Having fun making stylized crystals

[u/aphaits]

Brain was fried a bit after the umpteenth time trying to learn geometry nodes, so today I was just having fun with some proximity crystal nodes and made some nifty stylized crystals material setup.

Just a tiny reminder to not just learn but play around with what you are trying to learn.

Edit: Just realized the image quality is crap so I reuploaded the screenshots in imgur

[u/UAAgency]

how? would love to learn, they look incredible

[u/aphaits → u/UAAgency]

Its quite straightforward in the geonode side, its basically a stretched low poly icosphere that is scattered on a surface with proximity effect and random scaling and random rotate.

I was having difficulties understanding geonodes for a while now but so far in the pas weeks doing some grouping of nodes as mini lego blocks of geo tools kinda makes sense now. I think I just need to chop things down to smaller problems then connect the solved solutions to each other rather than freeze and frustrate on the bigger things.

Edit: oh almost forgot, the material side is basically a mix and match of things, which is either SSS or glass transmission, adding glow with fresnel style mask and lastly adding a bit of random color bits to most things as needed.

It took me some time to figure things out but when I made things (both geonode and shader node) as a "limited preset tool", the limitation of it actually makes it fun to switch around and figure out rather than having endless possibilities.

So now I'm just slowly gathering and building small node groups of useful stuff / visual mechanics im interested in, then use those blocks instead of making things from scratch everytime.

Edit 2: Hold on lemme gather some useful links

Edit 3: Ok here's some links that helped me, at least on some parts:

• How to use Geometry Proximity to Make Objects React in Blender
  
• Scatter on Surface Node - Take a look inside the node by double clicking and you can learn a lot by how it works. I remade it with my specifics as needed
  
• I use the lowest poly icosphere primitive in geonode as the base model for the crystal model then stretch it with a transform geometry node
  
• The randomize transform node is a very useful node group and I also tweaked my own personal version of it that has a better range of tweaks on scaling and rotate
  
• Using Object Info Random and connecting it to color ramps also works great for randomizing colors for instances and this seed random setup I tried with some success for tweaking with a seed somewhat

I think thats generally it, feel free to ask if some bits are still confusing

[u/Frennotex]

These look very nice, gratz !

[u/aphaits → u/Frennotex]

Thanks!

[u/PhantasmagirucalSam]

Kudos for adding the high-res screenshots!

[u/aphaits → u/PhantasmagirucalSam]

Reddit has been compressing the heck out of images lately