instances I want to plug it into the target because I want to map it back onto itself But what I want to do is I want to now set the position Let's see if I just set the position here then what it's going to do is Nothing because this is only for a mesh so I have to convert the curve to a mesh first and then it should work See if it did anything It did not lovely I'm happy to the points. I'm already regretting my decision These are realized instances so that should work technically why isn't it working I did it's in here. Oh Yeah, so that one should set wait Now I'm confused Okay, let me run through it here. So we've got our geometry we need to Sorry, I stayed out a little bit too late last night. So it's my own fault So we need to grab this I need to mask this We have the selection so I need to put in the factor So that's my selection and then I should be able to remap that geometry Why is it not doing what I wanted to do? It's gonna be something real stupid If I offset it it's doing something, but it's not working the way I want it to or is it Jesus Just work will you oh? Yeah, of course. I'm doing that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I need Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I don't need the instances Drops to that guy I Need this I need the dang points. So once I put the points in here there we go now We're gonna get what we want. Thank you a good sir Turns out I'm only human after all So now we can get a really kind of messed up creepy representation of this hallway and that's kind of what I was after We can go really far and then now start Displacing this a little bit so again what I'm gonna do is now that I have these curves this same spline parameter It's still giving me a zero to one to the end of the curve doesn't matter curves the same thing So the cool thing is what we can do is now we can resample this curve So what's that gonna do basically like remember I said earlier? It's just two points It's the first point and then the remap point at the end but by resampling the curves We're creating new points in between You can do it either by count or by length or whatever Let's say I want every curve now to be 32 points. Why am I doing this now? I can start doing cool stuff with the curves themselves and I have a little bit more geometry to work with So I'm gonna use the same spline parameter and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna grab a color ramp And the color ramp gonna plug it in here Really I'm just using this to remap the mask so remember the spline parameter zero to one start to finish I'm gonna set this from zero to point five and I'll make another swatch and then set it to Black at the end. Come on there you go and now it's just giving me a mask that's Nothing at the beginning and end and 100% towards the middle So now I can wiggle around the middle of the curve, but the start and end points stay the same So now it gets super interesting Again, let's have some fun with this. We're gonna go for another Set position Who's we're getting they joined You can be honest you can even walk out. It's all good. I understand So let's see Now we can set the position and then we do the thing with the count with the textures So now we get a noise texture again a Noise texture outputs rg and b so really we have x y and z if we think about it We have three channels we can convert colors to vectors very easily So we get a 3d sort of noise to push stuff around that's exactly what I want to do I want to offset basically these things and you'll see if I just plug it in You'll see the noise starts offsetting all the little things and the cool thing is once I plug this into the selection You'll see the base points stay the same And I'll fix this in just a little bit. You can see as I scale this up Starting points stay the same the end points stay the same, but everything else kind of gets pushed around now One problem is it's going in this weird one direction. Why well yay vector math Basically you want stuff to go negative z and positive or negative x positive x, you know negative y positive y and because we're only getting from black to white in from the noise texture We need to remap it the easiest way to do this is to create a vector math node and This is the part of the presentation where I wish I paid more attention in math class and What we can do is we if we subtract point five because we know the values are going from zero to one If we subtract point five basically now we have them going from minus point five to point five Which means we get noise in all directions. I Know right But the cool thing is you can now see we're only affecting We're actually kind of affecting the noise in an interesting way We can add another vector math in here set to multiply and really all that's going to do is it's just going to Give me like a slider to multiply the value of Like the displacement of the noise and you can see the the first points They kind of stick and everything in between goes a little bit Hey wire and because you could use like a map range or something for this as well or other things But I like a color wrap because it's really visual and you can really tell how you're manipulating the mask So I'm going to add some more points here and Then set this to B spline and now we get a nice fall off That we can control mask wise it doesn't do a lot, but it's just a little bit to kind of make it Control it. There we go So now we've made something absolutely horrendous. Let's actually try and render it and see what happens Obviously, nothing's going to happen because these are still curves. I don't even know why I hit render But there you go, and we need to change these curves back into a mesh We're going to do that with the curve to mesh node And Then the only thing we need is a profile curve. So again, we're going to grab a curve primitive Which means we use that line at the start. So we're going to grab a circle Set the resolution always set it to the lowest to begin with because once you have like thousands of curves and you start upping the resolution Exponential calculations things go bad very quickly. I'm also going to save at this point. Yes. Thank you very much Although to be honest I do Stuff where I get up to tens of millions of polygons with geometry nodes and then after two or three hours of work I'm like, oh, I haven't even saved yet. Cool. It is incredibly stable. It's very cool to see So props to the developers. Maybe And now we can make this a curve and I would just get a white thing I'm going to hedge my bets here and just throw in the set material and see if it still works And otherwise I have to do the whole capture attribute transfer attribute thing Which always confuses the heck out of me But now we have all those vertex colors because they transferred over to the curves. Yes Didn't have to do any work for that And Basically now it's just a case of seeing how far we push that displacement. Maybe we can turn on the modifier again Let's just see how many curves we can render before everything crashes. So this is the let's say experimental part of the Let's do a full screen because we're bad asses Turn on the volume there we go and Let's say there's no animation in this So what I could easily do to loop this without having to deal with multiple objects is if you add this to its own collection I'm gonna call this in for instance dot loop 000 there we go Now because this is in its own collection What you can do is you can use a collection instance to bring that exact same mesh back into blender But because it's an instance it doesn't take more memory. So you can just Move it down. So gz minus 20 see where that minus 20 comes in now pretty sweet, right? There we go, we do it a couple times and if anything I might have to put one up at the top Now if we move our camera, you can see first and last frames they look like they follow up perfectly So yes even managed to loop it Yeah, there should be more stuff at the top exactly and so that's what we're gonna do I'm gonna grab one of these instances duplicate it move it up 40 units see again. We're all this stuff Preparation is everything Says the guy that forgot which node to use So then we put in the volumetrics Alternative on later, but they usually work better when you have a lot of geometry and it's a bit more water tight So the light sort of leaks in a little bit if you have just very open geometry Well, yeah, you're just gonna get like a lot of volumetrics. So this is where the font font starts We're gonna grab that mesh to points. I'm gonna hit save and let's just start bringing up the amount of things So this is gonna be about 200,000 points And then we'll look at how many faces and triangles it is Let's look at our RAM. Oh, it's not even There we go, I'm just gonna leave this running in the background. Oh, it's swapping Yeah, I only have 16 gigabytes, but Will it blend? All right Look at that doesn't that look amazing. I can even fly through it. Oh, it's no stuff's disappearing So, you know, you've gone too far with geometry nodes when stuff just randomly starts disappearing See, this is my mesh. It doesn't know what to do, but it does render the instances Go figure. All right, don't you love being a CG artist? Okay, let's bring it down a little bit But again, you can see we're at 16 million faces on a laptop with 16 gigs of RAM like that's pretty decent Come on. You can do it. Oh, I believe in you little laptop. You can do it Late, let's close all the other stuff that's going on. Let's really maximize our chances here of getting a cool render from this Die. Die. Die. There we go. I don't think that's taken up a lot of RAM. That should be fine Open recent under conference. What time is it? Ooh, still got 10 minutes. Oh Apparently I saved it with all the crazy stuff. Ooh, I might have backed myself into a corner here. So let's see Let's bring it down to what is it a hundred thousand points. I remember there's a hundred thousand points that all have a line that each have 32 Subdivisions that each have three polygons going around it for each one of those subdivisions. That's why it gets crazy So that's why you start with three things going around What I could do if it it just refuses to load. Oh, no, I hit it like an idiot There we go. Yes Okay Try one more time You can do it. You can do it Can we break the 20 million polygone barrier? I think at this point we're all just asking that question at least I am And then if you want to get really Yeah, I don't think we're gonna do 20 but 15 should be okay. Come on You can do it. I don't know. I don't think it's blender that usually holds up better than the laptop Yeah, so let me put it this way I run a thread repair system at home with like 256 gigs of RAM you knew Lots of polys. Yeah, I found depending on which nodes you use in geometry nodes the limit is like somewhere between 25 million and 150 million polygons and you'll see it breaking sometimes when you're in those upper ranges because it just like Refuses to draw some of the mesh that it created. It just goes nope. I'm up. Sorry not doing this So generally what I'll do is if you want to optimize this now The quickest way to do so is just convert it to a mesh. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit save and then Apply all the modifiers and see what happens. I Should have just set this back to the normal but I want to twist it you can see let's render it one more time and We'll add the volumetrics. We'll go for the full thing about 15 million faces Yeah Whenever I stream on YouTube people are like you're just showing off with your computer I'm like no you actually need a decent computer to go really really far There we go. There's those streaks of Sun we wanted so we can even push it See how far we can get it. So as you move up the Sun elevation, you'll see These are really cool streaks of light running through it. You can up the strength a little bit And you can see how much fun you can have with this like once you have these setups Then it's just a case of bringing in new models loading on the geometry nodes set up to it And you're good to go. So and you get really interesting results every single time Obviously this is not a staircase anymore, I mean I'm not gonna sit here and try and convince people of that but you can see the big mess that we've created They turn off the cube again. So this is what happened was when people give me an iPhone I start scanning stuff and then bring it into Blender and again, like I said It's interesting to see how like an artist that I've loved for years now suddenly I'm finding these tools that are allowing me to kind of play with those ideas and replicate them somehow and My mission isn't to do the same thing But yeah, this is lots of fun. I think if we really wanted to optimize a little bit more what we could do is Just go into the geometry nodes setup again. I Mean let's go for the this is still a pretty small tree One of the things we could do is play with the curve count here rather than doing 32 subdivisions We could bring it maybe down to 16 and that could be a little bit quicker It's all up to you really you could even throw a subdivision surface modifier on top of this at the end if you wanted to Because when you use the subdivision surface as far as I know in geometry nodes It's not GPU accelerated and when it's at the end of your modifier stack It is GPU accelerated so you can get pretty quick subdivisions if you use a modifier on top of the geometry nodes There you go. So you see now we're down to only seven and a half million faces but now it's a bit more responsive and I mean the effect is quite the same we can even fly through it in real time almost And we get what we want so yeah, I hope you learned something and Just to finish up real quick and I guess I'm plugging myself, but it's not really the point It's just I want to show you some of the stuff that you can do with setups like these and if I can find my Yes, as you can see I take social media very seriously But as you can see this is what happens when you get like three meshes of people through each other And you apply some of those techniques and get some really creepy stuff as well, which is awesome And again, these are self portraits So I just scan myself with the the face ID camera of my iPhone and then put it through geometry nodes and played around with it So it's just another case of looking real sultry there and look at me and These as well. This is really interesting. Oh Twitter you can screw me over. Don't do me like that Okay, masted on it is then I'm gonna plug masted on if you're not using masted on and you love open source It is an awesome platform. It's like Twitter without the bullshit But I have to be logged in dang it Can I see my thing? No, is it at my tissa? Yay, there we go And this is like this is some really cool stuff where I Add in vector snapping. So it's the same technique But what vector snapping does it it gives you a way to snap those lines to an increment So you're like if you put in zero point one all the vertices are gonna snap to like cubes of zero point one But if you put a texture in there, you can see it sort of starts here And then it grows and then like the cubes grow and so yeah once once you get into it. It's wild But yeah, if you have any questions, I'll be around Thanks for for joining and I hope you had a good time